The Klaas Pools lived in a typical High Prairie house. They had passed a
score like it in the dusk. These sturdy Holland-Americans had built here
in Illinois after the pattern of the squat houses that dot the lowlands
about Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Rotterdam. A row of pollards stood stiffly
by the roadside. As they turned in at the yard Selina’s eye was caught
by the glitter of glass. The house was many-windowed, the panes the size
of pocket-handkerchiefs. Even in the dusk Selina thought she had never
seen windows sparkle so. She did not then know that spotless
window-panes were a mark of social standing in High Prairie. Yard and
dwelling had a geometrical neatness like that of a toy house in a set of
playthings. The effect was marred by a clothes-line hung with a dado of
miscellaneous wash—a pair of faded overalls, a shirt, socks, a man’s
drawers carefully patched and now bellying grotesquely in the breeze
like a comic tramp turned bacchanal. Selina was to know this frieze of
nether garments as a daily decoration in the farm-wife’s yard.
Peering down over the high wheel she waited for Klaas Pool to assist her
in alighting. He seemed to have no such thought. Having jumped down, he
was throwing empty crates and boxes out of the back of the wagon. So
Selina, gathering her shawls and cloak about her, clambered down the
side of the wheel and stood looking about her in the dim light, a very
small figure in a very large world. Klaas had opened the barn door. Now
he returned and slapped one of the horses smartly on the flank. The team
trotted obediently off to the barn. He picked up her little hide-bound
trunk. She took her satchel. The yard was quite dark now. As Klaas Pool
opened the kitchen door the red mouth that was the open draught in the
kitchen stove grinned a toothy welcome at them.
A woman stood over the stove, a fork in her hand. The kitchen was clean,
but disorderly, with the disorder that comes of pressure of work. There
was a not unpleasant smell of cooking. Selina sniffed it hungrily. The
woman turned to face them. Selina stared.
This, she thought, must be some other—an old woman—his mother perhaps.
But: “Maartje, here is school teacher,” said Klaas Pool. Selina put out
her hand to meet the other woman’s hand, rough, hard, calloused. Her
own, touching it, was like satin against a pine board. Maartje smiled,
and you saw her broken discoloured teeth. She pushed back the sparse
hair from her high forehead, fumbled a little, shyly, at the collar of
her clean blue calico dress.
“Pleased to meet you,” Maartje said, primly. “Make you welcome.” Then,
as Pool stamped out to the yard, slamming the door behind him, “Pool he
could have come with you by the front way, too. Lay off your things.”
Selina began to remove the wrappings that swathed her—the muffler, the
shawl, the cloak. Now she stood, a slim, incongruously elegant little
figure in that kitchen. The brown lady’s-cloth was very tight and
basqued above, very flounced and bustled below. “My, how you are young!”
cried Maartje. She moved nearer, as if impelled, and fingered the stuff
of Selina’s gown. And as she did this Selina suddenly saw that she, too,
was young. The bad teeth, the thin hair, the careless dress, the
littered kitchen, the harassed frown—above all these, standing out
clearly, appeared the look of a girl.
“Why, I do believe she’s not more than twenty-eight!” Selina said to
herself in a kind of panic. “I do believe she’s not more than
twenty-eight.”
She had been aware of the two pigtailed heads appearing and vanishing in
the doorway of the next room. Now Maartje was shooing her into this
room. Evidently her hostess was distressed because the school teacher’s
formal entrance had not been made by way of parlour instead of kitchen.
She followed Maartje Pool into the front room. Behind the stove,
tittering, were two yellow-haired little girls. Geertje and Jozina, of
course. Selina went over to them, smiling. “Which is Geertje?” she
asked. “And which Jozina?” But at this the titters became squeals. They
retired behind the round black bulwark of the woodburner, overcome.
There was no fire in this shining ebon structure, though the evening was
sharp. Above the stove a length of pipe, glittering with polish as was
the stove itself, crossed the width of the room and vanished through a
queer little perforated grating in the ceiling. Selina’s quick glance
encompassed the room. In the window were a few hardy plants in pots on a
green-painted wooden rack. There were geraniums, blossomless; a cactus
with its thick slabs of petals like slices of gangrenous ham set up for
beauty in a parlour; a plant called Jacob’s ladder, on a spindling
trellis. The bony scaffolding of the green-painted wooden stand was
turned toward the room. The flowers blindly faced the dark square of the
window. There was a sofa with a wrinkled calico cover; three rocking
chairs; some stark crayons of incredibly hard-featured Dutch ancients on
the wall. It was all neat, stiff, unlovely. But Selina had known too
many years of boarding-house ugliness to be offended at this.
Maartje had lighted a small glass-bowled lamp. The chimney of this
sparkled as had the window panes. A steep, uncarpeted stairway,
enclosed, led off the sitting room. Up this Maartje Pool, talking, led
the way to Selina’s bedroom. Selina was to learn that the farm woman,
often inarticulate through lack of companionship, becomes a torrent of
talk when opportunity presents itself. They made quite a little
procession. First, Mrs. Pool with the lamp; then Selina with the
satchel; then, tap-tap, tap-tap, Jozina and Geertje, their heavy
hob-nailed shoes creating a great clatter on the wooden stairs, though
they were tip-toeing in an effort to make themselves unheard by their
mother. There evidently had been an arrangement on the subject of their
invisibility. The procession moved to the accompaniment of Maartje’s,
“Now you stay downstairs didn’t I tell you!” There was in her tone a
warning; a menace. The two pigtails would hang back a moment, only to
come tap-tapping on again, their saucer eyes at once fearful and
mischievous.
A narrow, dim, close-smelling hallway, uncarpeted. At the end of it a
door opening into the room that was to be Selina’s. As its chill struck
her to the marrow three objects caught her eye. The bed, a huge and not
unhandsome walnut mausoleum, reared its sombre height almost to the
room’s top. Indeed, its apex of grapes did actually seem to achieve a
meeting with the whitewashed ceiling. The mattress of straw and
corn-husks was unworthy of this edifice, but over it Mrs. Pool had
mercifully placed a feather bed, stitched and quilted, so that Selina
lay soft and warm through the winter. Along one wall stood a low chest
so richly brown as to appear black. The front panel of this was
curiously carved. Selina stooped before it and for the second time that
day said: “How beautiful!” then looked quickly round at Maartje Pool as
though fearful of finding her laughing as Klaas Pool had laughed. But
Mrs. Pool’s face reflected the glow in her own. She came over to Selina
and stooped with her over the chest, holding the lamp so that its yellow
flame lighted up the scrolls and tendrils of the carved surface. With
one discoloured forefinger she traced the bold flourishes on the panel.
“See? How it makes out letters?”
Selina peered closer. “Why, sure enough! This first one’s an S!”
Maartje was kneeling before the chest now. “Sure an S. For Sophia. It is
a Holland bride’s chest. And here is K. And here is big D. It makes
Sophia Kroon DeVries. It is anyways two hundred years. My mother she
gave it to me when I was married, and her mother she gave it to her when
she was married, and her mother gave it to her when she was married, and
her——”
“I should think so!” exclaimed Selina, rather meaninglessly; but
stemming the torrent. “What’s in it? Anything? There ought to be bride’s
clothes in it, yellow with age.”
“It is!” cried Maartje Pool and gave a little bounce that imperilled the
lamp.
“No!” The two on their knees sat smiling at each other, wide-eyed, like
schoolgirls. The pigtails, emboldened, had come tap-tapping nearer and
were peering over the shoulders of the women before the chest.
“Here—wait.” Maartje Pool thrust the lamp into Selina’s hand, raised
the lid of the chest, dived expertly into its depths amidst a great
rustling of old newspapers and emerged red-faced with a Dutch basque and
voluminous skirt of silk; an age-yellow cap whose wings, stiff with
embroidery, stood out grandly on either side; a pair of wooden shoes,
stained terra-cotta like the sails of the Vollendam fishing boats, and
carved from toe to heel in a delicate and intricate pattern. A bridal
gown, a bridal cap, bridal shoes.
“Well!” said Selina, with the feeling of a little girl in a rich attic
on a rainy day. She clasped her hands. “May I dress up in it some time?”
Maartje Pool, folding the garments hastily, looked shocked and
horrified. “Never must anybody dress up in a bride’s dress only to get
married. It brings bad luck.” Then, as Selina stroked the stiff silken
folds of the skirt with a slim and caressing forefinger: “So you get
married to a High Prairie Dutchman I let you wear it.” At this absurdity
they both laughed again. Selina thought that this school-teaching
venture was starting out very well. She would have _such_ things to tell
her father—then she remembered. She shivered a little as she stood up
now. She raised her arms to take off her hat, feeling suddenly tired,
cold, strange in this house with this farm woman, and the two staring
little girls, and the great red-faced man. There surged over her a great
wave of longing for her father—for the gay little dinners, for the
theatre treats, for his humorous philosophical drawl, for the Chicago
streets, and the ugly Chicago houses; for Julie; for Miss Fister’s
school; for anything and any one that was accustomed, known, and
therefore dear. Even Aunt Abbie and Aunt Sarah had a not unlovely
aspect, viewed from this chill farmhouse bedroom that had suddenly
become her home. She had a horrible premonition that she was going to
cry, began to blink very fast, turned a little blindly in the dim light
and caught sight of the room’s third arresting object. A blue-black
cylinder of tin sheeting, like a stove and yet unlike. It was polished
like the length of pipe in the sitting room below. Indeed, it was
evidently a giant flower of this stem.
“What’s that?” demanded Selina, pointing.
Maartje Pool, depositing the lamp on the little wash-stand preparatory
to leaving, smiled pridefully. “Drum.”
“Drum?”
“For heat your room.” Selina touched it. It was icy. “When there is
fire,” Mrs. Pool added, hastily. In her mind’s eye Selina traced the tin
tube below running along the ceiling in the peaceful and orderly path of
a stove-pipe, thrusting its way through the cylindrical hole in the
ceiling and here bursting suddenly into swollen and monstrous bloom like
an unthinkable goitre on a black neck. Selina was to learn that its
heating powers were mythical. Even when the stove in the sitting room
was blazing away with a cheerful roar none of the glow communicated
itself to the drum. It remained as coolly indifferent to the blasts
breathed upon it as a girl hotly besieged by an unwelcome lover. This
was to influence a number of Selina’s habits, including nocturnal
reading and matutinal bathing. Selina was a daily morning bather in a
period which looked upon the daily bath as an eccentricity, or, at best,
an affectation. It would be charming to be able to record that she
continued the practice in the Pool household; but a morning bath in the
arctic atmosphere of an Illinois prairie farmhouse would not have been
eccentric merely, but mad, even if there had been an available kettle of
hot water at 6.30 A. M., which there emphatically was not. Selina was
grateful for an occasional steaming basin of water at night and a
hurried piecemeal bath by the mythical heat of the drum.
“Maartje!” roared a voice from belowstairs. The voice of the hungry
male. There was wafted up, too, a faint smell of scorching. Then came
sounds of a bumping and thumping along the narrow stairway.
“Og heden!” cried Maartje, in a panic, her hands high in air. She was
off, sweeping the two pigtails with her in her flight. There were sounds
of scuffling on the stairway, and Maartje’s voice calling something that
sounded like hookendunk to Selina. But she decided that that couldn’t
be. The bumping now sounded along the passage outside her room. Selina
turned from her satchel to behold a gnome in the doorway. Below, she saw
a pair of bow-legs; above, her own little hide-bound trunk; between, a
broad face, a grizzled beard, a lack-lustre eye in a weather-beaten
countenance.
“Jakob Hoogendunk,” the gnome announced, briefly, peering up at her from
beneath the trunk balanced on his back.
Selina laughed delightedly. “Not really! Do come in. This is a good
place, don’t you think? Along the wall? Mr.—Mr. Hoogendunk?”
Jakob Hoogendunk grunted and plodded across the room, the trunk lurching
perilously above his bow-legged stride. He set it down with a final
thump, wiped his nose with the back of his hand—sign of a task
completed—and surveyed the trunk largely, as if he had made it. “Thank
you, Mr. Hoogendunk,” said Selina, and put out her hand. “I’m Selina
Peake. How”—she couldn’t resist it—“how did you leave Rip?”
It was characteristic of her that in this grizzled hired man, twisted
with rheumatism, reeking of mould and manure, she should see a direct
descendant of those gnarled and bearded bowlers so mysteriously
encountered by Rip Van Winkle on that fatal day in the Kaatskills. The
name, too, appealed to her in its comic ugliness. So she laughed a soft
little laugh; held out her hand. The man was not offended. He knew that
people laughed when they were introduced. So he laughed, too, in a
mixture of embarrassment and attempted ease, looking down at the small
hand extended to him. He blinked at it curiously. He wiped his two hands
down his thighs, hard; then shook his great grizzled head. “My hand is
all muck. I ain’t washed up yet,” and lurched off, leaving Selina
looking rather helplessly down at her own extended hand. His clatter on
the wooden stairway sounded like cavalry on a frozen road.
Left alone in her room Selina unlocked her trunk and took from it two
photographs—one of a mild-looking man with his hat a little on one
side, the other of a woman who might have been a twenty-five-year-old
Selina, minus the courageous jaw-line. Looking about for a fitting place
on which to stand these leather-framed treasures she considered the top
of the chill drum, humorously, then actually placed them there, for lack
of better refuge, from which vantage point they regarded her with
politely interested eyes. Perhaps Jakob Hoogendunk would put up a shelf
for her. That would serve for her little stock of books and for the
pictures as well. She was enjoying that little flush of exhilaration
that comes to a woman, unpacking. There was about her trunk, even though
closed but this very day, the element of surprise that gilds familiar
objects when disclosed for the first time in unfamiliar surroundings.
She took out her neat pile of warm woollen underwear, her stout shoes.
She shook out the crushed folds of the wine-coloured cashmere. Now, if
ever, she should have regretted its purchase. But she didn’t. No one,
she reflected, as she spread it rosily on the bed, possessing a
wine-coloured cashmere could be altogether downcast.
The wine cashmere on the bed, the photographs on the drum, her clothes
hanging comfortably on wall-hooks with a calico curtain on a cord
protecting them, her stock of books on the closed trunk. Already the
room wore the aspect of familiarity.
From belowstairs came the hiss of frying. Selina washed in the chill
water of the basin, took down her hair and coiled it again before the
swimmy little mirror over the wash-stand. She adjusted the stitched
white bands of the severe collar and patted the cuffs of the brown
lady’s-cloth. The tight basque was fastened with buttons from throat to
waist. Her fine long head rose above this trying base with such grace
and dignity as to render the stiff garment beautiful. The skirt billowed
and puffed out behind, and was drawn in folds across the front. It was a
day of appalling bunchiness and equally appalling tightness in dress; of
panniers, galloons, plastrons, reveres, bustles, and all manner of lumpy
bedevilment. That Selina could appear in this disfiguring garment a
creature still graceful, slim, and pliant was a sheer triumph of spirit
over matter.
She blew out the light now and descended the steep wooden stairway to
the unlighted parlour. The door between parlour and kitchen was closed.
Selina sniffed sensitively. There was pork for supper. She was to learn
that there always was pork for supper. As the winter wore on she
developed a horror of this porcine fare, remembering to have read
somewhere that one’s diet was in time reflected in one’s face; that
gross eating made one gross looking. She would examine her features
fearfully in the swimmy mirror—the lovely little white nose—was it
coarsening? The deep-set dark eyes—were they squinting? The firm sweet
lips—were they broadening? But the reflection in the glass reassured
her.
She hesitated a moment there in the darkness. Then she opened the
kitchen door. There swam out at her a haze of smoke, from which emerged
round blue eyes, guttural talk, the smell of frying grease, of stable,
of loam, and of woollen wash freshly brought in from the line. With an
inrush of cold air that sent the blue haze into swirls the outer kitchen
door opened. A boy, his arm piled high with stove-wood, entered; a dark,
handsome sullen boy who stared at Selina over the armload of wood.
Selina stared back at him. There sprang to life between the boy of
twelve and the woman of nineteen an electric current of feeling.
“Roelf,” thought Selina; and even took a step toward him, inexplicably
drawn.
“Hurry then with that wood there!” fretted Maartje at the stove. The boy
flung the armful into the box, brushed his sleeve and coat-front
mechanically, still looking at Selina. A slave to the insatiable maw of
the wood-box.
Klaas Pool, already at table, thumped with his knife. “Sit down! Sit
down, teacher.” Selina hesitated, looked at Maartje. Maartje was holding
a frying pan aloft in one hand while with the other she thrust and poked
a fresh stick of wood into the open-lidded stove. The two pigtails
seated themselves at the table, set with its red-checked cloth and
bone-handled cutlery. Jakob Hoogendunk, who had been splashing,
snorting, and puffing porpoise-fashion in a corner over a hand-basin
whose cubic contents were out of all proportion to the sounds extracted
therefrom, now seated himself. Roelf flung his cap on a wall-hook and
sat down. Only Selina and Maartje remained standing. “Sit down! Sit
down!” Klaas Pool said again, jovially. “Well, how is cabbages?” He
chuckled and winked. Jakob Hoogendunk snorted. A duet of titters from
the pigtails. Maartje at the stove smiled; but a trifle grimly, one
might have thought, watching her. Evidently Klaas had not hugged his
joke in secret. Only the boy Roelf remained unsmiling. Even Selina,
feeling the red mounting her cheeks, smiled a little, nervously, and sat
down with some suddenness.
Maartje Pool now thumped down on the table a great bowl of potatoes
fried in grease; a platter of ham. There was bread cut in chunks. The
coffee was rye, roasted in the oven, ground, and taken without sugar or
cream. Of this food there was plenty. It made Mrs. Tebbitt’s Monday
night meal seem ambrosial. Selina’s visions of chickens, oly-koeks, wild
ducks, crusty crullers, and pumpkin pies vanished, never to return. She
had been very hungry, but now, as she talked, nodded, smiled, she cut
her food into infinitesimal bites, did not chew them so very well, and
despised herself for being dainty. A slight, distinctive little figure
there in the yellow lamplight, eating this coarse fare bravely, turning
her soft dark glance on the woman who was making countless trips from
stove to table, from table to stove; on the sullen handsome boy with his
purplish chapped hands and his sombre eyes; on the two round-eyed,
red-cheeked little girls; on the great red-faced full-lipped man eating
his supper noisily and with relish; on Jakob Hoogendunk, grazing
greedily. . . .
“Well,” she thought, “it’s going to be different enough, that’s
certain. . . . This is a vegetable farm, and they don’t eat vegetables.
I wonder why. . . . What a pity that she lets herself look like that,
just because she’s a farm woman. Her hair screwed into that knob, her
skin rough and neglected. That hideous dress. Shapeless. She’s not bad
looking, either. A red spot on either cheek, now; and her eyes so blue.
A little like those women in the Dutch pictures Father took me to see
in—where?—where?—New York, years ago?—yes. A woman in a kitchen, a
dark sort of room with pots of brass on a shelf; a high mullioned
window. But that woman’s face was placid. This one’s strained. Why need
she look like that, frowsy, harried, old! . . . The boy is, somehow,
foreign looking—Italian. Queer. . . . They talk a good deal like some
German neighbours we had in Milwaukee. They twist sentences. Literal
translations from the Dutch, I suppose.” . . .
Jakob Hoogendunk was talking. Supper over, the men sat relaxed, pipe in
mouth. Maartje was clearing the supper things, with Geertje and Jozina
making a great pretense at helping. If they giggled like that in school,
Selina thought, she would, in time, go mad, and knock their pigtailed
heads together.
“You got to have rich bottom land,” Hoogendunk was saying, “else you get
little tough stringy stuff. I seen it in market Friday, laying. Stick to
vegetables that is vegetables and not new-fangled stuff. Celery! What is
celery! It ain’t rightly a vegetable, and it ain’t a yerb. Look how
Voorhees he used as much as one hundred fifty pounds nitrate of sody,
let alone regular fertilizer, and what comes from it? Little stringy
stuff. You got to have rich bottom land.”
Selina was interested. She had always thought that vegetables grew. You
put them in the ground—seeds or something—and pretty soon things came
popping up—potatoes, cabbages, onions, carrots, beets. But what was
this thing called nitrate of soda? It must have had something to do with
the creamed cabbage at Mrs. Tebbitt’s. And she had never known it. And
what was regular fertilizer? She leaned forward.
“What’s a regular fertilizer?”
Klaas Pool and Jakob Hoogendunk looked at her. She looked at them, her
fine intelligent eyes alight with interest. Pool then tipped back his
chair, lifted a stove-lid, spat into the embers, replaced the lid and
rolled his eyes in the direction of Jakob Hoogendunk. Hoogendunk rolled
his slow gaze in the direction of Klaas Pool. Then both turned to look
at this audacious female who thus interrupted men’s conversation.
Pool took his pipe from his mouth, blew a thin spiral, wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand. “Regular fertilizer is—regular fertilizer.”
Jakob Hoogendunk nodded his solemn confirmation of this.
“What’s in it?” persisted Selina.
Pool waved a huge red hand as though to waft away this troublesome
insect. He looked at Maartje. But Maartje was slamming about her work.
Geertje and Jozina were absorbed in some game of their own behind the
stove. Roelf, at the table, sat reading, one slim hand, chapped and
gritty with rough work, outspread on the cloth. Selina noticed, without
knowing she noticed, that the fingers were long, slim, and the broken
nails thin and fine. “But what’s in it?” she said again. Suddenly life
in the kitchen hung suspended. The two men frowned. Maartje half turned
from her dishpan. The two little girls peered out from behind the stove.
Roelf looked up from his book. Even the collie, lying in front of the
stove half asleep, suddenly ran his tongue out, winked one eye. But
Selina, all sociability, awaited her answer. She could not know that in
High Prairie women did not brazenly intrude thus on men’s weighty
conversation. The men looked at her, unanswering. She began to feel a
little uncomfortable. The boy Roelf rose and went to the cupboard in the
kitchen corner. He took down a large green-bound book, and placed it in
Selina’s hand. The book smelled terribly. Its covers were greasy with
handling. On the page margins a brown stain showed the imprint of
fingers. Roelf pointed at a page. Selina followed the line with her eye.
Good Basic Fertilizer for Market-Garden Crops.
Then, below:
Nitrate of soda.
Ammonium sulfate.
Dried blood.
Selina shut the book and handed it back to Roelf, gingerly. Dried blood!
She stared at the two men. “What does it mean by dried blood?”
Klaas answered stubbornly, “Dried blood is dried blood. You put in the
field dried blood and it makes grow. Cabbages, onions, squash.” At sight
of her horrified face he grinned. “Well, cabbages is anyway beautiful,
huh?” He rolled a facetious eye around at Jakob. Evidently this joke was
going to last him the winter.
Selina stood up. She wasn’t annoyed; but she wanted, suddenly, to be
alone in her room—in the room that but an hour before had been a
strange and terrifying chamber with its towering bed, its chill drum,
its ghostly bride’s chest. Now it had become a refuge, snug, safe,
infinitely desirable. She turned to Mrs. Pool. “I—I think I’ll go up to
my room. I’m very tired. The ride, I suppose. I’m not used . . .” Her
voice trailed off.
“Sure,” said Maartje, briskly. She had finished the supper dishes and
was busy with a huge bowl, flour, a baking board. “Sure go up. I got my
bread to set yet and what all.”
“If I could have some hot water——”
“Roelf! Stop once that reading and show school teacher where is hot
water. Geertje! Jozina! Never in my world did I see such.” She cuffed a
convenient pigtail by way of emphasis. A wail arose.
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Don’t bother.” Selina was in a sort of
panic now. She wanted to be out of the room. But the boy Roelf, with
quiet swiftness, had taken a battered tin pail from its hook on the
wall, had lifted an iron slab at the back of the kitchen stove. A mist
of steam arose. He dipped the pail into the tiny reservoir thus
revealed. Then, as Selina made as though to take it, he walked past her.
She heard him ascending the wooden stairway. She wanted to be after him.
But first she must know the name of the book over which he had been
poring. But between her and the book outspread on the table were Pool,
Hoogendunk, dog, pigtails, Maartje. She pointed with a determined
forefinger. “What’s that book Roelf was reading?”
Maartje thumped a great ball of dough on the baking board. Her arms were
white with flour. She kneaded and pummelled expertly. “Woorden boek.”
Well. That meant nothing. Woorden boek. Woorden b—— Dimly the meaning
of the Dutch words began to come to her. But it couldn’t be. She brushed
past the men in the tipped-back chairs, stepped over the collie, reached
across the table. Woorden—word. Boek—book. Word book. “He’s reading
the dictionary!” Selina said, aloud. “He’s reading the dictionary!” She
had the horrible feeling that she was going to laugh and cry at once;
hysteria.
Mrs. Pool glanced around. “School teacher he gave it to Roelf time he
quit last year for spring planting. A word book. In it is more as a
hundred thousand words, all different.”
Selina flung a good-night over her shoulder and made for the stairway.
He should have all her books. She would send to Chicago for books. She
would spend her thirty dollars a month buying books for him. He had been
reading the dictionary!
Roelf had placed the pail of hot water on the little wash-stand, and had
lighted the glass lamp. He was intent on replacing the glass chimney
within the four prongs that held it firm. Downstairs, in the crowded
kitchen, he had seemed quite the man. Now, in the yellow lamplight, his
profile sharply outlined, she saw that he was just a small boy with
tousled hair. About his cheeks, his mouth, his chin one could even see
the last faint traces of soft infantile roundness. His trousers,
absurdly cut down from a man’s pair by inexpert hands, hung grotesquely
about his slim shanks.
“He’s just a little boy,” thought Selina, with a quick pang. He was
about to pass her now, without glancing at her, his head down. She put
out her hand; touched his shoulder. He looked up at her, his face
startlingly alive, his eyes blazing. It came to Selina that until now
she had not heard him speak. Her hand pressed the thin stuff of his coat
sleeve.
“Cabbages—fields of cabbages—what you said—they _are_ beautiful,” he
stammered. He was terribly in earnest. Before she could reply he was out
of the room, clattering down the stairs.
Selina stood, blinking a little.
The glow that warmed her now endured while she splashed about in the
inadequate basin; took down the dark soft masses of her hair; put on the
voluminous long-sleeved, high-necked nightgown. Just before she blew out
the lamp her last glimpse was of the black drum stationed like a patient
eunuch in the corner; and she could smile at that; even giggle a little,
what with weariness, excitement, and a general feeling of being awake in
a dream. But once in the vast bed she lay there utterly lost in the
waves of terror and loneliness that envelop one at night in a strange
house amongst strange people. She lay there, tensed and tight, her toes
curled with nervousness, her spine hunched with it, her leg muscles
taut. She peeked over the edge of the covers looking a good deal like a
frightened brownie, if one could have seen her; her eyes very wide, the
pupils turned well toward the corners with the look of listening and
distrust. The sharp November air cut in from the fields that were
fertilized with dried blood. She shivered, and wrinkled up her lovely
little nose and seemed to sniff this loathsome taint in the air. She
listened to the noises that came from belowstairs; voices gruff,
unaccustomed; shrill, high. These ceased and gave place to others less
accustomed to her city-bred ears; a dog’s bark and an answering one; a
far-off train whistle; the dull thud of hoofs stamping on the barn
floor; the wind in the bare tree branches outside the window.
Her watch—a gift from Simeon Peake on her eighteenth birthday—with the
gold case all beautifully engraved with a likeness of a gate, and a
church, and a waterfall and a bird, linked together with spirals and
flourishes of the most graceful description, was ticking away
companionably under her pillow. She felt for it, took it out and held it
in her palm, under her cheek, for comfort.
She knew she would not sleep that night. She knew she would not
sleep——
She awoke to a clear, cold November dawn; children’s voices; the
neighing of horses; a great sizzling and hissing, and scent of frying
bacon; a clucking and squawking in the barnyard. It was six o’clock.
Selina’s first day as a school teacher. In a little more than two hours
she would be facing a whole roomful of round-eyed Geertjes and Jozinas
and Roelfs. The bedroom was cruelly cold. As she threw the bed-clothes
heroically aside Selina decided that it took an appalling amount of
courage—this life that Simeon Peake had called a great adventure.