Every morning throughout November it was the same. At six o’clock: “Miss
Peake! _Oh_, Miss Peake!”
“I’m up!” Selina would call in what she meant to be a gay voice, through
chattering teeth.
“You better come down and dress where is warm here by the stove.”
Peering down the perforations in the floor-hole through which the
parlour chimney swelled so proudly into the drum, Selina could vaguely
descry Mrs. Pool stationed just below, her gaze upturned.
That first morning, on hearing this invitation, Selina had been rocked
between horror and mirth. “I’m not cold, really. I’m almost dressed.
I’ll be down directly.”
Maartje Pool must have sensed some of the shock in the girl’s voice; or,
perhaps, even some of the laughter. “Pool and Jakob are long out already
cutting. Here back of the stove you can dress warm.”
Shivering and tempted though she was, Selina had set her will against
it. A little hardening of the muscles around her jaw so that they stood
out whitely beneath the fine-grained skin. “I won’t go down,” she said
to herself, shaking with the cold. “I won’t come down to dressing behind
the kitchen stove like a—like a peasant in one of those dreadful
Russian novels. . . . That sounds stuck up and horrid. . . . The Pools
are good and kind and decent. . . . But I _won’t_ come down to huddling
behind the stove with a bundle of underwear in my arms. Oh, _dear_, this
corset’s like a casing of ice.”
Geertje and Jozina had no such maidenly scruples. Each morning they
gathered their small woollen garments in a bundle and scudded briskly to
the kitchen for warmth, though their bedroom just off the parlour had by
no means the degree of refrigeration possessed by Selina’s clammy
chamber. Not only that, the Misses Pool slept snugly in the woollen
nether garments that invested them by day and so had only mounds of
woollen petticoats, woollen stockings, and mysterious grimy straps,
bands, and fastenings with which to struggle. Their intimate flannels
had a cactus quality that made the early martyrs’ hair shirts seem, in
comparison, but a fleece-lined cloud. Dressing behind the kitchen stove
was a natural and universal custom in High Prairie.
By the middle of December as Selina stuck her nose cautiously out of the
covers into the midnight blackness of early morning you might have
observed, if it had been at all light, that the tip of that elegant and
erstwhile alabaster feature had been encarmined during the night by a
mischievous brush wielded by that same wight who had been busy painting
fronds and lacy ferns and gorgeous blossoms of silver all over the
bedroom window. Slowly, inch by inch, that bedroom window crept down,
down. Then, too, the Pools objected to the icy blasts which swept the
open stairway and penetrated their hermetically sealed bedrooms below.
Often the water in the pitcher on her washstand was frozen when Selina
awoke. Her garments, laid out the night before so that their donning
next morning might occupy a minimum of time, were mortuary to the touch.
Worst of all were the steel-stiffened, unwieldy, and ridiculous stays
that encased the female form of that day. As Selina’s numbed fingers
struggled with the fastenings of this iciest of garments her ribs shrank
from its arctic embrace.
“But I won’t dress behind the kitchen stove!” declared Selina, glaring
meanwhile at that hollow pretense, the drum. She even stuck her tongue
out at it (only nineteen, remember!). For that matter, it may as well be
known that she brought home a piece of chalk from school and sketched a
demon face on the drum’s bulging front, giving it a personal and horrid
aspect that afforded her much satisfaction.
When she thought back, years later, on that period of her High Prairie
experience, stoves seemed to figure with absurd prominence in her
memory. That might well be. A stove changed the whole course of her
life.
From the first, the schoolhouse stove was her bête noir. Out of the
welter of that first year it stood, huge and menacing, a black tyrant.
The High Prairie schoolhouse in which Selina taught was a little more
than a mile up the road beyond the Pool farm. She came to know that road
in all its moods—ice-locked, drifted with snow, wallowing in mud.
School began at half-past eight. After her first week Selina had the
mathematics of her early morning reduced to the least common
denominator. Up at six. A plunge into the frigid garments; breakfast of
bread, cheese, sometimes bacon, always rye coffee without cream or
sugar. On with the cloak, muffler, hood, mittens, galoshes. The lunch
box in bad weather. Up the road to the schoolhouse, battling the prairie
wind that whipped the tears into the eyes, ploughing the drifts,
slipping on the hard ruts and icy ridges in dry weather. Excellent at
nineteen. As she flew down the road in sun or rain, in wind or snow, her
mind’s eye was fixed on the stove. The schoolhouse reached, her numbed
fingers wrestled with the rusty lock. The door opened, there smote her
the schoolroom smell—a mingling of dead ashes, kerosene, unwashed
bodies, dust, mice, chalk, stove-wood, lunch crumbs, mould, slate that
has been washed with saliva. Into this Selina rushed, untying her
muffler as she entered. In the little vestibule there was a box piled
with chunks of stove-wood and another heaped with dried corn-cobs.
Alongside this a can of kerosene. The cobs served as kindling. A dozen
or more of these you soaked with kerosene and stuffed into the maw of
the rusty iron pot-bellied stove. A match. Up flared the corn-cobs. Now
was the moment for a small stick of wood; another to keep it company.
Shut the door. Draughts. Dampers. Smoke. Suspense. A blaze, then a
crackle. The wood has caught. In with a chunk now. A wait. Another
chunk. Slam the door. The schoolhouse fire is started for the day. As
the room thawed gradually Selina removed layers of outer garments. By
the time the children arrived the room was livable.
Naturally, those who sat near this monster baked; those near the windows
froze. Sometimes Selina felt she must go mad beholding the writhings and
contortions of a roomful of wriggling bodies scratching at backs, legs,
and sides as the stove grew hotter and flesh rebelled against the harsh
contact with the prickling undergarments of an over-cautious day.
Selina had seen herself, dignified, yet gentle, instructing a roomful of
Dutch cherubs in the simpler elements of learning. But it is difficult
to be dignified and gracious when you are suffering from chilblains.
Selina fell victim to this sordid discomfort, as did every child in the
room. She sat at the battered pine desk or moved about, a little
ice-wool shawl around her shoulders when the wind was wrong and the
stove balky. Her white little face seemed whiter in contrast with the
black folds of this sombre garment. Her slim hands were rough and
chapped. The oldest child in the room was thirteen, the youngest four
and a half. From eight-thirty until four Selina ruled this grubby
domain; a hot-and-cold roomful of sneezing, coughing, wriggling,
shuffling, dozing children, toe scuffling on agonized heel, and heel
scrunching on agonized toe, in a frenzy of itching.
“Aggie Vander Sijde, parse this sentence: The ground is wet because it
has rained.”
Miss Vander Sijde, eleven, arises with a switching of skirts and a
tossing of pigtail. “‘Ground’ the subject; ‘is wet’ the predicate;
‘because’ . . .”
Selina is listening with school-teacherly expression indicative of
encouragement and approval. “Jan Snip, parse this sentence: The flower
will wither if it is picked.”
Brown lady’s cloth; ice-wool shawl; chalk in hand. Just a phase; a brief
chapter in the adventure. Something to remember and look back on with a
mingling of amusement and wonder. Things were going to happen. Such
things, with life and life and life stretching ahead of her! In five
years—two—even one, perhaps, who knows but that she might be lying on
lacy pillows on just such a bleak winter morning, a satin coverlet over
her, the morning light shaded by soft rose-coloured hangings. (Early
influence of the _Fireside Companion_.)
“What time is it, Celeste?”
“It is now eleven o’clock, madame.”
“Is that all!”
“Would madame like that I prepare her bath now, or later?”
“Later, Celeste. My chocolate now. My letters.”
“. . . and if is the conjunction modifying . . .”
Early in the winter Selina had had the unfortunate idea of opening the
ice-locked windows at intervals and giving the children five minutes of
exercise while the fresh cold air cleared brains and room at once. Arms
waved wildly, heads wobbled, short legs worked vigorously. At the end of
the week twenty High Prairie parents sent protests by note or word of
mouth. Jan and Cornelius, Katrina and Aggie went to school to learn
reading and writing and numbers, not to stand with open windows in the
winter.
On the Pool farm the winter work had set in. Klaas drove into Chicago
with winter vegetables only once a week now. He and Jakob and Roelf were
storing potatoes and cabbages underground; repairing fences; preparing
frames for the early spring planting; sorting seedlings. It had been
Roelf who had taught Selina to build the schoolhouse fire. He had gone
with her on that first morning, had started the fire, filled the water
pail, initiated her in the rites of corn-cobs, kerosene, and dampers. A
shy, dark, silent boy. She set out deliberately to woo him to
friendship.
“Roelf, I have a book called ‘Ivanhoe.’ Would you like to read it?”
“Well, I don’t get much time.”
“You wouldn’t have to hurry. Right there in the house. And there’s
another called ‘The Three Musketeers’.”
He was trying not to look pleased; to appear stolid and Dutch, like the
people from whom he had sprung. Some Dutch sailor ancestor, Selina
thought, or fisherman, must have touched at an Italian port or Spanish
and brought back a wife whose eyes and skin and feeling for beauty had
skipped layer on layer of placid Netherlanders to crop out now in this
wistful sensitive boy.
Selina had spoken to Jakob Hoogendunk about a shelf for her books and
her photographs. He had put up a rough bit of board, very crude and
ugly, but it had served. She had come home one snowy afternoon to find
this shelf gone and in its place a smooth and polished one, with
brackets intricately carved. Roelf had cut, planed, polished, and carved
it in many hours of work in the cold little shed off the kitchen. He had
there a workshop of sorts, fitted with such tools and implements as he
could devise. He did man’s work on the farm, yet often at night Selina
could faintly hear the rasp of his handsaw after she had gone to bed. He
had built a doll’s house for Geertje and Jozina that was the black envy
of every pigtail in High Prairie. This sort of thing was looked upon by
Klaas Pool as foolishness. Roelf’s real work in the shed was the making
and mending of coldframes and hotbeds for the early spring plants.
Whenever possible Roelf neglected this dull work for some fancy of his
own. To this Klaas Pool objected as being “dumb.” For that matter, High
Prairie considered Pool’s boy “dumb like.” He said such things. When the
new Dutch Reformed Church was completed after gigantic effort—red
brick, and the first brick church in High Prairie—bright yellow painted
pews—a red and yellow glass window, most handsome—the Reverend
Vaarwerk brought from New Haarlem to preach the first sermon—Pool’s
Roelf was heard to hint darkly to a group of High Prairie boys that some
night he was going to burn the church down. It was ugly. It hurt you to
look at it, just.
Certainly, the boy was different. Selina, none too knowledgeous herself,
still recognized that here was something rare, something precious to be
fostered, shielded, encouraged.
“Roelf, stop that foolishness, get your ma once some wood. Carving on
that box again instead finishing them coldframes. Some day, by golly, I
show you. I break every stick . . . dumb as a Groningen . . .”
Roelf did not sulk. He seemed not to mind, particularly, but he came
back to the carved box as soon as chance presented itself. Maartje and
Klaas Pool were not cruel people, nor unkind. They were a little
bewildered by this odd creature that they, inexplicably enough, had
produced. It was not a family given to demonstration of affection. Life
was too grim for the flowering of this softer side. Then, too, they had
sprung from a phlegmatic and unemotional people. Klaas toiled like a
slave in the fields and barn; Maartje’s day was a treadmill of cooking,
scrubbing, washing, mending from the moment she arose (four in the
summer, five in the winter) until she dropped with a groan in her bed
often long after the others were asleep. Selina had never seen her kiss
Geertje or Jozina. But once she had been a little startled to see
Maartje, on one of her countless trips between stove and table, run her
hand through the boy’s shock of black hair, down the side of his face to
his chin which she tipped up with an indescribably tender gesture as she
looked down into his eyes. It was a movement fleeting, vague, yet
infinitely compassionate. Sometimes she even remonstrated when Klaas
berated Roelf. “Leave the boy be, then, Klaas. Leave him be, once.”
“She loves him best,” Selina thought. “She’d even try to understand him
if she had time.”
He was reading her books with such hunger as to cause her to wonder if
her stock would last him the winter. Sometimes, after supper, when he
was hammering and sawing away in the little shed Selina would snatch
Maartje’s old shawl off the hook, and swathed in this against draughty
chinks, she would read aloud to him while he carved, or talk to him
above the noise of his tools. Selina was a gay and volatile person. She
loved to make this boy laugh. His dark face would flash into almost
dazzling animation. Sometimes Maartje, hearing their young laughter,
would come to the shed door and stand there a moment, hugging her arms
in her rolled apron and smiling at them, uncomprehending but
companionable.
“You make fun, h’m?”
“Come in, Mrs. Pool. Sit down on my box and make fun, too. Here, you may
have half the shawl.”
“Og Heden! I got no time to sit down.” She was off.
Roelf slid his plane slowly, more slowly, over the surface of a
satin-smooth oak board. He stopped, twined a curl of shaving about his
finger. “When I am a man, and earning, I am going to buy my mother a
silk dress like I saw in a store in Chicago and she should put it on
every day, not only for Sunday; and sit in a chair and make little fine
stitches like Widow Paarlenberg.”
“What else are you going to do when you grow up?” She waited, certain
that he would say something delightful.
“Drive the team to town alone to market.”
“Oh, Roelf!”
“Sure. Already I have gone five times—twice with Jakob and three times
with Pop. Pretty soon, when I am seventeen or eighteen, I can go alone.
At five in the afternoon you start and at nine you are in the Haymarket.
There all night you sleep on the wagon. There are gas lights. The men
play dice and cards. At four in the morning you are ready when they
come, the commission men and the pedlers and the grocery men. Oh, it’s
fine, I tell you!”
“Roelf!” She was bitterly disappointed.
“Here. Look.” He rummaged around in a dusty box in a corner and,
suddenly shy again, laid before her a torn sheet of coarse brown paper
on which he had sketched crudely, effectively, a mêlée of great-haunched
horses; wagons piled high with garden truck; men in overalls and
corduroys; flaring gas torches. He had drawn it with a stub of pencil
exactly as it looked to him. The result was as startling as that
achieved by the present-day disciple of the impressionistic school.
Selina was enchanted.
Many of her evenings during November were spent thus. The family life
was lived in a kitchen blue with pipe smoke, heavy with the smell of
cooking. Sometimes—though rarely—a fire was lighted in the parlour
stove. Often she had school papers to correct—grubby sheaves of
arithmetic, grammar, or spelling lessons. Often she longed to read;
wanted to sew. Her bedroom was too cold. The men sat in the kitchen or
tramped in and out. Geertje and Jozina scuffled and played. Maartje
scuttled about like a harried animal, heavy-footed but incredibly swift.
The floor was always gritty with the sandy loam tracked in by the men’s
heavy boots.
Once, early in December, Selina went into town. The trip was born of
sudden revolt against her surroundings and a great wave of nostalgia for
the dirt and clamour and crowds of Chicago. Early Saturday morning Klaas
drove her to the railway station five miles distant. She was to stay
until Sunday. A letter had been written Julie Hempel ten days before,
but there had been no answer. Once in town she went straight to the
Hempel house. Mrs. Hempel, thin-lipped, met her in the hall and said
that Julie was out of town. She was visiting her friend Miss Arnold, in
Kansas City. Selina was not asked to stay to dinner. She was not asked
to sit down. When she left the house her great fine eyes seemed larger
and more deep-set than ever, and her jaw-line was set hard against the
invasion of tears. Suddenly she hated this Chicago that wanted none of
her; that brushed past her, bumping her elbow and offering no apology;
that clanged, and shrieked, and whistled, and roared in her ears now
grown accustomed to the prairie silence.
“I don’t care,” she said, which meant she did. “I don’t care. Just you
wait. Some day I’m going to be—oh, terribly important. And people will
say, ‘Do you know that wonderful Selina Peake? Well, they say she used
to be a country school teacher and slept in an ice-cold room and ate
pork three times a . . .’ There! I know what I’m going to do. I’m going
to have luncheon and I’ll order the most delicious things. I think I’ll
go to the Palmer House where Father and I . . . no, I couldn’t stand
that. I’ll go to the Auditorium Hotel restaurant and have ice cream; and
chicken broth in a silver cup; and cream puffs, and all kinds of
vegetables and little lamb chops in paper panties. And orange pekoe
tea.”
She actually did order all these things and had a group of amazed
waiters hovering about her table waiting to see her devour this meal,
much as a similar group had stared at David Copperfield when he was
innocent of having bolted the huge dinner ordered in the inn on his way
to London.
She ate the ice cream and drank the orange pekoe (mainly because she
loved the sound of its name; it made her think of chrysanthemums and
cherry blossoms, spices, fans, and slant-eyed maidens). She devoured a
crisp salad with the avidity of a canary pecking at a lettuce leaf. She
flirted with the lamb chops. She remembered the size of her father’s
generous tips and left a sum on the table that temporarily dulled the
edge of the waiter’s hatred of women diners. But the luncheon could not
be said to have been a success. She thought of dinner, and her spirit
quailed. She spent the time between one and three buying portable
presents for the entire Pool household—including bananas for Geertje
and Jozina, for whom that farinaceous fruit had the fascination always
held for the farm child. She caught a train at four thirty-five and
actually trudged the five miles from the station to the farm, arriving
half frozen, weary, with aching arms and nipped toes, to a great welcome
of the squeals, grunts, barks, and gutturals that formed the expression
of the Pool household. She was astonished to find how happy she was to
return to the kitchen stove, to the smell of frying pork, to her own
room with the walnut bed and the book shelf. Even the grim drum had
taken on the dear and comforting aspect of the accustomed.
V
High Prairie swains failed to find Selina alluring. She was too small,
too pale and fragile for their robust taste. Naturally, her coming had
been an event in this isolated community. She would have been surprised
to know with what eagerness and curiosity High Prairie gathered crumbs
of news about her; her appearance, her manner, her dress. Was she stuck
up? Was she new fangled? She failed to notice the agitation of the
parlour curtains behind the glittering windows of the farmhouses she
passed on her way to school. With no visible means of communication news
of her leaped from farm to farm as flame leaps the gaps in a forest
fire. She would have been aghast to learn that High Prairie,
inexplicably enough, knew all about her from the colour of the ribbon
that threaded her neat little white corset covers to the number of books
on her shelf. She thought cabbage fields beautiful; she read books to
that dumb-acting Roelf Pool; she was making over a dress for Maartje
after the pattern of the stylish brown lady’s-cloth she wore (foolishly)
to school. Now and then she encountered a team on the road. She would
call a good-day. Sometimes the driver answered, tardily, as though
surprised. Sometimes he only stared. She almost never saw the High
Prairie farm women, busy in their kitchens.
On her fifth Sunday in the district she accompanied the Pools to the
morning service at the Dutch Reformed Church. Maartje seldom had the
time for such frivolity. But on this morning Klaas hitched up the big
farm wagon with the double seat and took the family complete—Maartje,
Selina, Roelf, and the pigtails. Maartje, out of her kitchen calico and
dressed in her best black, with a funereal bonnet made sadder by a
sparse and drooping feather whose listless fronds emerged surprisingly
from a faded red cotton rose, wore a new strange aspect to Selina’s
eyes, as did Klaas in his clumsy sabbaticals. Roelf had rebelled against
going, had been cuffed for it, and had sat very still all through the
service, gazing at the red and yellow glass church window. Later he
confided to Selina that the sunlight filtering through the crude yellow
panes had imparted a bilious look to the unfortunates seated within its
range, affording him much secret satisfaction.
Selina’s appearance had made quite a stir, of which she was entirely
unaware. As the congregation entered by twos and threes she thought they
resembled startlingly a woodcut in an old illustrated book she once had
seen. The men’s Sunday trousers and coats had a square stiff angularity,
as though chopped out of a block. The women, in shawls and bonnets of
rusty black, were incredibly cut in the same pattern. The unmarried
girls, though, were plump, red-cheeked, and not uncomely, with high
round cheek-bones on which sat a spot of brick-red which imparted no
glow to the face. Their foreheads were prominent and meaningless.
In the midst of this drab assemblage there entered late and rustlingly a
tall, slow-moving woman in a city-bought cloak and a bonnet quite unlike
the vintage millinery of High Prairie. As she came down the aisle Selina
thought she was like a full-sailed frigate. An ample woman, with a fine
fair skin and a ripe red mouth; a high firm bosom and great thighs that
moved rhythmically, slowly. She had thick, insolent eyelids. Her hands,
as she turned the leaves of her hymn book, were smooth and white. As she
entered there was a little rustle throughout the congregation; a craning
of necks. Though she was bustled and flounced and panniered, you
thought, curiously enough, of those lolling white-fleshed and
unconventional ladies whom the sixteenth century painters were always
portraying as having their toe nails cut with nothing on.
“Who’s that?” whispered Selina to Maartje.
“Widow Paarlenberg. She is rich like anything.”
“Yes?” Selina was fascinated.
“Look once how she makes eyes at him.”
“At him? Who? Who?”
“Pervus DeJong. By Gerrit Pon he is sitting with the blue shirt and sad
looking so.”
Selina craned, peered. “The—oh—he’s very good looking, isn’t he?”
“Sure. Widow Paarlenberg is stuck on him. See how
she—Sh-sh-sh!—Reverend Dekker looks at us. I tell you after.”
Selina decided she’d come to church oftener. The service went on, dull,
heavy. It was in English and Dutch. She heard scarcely a word of it. The
Widow Paarlenberg and this Pervus DeJong occupied her thoughts. She
decided, without malice, that the widow resembled one of the sleekest of
the pink porkers rooting in Klaas Pool’s barnyard, waiting to be cut
into Christmas meat.
The Widow Paarlenberg turned and smiled. Her eyes were slippery
(Selina’s term). Her mouth became loose and wide with one corner sliding
down a trifle into something very like a leer.
With one surge the Dutch Reformed congregation leaned forward to see how
Pervus DeJong would respond to this public mark of favour. His gaze was
stern, unsmiling. His eyes were fixed on that extremely dull gentleman,
the Reverend Dekker.
“He’s annoyed,” thought Selina, and was pleased at the thought. “Well, I
may not be a widow, but I’m sure that’s not the way.” And then: “Now I
wonder what it’s like when _he_ smiles.”
According to fiction as Selina had found it in the _Fireside Companion_
and elsewhere, he should have turned at this moment, irresistibly drawn
by the magnetism of her gaze, and smiled a rare sweet smile that lighted
up his stern young face. But he did not. He yawned suddenly and
capaciously. The Reformed Dutch congregation leaned back feeling
cheated. Handsome, certainly, Selina reflected. But then, probably Klaas
Pool, too, had been handsome a few years ago.
The service ended, there was much talk of the weather, seedlings, stock,
the approaching holiday season. Maartje, her Sunday dinner heavy on her
mind, was elbowing her way up the aisle. Here and there she introduced
Selina briefly to a woman friend. “Mrs. Vander Sijde, meet school
teacher.”
“Aggie’s mother?” Selina would begin, primly, only to be swept along by
Maartje on her way to the door. “Mrs. Von Mijnen, meet school teacher.
Is Mrs. Von Mijnen.” They regarded her with a grim gaze. Selina would
smile and nod rather nervously, feeling young, frivolous, and somehow
guilty.
When, with Maartje, she reached the church porch Pervus DeJong was
unhitching the dejected horse that was harnessed to his battered and
lopsided cart. The animal stood with four feet bunched together in a
drooping and pathetic attitude and seemed inevitably meant for mating
with this decrepit vehicle. DeJong untied the reins quickly, and was
about to step into the sagging conveyance when the Widow Paarlenberg
sailed down the church steps with admirable speed for one so amply
proportioned. She made straight for him, skirts billowing, flounces
flying, plumes waving. Maartje clutched Selina’s arm. “Look how she
makes! She asks him to eat Sunday dinner I bet you! See once how he
makes with his head no.”
Selina—and the whole congregation unashamedly watching—could indeed
see how he made with his head no. His whole body seemed set in
negation—the fine head, the broad patient shoulders, the muscular
powerful legs in their ill-fitting Sunday blacks. He shook his head,
gathered up the reins, and drove away, leaving the Widow Paarlenberg to
carry off with such bravado as she could muster this public flouting in
full sight of the Dutch Reformed congregation of High Prairie. It must
be said that she actually achieved this feat with a rather magnificent
composure. Her round pink face, as she turned away, was placid; her
great cowlike eyes mild. Selina abandoned the pink porker simile for
that of a great Persian cat, full-fed and treacherous, its claws all
sheathed in velvet. The widow stepped agilely into her own neat phaeton
with its sleek horse and was off down the hard snowless road, her head
high.
“Well!” exclaimed Selina, feeling as though she had witnessed the first
act of an exciting play. And breathed deeply. So, too, did the watching
congregation, so that the widow could be said to have driven off in
quite a gust.
As they jogged home in the Pool farm wagon Maartje told her tale with a
good deal of savour.
Pervus DeJong had been left a widower two years before. Within a month
of that time Leendert Paarlenberg had died, leaving to his widow the
richest and most profitable farm in the whole community. Pervus DeJong,
on the contrary, through inheritance from his father, old Johannes,
possessed a scant twenty-five acres of the worst lowland—practically
the only lowland—in all High Prairie. The acreage was notoriously
barren. In spring, the critical time for seedlings and early vegetable
crops, sixteen of the twenty-five were likely to be under water. Pervus
DeJong patiently planted, sowed, gathered crops, hauled them to market;
seemed still never to get on in this thrifty Dutch community where
getting on was so common a trait as to be no longer thought a virtue.
Luck and nature seemed to work against him. His seedlings proved
unfertile; his stock was always ailing; his cabbages were worm-infested;
snout-beetle bored his rhubarb. When he planted largely of spinach,
hoping for a wet spring, the season was dry. Did he turn the following
year to sweet potatoes, all auguries pointing to a dry spring and
summer, the summer proved the wettest in a decade. Insects and fungi
seemed drawn to his fields as by a malevolent force. Had he been small,
puny, and insignificant his bad luck would have called forth
contemptuous pity. But there was about him the lovableness and splendour
of the stricken giant. To complete his discomfort, his household was
inadequately ministered by an elderly and rheumatic female connection
whose pies and bread were the scandal of the neighbouring housewives.
It was on this Pervus DeJong, then, that the Widow Paarlenberg of the
rich acres, the comfortable farmhouse, the gold neck chain, the silk
gowns, the soft white hands and the cooking talents, had set her
affections. She wooed him openly, notoriously, and with a Dutch
vehemence that would have swept another man off his feet. It was known
that she sent him a weekly baking of cakes, pies, and bread. She urged
upon him choice seeds from her thriving fields; seedlings from her
hotbeds; plants, all of which he steadfastly refused. She tricked,
cajoled, or nagged him into eating her ample meals. She even asked his
advice—that subtlest form of flattery. She asked him about sub-soiling,
humus, rotation—she whose rich land yielded, under her shrewd
management, more profitably to the single acre than to any ten of
Pervus’s. One Jan Bras managed her farm admirably under her supervision.
DeJong’s was a simple mind. In the beginning, when she said to him, in
her deep, caressing voice, “Mr. DeJong, could I ask you a little advice
about something? I’m a woman alone since I haven’t got Leendert any
more, and strangers what do they care how they run the land! It’s about
my radishes, lettuce, spinach, and turnips. Last year, instead of
tender, they were stringy and full of fibre on account that Jan Bras.
He’s for slow growing. Those vegetables you’ve got to grow quick. Bras
says my fertilizer is the fault, but I know different. What you think?”
Jan Bras, getting wind of this, told it abroad with grim humour.
Masculine High Prairie, meeting Pervus DeJong on the road, greeted him
with: “Well, DeJong, you been giving the Widow Paarlenberg any good
advice here lately about growing?”
It had been a particularly bad season for his fields. As High Prairie
poked a sly thumb into his ribs thus he realized that he had been duped
by the wily widow. A slow Dutch wrath rose in him against her; a male
resentment at being manipulated by a woman. When next she approached
him, cajolery in her voice, seeking guidance about tillage, drainage, or
crops, he said, bluntly: “Better you ask Harm Tien his advice.” Harm
Tien was the district idiot, a poor witless creature of thirty with the
mind of a child.
Knowing well that the entire community was urging him toward this
profitable match with the plump, rich, red-lipped widow, Pervus set his
will like a stubborn steer and would have none of her. He was
uncomfortable in his untidy house; he was lonely, he was unhappy. But he
would have none of her. Vanity, pride, resentment were all mixed up in
it.
The very first time that Pervus DeJong met Selina he had a chance to
protect her. With such a start, the end was inevitable. Then, too,
Selina had on the wine-coloured cashmere and was trying hard to keep the
tears back in full view of the whole of High Prairie. Urged by Maartje
(and rather fancying the idea) Selina had attended the great meeting and
dance at Adam Ooms’s hall above the general store near the High Prairie
station. Farmer families for miles around were there. The new church
organ—that time-hallowed pretext for sociability—was the excuse for
this gathering. There was a small admission charge. Adam Ooms had given
them the hall. The three musicians were playing without fee. The women
were to bring supper packed in boxes or baskets, these to be raffled off
to the highest bidder whose privilege it then was to sup with the fair
whose basket he had bought. Hot coffee could be had at so much the cup.
All the proceeds were to be devoted to the organ. It was understood, of
course, that there was to be no lively bidding against husbands. Each
farm woman knew her own basket as she knew the countenance of her
children, and each farmer, as that basket came up at auction, named a
cautious sum which automatically made him the basket’s possessor. The
larger freedom had not come to High Prairie in 1890. The baskets and
boxes of the unwed women were to be the fought-for prizes. Maartje had
packed her own basket at noon and had driven off at four with Klaas and
the children. She was to serve on one of those bustling committees whose
duties ranged from coffee making to dish washing. Klaas and Roelf were
to be pressed into service. The pigtails would slide up and down the
waxed floor of Ooms’s hall with other shrieking pigtails of the
neighbourhood until the crowd began to arrive for the auction and
supper. Jakob Hoogendunk would convey Selina to the festivities when his
chores were done. Selina’s lunch basket was to be a separate and
distinct affair, offered at auction with those of the Katrinas and Linas
and Sophias of High Prairie. Not a little apprehensive, she was to pack
this basket herself. Maartje, departing, had left copious but disjointed
instructions.
“Ham . . . them big cookies in the crock . . . pickles . . . watch how
you don’t spill . . . plum preserves . . .”
Maartje’s own basket was of gigantic proportions and staggering content.
Her sandwiches were cubic blocks; her pickles clubs of cucumber; her
pies vast plateaus.
The basket provided for Selina, while not quite so large, still was of
appalling size as Selina contemplated it. She decided, suddenly, that
she would have none of it. In her trunk she had a cardboard box such as
shoes come in. Certainly this should hold enough lunch for two, she
thought. She and Julie Hempel had used such boxes for picnic lunches on
their Saturday holidays. She was a little nervous about the whole thing;
rather dreaded the prospect of eating her supper with a High Prairie
swain unknown to her. Suppose no one should bid for her box! She
resolved to fill it after her own pattern, disregarding Maartje’s heavy
provender.
She had the kitchen to herself. Jakob was in the fields or out-houses.
The house was deliciously quiet. Selina rummaged for the shoe box, lined
it with a sheet of tissue paper, rolled up her sleeves, got out mixing
bowl, flour, pans. Cup cakes were her ambition. She baked six of them.
They came out a beautiful brown but somewhat leaden. Still, anything was
better than a wedge of soggy pie, she told herself. She boiled eggs very
hard, halved them, devilled their yolks, filled the whites neatly with
this mixture and clapped the halves together again, skewering them with
a toothpick. Then she rolled each egg separately in tissue paper twisted
at the ends. Daintiness, she had decided, should be the keynote of her
supper box. She cut bread paper-thin and made jelly sandwiches, scorning
the ubiquitous pork. Bananas, she knew, belonged in a lunch box, but
these were unobtainable. She substituted two juicy pippins, polished
until their cheeks glittered. The food neatly packed she wrapped the box
in paper and tied it with a gay red ribbon yielded by her trunk. At the
last moment she whipped into the yard, twisted a brush of evergreen from
the tree at the side of the house, and tucked this into the knot of
ribbon atop the box. She stepped back and thought the effect enchanting.
She was waiting in her red cashmere and her cloak and hood when
Hoogendunk called for her. They were late arrivals, for outside Ooms’s
hall were hitched all manner of vehicles. There had been a heavy
snowfall two days before. This had brought out bob-sleds, cutters,
sleighs. The horse sheds were not large enough to shelter all. Late
comers had to hitch where they could. There was a great jangling of
bells as the horses stamped in the snow.
Selina, balancing her box carefully, opened the door that led to the
wooden stairway. The hall was on the second floor. The clamour that
struck her ears had the effect of a physical blow. She hesitated a
moment, and if there had been any means of returning to the Pool farm,
short of walking five miles in the snow, she would have taken it. Up the
stairs and into the din. Evidently the auctioning of supper baskets was
even now in progress. The roar of voices had broken out after the sale
of a basket and now was subsiding under the ear-splitting cracks of the
auctioneer’s hammer. Through the crowded doorway Selina could catch a
glimpse of him as he stood on a chair, the baskets piled before him. He
used a barrel elevated on a box as his pulpit. The auctioneer was Adam
Ooms who himself had once been the High Prairie school teacher. A
fox-faced little man, bald, falsetto, the village clown with a solid
foundation of shrewdness under his clowning and a tart layer of malice
over it.
High and shrill came his voice. “What am I bid! What am I bid! Thirty
cents! Thirty-five! Shame on you, gentlemen. What am I bid! Who’ll make
it forty!”
Selina felt a little thrill of excitement. She looked about for a place
on which to lay her wraps. Every table, chair, hook, and rack in the
hallway was piled with clothing. She espied a box that appeared empty,
rolled her cloak, muffler, and hood into a neat bundle and, about to
cast it into the box, saw, upturned to her from its depths, the round
pink faces of the sleeping Kuyper twins, aged six months. From the big
hall now came a great shouting, clapping of hands, stamping, cat-calls.
Another basket had been disposed of. Oh, dear! In desperation Selina
placed her bundle on the floor in a corner, smoothed down the red
cashmere, snatched up her lunch box and made for the doorway with the
childish eagerness of one out of the crowd to be in it. She wondered
where Maartje and Klaas Pool were in this close-packed roomful; and
Roelf. In the doorway she found that broad black-coated backs shut off
sight and ingress. She had written her name neatly on her lunch box. Now
she was at a loss to find a way to reach Adam Ooms. She eyed the
great-shouldered expanse just ahead of her. In desperation she decided
to dig into it with a corner of her box. She dug, viciously. The back
winced. Its owner turned. “Here! What——!”
Selina looked up into the wrathful face of Pervus DeJong. Pervus DeJong
looked down into the startled eyes of Selina Peake. Large enough eyes at
any time; enormous now in her fright at what she had done.
“I’m sorry! I’m—sorry. I thought if I could—there’s no way of getting
my lunch box up there—such a crowd——”
A slim, appealing, lovely little figure in the wine-red cashmere, amidst
all those buxom bosoms, and overheated bodies, and flushed faces. His
gaze left her reluctantly, settled on the lunch box, became, if
possible, more bewildered. “That? Lunch box?”
“Yes. For the raffle. I’m the school teacher. Selina Peake.”
He nodded. “I saw you in church Sunday.”
“You did! I didn’t think you. . . . Did you?”
“Wait here. I’ll come back. Wait here.”
He took the shoe box. She waited. He ploughed his way through the crowd
like a Juggernaut, reached Adam Ooms’s platform and placed the box
inconspicuously next a colossal hamper that was one of a dozen grouped
awaiting Adam’s attention. When he had made his way back to Selina he
again said, “Wait,” and plunged down the wooden stairway. Selina waited.
She had ceased to feel distressed at her inability to find the Pools in
the crowd, a-tiptoe though she was. When presently he came back he had
in his hand an empty wooden soap-box. This he up-ended in the doorway
just behind the crowd stationed there. Selina mounted it; found her head
a little above the level of his. She could survey the room from end to
end. There were the Pools. She waved to Maartje; smiled at Roelf. He
made as though to come toward her; did come part way, and was restrained
by Maartje catching at his coat tail.
Selina wished she could think of something to say. She looked down at
Pervus DeJong. The back of his neck was pink, as though with effort. She
thought, instinctively, “My goodness, he’s trying to think of something
to say, too.” That, somehow, put her at her ease. She would wait until
he spoke. His neck was now a deep red. The crowd surged back at some
disturbance around Adam Ooms’s elevation. Selina teetered perilously on
her box, put out a hand blindly, felt his great hard hand on her arm,
steadying her.
“Quite a crowd, ain’t it?” The effort had reached its apex. The red of
his neck began to recede.
“Oh, quite!”
“They ain’t all High Prairie. Some of ’em’s from Low Prairie way. New
Haarlem, even.”
“Really!”
A pause. Another effort.
“How goes it school teaching?”
“Oh—it goes pretty well.”
“You are little to be school teacher, anyway, ain’t you?”
“Little!” She drew herself up from her vantage point of the soap-box.
“I’m bigger than you are.”
They laughed at that as at an exquisite piece of repartee.
Adam Oom’s gavel (a wooden potato masher) crashed for silence. “Ladies!”
[Crash!] “And gents!” [Crash!] “Gents! Look what basket we’ve got here!”
Look indeed. A great hamper, grown so plethoric that it could no longer
wear its cover. Its contents bellied into a mound smoothly covered with
a fine white cloth whose glistening surface proclaimed it damask. A
Himalaya among hampers. You knew that under that snowy crust lay gold
that was fowl done crisply, succulently; emeralds in the form of
gherkins; rubies that melted into strawberry preserves; cakes frosted
like diamonds; to say nothing of such semi-precious jewels as potato
salad; cheeses; sour cream to be spread on rye bread and butter; coffee
cakes; crullers.
Crash! “The Widow Paarlenberg’s basket, ladies—_and_ gents! The Widow
Paarlenberg! I don’t know what’s in it. You don’t know what’s in it. We
don’t have to know what’s in it. Who has eaten Widow Paarlenberg’s
chicken once don’t have to know. Who has eaten Widow Paarlenberg’s cake
once don’t have to know. What am I bid on Widow Paarlenberg’s basket!
What am I bid! WhatmIbidwhatmIbidwhatmIbid!” [Crash!]
The widow herself, very handsome in black silk, her gold neck chain
rising and falling richly with the little flurry that now agitated her
broad bosom, was seated in a chair against the wall not five feet from
the auctioneer’s stand. She bridled now, blushed, cast down her eyes,
cast up her eyes, succeeded in looking as unconscious as a complaisant
Turkish slave girl on the block.
Adam Ooms’s glance swept the hall. He leaned forward, his fox-like face
fixed in a smile. From the widow herself, seated so prominently at his
right, his gaze marked the young blades of the village; the old bucks;
youths and widowers and bachelors. Here was the prize of the evening.
Around, in a semi-circle, went his keen glance until it reached the tall
figure towering in the doorway—reached it, and rested there. His gimlet
eyes seemed to bore their way into Pervus DeJong’s steady stare. He
raised his right arm aloft, brandishing the potato masher. The whole
room fixed its gaze on the blond head in the doorway. “Speak up! Young
men of High Prairie! Heh, you, Pervus DeJong!
WhatmIbidwhatmIbidwhatmIbid!”
“Fifty cents!” The bid came from Gerrit Pon at the other end of the
hall. A dashing offer, as a start, in this district where one dollar
often represented the profits on a whole load of market truck brought to
the city.
Crash! went the potato masher. “Fifty cents I’m bid. Who’ll make it
seventy-five? Who’ll make it seventy-five?”
“Sixty!” Johannes Ambuul, a widower, his age more than the sum of his
bid.
“Seventy!” Gerrit Pon.
Adam Ooms whispered it—hissed it. “S-s-s-seventy. Ladies and gents, I
wouldn’t repeat out loud sucha figger. I would be ashamed. Look at this
basket, gents, and then you can say . . . s-s-seventy!”
“Seventy-five!” the cautious Ambuul.
Scarlet, flooding her face, belied the widow’s outward air of composure.
Pervus DeJong, standing beside Selina, viewed the proceedings with an
air of detachment. High Prairie was looking at him expectantly, openly.
The widow bit her red lip, tossed her head. Pervus DeJong returned the
auctioneer’s meaning smirk with the mild gaze of a disinterested
outsider. High Prairie, Low Prairie, and New Haarlem sat tense, like an
audience at a play. Here, indeed, was drama being enacted in a community
whose thrills were all too rare.
“Gents!” Adam Ooms’s voice took on a tearful note—the tone of one who
is more hurt than angry. “Gents!” Slowly, with infinite reverence, he
lifted one corner of the damask cloth that concealed the hamper’s
contents—lifted it and peered within as at a treasure. At what he saw
there he started back dramatically, at once rapturous, despairing,
amazed. He rolled his eyes. He smacked his lips. He rubbed his stomach.
The sort of dumb show that, since the days of the Greek drama, has been
used to denote gastronomic delight.
“Eighty!” was wrenched suddenly from Goris Von Vuuren, the
nineteen-year-old fat and gluttonous son of a prosperous New Haarlem
farmer.
Adam Ooms rubbed brisk palms together. “Now then! A dollar! A dollar!
It’s an insult to this basket to make it less than a dollar.” He lifted
the cover again, sniffed, appeared overcome. “Gents, if it wasn’t for
Mrs. Ooms sitting there I’d make it a dollar myself and a bargain. A
dollar! Am I bid a dollar!” He leaned far forward over his improvised
pulpit. “Did I hear you say a dollar, Pervus DeJong?” DeJong stared,
immovable, unabashed. His very indifference was contagious. The widow’s
bountiful basket seemed to shrink before one’s eyes.
“Eighty-eighty-eighty-eighty—gents! I’m going to tell you something.
I’m going to whisper a secret.” His lean face was veined with
craftiness. “Gents. Listen. It isn’t chicken in this beautiful basket.
It isn’t chicken. It’s”—a dramatic pause—“it’s _roast duck!_” He
swayed back, mopped his brow with his red handkerchief, held one hand
high in the air. His last card.
“Eighty-five!” groaned the fat Goris Von Vuuren.
“Eighty-five! Eighty-five! Eightyfiveeightyfiveeightyfive eighty-five!
Gents! Gen-tle-men! Eighty-five once! Eighty-five—twice!” [Crash!]
“Gone to Goris Von Vuuren for eighty-five.”
A sigh went up from the assemblage; a sigh that was the wind before the
storm. There followed a tornado of talk. It crackled and thundered. The
rich Widow Paarlenberg would have to eat her supper with Von Vuuren’s
boy, the great thick Goris. And there in the doorway, talking to teacher
as if they had known each other for years, was Pervus DeJong with his
money in his pocket. It was as good as a play.
Adam Ooms was angry. His lean, fox-like face became pinched with spite.
He prided himself on his antics as auctioneer; and his chef d’œuvre had
brought a meagre eighty-five cents, besides doubtless winning him the
enmity of that profitable store customer, the Widow Paarlenberg. Goris
Von Vuuren came forward to claim his prize amidst shouting, clapping,
laughter. The great hamper was handed down to him; an ample,
rich-looking burden, its handle folded comfortably over its round
stomach, its white cover so glistening with starch and ironing that it
gave back the light from the big lamp above the auctioneer’s stand. As
Goris Von Vuuren lifted it his great shoulders actually sagged. Its
contents promised satiety even to such a feeder as he. A grin, half
sheepish, half triumphant, creased his plump pink face.
Adam Ooms scuffled about among the many baskets at his feet. His
nostrils looked pinched and his skinny hands shook a little as he
searched for one small object.
When he stood upright once more he was smiling. His little eyes gleamed.
His wooden sceptre pounded for silence. High in one hand, balanced
daintily on his finger tips, he held Selina’s little white shoe box,
with its red ribbon binding it, and the plume of evergreen stuck in the
ribbon. Affecting great solicitude he brought it down then to read the
name written on it; held it aloft again, smirking.
He said nothing. Grinning, he held it high. He turned his body at the
waist from side to side, so that all might see. The eyes of those before
him still held a mental picture of the huge hamper, food-packed, that
had just been handed down. The contrast was too absurd, too cruel. A
ripple of laughter swept the room; rose; swelled to a roar. Adam Ooms
drew his mouth down solemnly. His little finger elegantly crooked, he
pendulumed the box to right and left. He swerved his beady eyes from
side to side. He waited with a nice sense of the dramatic until the
laughter had reached its height, then held up a hand for silence. A
great scraping “Ahem!” as he cleared his throat threatened to send the
crowd off again.
“Ladies—_and_ gents! Here’s a dainty little tidbit. Here’s something
not only for the inner man, but a feast for the eye. Well, boys, if the
last lot was too much for you this lot ought to be just about right. If
the food ain’t quite enough for you, you can tie the ribbon in the
lady’s hair and put the posy in your buttonhole and there you are.
_There_ you are! What’s more, the lady herself goes with it. You don’t
get a country girl with this here box, gents. A city girl, you can tell
by looking at it, just. And who is she? Who did up this dainty little
box just big enough for two?” He inspected it again, solemnly, and
added, as an after-thought, “If you ain’t feeling specially hungry.
Who?——” He looked about, apishly.
Selina’s cheeks matched her gown. Her eyes were wide and dark with the
effort she was making to force back the hot haze threatening them. Why
had she mounted this wretched soap-box! Why had she come to this hideous
party! Why had she come to High Prairie! Why! . . .
“Miss Selina Peake, that’s who. Miss Se-li-na Peake!”
A hundred balloon faces pulled by a single cord turned toward her as she
stood there on the box for all to see. They swam toward her. She put up
a hand to push them back.
“What’m I bid! What’m I bid! What’m I bid for this here lovely little
toothful, gents! Start her up!”
“Five cents!” piped up old Johannes Ambuul, with a snicker. The
tittering crowd broke into a guffaw. Selina was conscious of a little
sick feeling at the pit of her stomach. Through the haze she saw the
widow’s face, no longer sulky, but smiling now. She saw Roelf’s dear
dark head. His face was set, like a man’s. He was coming toward her, or
trying to, but the crowd wedged him in, small as he was among those
great bodies. She lost sight of him. How hot it was! how hot . . . An
arm at her waist. Some one had mounted the little box and stood
teetering there beside her, pressed against her slightly, reassuringly.
Pervus DeJong. Her head was on a level with his great shoulder now. They
stood together in the doorway, on the soap-box, for all High Prairie to
see.
“Five cents I’m bid for this lovely little mouthful put up by the school
teacher’s own fair hands. Five cents! Five——”
“One dollar!” Pervus DeJong.
The balloon faces were suddenly punctured with holes. High Prairie’s jaw
dropped with astonishment. Its mouth stood open.
There was nothing plain about Selina now. Her dark head was held high,
and his fair one beside it made a vivid foil. The purchase of the
wine-coloured cashmere was at last justified.
“And ten!” cackled old Johannes Ambuul, his rheumy eyes on Selina.
Art and human spitefulness struggled visibly for mastery in Adam Ooms’s
face—and art won. The auctioneer triumphed over the man. The term
“crowd psychology” was unknown to him, but he was artist enough to sense
that some curious magic process, working through this roomful of people,
had transformed the little white box, from a thing despised and
ridiculed, into an object of beauty, of value, of infinite desirability.
He now eyed it in a catalepsy of admiration.
“One-ten I’m bid for this box all tied with a ribbon to match the gown
of the girl who brought it. Gents, you get the ribbon, the lunch, _and_
the girl. And only one-ten bid for all that. Gents! Gents! Remember, it
ain’t only a lunch—it’s a picture. It pleases the eye. Do I hear
one——”
“Five bits!” Barend DeRoo, of Low Prairie, in the lists. A strapping
young Dutchman, the Brom Bones of the district. Aaltje Huff, in a fit of
pique at his indifference, had married to spite him. Cornelia Vinke,
belle of New Haarlem, was said to be languishing for love of him. He
drove to the Haymarket with his load of produce and played cards all
night on the wagon under the gas torches while the street girls of the
neighbourhood assailed him in vain. Six feet three, his red face shone
now like a harvest moon above the crowd. A merry, mischievous eye that
laughed at Pervus DeJong and his dollar bid.
“Dollar and a half!” A high clear voice—a boy’s voice. Roelf.
“Oh, no!” said Selina aloud. But she was unheard in the gabble. Roelf
had once confided to her that he had saved three dollars and fifty cents
in the last three years. Five dollars would purchase a set of tools that
his mind had been fixed on for months past. Selina saw Klaas Pool’s look
of astonishment changing to anger. Saw Maartje Pool’s quick hand on his
arm, restraining him.
“Two dollars!” Pervus DeJong.
“Twotwotwotwotwotwo!” Adam Ooms in a frenzy of salesmanship.
“And ten.” Johannes Ambuul’s cautious bid.
“Two and a quarter.” Barend DeRoo.
“Two-fifty!” Pervus DeJong.
“Three dollars!” The high voice of the boy. It cracked a little on the
last syllable, and the crowd laughed.
“Three-three-three-three-threethreethree. Three once——”
“And a half.” Pervus DeJong.
“Three sixty.”
“Four!” DeRoo.
“And ten.”
The boy’s voice was heard no more.
“I wish they’d stop,” whispered Selina.
“Five!” Pervus DeJong.
“Six!” DeRoo, his face very red.
“And ten.”
“Seven!”
“It’s only jelly sandwiches,” said Selina to DeJong, in a panic.
“Eight!” Johannes Ambuul, gone mad.
“Nine!” DeRoo.
“Nine! Nine I’m bid! Nine-nine-nine! Who’ll make it——”
“Let him have it. The cup cakes fell a little. Don’t——”
“Ten!” said Pervus DeJong.
Barend DeRoo shrugged his great shoulders.
“Ten-ten-ten. Do I hear eleven? Do I hear ten-fifty! Ten-ten-ten
tententententententen! Gents! Ten once. Ten twice! Gone!—for ten
dollars to Pervus DeJong. And a bargain.” Adam Ooms mopped his bald head
and his cheeks and the damp spot under his chin.
Ten dollars. Adam Ooms knew, as did all the countryside, this was not
the sum of ten dollars merely. No basket of food, though it contained
nightingales’ tongues, the golden apple of Atalanta, wines of rare
vintage, could have been adequate recompense for these ten dollars. They
represented sweat and blood; toil and hardship; hours under the burning
prairie sun at mid-day; work doggedly carried on through the drenching
showers of spring; nights of restless sleep snatched an hour at a time
under the sky in the Chicago market place; miles of weary travel down
the rude corduroy road between High Prairie and Chicago, now up to the
hubs in mud, now blinded by dust and blowing sand.
A sale at Christie’s, with a miniature going for a million, could not
have met with a deeper hush, a more dramatic babble following the hush.
They ate their lunch together in one corner of Adam Ooms’s hall. Selina
opened the box and took out the devilled eggs, and the cup cakes that
had fallen a little, and the apples, and the sandwiches sliced very,
very thin. The coldly appraising eye of all High Prairie, Low Prairie,
and New Haarlem watched this sparse provender emerge from the
ribbon-tied shoe box. She offered him a sandwich. It looked
infinitesimal in his great paw. Suddenly all Selina’s agony of
embarrassment was swept away, and she was laughing, not wildly or
hysterically, but joyously and girlishly. She sank her little white
teeth into one of the absurd sandwiches and looked at him, expecting to
find him laughing, too. But he wasn’t laughing. He looked very earnest,
and his blue eyes were fixed hard on the bit of bread in his hand, and
his face was very red and clean-shaven. He bit into the sandwich and
chewed it solemnly. And Selina thought: “Why, the dear thing! The great
big dear thing! And he might have been eating breast of duck . . . Ten
dollars!” Aloud she said, “What made you do it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Then, “You looked so little. And they were
making fun. Laughing.” He looked very earnest, and his blue eyes were
fixed hard on the sandwich, and his face was very red.
“That’s a very foolish reason for throwing away ten dollars,” Selina
said, severely.
He seemed not to hear her; bit ruminantly into one of the cup cakes.
Suddenly: “I can’t hardly write at all, only to sign my name and like
that.”
“Read?”
“Only to spell out the words. Anyways I don’t get time for reading. But
figuring I wish I knew. ’Rithmetic. I can figger some, but those fellows
in Haymarket they are too sharp for me. They do numbers in their
head—like that, so quick.”
Selina leaned toward him. “I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you.”
“How do you mean, teach me?”
“Evenings.”
He looked down at his great calloused palms, then up at her. “What would
you take for pay?”
“Pay! I don’t want any pay.” She was genuinely shocked.
His face lighted up with a sudden thought. “Tell you what. My place is
just this side the school, next to Bouts’s place. I could start for you
the fire, mornings, in the school. And thaw the pump and bring in a pail
of water. This month, and January and February and part of March, even,
now I don’t go to market on account it’s winter, I could start you the
fire. Till spring. And I could come maybe three times a week, evenings,
to Pool’s place, for lessons.” He looked so helpless, so humble, so
huge; and the more pathetic for his hugeness.
She felt a little rush of warmth toward him that was at once impersonal
and maternal. She thought again, “Why, the dear thing! The great
helpless big thing! How serious he is! And funny.” He was indeed both
serious and funny, with the ridiculous cup cake in his great hand, his
eyes wide and ruminant, his face ruddier than ever, his forehead knotted
with earnestness. She laughed, suddenly, a gay little laugh, and he,
after a puzzled pause, joined her companionably.
“Three evenings a week,” repeated Selina, then, from the depths of her
ignorance. “Why, I’d love to. I’d—love to.”