They were married the following May, just two months later. The High
Prairie school year practically ended with the appearance of the first
tender shoots of green that meant onions, radishes, and spinach above
the rich sandy loam. Selina’s classes broke, dwindled, shrank to almost
nothing. The school became a kindergarten of five-year-old babies who
wriggled and shifted and scratched in the warm spring air that came from
the teeming prairie through the open windows. The schoolhouse stove
stood rusty-red and cold. The drum in Selina’s bedroom was a black genie
deprived of his power now to taunt her.
Selina was at once bewildered and calm; rebellious and content.
Over-laying these emotions was something like grim amusement. Beneath
them, something like fright. High Prairie, in May, was green and gold
and rose and blue. The spring flowers painted the fields and the
roadside with splashes of yellow, of pink, of mauve, and purple.
Violets, buttercups, mandrakes, marsh-marigolds, hepatica. The air was
soft and cool from the lake. Selina had never known spring in the
country before. It made her ache with an actual physical ache. She moved
with a strange air of fatality. It was as if she were being drawn
inexorably, against her will, her judgment, her plans, into something
sweet and terrible. When with Pervus she was elated, gay, voluble. He
talked little; looked at her dumbly, worshippingly. When he brought her
a withered bunch of trilliums, the tears came to her eyes. He had walked
to Updike’s woods to get them because he had heard her say she loved
them, and there were none nearer. They were limp and listless from the
heat, and from being held in his hand. He looked up at her from where he
stood on the kitchen steps, she in the doorway. She took them, laid her
hand on his head. It was as when some great gentle dog brings in a limp
and bedraggled prize dug from the yard and, laying it at one’s feet,
looks up at one with soft asking eyes.
There were days when the feeling of unreality possessed her. She, a
truck farmer’s wife, living in High Prairie the rest of her days! Why,
no! No! Was this the great adventure that her father had always spoken
of? She, who was going to be a happy wayfarer down the path of life—any
one of a dozen things. This High Prairie winter was to have been only an
episode. Not her life! She looked at Maartje. Oh, but she’d never be
like that. That was stupid, unnecessary. Pink and blue dresses in the
house, for her. Frills on the window curtains. Flowers in bowls.
Some of the pangs and terrors with which most prospective brides are
assailed she confided to Mrs. Pool while that active lady was slamming
about the kitchen.
“Did you ever feel scared and—and sort of—scared when you thought
about marry, Mrs. Pool?”
Maartje Pool’s hands were in a great batch of bread dough which she
pummelled and slapped and kneaded vigorously. She shook out a handful of
flour on the baking board while she held the dough mass in the other
hand, then plumped it down and again began to knead, both hands doubled
into fists.
She laughed a short little laugh. “I ran away.”
“You did! You mean you really ran—but why? Didn’t you lo—like Klaas?”
Maartje Pool kneaded briskly, the colour high in her cheeks, what with
the vigorous pummelling and rolling, and something else that made her
look strangely young for the moment—girlish, almost. “Sure I liked him,
I liked him.”
“But you ran away?”
“Not far. I came back. Nobody ever knew I ran, even. But I ran. I knew.”
“Why did you come back?”
Maartje elucidated her philosophy without being in the least aware that
it could be called by any such high-sounding name. “You can’t run away
far enough. Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”
The girlish look had fled. She was world-old. Her strong arms ceased
their pounding and thumping for a moment. On the steps just outside
Klaas and Jakob were scanning the weekly reports preparatory to going
into the city late that afternoon.
Selina had the difficult task of winning Roelf to her all over again. He
was like a trusting little animal, who, wounded by the hand he has
trusted, is shy of it. She used blandishments on this boy of thirteen
such as she had never vouchsafed the man she was going to marry. He had
asked her, bluntly, one day: “Why are you going to marry with him?” He
never spoke the name.
She thought deeply. What to say? The answer ready on her tongue would
have little meaning for this boy. There came to her a line from Lancelot
and Elaine. She answered, “To serve him, and to follow him through the
world.” She thought that rather fine-sounding until Roelf promptly
rejected it. “That’s no reason. An answer out of a book. Anyway, to
follow him through the world is dumb. He stays right here in High
Prairie all his life.”
“How do you know!” Selina retorted, almost angrily. Startled, too.
“I know. He stays.”
Still, he could not withstand her long. Together they dug and planted
flower beds in Pervus’s dingy front yard. It was too late for tulips
now. Pervus had brought her some seeds from town. They ranged all the
way from poppies to asters; from purple iris to morning glories. The
last named were to form the back-porch vine, of course, because they
grew quickly. Selina, city-bred, was ignorant of varieties, but insisted
she wanted an old-fashioned garden—marigolds, pinks, mignonette, phlox.
She and Roelf dug, spaded, planted. The DeJong place was markedly ugly
even in that community of squat houses. It lacked the air of sparkling
cleanliness that saved the other places from sordidness. The house, even
then, was thirty years old—a gray, weather-beaten frame box with a
mansard roof and a flat face staring out at the dense willows by the
roadside. It needed paint; the fences sagged; the window curtains were
awry. The parlour was damp, funereal. The old woman who tended the house
for Pervus slopped about all day with a pail and a wet gray rag. There
was always a crazy campanile of dirty dishes stacked on the table, and
the last meal seemed never to catch up with the next. About the whole
house there was a starkness, a bareness that proclaimed no woman who
loved it dwelt therein.
Selina told herself (and Pervus) that she would change all that. She saw
herself going about with a brush and a can of white paint, leaving
beauty in her wake, where ugliness had been.
Her trousseau was of the scantiest. Pervus’s household was already
equipped with such linens as they would need. The question of a wedding
gown troubled her until Maartje suggested that she be married in the old
Dutch wedding dress that lay in the bride’s chest in Selina’s bedroom.
“A real Dutch bride,” Maartje said. “Your man will think that is fine.”
Pervus was delighted. Selina basked in his love like a kitten in the
sun. She was, after all, a very lonely little bride with only two
photographs on the shelf in her bedroom to give her courage and counsel.
The old Dutch wedding gown was many inches too large for her. The
skirt-band overlapped her slim waist; her slender little bosom did not
fill out the generous width of the bodice; but the effect of the whole
was amazingly quaint as well as pathetic. The wings of the stiffly
embroidered coif framed the white face from which the eyes looked out,
large and dark. She had even tried to wear the hand-carved shoes, but
had to give that up. In them her feet were as lost as minnows in a
rowboat. She had much difficulty with the queer old buttons and
fastenings. It was as though the dead and gone Sophia Kroon were trying,
with futile ghostly fingers, to prevent this young thing from meeting
the fate that was to be hers.
They were married at the Pools’. Klaas and Maartje had insisted on
furnishing the wedding supper—ham, chickens, sausages, cakes, pickles,
beer. The Reverend Dekker married them and all through the ceremony
Selina chided herself because she could not keep her mind on his words
in the fascination of watching his short stubby beard as it waggled with
every motion of his jaw. Pervus looked stiff, solemn, and uncomfortable
in his wedding blacks—not at all the handsome giant of the everyday
corduroys and blue shirt. In the midst of the ceremony Selina had her
moment of panic when she actually saw herself running shrieking from
this company, this man, this house, down the road, on, on toward—toward
what? The feeling was so strong that she was surprised to find herself
still standing there in the Dutch wedding gown answering “I do” in the
proper place.
The wedding gifts were few. The Pools had given them a “hanging lamp,”
coveted of the farmer’s wife; a hideous atrocity in yellow, with pink
roses on its shade and prisms dangling and tinkling all around the edge.
It was intended to hang suspended from the parlour ceiling, and worked
up and down on a sort of pulley chain. From the Widow Paarlenberg came a
water set in red frosted glass shading to pink—a fat pitcher and six
tumblers. Roelf’s gift, the result of many weeks’ labour in the
work-shed, was a bride’s chest copied from the fine old piece that had
saved Selina’s room from sheer ugliness. He had stained the wood,
polished it. Had carved the front of it with her initials—very like
those that stood out so boldly on the old chest upstairs—S. P. D. And
the year—1890. The whole was a fine piece of craftsmanship for a boy of
thirteen—would not have discredited a man of any age. It was the one
beautiful gift among Selina’s clumsy crude wedding things. She had
thanked him with tears in her eyes. “Roelf, you’ll come to see me often,
won’t you? Often!” Then, as he had hesitated, “I’ll need you so. You’re
all I’ve got.” A strange thing for a bride to say.
“I’ll come,” the boy had said, trying to make his voice casual, his tone
careless. “Sure, I’ll come oncet in a while.”
“Once, Roelf. _Once_ in a while.”
He repeated it after her, dutifully.
After the wedding they went straight to DeJong’s house. In May the
vegetable farmer cannot neglect his garden even for a day. The house had
been made ready for them. The sway of the old housekeeper was over. Her
kitchen bedroom was empty.
Throughout the supper Selina had had thoughts which were so foolish and
detached as almost to alarm her.
“Now I am married. I am Mrs. Pervus DeJong. That’s a pretty name. It
would look quite distinguished on a calling card, very spidery and fine:
┌───────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ │
│ MRS. PERVUS DEJONG │
│ │
│ _At Home Fridays_ │
│ │
└───────────────────────────────────┘
She recalled this later, grimly, when she was Mrs. Pervus DeJong, at
home not only Fridays, but Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays,
Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
They drove down the road to DeJong’s place. Selina thought, “Now I am
driving home with my husband. I feel his shoulder against mine. I wish
he would talk. I wish he would say something. Still, I’m not
frightened.”
Pervus’s market wagon was standing in the yard, shafts down. He should
have gone to market to-day; would certainly have to go to-morrow,
starting early in the afternoon so as to get a good stand in the
Haymarket. By the light of his lantern the wagon seemed to Selina to be
a symbol. She had often seen it before, but now that it was to be a part
of her life—this the DeJong market wagon and she Mrs. DeJong—she saw
clearly what a crazy, disreputable, and poverty-proclaiming old vehicle
it was, in contrast with the neat strong wagon in Klaas Pool’s yard,
smart with green paint and red lettering that announced, “Klaas Pool,
Garden Produce.” With the two sleek farm horses the turnout looked as
prosperous and comfortable as Klaas himself.
Pervus swung her down from the seat of the buggy, his hand about her
waist, and held her so for a moment, close. Selina said, “You must have
that wagon painted, Pervus. And the seat-springs fixed and the sideboard
mended.”
He stared. “Wagon!”
“Yes. It looks a sight.”
The house was tidy enough, but none too clean. Old Mrs. Voorhees had not
been minded to keep house too scrupulously for a man who would be
unlikely to know whether or not it was clean. Pervus lighted the lamps.
There was a fire in the kitchen stove. It made the house seem stuffy on
this mild May night. Selina thought that her own little bedroom at the
Pools’, no longer hers, must be deliciously cool and still with the
breeze fanning fresh from the west. Pervus was putting the horse into
the barn. The bedroom was off the sitting room. The window was shut.
This last year had taught Selina to prepare the night before for next
morning’s rising, so as to lose the least possible time. She did this
now, unconsciously. She took off her white muslin underwear with its
frills and embroidery—the three stiff petticoats, and the stiffly
starched corset-cover, and the high-bosomed corset and put them into the
bureau drawer that she herself had cleaned and papered neatly the week
before. She brushed her hair, laid out to-morrow’s garments, put on her
high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown and got into this strange bed. She
heard Pervus DeJong shut the kitchen door; the latch clicked, the lock
turned. Heavy quick footsteps across the bare kitchen floor. This man
was coming into her room . . . “You can’t run far enough,” Maartje Pool
had said. “Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”
Next morning it was dark when he awakened her at four. She started up
with a little cry and sat up, straining her ears, her eyes. “Is that
you, Father?” She was little Selina Peake again, and Simeon Peake had
come in, gay, debonair, from a night’s gaming.
Pervus DeJong was already padding about the room in stocking feet.
“What—what time is it? What’s the matter, Father? Why are you up?
Haven’t you gone to bed . . .” Then she remembered.
Pervus DeJong laughed and came toward her. “Get up, little lazy bones.
It’s after four. All yesterday’s work I’ve got to do, and all to-day’s.
Breakfast, little Lina, breakfast. You are a farmer’s wife now.”