The evenings turned out to be Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Supper
was over by six-thirty in the Pool household. Pervus was there by seven,
very clean as to shirt, his hair brushed till it shone; shy, and given
to dropping his hat and bumping against chairs, and looking solemn.
Selina was torn between pity and mirth. If only he had blustered. A
blustering big man puts the world on the defensive. A gentle giant
disarms it.
Selina got out her McBride’s Grammar and Duffy’s Arithmetic, and
together they started to parse verbs, paper walls, dig cisterns, and
extract square roots. They found study impossible at the
oilcloth-covered kitchen table, with the Pool household eddying about
it. Jakob built a fire in the parlour stove and there they sat, teacher
and pupil, their feet resting cosily on the gleaming nickel railing that
encircled the wood burner.
On the evening of the first lesson Roelf had glowered throughout supper
and had disappeared into the work-shed, whence issued a great sound of
hammering, sawing, and general clatter. He and Selina had got into the
way of spending much time together, in or out of doors. They skated on
Vander Sijde’s pond; together with the shrieking pigtails they coasted
on the little slope that led down from Kuyper’s woods to the main road,
using sleds that had been put together by Roelf. On bad days they read
or studied. Not Sundays merely, but many week-day evenings were spent
thus. Selina was determined that Roelf should break away from the
uncouth speech of the countryside; that he should at least share with
her the somewhat sketchy knowledge gained at Miss Fister’s select
school. She, the woman of almost twenty, never talked down to this boy
of twelve. The boy worshipped her inarticulately. She had early
discovered that he had a feeling for beauty—beauty of line, texture,
colour, and grouping—that was rare in one of his years. The feel of a
satin ribbon in his fingers; the orange and rose of a sunset; the folds
of the wine-red cashmere dress; the cadence of a spoken line, brought a
look to his face that startled her. She had a battered volume of
Tennyson. When first she read him the line beginning, “Elaine the fair,
Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat——” he had uttered
a little exclamation. She, glancing up from her book, had found his eyes
wide, bright, and luminous in his lean dark face.
“What is it, Roelf?”
He had flushed. “I didn’t say nothing—anything. Start over again how it
goes, ‘Elaine——’”
She had begun again the fragrant lines, “Elaine the fair, Elaine the
lovable . . .”
Since the gathering at Ooms’s hall he had been moody and sullen; had
refused to answer when she spoke to him of his bid for her basket.
Urged, he would only say, “Oh, it was just fun to make old Ooms mad.”
Now, with the advent of Pervus DeJong, Roelf presented that most
touching and miserable of spectacles, a small boy jealous and helpless
in his jealousy. Selina had asked him to join the tri-weekly evening
lessons; had, indeed, insisted that he be a pupil in the class round the
parlour stove. Maartje had said, on the night of Pervus DeJong’s first
visit, “Roelf, you sit, too, and learn. Is good for you to learn out of
books the way teacher says.” Klaas Pool, too, had approved the plan,
since it would cost nothing and, furthermore, would in no way interfere
with Roelf’s farm work. “Sure; learn,” he said, with a large gesture.
Roelf would not. He behaved very badly; slammed doors, whistled,
scuffled on the kitchen floor, made many mysterious trips through the
parlour up the stairs that led off that room, ascending with a clatter;
incited Geertje and Jozina to quarrels and tears; had the household in a
hubbub; stumbled over Dunder, the dog, so that that anguished animal’s
yelps were added to the din.
Selina was frantic. Lessons were impossible amidst this uproar. “It has
never been like this before,” she assured Pervus, almost tearfully. “I
don’t know what’s the matter. It’s awful.”
Pervus had looked up from his slate. His eyes were calm, his lips
smiling. “Is all right. In my house is too still, evenings. Next time it
goes better. You see.”
Next time it did go better. Roelf disappeared into his work-shed after
supper; did not emerge until after DeJong’s departure.
There was something about the sight of this great creature bent
laboriously over a slate, the pencil held clumsily in his huge fingers,
that moved Selina strangely. Pity wracked her. If she had known to what
emotion this pity was akin she might have taken away the slate and given
him a tablet, and the whole course of her life would have been
different. “Poor lad,” she thought. “Poor lad.” Chided herself for being
amused at his childlike earnestness.
He did not make an apt pupil, though painstaking. Usually the top
draught of the stove was open, and the glow of the fire imparted to his
face and head a certain roseate glory. He was very grave. His brow wore
a troubled frown. Selina would go over a problem or a sentence again and
again, patiently, patiently. Then, suddenly, like a hand passed over his
face, his smile would come, transforming it. He had white strong teeth,
too small, and perhaps not so white as they seemed because of his russet
blondeur. He would smile like a child, and Selina should have been
warned by the warm rush of joy that his smile gave her. She would smile,
too. He was as pleased as though he had made a fresh and wonderful
discovery.
“It’s easy,” he would say, “when you know it once.” Like a boy.
He usually went home by eight-thirty or nine. Often the Pools went to
bed before he left. After he had gone Selina was wakeful. She would heat
water and wash; brush her hair vigorously; feeling at once buoyant and
depressed.
Sometimes they fell to talking. His wife had died in the second year of
their marriage, when the child was born. The child, too, had died. A
girl. He was unlucky, like that. It was the same with the farm.
“Spring, half of the land is under water. My piece, just. Bouts’s place,
next to me, is high and rich. Bouts, he don’t even need deep ploughing.
His land is quick land. It warms up in the spring early. After rain it
works easy. He puts in fertilizer, any kind, and his plants jump, like.
My place is bad for garden truck. Wet. All the time, wet; or in summer
baked before I can loosen it again. Muckland.”
Selina thought a moment. She had heard much talk between Klaas and
Jakob, winter evenings. “Can’t you do something to it—fix it—so that
the water will run off? Raise it, or dig a ditch or something?”
“We-e-ell, maybe. Maybe you could. But it costs money, draining.”
“It costs money not to, doesn’t it?”
He considered this, ruminatively. “Guess it does. But you don’t have to
have ready cash to let the land lay. To drain it you do.”
Selina shook her head impatiently. “That’s a very foolish, short-sighted
way to reason.”
He looked helpless as only the strong and powerful can look. Selina’s
heart melted in pity. He would look down at the great calloused hands;
up at her. One of the charms of Pervus DeJong lay in the things that his
eyes said and his tongue did not. Women always imagined he was about to
say what he looked, but he never did. It made otherwise dull
conversation with him most exciting.
His was in no way a shrewd mind. His respect for Selina was almost
reverence. But he had this advantage: he had married a woman, had lived
with her for two years. She had borne him a child. Selina was a girl in
experience. She was a woman capable of a great deal of passion, but she
did not know that. Passion was a thing no woman possessed, much less
talked about. It simply did not exist, except in men, and then was
something to be ashamed of, like a violent temper, or a weak stomach.
By the first of March he could speak a slow, careful, and fairly
grammatical English. He could master simple sums. By the middle of March
the lessons would cease. There was too much work to do about the
farm—night work as well as day. She found herself trying not to think
about the time when the lessons should cease. She refused to look ahead
to April.
One night, late in February, Selina was conscious that she was trying to
control something. She was trying to keep her eyes away from something.
She realized that she was trying not to look at his hands. She wanted,
crazily, to touch them. She wanted to feel them about her throat. She
wanted to put her lips on his hands—brush the backs of them, slowly,
moistly, with her mouth, lingeringly. She was terribly frightened. She
thought to herself: “I am going crazy. I am losing my mind. There is
something the matter with me. I wonder how I look. I must look queer.”
She said something to make him look up at her. His glance was mild,
undismayed. So this hideous thing did not show in her face. She kept her
eyes resolutely on the book. At half-past eight she closed her book
suddenly. “I’m tired. I think it’s the spring coming on.” She smiled a
little wavering smile. He rose and stretched himself, his great arms
high above his head. Selina shivered.
“Two more weeks,” he said, “is the last lesson. Well, do you think I
have done pretty good—well?”
“Very well,” Selina replied, evenly. She felt very tired.
The first week in March he was ill, and did not come. A rheumatic
affliction to which he was subject. His father, old Johannes DeJong, had
had it before him. Working in the wet fields did it, they said. It was
the curse of the truck farmer. Selina’s evenings were free to devote to
Roelf, who glowed again. She sewed, too; read; helped Mrs. Pool with the
housework in a gust of sympathy and found strange relief therein; made
over an old dress; studied; wrote all her letters (few enough), even one
to the dried-apple aunts in Vermont. She no longer wrote to Julie
Hempel. She had heard that Julie was to be married to a Kansas man named
Arnold. Julie herself had not written. The first week in March passed.
He did not come. Nor did he come the following Tuesday or Thursday.
After a terrific battle with herself Selina, after school on Thursday,
walked past his house, busily, as though bent on an errand. Despised
herself for doing it, could not help herself, found a horrible and
tortuous satisfaction in not looking at the house as she passed it.
She was bewildered, frightened. All that week she had a curious
feeling—or succession of feelings. There was the sensation of
suffocation followed by that of emptiness—of being
hollow—boneless—bloodless. Then, at times, there was a feeling of
physical pain; at others a sense of being disembowelled. She was
restless, listless, by turns. Period of furious activity followed by
days of inertia. It was the spring, Maartje said. Selina hoped she
wasn’t going to be ill. She had never felt like that before. She wanted
to cry. She was irritable to the point of waspishness with the children
in the schoolroom.
On Saturday—the fourteenth of March—he walked in at seven. Klaas,
Maartje, and Roelf had driven off to a gathering at Low Prairie, leaving
Selina with the pigtails and old Jakob. She had promised to make taffy
for them, and was in the midst of it when his knock sounded at the
kitchen door. All the blood in her body rushed to her head; pounded
there hotly. He entered. There slipped down over her a complete armour
of calmness, of self-possession; of glib how do you do Mr. DeJong and
how are you feeling and won’t you sit down and there’s no fire in the
parlour we’ll have to sit here.
He took part in the taffy pulling. Selina wondered if Geertje and Jozina
would ever have done squealing. It was half-past eight before she
bundled them off to bed with a plate of clipped taffy lozenges between
them. She heard them scuffling and scrimmaging about in the rare freedom
of their parents’ absence.
“Now, children!” she called. “You know what you promised your mother and
father.”
She heard Geertje’s tones mimicking her mincingly, “You know what you
promised your mother and father.” Then a cascade of smothered giggles.
Pervus had been to town, evidently, for he now took from his coat pocket
a bag containing half a dozen bananas—that delicacy of delicacies to
the farm palate. She half peeled two and brought them in to the
pigtails. They ate them thickly rapturous, and dropped off to sleep
immediately, surfeited.
Pervus DeJong and Selina sat at the kitchen table, their books spread
out before them on the oilcloth. The sweet heavy scent of the fruit
filled the room. Selina brought the parlour lamp into the kitchen, the
better to see. It was a nickel-bellied lamp with a yellow glass shade
that cast a mellow golden glow.
“You didn’t go to the meeting,” primly. “Mr. and Mrs. Pool went.”
“No. No, I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
She saw him swallow. “I got through too late. I went to town, and I got
through too late. We’re fixing to sow tomato seeds in the hotbeds
to-morrow.”
Selina opened McBride’s Grammar. “Ahem!” a school-teacherly cough. “Now,
then, we’ll parse this sentence: Blucher arrived on the field of
Waterloo just as Wellington was receiving the last onslaught of
Napoleon. ‘Just’ may be treated as a modifier of the dependent clause.
That is: ‘Just’ means: at the time _at which_. Well. _Just_ here
modified _at the time_. And Wellington is the . . .”
This for half an hour. Selina kept her eyes resolutely on the book. His
voice went on with the dry business of parsing and its deep resonance
struck a response from her as a harp responds when a hand is swept over
its strings. Upstairs she could hear old Jakob clumping about in his
preparations for bed. Then there was only stillness overhead. Selina
kept her eyes resolutely on the book. Yet she saw, as though her eyes
rested on them, his large, strong hands. On the backs of them was a fine
golden down that deepened at his wrists. Heavier and darker at the
wrists. She found herself praying a little for strength—for strength
against this horror and wickedness. This sin, this abomination that held
her. A terrible, stark, and pitiful prayer, couched in the idiom of the
Bible.
“Oh, God, keep my eyes and my thoughts away from him. Away from his
hands. Let me keep my eyes and my thoughts away from the golden hairs on
his wrists. Let me not think of his wrists. . . . The owner of the
southwest ¼ sells a strip 20 rods wide along the south side of his farm.
How much does he receive at $150 per acre?”
He triumphed in this transaction, began the struggle with the square
root of 576. Square roots agonized him. She washed the slate clean with
her little sponge. He was leaning close in his effort to comprehend the
fiendish little figures that marched so tractably under Selina’s
masterly pencil.
She took it up, glibly. “The remainder must contain twice the product of
the tens by the units plus the square of the units.” He blinked. Utterly
bewildered. “_And_,” went on Selina, blithely, “twice the tens, times
the units, plus the square of the units, is the same as the sum of twice
the tens, and the units, times the units. _Therefore_”—with a
flourish—“add 4 units to the 40 and multiply the result by 4.
_Therefore_”—in final triumph—“the square root of 576 is 24.”
She was breathing rather fast. The fire in the kitchen stove snapped and
cracked. “Now, then, suppose you do that for me. We’ll wipe it out.
There! What must the remainder contain?”
He took it up, slowly, haltingly. The house was terribly still except
for the man’s voice. “The remainder . . . twice . . . product . . . tens
. . . units . . .” A something in his voice—a note—a timbre. She felt
herself swaying queerly, as though the whole house were gently rocking.
Little delicious agonizing shivers chased each other, hot and cold, up
her arms, down her legs, over her spine. . . . “plus the square of the
units is the same as the sum twice the tens . . . twice . . . the tens
. . . the tens . . .” His voice stopped.
Selina’s eyes leaped from the book to his hands, uncontrollably.
Something about them startled her. They were clenched into fists. Her
eyes now leaped from those clenched fists to the face of the man beside
her. Her head came up, and back. Her wide startled eyes met his. His
were a blaze of blinding blue in his tanned face. Some corner of her
mind that was still working clearly noted this. Then his hands
unclenched. The blue blaze scorched her, enveloped her. Her cheek knew
the harsh cool feel of a man’s cheek. She sensed the potent, terrifying,
pungent odour of close contact—a mixture of tobacco smoke, his hair,
freshly laundered linen, an indefinable body smell. It was a mingling
that disgusted and attracted her. She was at once repelled and drawn.
Then she felt his lips on hers and her own, incredibly, responding
eagerly, wholly to that pressure.