Selina had thought herself lucky to get the Dutch school at High
Prairie, ten miles outside Chicago. Thirty dollars a month! She was to
board at the house of Klaas Pool, the truck farmer. It was August Hempel
who had brought it all about; or Julie, urging him. Now, at forty-five,
August Hempel, the Clark Street butcher, knew every farmer and stockman
for miles around, and hundreds besides scattered throughout Cook County
and the State of Illinois.
To get the Dutch school for Selina Peake was a simple enough matter for
him. The High Prairie district school teacher had always, heretofore,
been a man. A more advantageous position presenting itself, this year’s
prospective teacher had withdrawn before the school term had begun. This
was in September. High Prairie school did not open until the first week
in November. In that region of truck farms every boy and girl over six
was busy in the fields throughout the early autumn. Two years of this,
and Selina would be qualified for a city grade. August Hempel indicated
that he could arrange that, too, when the time came. Selina thought this
shrewd red-faced butcher a wonderful man, indeed. Which he was.
At forty-seven, single-handed, he was to establish the famous Hempel
Packing Company. At fifty he was the power in the yards, and there were
Hempel branches in Kansas City, Omaha, Denver. At sixty you saw the name
of Hempel plastered over packing sheds, factories, and canning plants
all the way from Honolulu to Portland. You read:
Don’t Say Ham: Say Hempel’s.
Hempel products ranged incredibly from pork to pineapple; from grease to
grape-juice. An indictment meant no more to Hempel, the packer, than an
injunction for speeding to you. Something of his character may be
gleaned from the fact that farmers who had known the butcher at forty
still addressed this millionaire, at sixty, as Aug. At sixty-five he
took up golf and beat his son-in-law, Michael Arnold, at it. A
magnificent old pirate, sailing the perilous commercial seas of the
American ’90s before commissions, investigations, and inquisitive senate
insisted on applying whitewash to the black flag of trade.
Selina went about her preparations in a singularly clear-headed fashion,
considering her youth and inexperience. She sold one of the blue-white
diamonds, and kept one. She placed her inheritance of four hundred and
ninety-seven dollars, complete, in the bank. She bought stout sensible
boots, two dresses, one a brown lady’s-cloth which she made herself,
finished with white collars and cuffs, very neat (the cuffs to be
protected by black sateen sleevelets, of course, while teaching); and a
wine-red cashmere (mad, but she couldn’t resist it) for best.
She eagerly learned what she could of this region once known as New
Holland. Its people were all truck gardeners, and as Dutch as the
Netherlands from which they or their fathers had come. She heard stories
of wooden shoes worn in the wet prairie fields; of a red-faced plodding
Cornelius Van der Bilt living in placid ignorance of the existence of
his distinguished New York patronymic connection; of sturdy, phlegmatic,
industrious farmers in squat, many-windowed houses patterned after the
north Holland houses of their European memories. Many of them had come
from the town of Schoorl, or near it. Others from the lowlands outside
Amsterdam. Selina pictured it another Sleepy Hollow, a replica of the
quaint settlement in Washington Irving’s delightful tale. The deserting
schoolmaster had been a second Ichabod Crane, naturally; the farmer at
whose house she was to live a modern Mynheer Van Tassel, pipe, chuckle,
and all. She and Julie Hempel read the tale over together on an
afternoon when Julie managed to evade the maternal edict. Selina,
picturing mellow golden corn fields; crusty crullers, crumbling
oly-koeks, toothsome wild ducks, sides of smoked beef, pumpkin pies;
country dances, apple-cheeked farmer girls, felt sorry for poor Julie
staying on in the dull gray commonplaceness of Chicago.
The last week in October found her on the way to High Prairie, seated
beside Klaas Pool in the two-horse wagon with which he brought his
garden stuff to the Chicago market. She sat perched next him on the high
seat like a saucy wren beside a ruminant Holstein. So they jolted up the
long Halsted road through the late October sunset. The prairie land just
outside Chicago had not then been made a terrifying and epic thing of
slag-heaps, smoke-stacks, and blast furnaces like a Pennell drawing.
To-day it stretched away and away in the last rays of the late autumn
sunlight over which the lake mist was beginning to creep like chiffon
covering gold. Mile after mile of cabbage fields, jade-green against the
earth. Mile after mile of red cabbage, a rich plummy Burgundy veined
with black. Between these, heaps of corn were piled-up sunshine. Against
the horizon an occasional patch of woods showed the last russet and
bronze of oak and maple. These things Selina saw with her beauty-loving
eye, and she clasped her hands in their black cotton gloves.
“Oh, Mr. Pool!” she cried. “Mr. Pool! How beautiful it is here!”
Klaas Pool, driving his team of horses down the muddy Halsted road, was
looking straight ahead, his eyes fastened seemingly on an invisible spot
between the off-horse’s ears. His was not the kind of brain that acts
quickly, nor was his body’s mechanism the sort that quickly responds to
that brain’s message. His eyes were china-blue in a round red face that
was covered with a stubble of stiff golden hairs. His round moon of a
head was set low and solidly between his great shoulders, so that as he
began to turn it now, slowly, you marvelled at the process and waited
fearfully to hear a creak. He was turning his head toward Selina, but
keeping his gaze on the spot between his horse’s ears. Evidently the
head and the eyes revolved by quite distinct processes. Now he faced
Selina almost directly. Then he brought his eyes around, slowly, until
they focussed on her cameo-like face all alight now with her enjoyment
of the scene around her; with a certain elation at this new venture into
which she was entering; and with excitement such as she used to feel
when the curtain rose with tantalizing deliberateness on the first act
of a play which she was seeing with her father. She was well bundled up
against the sharp October air in her cloak and muffler, with a shawl
tucked about her knees and waist. The usual creamy pallor of her fine
clear skin showed an unwonted pink, and her eyes were wide, dark, and
bright. Beside this sparkling delicate girl’s face Klaas Pool’s heavy
features seemed carved from the stuff of another clay and race. His pale
blue eyes showed incomprehension.
“Beautiful?” he echoed, in puzzled interrogation. “What is beautiful?”
Selina’s slim arms flashed out from the swathings of cloak, shawl, and
muffler and were flung wide in a gesture that embraced the landscape on
which the late afternoon sun was casting a glow peculiar to that lake
region, all rose and golden and mist-shimmering.
“This! The—the cabbages.”
A slow-dawning film of fun crept over the blue of Klaas Pool’s stare.
This film spread almost imperceptibly so that it fluted his broad
nostrils, met and widened his full lips, reached and agitated his
massive shoulders, tickled the round belly, so that all Klaas Pool, from
his eyes to his waist, was rippling and shaking with slow, solemn, heavy
Dutch mirth.
“Cabbages is beautiful!” his round pop eyes staring at her in a fixity
of glee. “Cabbages is beautiful!” His silent laughter now rose and
became audible in a rich throaty chortle. It was plain that laughter,
with Klaas Pool, was not a thing to be lightly dismissed, once raised.
“Cabbages——” he choked a little, and spluttered, overcome. Now he
began to shift his gaze back to his horses and the road, by the same
process of turning his head first and then his eyes, so that to Selina
the mirthful tail of his right eye and his round red cheek with the
golden fuzz on it gave him an incredibly roguish brownie look.
Selina laughed, too, even while she protested his laughter. “But they
are!” she insisted. “They _are_ beautiful. Like jade and Burgundy. No,
like—uh—like—what’s that in—like chrysoprase and porphyry. All those
fields of cabbages and the corn and the beet-tops together look like
Persian patches.”
Which was, certainly, no way for a new school teacher to talk to a
Holland truck gardener driving his team along the dirt road on his way
to High Prairie. But then, Selina, remember, had read Byron at
seventeen.
Klaas Pool knew nothing of chrysoprase and porphyry. Nor of Byron. Nor,
for that matter, of jade and Burgundy. But he did know cabbages, both
green and red. He knew cabbage from seed to sauerkraut; he knew and grew
varieties from the sturdy Flat Dutch to the early Wakefield. But that
they were beautiful; that they looked like jewels; that they lay like
Persian patches, had never entered his head, and rightly. What has the
head of a cabbage, or, for that matter, of a robust, soil-stained,
toiling Dutch truck farmer to do with nonsense like chrysoprase, with
jade, with Burgundy, with Persian patterns!
The horses clopped down the heavy country road. Now and again the bulk
beside Selina was agitated silently, as before. And from between the
golden fuzz of stubble beard she would hear, “Cabbages! Cabbages is
——” But she did not feel offended. She could not have been offended at
anything to-day. For in spite of her recent tragedy, her nineteen years,
her loneliness, the terrifying thought of this new home to which she was
going, among strangers, she was conscious of a warm little thrill of
elation, of excitement—of adventure! That was it. “The whole thing’s
just a grand adventure,” Simeon Peake had said. Selina gave a little
bounce of anticipation. She was doing a revolutionary and daring thing;
a thing that the Vermont and now, fortunately, inaccessible Peakes would
have regarded with horror. For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a
steel-strong frame; one brown lady’s-cloth, one wine-red cashmere; four
hundred and ninety-seven dollars; and a gay, adventuresome spirit that
was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often
found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace
her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to
be jade and Burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons
against a woman like that.
So now, as they bumped and jolted along the road Selina thought herself
lucky, though she was a little terrified. She turned her gaze from the
flat prairie land to the silent figure beside her. Hers was a lively,
volatile nature, and his uncommunicativeness made her vaguely
uncomfortable. Yet there was nothing glum about his face. Upon it there
even lingered, in the corners of his eyes and about his mouth, faint
shadows of merriment.
Klaas Pool was a school director. She was to live at his house. Perhaps
she should not have said that about the cabbages. So now she drew
herself up primly and tried to appear the school teacher, and succeeded
in looking as severe as a white pansy.
“Ahem!” (or nearly that). “You have three children, haven’t you, Mr.
Pool? They’ll all be my pupils?”
Klaas Pool ruminated on this. He concentrated so that a slight frown
marred the serenity of his brow. In this double question of hers, an
attempt to give the conversation a dignified turn, she had apparently
created some difficulty for her host. He was trying to shake his head
two ways at the same time. This gave it a rotary motion. Selina saw,
with amazement, that he was attempting to nod negation and confirmation
at once.
“You mean you haven’t—or they’re not?—or——?”
“I have got three children. All will not be your pupils.” There was
something final, unshakable in his delivery of this.
“Dear me! Why not? Which ones won’t?”
This fusillade proved fatal. It served permanently to check the slight
trickle of conversation which had begun to issue from his lips. They
jogged on for perhaps a matter of three miles, in silence. Selina told
herself then, sternly, that she must not laugh. Having told herself
this, sternly, she began to laugh because she could not help it; a gay
little sound that flew out like the whir of a bird’s wing on the crisp
autumnal sunset air. And suddenly this light sound was joined by a slow
rumbling that swelled and bubbled a good deal in the manner of the rich
glubby sounds that issue from a kettle that has been simmering for a
long time. So they laughed together, these two; the rather scared young
thing who was trying to be prim, and the dull, unimaginative truck
farmer because this alert, great-eyed, slim white creature perched
birdlike on the wagon seat beside him had tickled his slow humour-sense.
Selina felt suddenly friendly and happy. “Do tell me which ones will and
which won’t.”
“Geertje goes to school. Jozina goes to school. Roelf works by the
farm.”
“How old is Roelf?” She was being school teacherly again.
“Roelf is twelve.”
“Twelve! And no longer at school! But why not!”
“Roelf he works by the farm.”
“Doesn’t Roelf like school?”
“But sure.”
“Don’t you think he ought to go to school?”
“But sure.”
Having begun, she could not go back. “Doesn’t your wife want Roelf to go
to school any more?”
“Maartje? But sure.”
She gathered herself together; hurled herself behind the next question.
“Then why _doesn’t_ he go to school, for pity’s sake!”
Klaas Pool’s pale blue eyes were fixed on the spot between the horse’s
ears. His face was serene, placid, patient.
“Roelf he works by the farm.”
Selina subsided, beaten.
She wondered about Roelf. Would he be a furtive, slinking boy, like
Smike? Geertje and Jozina. Geertje—Gertrude, of course. Jozina?
Josephine. Maartje?—m-m-m-m—Martha, probably. At any rate, it was
going to be interesting. It was going to be wonderful! Suppose she had
gone to Vermont and become a dried apple!
Dusk was coming on. The lake mist came drifting across the prairie and
hung, a pearly haze, over the frost-nipped stubble and the leafless
trees. It caught the last light in the sky, and held it, giving to
fields, trees, black earth, to the man seated stolidly beside the girl,
and to the face of the girl herself an opalescent glow very wonderful to
see. Selina, seeing it, opened her lips to exclaim again; and then,
remembering, closed them. She had learned her first lesson in High
Prairie.