I
Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him. He had literally to fight
his way free of it. From So Big (of fond and infantile derivation) it
had been condensed into Sobig. And Sobig DeJong, in all its consonantal
disharmony, he had remained until he was a ten-year-old schoolboy in
that incredibly Dutch district southwest of Chicago known first as New
Holland and later as High Prairie. At ten, by dint of fists, teeth,
copper-toed boots, and temper, he earned the right to be called by his
real name, Dirk DeJong. Now and then, of course, the nickname bobbed up
and had to be subdued in a brief and bitter skirmish. His mother, with
whom the name had originated, was the worst offender. When she lapsed he
did not, naturally, use schoolyard tactics on her. But he sulked and
glowered portentously and refused to answer, though her tone, when she
called him So Big, would have melted the heart of any but that natural
savage, a boy of ten.
The nickname had sprung from the early and idiotic question invariably
put to babies and answered by them, with infinite patience, through the
years of their infancy.
Selina DeJong, darting expertly about her kitchen, from washtub to
baking board, from stove to table, or, if at work in the fields of the
truck farm, straightening the numbed back for a moment’s respite from
the close-set rows of carrots, turnips, spinach, or beets over which she
was labouring, would wipe the sweat beads from nose and forehead with a
quick duck of her head in the crook of her bent arm. Those great fine
dark eyes of hers would regard the child perched impermanently on a
little heap of empty potato sacks, one of which comprised his costume.
He was constantly detaching himself from the parent sack heap to dig and
burrow in the rich warm black loam of the truck garden. Selina DeJong
had little time for the expression of affection. The work was always hot
at her heels. You saw a young woman in a blue calico dress, faded and
earth-grimed. Between her eyes was a driven look as of one who walks
always a little ahead of herself in her haste. Her dark abundant hair
was skewered into a utilitarian knob from which soft loops and strands
were constantly escaping, to be pushed back by that same harried ducking
gesture of head and bent arm. Her hands, for such use, were usually too
crusted and inground with the soil into which she was delving. You saw a
child of perhaps two years, dirt-streaked, sunburned, and generally
otherwise defaced by those bumps, bites, scratches, and contusions that
are the common lot of the farm child of a mother harried by work. Yet,
in that moment, as the woman looked at the child there in the warm moist
spring of the Illinois prairie land, or in the cluttered kitchen of the
farmhouse, there quivered and vibrated between them and all about them
an aura, a glow, that imparted to them and their surroundings a mystery,
a beauty, a radiance.
“How big is baby?” Selina would demand, senselessly. “How big is my
man?”
The child would momentarily cease to poke plump fingers into the rich
black loam. He would smile a gummy though slightly weary smile and
stretch wide his arms. She, too, would open her tired arms wide, wide.
Then they would say in a duet, his mouth a puckered pink petal, hers
quivering with tenderness and a certain amusement, “_So-o-o-o_ big!”
with the voice soaring on the prolonged vowel and dropping suddenly with
the second word. Part of the game. The child became so habituated to
this question that sometimes, if Selina happened to glance round at him
suddenly in the midst of her task, he would take his cue without the
familiar question being put and would squeal his “_So-o-o-o_ big!”
rather absently, in dutiful solo. Then he would throw back his head and
laugh a triumphant laugh, his open mouth a coral orifice. She would run
to him, and swoop down upon him, and bury her flushed face in the warm
moist creases of his neck, and make as though to devour him. “So big!”
But of course he wasn’t. He wasn’t as big as that. In fact, he never
became as big as the wide-stretched arms of her love and imagination
would have had him. You would have thought she should have been
satisfied when, in later years, he was the Dirk DeJong whose name you
saw (engraved) at the top of heavy cream linen paper, so rich and thick
and stiff as to have the effect of being starched and ironed by some
costly American business process; whose clothes were made by Peter Peel,
the English tailor; whose roadster ran on a French chassis; whose
cabinet held mellow Italian vermouth and Spanish sherry; whose wants
were served by a Japanese houseman; whose life, in short, was that of
the successful citizen of the Republic. But she wasn’t. Not only was she
dissatisfied: she was at once remorseful and indignant, as though she,
Selina DeJong, the vegetable pedler, had been partly to blame for this
success of his, and partly cheated by it.
When Selina DeJong had been Selina Peake she had lived in Chicago with
her father. They had lived in many other cities as well. In Denver
during the rampant ’80s. In New York when Selina was twelve. In
Milwaukee briefly. There was even a San Francisco interlude which was
always a little sketchy in Selina’s mind and which had ended in a
departure so hurried as to bewilder even Selina who had learned to
accept sudden comings and abrupt goings without question. “Business,”
her father always said. “Little deal.” She never knew until the day of
his death how literally the word deal was applicable to his business
transactions. Simeon Peake, travelling the country with his little
daughter, was a gambler by profession, temperament, and natural talents.
When in luck they lived royally, stopping at the best hotels, eating
strange, succulent sea-viands, going to the play, driving in hired rigs
(always with two horses. If Simeon Peake had not enough money for a
two-horse equipage he walked). When fortune hid her face they lived in
boarding houses, ate boarding-house meals, wore the clothes bought when
Fortune’s breath was balmy. During all this time Selina attended
schools, good, bad, private, public, with surprising regularity
considering her nomadic existence. Deep-bosomed matrons, seeing this
dark-eyed serious child seated alone in a hotel lobby or boarding-house
parlour, would bend over her in solicitous questioning.
“Where is your mamma, little girl?”
“She is dead,” Selina would reply, politely and composedly.
“Oh, my poor little dear!” Then, with a warm rush, “Don’t you want to
come and play with my little girl? She loves little girls to play with.
H’m?” The “m” of the interrogation held hummingly, tenderly.
“No, thank you very much. I’m waiting for my father. He would be
disappointed not to find me here.”
These good ladies wasted their sympathy. Selina had a beautiful time.
Except for three years, to recall which was to her like entering a
sombre icy room on leaving a warm and glowing one, her life was free,
interesting, varied. She made decisions usually devolving upon the adult
mind. She selected clothes. She ruled her father. She read absorbedly
books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public
libraries as the times afforded. She was alone for hours a day, daily.
Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an
armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among
them in a sort of gourmand’s ecstasy of indecision. In this way, at
fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte
Brontë, Felicia Hemans. Not to speak of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth,
Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the _Fireside
Companion_, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together
as inevitably as steak and onions. These last were, of course, the
result of Selina’s mode of living, and were loaned her by kind-hearted
landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to
New York.
Her three dark years—from nine to twelve—were spent with her two
maiden aunts, the Misses Sarah and Abbie Peake, in the dim, prim Vermont
Peake house from which her father, the black sheep, had run away when a
boy. After her mother’s death Simeon Peake had sent his little daughter
back east in a fit of remorse and temporary helplessness on his part and
a spurt of forgiveness and churchly charity on the part of his two
sisters. The two women were incredibly drawn in the pattern of the New
England spinster of fiction. Mitts, preserves, Bible, chilly best room,
solemn and kittenless cat, order, little-girls-mustn’t. They smelled of
apples—of withered apples that have rotted at the core. Selina had once
found such an apple in a corner of a disorderly school-desk, had sniffed
it, regarded its wrinkled, sapless pink cheek, and had bitten into it
adventuresomely, only to spit out the mouthful in an explosive and
unladylike spray. It had been all black and mouldy at its heart.
Something of this she must have conveyed, in her desperation, to her
father in an uncensored letter. Without warning he had come for her, and
at sight of him she had been guilty of the only fit of hysteria that
marked her life, before or after the episode.
So, then, from twelve to nineteen she was happy. They had come to
Chicago in 1885, when she was sixteen. There they remained. Selina
attended Miss Fister’s Select School for Young Ladies. When her father
brought her there he had raised quite a flutter in the Fister breast—so
soft-spoken was he, so gentle, so sad-appearing, so winning as to smile.
In the investment business, he explained. Stocks and that kind of thing.
A widower. Miss Fister said, yes, she understood.
Simeon Peake had had nothing of the look of the professional gambler of
the day. The wide slouch hat, the flowing mustache, the glittering eye,
the too-bright boots, the gay cravat, all were missing in Simeon Peake’s
makeup. True, he did sport a singularly clear white diamond pin in his
shirt front; and his hat he wore just a little on one side. But then,
these both were in the male mode and quite commonly seen. For the rest
he seemed a mild and suave man, slim, a trifle diffident, speaking
seldom and then with a New England drawl by which he had come honestly
enough, Vermont Peake that he was.
Chicago was his meat. It was booming, prosperous. Jeff Hankins’s red
plush and mirrored gambling house, and Mike McDonald’s, too, both on
Clark Street, knew him daily. He played in good luck and bad, but he
managed somehow to see to it that there was always the money to pay for
the Fister schooling. His was the ideal poker face—bland, emotionless,
immobile. When he was flush they ate at the Palmer House, dining off
chicken or quail and thick rich soup and the apple pie for which the
hostelry was famous. Waiters hovered solicitously about Simeon Peake,
though he rarely addressed them and never looked at them. Selina was
happy. She knew only such young people—girls—as she met at Miss
Fister’s school. Of men, other than her father, she knew as little as a
nun—less. For those cloistered creatures must, if only in the conning
of their Bible, learn much of the moods and passions that sway the male.
The Songs of Solomon alone are a glorious sex education. But the Bible
was not included in Selina’s haphazard reading, and the Gideonite was
not then a force in the hotel world.
Her chum was Julie Hempel, daughter of August Hempel, the Clark Street
butcher. You probably now own some Hempel stock, if you’re lucky; and
eat Hempel bacon and Hempel hams cured in the hickory, for in Chicago
the distance from butcher of 1885 to packer of 1890 was only a five-year
leap.
Being so much alone developed in her a gift for the make-believe. In a
comfortable, well-dressed way she was a sort of mixture of Dick
Swiveller’s Marchioness and Sarah Crewe. Even in her childhood she
extracted from life the double enjoyment that comes usually only to the
creative mind. “Now I’m doing this. Now I’m doing that,” she told
herself while she was doing it. Looking on while she participated.
Perhaps her theatre-going had something to do with this. At an age when
most little girls were not only unheard but practically unseen, she
occupied a grown-up seat at the play, her rapt face, with its dark
serious eyes, glowing in a sort of luminous pallor as she sat proudly
next her father. Simeon Peake had the gambler’s love of the theatre,
himself possessing the dramatic quality necessary to the successful
following of his profession.
In this way Selina, half-hidden in the depths of an orchestra seat,
wriggled in ecstatic anticipation when the curtain ascended on the
grotesque rows of Haverly’s minstrels. She wept (as did Simeon) over the
agonies of The Two Orphans when Kitty Blanchard and McKee Rankin came to
Chicago with the Union Square Stock Company. She witnessed that
startling innovation, a Jewish play, called Samuel of Posen. She saw
Fanny Davenport in Pique. Simeon even took her to a performance of that
shocking and delightful form of new entertainment, the Extravaganza. She
thought the plump creature in tights and spangles, descending the long
stairway, the most beautiful being she had ever seen.
“The thing I like about plays and books is that anything can happen.
Anything! You never know,” Selina said, after one of these evenings.
“No different from life,” Simeon Peake assured her. “You’ve no idea the
things that happen to you if you just relax and take them as they come.”
Curiously enough, Simeon Peake said this, not through ignorance, but
deliberately and with reason. In his way and day he was a very modern
father. “I want you to see all kinds,” he would say to her. “I want you
to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show.
The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.”
“What whole thing?”
“Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more
things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you
are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no
matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much”—he used the
gambler’s term, unconsciously—“just so much velvet.”
But Selina, somehow, understood. “You mean that anything’s better than
being Aunt Sarah and Aunt Abbie.”
“Well—yes. There are only two kinds of people in the world that really
count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emeralds.”
“Fanny Davenport’s an emerald,” said Selina, quickly, and rather
surprised to find herself saying it.
“Yes. That’s it.”
“And—and Julie Hempel’s father—he’s wheat.”
“By golly, Sele!” shouted Simeon Peake. “You’re a shrewd little tyke!”
It was after reading “Pride and Prejudice” that she decided to be the
Jane Austen of her time. She became very mysterious and enjoyed a brief
period of unpopularity at Miss Fister’s owing to her veiled allusions to
her “work”; and an annoying way of smiling to herself and tapping a
ruminative toe as though engaged in visions far too exquisite for the
common eye. Her chum Julie Hempel, properly enough, became enraged at
this and gave Selina to understand that she must make her choice between
revealing her secret or being cast out of the Hempel heart. Selina swore
her to secrecy.
“Very well, then. Now I’ll tell you. I’m going to be a novelist.” Julie
was palpably disappointed, though she said, “Selina!” as though properly
impressed, but followed it up with: “Still, I don’t see why you had to
be so mysterious about it.”
“You just don’t understand, Julie. Writers have to study life at first
hand. And if people know you’re studying them they don’t act natural.
Now, that day you were telling me about the young man in your father’s
shop who looked at you and said——”
“Selina Peake, if you dare to put that in your book I’ll never
speak——”
“All right. I won’t. But that’s what I mean. You see!”
Julie Hempel and Selina Peake, both finished products of Miss Fister’s
school, were of an age—nineteen. Selina, on this September day, had
been spending the afternoon with Julie, and now, adjusting her hat
preparatory to leaving, she clapped her hands over her ears to shut out
the sounds of Julie’s importunings that she stay to supper. Certainly
the prospect of the usual Monday evening meal in Mrs. Tebbitt’s boarding
house (the Peake luck was momentarily low) did not present sufficient
excuse for Selina’s refusal. Indeed, the Hempel supper as sketched dish
for dish by the urgent Julie brought little greedy groans from Selina.
“It’s prairie chickens—three of them—that a farmer west of town
brought Father. Mother fixes them with stuffing, and there’s currant
jell. Creamed onions and baked tomatoes. And for dessert, apple roll.”
Selina snapped the elastic holding her high-crowned hat under her
chignon of hair in the back. She uttered a final and quavering groan.
“On Monday nights we have cold mutton and cabbage at Mrs. Tebbitt’s.
This is Monday.”
“Well then, silly, why not stay!”
“Father comes home at six. If I’m not there he’s disappointed.”
Julie, plump, blonde, placid, forsook her soft white blandishments and
tried steel against the steel of Selina’s decision.
“He leaves you right after supper. And you’re alone every night until
twelve and after.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Selina said, stiffly.
Julie’s steel, being low-grade, melted at once and ran off her in
rivulets. “Of course it hasn’t, Selie dear. Only I thought you might
leave him just this once.”
“If I’m not there he’s disappointed. And that terrible Mrs. Tebbitt
makes eyes at him. He hates it there.”
“Then I don’t see why you stay. I never could see. You’ve been there
four months now, and I think it’s horrid and stuffy; and oilcloth on the
stairs.”
“Father has had some temporary business setbacks.”
Selina’s costume testified to that. True, it was modish, and bustled,
and basqued, and flounced; and her high-crowned, short-rimmed hat, with
its trimming of feathers and flowers and ribbons had come from New York.
But both were of last spring’s purchasing, and this was September.
In the course of the afternoon they had been looking over the pages of
Godey’s _Ladies’ Book_ for that month. The disparity between Selina’s
costume and the creations pictured there was much as the difference
between the Tebbitt meal and that outlined by Julie. Now Julie, fond
though defeated, kissed her friend good-bye.
Selina walked quickly the short distance from the Hempel house to
Tebbitt’s, on Dearborn Avenue. Up in her second-floor room she took off
her hat and called to her father, but he had not yet come in. She was
glad of that. She had been fearful of being late. She regarded her hat
now with some distaste, decided to rip off the faded spring roses, did
rip a stitch or two, only to discover that the hat material was more
faded than the roses, and that the uncovered surface showed up a dark
splotch like a wall-spot when a picture, long hung, is removed. So she
got a needle and prepared to tack the offending rose in its accustomed
place.
Perched on the arm of a chair near the window, taking quick deft
stitches, she heard a sound. She had never heard that sound before—that
peculiar sound—the slow, ominous tread of men laden with a heavy inert
burden; bearing with infinite care that which was well beyond hurting.
Selina had never heard that sound before, and yet, hearing it, she
recognized it by one of those pangs, centuries old, called woman’s
instinct. Thud—shuffle—thud—shuffle—up the narrow stairway, along
the passage. She stood up, the needle poised in her hand. The hat fell
to the floor. Her eyes were wide, fixed. Her lips slightly parted. The
listening look. She knew.
She knew even before she heard the hoarse man’s voice saying, “Lift ’er
up there a little on the corner, now. Easy—e-e-easy.” And Mrs.
Tebbitt’s high shrill clamour: “You can’t bring it in there! You hadn’t
ought to bring it in here like this!”
Selina’s suspended breath came back. She was panting now. She had flung
open the door. A flat still burden partially covered with an overcoat
carelessly flung over the face. The feet, in their square-toed boots,
wobbled listlessly. Selina noticed how shiny the boots were. He was
always very finicking about such things.
Simeon Peake had been shot in Jeff Hankins’s place at five in the
afternoon. The irony of it was that the bullet had not been intended for
him at all. Its derelict course had been due to feminine aim. Sped by
one of those over-dramatic ladies who, armed with horsewhip or pistol in
tardy defence of their honour, spangled Chicago’s dull ’80s with their
doings, it had been meant for a well-known newspaper publisher usually
mentioned (in papers other than his own) as a bon vivant. The lady’s
leaden remonstrance was to have been proof of the fact that he had been
more vivacious than bon.
It was, perhaps, because of this that the matter was pretty well hushed
up. The publisher’s paper—which was Chicago’s foremost—scarcely
mentioned the incident and purposely misspelled the name. The lady,
thinking her task accomplished, had taken truer aim with her second
bullet, and had saved herself the trouble of trial by human jury.
Simeon Peake left his daughter Selina a legacy of two fine clear
blue-white diamonds (he had had the gambler’s love of them) and the sum
of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash. Just how he had
managed to have a sum like this put by was a mystery. The envelope
containing it had evidently once held a larger sum. It had been sealed,
and then slit. On the outside was written, in Simeon Peake’s fine,
almost feminine hand: “For my little daughter Selina Peake in case
anything should happen to me.” It bore a date seven years old. What the
original sum had been no one ever knew. That any sum remained was
evidence of the almost heroic self-control practised by one to whom
money—ready money in any sum at all—meant only fuel to feed the flames
of his gaming fever.
To Selina fell the choice of earning her own living or of returning to
the Vermont village and becoming a withered and sapless dried apple,
with black fuzz and mould at her heart, like her aunts, the Misses Sarah
and Abbie Peake. She did not hesitate.
“But what kind of work?” Julie Hempel demanded. “What kind of work can
you do?” Women—that is, the Selina Peakes—did not work.
“I—well, I can teach.”
“Teach what?”
“The things I learned at Miss Fister’s.”
Julie’s expression weighed and discredited Miss Fister. “Who to?” Which
certainly justified her expression.
“To children. People’s children. Or in the public schools.”
“You have to do something first—go to Normal, or teach in the country,
don’t you?—before you can teach in the public schools. They’re mostly
old. Twenty-five or even thirty—or more!” with nineteen’s incapacity to
imagine an age beyond thirty.
That Julie was taking the offensive in this conversation, and Selina the
defensive, was indicative of the girl’s numbed state. Selina did not
then know the iron qualities her friend was displaying in being with her
at all. Mrs. Hempel had quite properly forbidden Julie ever to see the
dead dissolute gambler’s daughter again. She had even sent a note to
Miss Fister expressing her opinion of a school which would, by admitting
such unselected ladies to its select circle, expose other pupils to
contamination.
Selina rallied to Julie’s onslaught. “Then I’ll just teach a country
school. I’m good at arithmetic. You know that.” Julie should have known
it, having had all her Fister sums solved by Selina. “Country schools
are just arithmetic and grammar and geography.”
“You! Teaching a country school!”
She looked at Selina.
She saw a misleadingly delicate face, the skull small and exquisitely
formed. The cheek bones rather high—or perhaps they looked so because
of the fact that the eyes, dark, soft, and luminous, were unusually
deep-set in their sockets. The face, instead of narrowing to a soft
curve at the chin, developed unexpected strength in the jaw line. That
line, fine, steel-strong, sharp and clear, was of the stuff of which
pioneer women are made. Julie, inexperienced in the art of reading the
human physiognomy, did not decipher the meaning of it. Selina’s hair was
thick, long, and fine, so that she piled it easily in the loops, coils,
and knots that fashion demanded. Her nose, slightly pinched at the
nostrils, was exquisite. When she laughed it had the trick of wrinkling
just a little across the narrow bridge; very engaging, and mischievous.
She was thought a rather plain little thing, which she wasn’t. But the
eyes were what you marked and remembered. People to whom she was
speaking had a way of looking into them deeply. Selina was often
embarrassed to discover that they were not hearing what she had to say.
Perhaps it was this velvety softness of the eyes that caused one to
overlook the firmness of the lower face. When the next ten years had
done their worst to her, and Julie had suddenly come upon her stepping
agilely out of a truck gardener’s wagon on Prairie Avenue, a tanned,
weather-beaten, toil-worn woman, her abundant hair skewered into a knob
and held by a long gray hairpin, her full calico skirt grimed with the
mud of the wagon wheel, a pair of men’s old side-boots on her slim feet,
a grotesquely battered old felt hat (her husband’s) on her head, her
arms full of ears of sweet corn, and carrots, and radishes, and bunches
of beets; a woman with bad teeth, flat breasts, a sagging pocket in her
capacious skirt—even then Julie, staring, had known her by her eyes.
And she had run to her in her silk suit and her fine silk shirtwaist and
her hat with the plume and had cried, “Oh, Selina! My dear! My
dear!”—with a sob of horror and pity—“My dear.” And had taken Selina,
carrots, beets, corn, and radishes, in her arms. The vegetables lay
scattered all about them on the sidewalk in front of Julie Hempel
Arnold’s great stone house on Prairie Avenue. But strangely enough it
had been Selina who had done the comforting, patting Julie’s silken
shoulder and saying, over and over, “There, there! It’s all right,
Julie. It’s all right. Don’t cry. What’s there to cry for! Sh! . . .
It’s all right.”