I thought it was so queer that you didn’t answer my letter and
now I know you must have thought it queer that I did not answer
yours. I found your letter to me, written long ago, when I was
going over Mother’s things last week. It was the letter you must
have written when I was in Kansas City. Mother had never given
it to me. I am not reproaching her. You see, I had written you
from Kansas City, but had sent my letter to Mamma to mail
because I never could remember that funny address of yours in
the country.
Mamma died three weeks ago. Last week I was going over her
things—a trying task, you may imagine—and there were your two
letters addressed to me. She had never destroyed them. Poor
Mamma . . .
Well, dear Selina, I suppose you don’t even know that I am
married. I married Michael Arnold of Kansas City. The Arnolds
were in the packing business there, you know. Michael has gone
into business with Pa here in Chicago and I suppose you have
heard of Pa’s success. Just all of a sudden he began to make a
great deal of money after he left the butcher business and went
into the yards—the stockyards, you know. Poor Mamma was so
happy these last few years, and had everything that was
beautiful. I have two children. Eugene and Pauline.
I am getting to be quite a society person. You would laugh to
see me. I am on the Ladies’ Entertainment Committee of the
World’s Fair. We are supposed to entertain all the visiting big
bugs—that is the lady bugs. There! How is that for a joke?
I suppose you know about the Infanta Eulalie. Of Spain, you
know. And what she did about the Potter Palmer ball. . . .
Selina, holding the letter in her work-stained hand, looked up and
across the fields and away to where the prairie met the sky and closed
in on her; her world. The Infanta Eulalie of Spain. . . . She went back
to the letter.
Well, she came to Chicago for the Fair and Mrs. Potter Palmer
was to give a huge reception and ball for her. Mrs. P. is head
of the whole committee, you know, and I must say she looks
queenly with her white hair so beautifully dressed and her
diamond dog-collar and her black velvet and all. Well, at the
very last minute the Infanta refused to attend the ball because
she had just heard that Mrs. P. was an innkeeper’s wife.
Imagine! The Palmer House, of course.
Selina, holding the letter in her hand, imagined.
It was in the third year of Selina’s marriage that she first went into
the fields to work. Pervus had protested miserably, though the
vegetables were spoiling in the ground.
“Let them rot,” he said. “Better the stuff rots in the ground. DeJong
women folks they never worked in the fields. Not even in Holland. Not my
mother or my grandmother. It isn’t for women.”
Selina had regained health and vigour after two years of wretchedness.
She felt steel-strong and even hopeful again, sure sign of physical
well-being. Long before now she had realized that this time must
inevitably come. So she answered briskly, “Nonsense, Pervus. Working in
the field’s no harder than washing or ironing or scrubbing or standing
over a hot stove in August. Women’s work! Housework’s the hardest work
in the world. That’s why men won’t do it.”
She would often take the boy Dirk with her into the fields, placing him
on a heap of empty sacks in the shade. He invariably crawled off this
lowly throne to dig and burrow in the warm black dirt. He even made as
though to help his mother, pulling at the rooted things with futile
fingers, and sitting back with a bump when a shallow root did
unexpectedly yield to his tugging.
“Look! He’s a farmer already,” Pervus would say.
But within Selina something would cry, “No! No!”
During May, June, and July Pervus worked not only from morning until
night, but by moonlight as well, and Selina worked with him. Often their
sleep was a matter of three hours only, or four.
So two years went—three years—four. In the fourth year of Selina’s
marriage she suffered the loss of her one woman friend in all High
Prairie. Maartje Pool died in childbirth, as was so often the case in
this region where a Gampish midwife acted as obstetrician. The child,
too, had not lived. Death had not been kind to Maartje Pool. It had
brought neither peace nor youth to her face, as it so often does.
Selina, looking down at the strangely still figure that had been so
active, so bustling, realized that for the first time in the years she
had known her she was seeing Maartje Pool at rest. It seemed incredible
that she could lie there, the infant in her arms, while the house was
filled with people and there were chairs to be handed, space to be
cleared, food to be cooked and served. Sitting there with the other High
Prairie women Selina had a hideous feeling that Maartje would suddenly
rise up and take things in charge; rub and scratch with capable fingers
the spatters of dried mud on Klaas Pool’s black trousers (he had been in
the yard to see to the horses); quiet the loud wailing of Geertje and
Jozina; pass her gnarled hand over Roelf’s wide-staring tearless eyes;
wipe the film of dust from the parlour table that had never known a
speck during her régime.
“You can’t run far enough,” Maartje had said. “Except you stop living
you can’t run away from life.”
Well, she had run far enough this time.
Roelf was sixteen now, Geertje twelve, Jozina eleven. What would this
household do now, Selina wondered, without the woman who had been so
faithful a slave to it? Who would keep the pigtails—no longer
giggling—in clean ginghams and decent square-toed shoes? Who, when
Klaas broke out in rumbling Dutch wrath against what he termed Roelf’s
“dumb” ways, would say, “Og, Pool, leave the boy alone once. He does
nothing.” Who would keep Klaas himself in order; cook his meals, wash
his clothes, iron his shirts, take pride in the great ruddy childlike
giant?
Klaas answered these questions just nine months later by marrying the
Widow Paarlenberg. High Prairie was rocked with surprise. For months
this marriage was the talk of the district. They had gone to Niagara
Falls on a wedding trip; Pool’s place was going to have this improvement
and that; no, they were going to move to the Widow Paarlenberg’s large
farmhouse (they would always call her that); no, Pool was putting in a
bathroom with a bathtub and running water; no, they were going to buy
the Stikker place between Pool’s and Paarlenberg’s and make one farm of
it, the largest in all High Prairie, Low Prairie, or New Haarlem. Well,
no fool like an old fool.
So insatiable was High Prairie’s curiosity that every scrap of fresh
news was swallowed at a gulp. When the word went round of Roelf’s flight
from the farm, no one knew where, it served only as sauce to the great
dish of gossip.
Selina had known. Pervus was away at the market when Roelf had knocked
at the farmhouse door one night at eight, had turned the knob and
entered, as usual. But there was nothing of the usual about his
appearance. He wore his best suit—his first suit of store clothes,
bought at the time of his mother’s funeral. It never had fitted him; now
was grotesquely small for him. He had shot up amazingly in the last
eight or nine months. Yet there was nothing of the ridiculous about him
as he stood before her now, tall, lean, dark. He put down his cheap
yellow suitcase.
“Well, Roelf.”
“I am going away. I couldn’t stay.”
She nodded. “Where?”
“Away. Chicago maybe.” He was terribly moved, so he made his tone
casual. “They came home last night. I have got some books that belong to
you.” He made as though to open the suitcase.
“No, no! Keep them.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Roelf.” She took the boy’s dark head in her two hands and,
standing on tiptoe, kissed him. He turned to go. “Wait a minute. Wait a
minute.” She had a few dollars—in quarters, dimes, half
dollars—perhaps ten dollars in all—hidden away in a canister on the
shelf. She reached for it. But when she came back with the box in her
hand he was gone.