By October High Prairie Housewives told each other that Mrs. Pervus
DeJong was “expecting.” Dirk DeJong was born in the bedroom off the
sitting room on the fifteenth day of March, of a bewildered, somewhat
resentful, but deeply interested mother; and a proud, foolish, and
vainglorious father whose air of achievement, considering the really
slight part he had played in the long, tedious, and racking business,
was disproportionate. The name Dirk had sounded to Selina like something
tall, straight, and slim. Pervus had chosen it. It had been his
grandfather’s name.
Sometimes, during those months, Selina would look back on her first
winter in High Prairie—that winter of the icy bedroom, the chill black
drum, the schoolhouse fire, the chilblains, the Pool pork—and it seemed
a lovely dream; a time of ease, of freedom, of careless happiness. That
icy room had been her room; that mile of road traversed on bitter winter
mornings a mere jaunt; the schoolhouse stove a toy, fractious but
fascinating.
Pervus DeJong loved his pretty young wife, and she him. But young love
thrives on colour, warmth, beauty. It becomes prosaic and inarticulate
when forced to begin its day at four in the morning by reaching blindly,
dazedly, for limp and obscure garments dangling from bedpost or chair,
and to end that day at nine, numb and sodden with weariness, after
seventeen hours of physical labour.
It was a wet summer. Pervus’s choice tomato plants, so carefully set out
in the hope of a dry season, became draggled gray spectres in a waste of
mire. Of fruit the field bore one tomato the size of a marble.
For the rest, the crops were moderately successful on the DeJong place.
But the work necessary to make this so was heartbreaking. Pervus and his
hired helper, Jan Steen, used the hand sower and hand cultivator. It
seemed to Selina that they were slaves to these buds, shoots, and roots
that clamoured with a hundred thousand voices, “Let me out! Let me out!”
She had known, during her winter at the Pools’, that Klaas, Roelf, and
old Jakob worked early and late, but her months there had encompassed
what is really the truck farmer’s leisure period. She had arrived in
November. She had married in May. From May until October it was
necessary to tend the fields with a concentration amounting to fury.
Selina had never dreamed that human beings toiled like that for
sustenance. Toil was a thing she had never encountered until coming to
High Prairie. Now she saw her husband wrenching a living out of the
earth by sheer muscle, sweat, and pain. During June, July, August, and
September the good black prairie soil for miles around was teeming, a
hotbed of plenty. There was born in Selina at this time a feeling for
the land that she was never to lose. Perhaps the child within her had
something to do with this. She was aware of a feeling of kinship with
the earth; an illusion of splendour, of fulfilment. Sometimes, in a
moment’s respite from her work about the house, she would stand in the
kitchen doorway, her flushed face turned toward the fields. Wave on wave
of green, wave on wave, until the waves melted into each other and
became a verdant sea.
As cabbages had been cabbages, and no more, to Klaas Pool, so, to
Pervus, these carrots, beets, onions, turnips, and radishes were just so
much produce, to be planted, tended, gathered, marketed. But to Selina,
during that summer, they became a vital part in the vast mechanism of a
living world. Pervus, earth, sun, rain, all elemental forces that
laboured to produce the food for millions of humans. The sordid, grubby
little acreage became a kingdom; the phlegmatic Dutch-American truck
farmers of the region were high priests consecrated to the service of
the divinity, Earth. She thought of Chicago’s children. If they had red
cheeks, clear eyes, nimble brains it was because Pervus brought them the
food that made them so. It was before the day when glib talk of irons,
vitamines, arsenic entered into all discussion pertaining to food. Yet
Selina sensed something of the meaning behind these toiling, patient
figures, all unconscious of meaning, bent double in the fields for miles
throughout High Prairie. Something of this she tried to convey to
Pervus. He only stared, his blue eyes wide and unresponsive.
“Farm work grand! Farm work is slave work. Yesterday, from the load of
carrots in town I didn’t make enough to bring you the goods for the
child so when it comes you should have clothes for it. It’s better I
feed them to the livestock.”
Pervus drove into the Chicago market every other day. During July and
August he sometimes did not have his clothes off for a week. Together he
and Jan Steen would load the wagon with the day’s garnering. At four he
would start on the tedious trip into town. The historic old Haymarket on
west Randolph Street had become the stand for market gardeners for miles
around Chicago. Here they stationed their wagons in preparation for the
next day’s selling. The wagons stood, close packed, in triple rows, down
both sides of the curb and in the middle of the street. The early comer
got the advantageous stand. There was no regular allotment of space.
Pervus tried to reach the Haymarket by nine at night. Often bad roads
made a detour necessary and he was late. That usually meant bad business
next day. The men, for the most part, slept on their wagons, curled up
on the wagon-seat or stretched out on the sacks. Their horses were
stabled and fed in near-by sheds, with more actual comfort than the men
themselves. One could get a room for twenty-five cents in one of the
ramshackle rooming houses that faced the street. But the rooms were
small, stuffy, none too clean; the beds little more comfortable than the
wagons. Besides, twenty-five cents! You got twenty-five cents for half a
barrel of tomatoes. You got twenty-five cents for a sack of potatoes.
Onions brought seventy-five cents a sack. Cabbages went a hundred heads
for two dollars, and they were five-pound heads. If you drove home with
ten dollars in your pocket it represented a profit of exactly zero. The
sum must go above that. No; one did not pay out twenty-five cents for
the mere privilege of sleeping in a bed.
One June day, a month or more after their marriage, Selina drove into
Chicago with Pervus, an incongruous little figure in her bride’s finery
perched on the seat of the vegetable wagon piled high with early garden
stuff. They had started before four that afternoon, and reached the city
at nine, though the roads were still heavy from the late May rains. It
was, in a way, their wedding trip, for Selina had not been away from the
farm since her marriage. The sun was bright and hot. Selina held an
umbrella to shield herself from the heat and looked about her with
enjoyment and interest. She chattered, turned her head this way and
that, exclaimed, questioned. Sometimes she wished that Pervus would
respond more quickly to her mood. A gay, volatile creature, she frisked
about him like a friendly bright-eyed terrier about a stolid, ponderous
St. Bernard.
As they jogged along now she revealed magnificent plans that had been
forming in her imagination during the past four weeks. It had not taken
her four weeks—or days—to discover that this great broad-shouldered
man she had married was a kindly creature, tender and good, but lacking
any vestige of initiative, of spirit. She marvelled, sometimes, at the
memory of his boldness in bidding for her lunch box that evening of the
raffle. It seemed incredible now, though he frequently referred to it,
wagging his head doggishly and grinning the broadly complacent grin of
the conquering male. But he was, after all, a dull fellow, and there was
in Selina a dash of fire, of wholesome wickedness, of adventure, that he
never quite understood. For her flashes of flame he had a mingled
feeling of uneasiness and pride.
In the manner of all young brides, Selina started bravely out to make
her husband over. He was handsome, strong, gentle; slow, conservative,
morose. She would make him keen, daring, successful, buoyant. Now,
bumping down the Halsted road, she sketched some of her plans in large
dashing strokes.
“Pervus, we must paint the house in October, before the frost sets in,
and after the summer work is over. White would be nice, with green
trimmings. Though perhaps white isn’t practical. Or maybe green with
darker green trimmings. A lovely background for the hollyhocks.” (Those
that she and Roelf had planted showed no signs of coming up.) “Then that
west sixteen. We’ll drain it.”
“Yeh, drain,” Pervus muttered. “It’s clay land. Drain and you have got
yet clay. Hard clay soil.”
Selina had the answer to that. “I know it. You’ve got to use tile
drainage. And—wait a minute—humus. I know what humus is. It’s decayed
vegetables. There’s always a pile by the side of the barn; and you’ve
been using it on the quick land. All the west sixteen isn’t clay. Part
of it’s muckland. All it needs is draining and manure. With potash, too,
and phosphoric acid.”
Pervus laughed a great hearty laugh that Selina found surprisingly
infuriating. He put one great brown hand patronizingly on her flushed
cheek; pinched it gently.
“Don’t!” said Selina, and jerked her head away. It was the first time
she had ever resented a caress from him.
Pervus laughed again. “Well, well, well! School teacher is a farmer now,
huh? I bet even Widow Paarlenberg don’t know as much as my little farmer
about”—he exploded again—“about this, now, potash and—what kind of
acid? Tell me, little Lina, from where did you learn all this about
truck farming?”
“Out of a book,” Selina said, almost snappishly. “I sent to Chicago for
it.”
“A book! A book!” He slapped his knee. “A vegetable farmer out of a
book.”
“Why not! The man who wrote it knows more about vegetable farming than
anybody in all High Prairie. He knows about new ways. You’re running the
farm just the way your father ran it.”
“What was good enough for my father is good enough for me.”
“It isn’t!” cried Selina, “It isn’t! The book says clay loam is all
right for cabbages, peas, and beans. It tells you how. It tells you
how!” She was like a frantic little fly darting and pricking him on to
accelerate the stolid sluggishness of his slow plodding gait.
Having begun, she plunged on. “We ought to have two horses to haul the
wagon to market. It would save you hours of time that you could spend on
the place. Two horses, and a new wagon, green and red, like Klaas
Pool’s.”
Pervus stared straight ahead down the road between his horse’s ears much
as Klaas Pool had done so maddeningly on Selina’s first ride on the
Halsted road. “Fine talk. Fine talk.”
“It isn’t talk. It’s plans. You’ve got to plan.”
“Fine talk. Fine talk.”
“Oh!” Selina beat her knee with an impotent fist.
It was the nearest they had ever come to quarrelling. It would seem that
Pervus had the best of the argument, for when two years had passed the
west sixteen was still a boggy clay mass, and unprolific; and the old
house stared out shabby and paintless, at the dense willows by the
roadside.
They slept that night in one of the twenty-five-cent rooming houses.
Rather, Pervus slept. The woman lay awake, listening to the city noises
that had become strange in her ears; staring out into the purple-black
oblong that was the open window, until that oblong became gray. She wept
a little, perhaps. But in the morning Pervus might have noted (if he had
been a man given to noting) that the fine jaw-line was set as
determinedly as ever with an angle that spelled inevitably paint,
drainage, humus, potash, phosphoric acid, and a horse team.
She rose before four with Pervus, glad to be out of the stuffy little
room with its spotted and scaly green wall paper, its rickety bed and
chair. They had a cup of coffee and a slice of bread in the eating house
on the first floor. Selina waited while he tended the horse. The
night-watchman had been paid another twenty-five cents for watching the
wagonload through the night as it stood in a row with the hundreds of
others in the Haymarket. It was scarcely dawn when the trading began.
Selina, watching it from the wagon seat, thought that this was a
ridiculously haphazard and perilous method of distributing the food for
whose fruition Pervus had toiled with aching back and tired arms. But
she said nothing.
She kept, perforce, to the house that first year, and the second. Pervus
declared that his woman should never work in the fields as did many of
the High Prairie wives and daughters. Of ready cash there was almost
none. Pervus was hard put to it to pay Jan Steen his monthly wage during
May, June, July, and August, when he was employed on the DeJong place,
though Steen got but a pittance, being known as a poor hand, and “dumb.”
Selina learned much that first year, and the second, but she said
little. She kept the house in order—rough work, and endless—and she
managed, miraculously, to keep herself looking fresh and neat. She
understood now Maartje Pool’s drab garments, harassed face, heavily
swift feet, never at rest. The idea of flowers in bowls was abandoned by
July. Had it not been for Roelf’s faithful tending, the flower beds
themselves, planted with such hopes, would have perished for lack of
care.
Roelf came often to the house. He found there a tranquillity and peace
never known in the Pool place, with its hubbub and clatter. In order to
make her house attractive Selina had actually rifled her precious little
bank hoard—the four hundred and ninety-seven dollars left her by her
father. She still had one of the clear white diamonds. She kept it sewed
in the hem of an old flannel petticoat. Once she had shown it to Pervus.
“If I sell this maybe we could get enough money to drain and tile.”
Pervus took the stone, weighed it in his great palm, blinked as he
always did when discussing a subject of which he was ignorant. “How much
could you get for it? Fifty dollars, maybe. Five hundred is what I would
need.”
“I’ve got that. I’ve got it in the bank!”
“Well, maybe next spring. Right now I got my hands full, and more.”
To Selina that seemed a short-sighted argument. But she was too newly
married to stand her ground; too much in love; too ignorant still of
farm conditions.
The can of white paint and the brush actually did materialize. For weeks
it was dangerous to sit, lean, or tread upon any paintable thing in the
DeJong farmhouse without eliciting a cry of warning from Selina. She
would actually have tried her hand at the outside of the house with a
quart can and three-inch brush if Pervus hadn’t intervened. She hemmed
dimity curtains, made slip-covers for the hideous parlour sofa and the
ugliest of the chairs. Subscribed for a magazine called _House and
Garden_. Together she and Roelf used to pore over this fascinating
periodical. Terraces, lily-pools, leaded casements, cretonne,
fireplaces, yew trees, pergolas, fountains—they absorbed them all,
exclaimed, admired, actually criticized. Selina was torn between an
English cottage with timbered porch, bay window, stone flagging, and an
Italian villa with a broad terrace on which she would stand in trailing
white with a Russian wolf-hound. If High Prairie had ever overheard one
of these conversations between the farm woman who would always be a girl
and the farm boy who had never been quite a child, it would have raised
palms high in an “Og heden!” of horror. But High Prairie never heard,
and wouldn’t have understood if it had. She did another strange thing:
She placed the fine hand-carved oak chest Roelf had given her in a
position so that her child should see it as soon as he opened his eyes
in the morning. It was the most beautiful thing she possessed. She had,
too, an incomplete set of old Dutch luster ware. It had belonged to
Pervus’s mother, and to her mother before her. On Sunday nights Selina
used this set for supper, though Pervus protested. And she always
insisted that Dirk drink his milk out of one of the lovely jewel-like
cups. Pervus thought this a piece of madness.
Selina was up daily at four. Dressing was a swift and mechanical
covering of the body. Breakfast must be ready for Pervus and Jan when
they came in from the barn. The house to clean, the chickens to tend,
sewing, washing, ironing, cooking. She contrived ways of minimizing her
steps, of lightening her labour. And she saw clearly how the little farm
was mismanaged through lack of foresight, imagination, and—she faced it
squarely—through stupidity. She was fond of this great, kindly,
blundering, stubborn boy who was her husband. But she saw him with
amazing clearness through the mists of her love. There was something
prophetic about the way she began to absorb knowledge of the farm work,
of vegetable culture, of marketing. Listening, seeing, she learned about
soil, planting, weather, selling. The daily talk of the house and fields
was of nothing else. About this little twenty-five-acre garden patch
there was nothing of the majesty of the Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas grain
farms, with their endless billows of wheat and corn, rye, alfalfa, and
barley rolling away to the horizon. Everything was done in diminutive
here. An acre of this. Two acres of that. A score of chickens. One cow.
One horse. Two pigs. Here was all the drudgery of farm life with none of
its bounteousness, fine sweep, or splendour. Selina sensed that every
inch of soil should have been made to yield to the utmost. Yet there lay
the west sixteen, useless during most of the year; reliable never. And
there was no money to drain it or enrich it; no ready cash for the
purchase of profitable neighbouring acreage. She did not know the term
intensive farming, but this was what she meant. Artificial protection
against the treacherous climate of the Great Lakes region was pitifully
lacking in Pervus’s plans. Now it would be hot with the humid,
withering, sticky heat of the district. The ground was teeming, smoking,
and the green things seemed actually to be pushing their way out of the
earth so that one could almost see them growing, as in some absurd
optical illusion. Then, without warning, would come the icy Lake
Michigan wind, nipping the tender shoots with fiendish fingers. There
should have been hotbeds and coldframes, forcing-hills, hand-boxes.
There were almost none.
These things Selina saw, but not quite clearly. She went about her
housework, now dreamily, now happily. Her physical condition swayed her
mood. Sometimes, in the early autumn, when the days became cooler, she
would go to where Pervus and Jan were working in the fields in the late
afternoon gathering the produce for that night’s trip to market. She
would stand there, a bit of sewing in her hand, perhaps, the wind
ruffling her hair, whipping her skirts, her face no longer pale, tilted
a little toward the good sun like a lovely tawny flower. Sometimes she
sat perched on a pile of empty sacks, or on an up-ended crate, her
sewing in her hand. She was happiest at such times—most content—except
for the pang she felt at sight of the great dark splotch on the blue of
Pervus’s work-shirt where the sweat stained it.
She had come out so one autumn afternoon. She was feeling particularly
gay, buoyant. In one of his rare hours of leisure Roelf Pool had come to
help her with her peony roots which Pervus had brought her from Chicago
for fall planting. Roelf had dug the trench, deep and wide, mulched it
with cow-manure, banked it. They were to form a double row up the path
to the front of the house, and in her mind’s eye Selina already saw them
blooming when spring should come, shaggy balls of luscious pink. Now
Roelf was lending a hand to Pervus and Jan as they bent over the late
beets and radishes. It was a day all gold and blue and scarlet; warm for
the season with a ripe mellow warmth like yellow chartreuse. There were
stretches of seal-black loam where the vegetables had been uprooted.
Bunches of them, string-tied, lay ready for gathering into baskets.
Selina’s eye was gladdened by the clear coral of radishes flung against
the rich black loam.
“A jewel, Pervus!” she cried. “A jewel in an Ethiop’s ear!”
“What?” said Pervus, looking up, amiable but uncomprehending. But the
boy smiled. Selina had left him that book for his own when she went
away. Suddenly Selina stooped and picked up one of the scarlet and green
clusters tied with its bit of string. Laughing, she whipped out a
hairpin and fastened the bunch in her hair just behind her ear. An
absurd thing to do, and childish. It should have looked as absurd as it
was, but it didn’t. Instead it was like a great crimson flower there.
Her cheeks were flushed with the hot sun. Her fine dark hair was
wind-blown and a little loosened, her dress open at the throat. Her
figure was fuller, her breast had a richer curve, for the child was four
months on the way. She was laughing. At a little exclamation from Roelf,
Pervus looked up, as did Jan. Selina took a slow rhythmic step, and
another, her arms upraised, a provocative lovely bacchic little figure
there in the fields under the hot blue sky. Jan Steen wiped the sweat
from his brown face, a glow in his eyes.
“You are like the calendar!” cried Roelf, “on the wall in the parlour.”
A cheap but vivid and not unlovely picture of a girl with cherries in
her hair. It hung in the Pool farmhouse.
Pervus DeJong showed one of his rare storms of passion. Selina had not
seen that blaze of blue in his eyes since the night, months ago, in the
Pools’ kitchen. But that blaze had been a hot and burning blue, like the
sky of to-day. This was a bitter blue, a chill and freezing thing, like
the steel-blue of ice in the sun.
“Take them things out of your hair now! Take shame to yourself!” He
strode over to her and snatched the things from her hair and threw them
down and ground them into the soft earth with his heavy heel. A long
coil of her fine dark hair came rippling over her shoulder as he did so.
She stood looking at him, her eyes wide, dark, enormous in her face now
suddenly white.
His wrath was born of the narrow insular mind that fears gossip. He knew
that the hired man would tell through the length and width of High
Prairie how Pervus DeJong’s wife pinned red radishes in her hair and
danced in the fields like a loose woman.
Selina had turned, fled to the house. It was their first serious
quarrel. For days she was hurt, ashamed, moody. They made it up, of
course. Pervus was contrite, abject almost. But something that belonged
to her girlhood had left her that day.
During that winter she was often hideously lonely. She never got over
her hunger for companionship. Here she was, a gregarious and fun-loving
creature, buried in a snow-bound Illinois prairie farmhouse with a
husband who looked upon conversation as a convenience, not a pastime.
She learned much that winter about the utter sordidness of farm life.
She rarely saw the Pools; she rarely saw any one outside her own little
household. The front room—the parlour—was usually bitterly cold but
sometimes she used to slip in there, a shawl over her shoulders, and sit
at the frosty window to watch for a wagon to go by, or a chance
pedestrian up the road. She did not pity herself, nor regret her step.
She felt, physically, pretty well for a child-bearing woman; and Pervus
was tender, kindly, sympathetic, if not always understanding. She
struggled gallantly to keep up the small decencies of existence. She
loved the glow in Pervus’s eyes when she appeared with a bright ribbon,
a fresh collar, though he said nothing and perhaps she only fancied that
he noticed. Once or twice she had walked the mile and a half of slippery
road to the Pools’, and had sat in Maartje’s warm bright bustling
kitchen for comfort. It seemed to her incredible that a little more than
a year ago she had first stepped into this kitchen in her modish brown
lady’s-cloth dress, muffled in wraps, cold but elated, interested, ready
for adventure, surprise, discomfort—anything. And now here she was in
that same kitchen, amazingly, unbelievably Mrs. Pervus DeJong, truck
farmer’s wife, with a child soon to be born. And where was adventure
now? And where was life? And where the love of chance bred in her by her
father?
The two years following Dirk’s birth were always somewhat vague in
Selina’s mind, like a dream in which horror and happiness are
inextricably blended. The boy was a plump hardy infant who employed
himself cheerfully in whatever spot Selina happened to deposit him. He
had his father’s blond exterior, his mother’s brunette vivacity. At two
he was a child of average intelligence, sturdy physique, and marked good
humour. He almost never cried.
He was just twelve months old when Selina’s second child—a girl—was
born dead. Twice during those two years Pervus fell victim to his
so-called rheumatic attacks following the early spring planting when he
was often forced to stand in water up to his ankles. He suffered
intensely and during his illness was as tractable as a goaded bull.
Selina understood why half of High Prairie was bent and twisted with
rheumatism—why the little Dutch Reformed church on Sunday mornings
resembled a shrine to which sick and crippled pilgrims creep.
High Prairie was kind to the harried household. The farm women sent
Dutch dainties. The men lent a hand in the fields, though they were hard
put to it to tend their own crops at this season. The Widow
Paarlenberg’s neat smart rig was frequently to be seen waiting under the
willows in the DeJong yard. The Paarlenberg, still widow, still
Paarlenberg, brought soups and chickens and cakes which never stuck in
Selina’s throat because she refused to touch them. The Widow Paarlenberg
was what is known as good-hearted. She was happiest when some one else
was in trouble. Hearing of an illness, a catastrophe, “Og heden!” she
would cry, and rush off to the scene with sustaining soup. She was the
sort of lady bountiful who likes to see her beneficiaries benefit before
her very eyes. If she brought them soup at ten in the morning she wanted
to see that soup consumed.
“Eat it all,” she would urge. “Take it now, while it is hot. See, you
are looking better already. Just another spoonful.”
In the DeJongs’ plight she found a grisly satisfaction, cloaked by
commiseration. Selina, white and weak following her tragic second
confinement, still found strength to refuse the widow’s sustaining
potions. The widow, her silks making a gentle susurrus in the bare
little bedroom, regarded Selina with eyes in which pity and triumph made
horrid conflict. Selina’s eyes, enormous now in her white face, were
twin pools of Peake pride.
“It’s most kind of you, Mrs. Paarlenberg, but I don’t like soup.”
“A whole chicken boiled in it.”
“Especially chicken soup. Neither does Pervus. But I’m sure Mrs.
Voorhees will enjoy it.” This being Pervus’s old housekeeper pressed now
into temporary emergency service.
It was easy to see why the DeJong house still was unpainted two years
after Selina’s rosy plans began to form; why the fences still sagged,
the wagon creaked, the single horse hauled the produce to market.
Selina had been married almost three years when there came to her a
letter from Julie Hempel, now married. The letter had been sent to the
Klaas Pool farm and Jozina had brought it to her. Though she had not
seen it since her days at Miss Fister’s school, Selina recognized with a
little hastening heart-beat the spidery handwriting with the shading and
curleycues. Seated on her kitchen steps in her calico dress she read it.