IX

Dirk was eight; Little Sobig DeJong, in a suit made of bean-sacking

sewed together by his mother. A brown blond boy with mosquito bites on

his legs and his legs never still. Nothing of the dreamer about this

lad. The one-room schoolhouse of Selina’s day had been replaced by a

two-story brick structure, very fine, of which High Prairie was vastly

proud. The rusty iron stove had been dethroned by a central heater. Dirk

went to school from October until June. Pervus protested that this was

foolish. The boy could be of great help in the fields from the beginning

of April to the first of November, but Selina fought savagely for his

schooling, and won.

“Reading and writing and figgering is what a farmer is got to know,”

Pervus argued. “The rest is all foolishness. Constantinople is the

capital of Turkey he studies last night and uses good oil in the lamp.

What good does it do a truck farmer when he knows Constantinople is the

capital of Turkey? That don’t help him raise turnips.”

“Sobig isn’t a truck farmer.”

“Well, he will be pretty soon. Time I was fifteen I was running our

place.”

Verbally Selina did not combat this. But within her every force was

gathering to fight it when the time should come. Her Sobig a truck

farmer, a slave to the soil, bent by it, beaten by it, blasted by it, so

that he, in time, like the other men of High Prairie, would take on the

very look of the rocks and earth among which they toiled!

Dirk, at eight, was a none too handsome child, considering his father

and mother—or his father and mother as they had been. He had, though, a

“different” look. His eyelashes were too long for a boy. Wasted, Selina

said as she touched them with a fond forefinger, when a girl would have

been so glad of them. He had developed, too, a slightly aquiline nose,

probably a long-jump inheritance from some Cromwellian rapscallion of

the English Peakes of a past century. It was not until he was seventeen

or eighteen that he was to metamorphose suddenly into a graceful and

aristocratic youngster with an indefinable look about him of distinction

and actual elegance. It was when Dirk was thirty that Peter Peel the

English tailor (of Michigan Avenue north) said he was the only man in

Chicago who could wear English clothes without having them look like

Halsted Street. Dirk probably appeared a little startled at that, as

well he might, west Halsted Street having loomed up so large in his

background.

Selina was a farm woman now, nearing thirty. The work rode her as it had

ridden Maartje Pool. In the DeJong yard there was always a dado of

washing, identical with the one that had greeted Selina’s eye when first

she drove into the Pool yard years before. Faded overalls, a shirt,

socks, a boy’s drawers grotesquely patched and mended, towels of rough

sacking. She, too, rose at four, snatched up shapeless garments,

invested herself with them, seized her great coil of fine cloudy hair,

twisted it into a utilitarian knob and skewered it with a hairpin from

which the varnish had long departed, leaving it a dull gray; thrust her

slim feet into shapeless shoes, dabbed her face with cold water, hurried

to the kitchen stove. The work was always at her heels, its breath hot

on her neck. Baskets of mending piled up, threatened to overwhelm her.

Overalls, woollen shirts, drawers, socks. Socks! They lay coiled and

twisted in an old market basket. Sometimes as she sat late at night

mending them, in and out, in and out, with quick fierce stabs of the

needle in her work-scarred hand, they seemed to writhe and squirm and

wriggle horribly, like snakes. One of her bad dreams was that in which

she saw herself overwhelmed, drowned, swallowed up by a huge welter and

boiling of undarned, unmended nightshirts, drawers, socks, aprons,

overalls.

Seeing her thus one would have thought that the Selina Peake of the

wine-red cashmere, the fun-loving disposition, the high-spirited

courage, had departed forever. But these things still persisted. For

that matter, even the wine-red cashmere clung to existence. So

hopelessly old-fashioned now as to be almost picturesque, it hung in

Selina’s closet like a rosy memory. Sometimes when she came upon it in

an orgy of cleaning she would pass her rough hands over its soft folds

and by that magic process Mrs. Pervus DeJong vanished in a pouf and in

her place was the girl Selina Peake perched a-tiptoe on a soap-box in

Adam Ooms’s hall while all High Prairie, open-mouthed, looked on as the

impecunious Pervus DeJong threw ten hard-earned dollars at her feet. In

thrifty moments she had often thought of cutting the wine-red cashmere

into rag-rug strips; of dyeing it a sedate brown or black and

remodelling it for a much-needed best dress; of fashioning it into

shirts for Dirk. But she never did.

It would be gratifying to be able to record that in these eight or nine

years Selina had been able to work wonders on the DeJong farm; that the

house glittered, the crops thrived richly, the barn housed sleek cattle.

But it could not be truthfully said. True, she had achieved some

changes, but at the cost of terrific effort. A less indomitable woman

would have sunk into apathy years before. The house had a coat of

paint—lead-gray, because it was cheapest. There were two horses—the

second a broken-down old mare, blind in one eye, that they had picked up

for five dollars after it had been turned out to pasture for future sale

as horse-carcass. Piet Pon, the mare’s owner who drove a milk route, had

hoped to get three dollars for the animal, dead. A month of rest and

pasturage restored the mare to usefulness. Selina had made the bargain,

and Pervus had scolded her roundly for it. Now he drove the mare to

market, saw that she pulled more sturdily than the other horse, but had

never retracted. It was no quality of meanness in him. Pervus merely was

like that.

But the west sixteen! That had been Selina’s most heroic achievement.

Her plan, spoken of to Pervus in the first month of her marriage, had

taken years to mature; even now was but a partial triumph. She had even

descended to nagging.

“Why don’t we put in asparagus?”

“Asparagus!” considered something of a luxury, and rarely included in

the High Prairie truck farmer’s products. “And wait three years for a

crop!”

“Yes, but then we’d have it. And a plantation’s good for ten years, once

it’s started.”

“Plantation! What is that? An asparagus plantation? Asparagus I’ve

always heard of in beds.”

“That’s the old idea. I’ve been reading up on it. The new way is to

plant asparagus in rows, the way you would rhubarb or corn. Plant six

feet apart, and four acres anyway.”

He was not even sufficiently interested to be amused. “Yeh, four acres

where? In the clay land, maybe.” He did laugh then, if the short bitter

sound he made could be construed as indicating mirth. “Out of a book.”

“In the clay land,” Selina urged, crisply. “And out of a book. Every

farmer in High Prairie raises cabbage, turnips, carrots, beets, beans,

onions, and they’re better quality than ours. That west sixteen isn’t

bringing you anything, so what difference does it make if I am wrong!

Let me put my own money into it, I’ve thought it all out, Pervus.

Please. We’ll under-drain the clay soil. Just five or six acres, to

start. We’ll manure it heavily—as much as we can afford—and then for

two years we’ll plant potatoes there. We’ll put in our asparagus plants

the third spring—one-year-old seedlings. I’ll promise to keep it

weeded—Dirk and I. He’ll be a big boy by that time.”

“How much manure?”

“Oh, twenty to forty tons to the acre——”

He shook his head in slow Dutch opposition.

“—but if you’ll let me use humus I won’t need that much. Let me try it,

Pervus. Let me try.”

In the end she had her way, partly because Pervus was too occupied with

his own endless work to oppose her; and partly because he was, in his

undemonstrative way, still in love with his vivacious, nimble-witted,

high-spirited wife, though to her frantic goadings and proddings he was

as phlegmatically oblivious as an elephant to a pin prick. Year in, year

out, he maintained his slow-plodding gait, content to do as his father

had done before him; content to let the rest of High Prairie pass him on

the road. He rarely showed temper. Selina often wished he would.

Sometimes, in a sort of hysteria of hopelessness, she would rush at him,

ruffle up his thick coarse hair, now beginning to be threaded with gray;

shake his great impassive shoulders.

“Pervus! Pervus! if you’d only get mad—real mad! Fly into a rage. Break

things! Beat me! Sell the farm! Run away!” She didn’t mean it, of

course. It was the vital and constructive force in her resenting his

apathy, his acceptance of things as they were.

“What is that for dumb talk?” He would regard her solemnly through a

haze of smoke, his pipe making a maddening putt-putt of sleepy content.

Though she worked as hard as any woman in High Prairie, had as little,

dressed as badly, he still regarded her as a luxury; an exquisite toy

which, in a moment of madness, he had taken for himself. “Little

Lina”—tolerantly, fondly. You would have thought that he spoiled her,

pampered her. Perhaps he even thought he did.

When she spoke of modern farming, of books on vegetable gardening, he

came very near to angry impatience, though his amusement at the idea

saved him from it. College agricultural courses he designated as

foolishness. Of Linnæus he had never heard. Burbank was, for him,

non-existent, and he thought head-lettuce a silly fad. Selina sometimes

talked of raising this last named green as a salad, with marketing

value. Everyone knew that regular lettuce was leaf lettuce which you ate

with vinegar and a sprinkling of sugar, or with hot bacon and fat

sopping its wilted leaves.

He said, too, she spoiled the boy. Back of this may have been a lurking

jealousy. “Always the boy; always the boy,” he would mutter when Selina

planned for the child; shielded him; took his part (sometimes unjustly).

“You will make a softy of him with your always babying.” So from time to

time he undertook to harden Dirk. The result was generally disastrous.

In one case the process terminated in what was perilously near to

tragedy. It was during the midsummer school vacation. Dirk was eight.

The woody slopes about High Prairie and the sand hills beyond were

covered with the rich blue of huckleberries. They were dead ripe. One

shower would spoil them. Geertje and Jozina Pool were going

huckleberrying and had consented to take Dirk—a concession, for he was

only eight and considered, at their advanced age, a tagger. But the last

of the tomatoes on the DeJong place were also ripe and ready for

picking. They hung, firm, juicy scarlet globes, prime for the Chicago

market. Pervus meant to haul them to town that day. And this was work in

which the boy could help. To Dirk’s, “Can I go berrying? The

huckleberries are ripe. Geert and Jozina are going,” his father shook a

negative head.

“Yes, well tomatoes are ripe, too, and that comes before huckleberries.

There’s the whole patch to clean up this afternoon by four.”

Selina looked up, glanced at Pervus’s face, at the boy’s, said nothing.

The look said, “He’s a child. Let him go, Pervus.”

Dirk flushed with disappointment. They were at breakfast. It was barely

daybreak. He looked down at his plate, his lip quivered, his long lashes

lay heavy on his cheeks. Pervus got up, wiped his mouth with the back of

his hand. There was a hard day ahead of him. “Time I was your age,

Sobig, I would think it was an easy day when all I had to do was pick a

tomato patch clean.”

Dirk looked up then, quickly. “If I get it all picked can I go?”

“It’s a day’s job.”

“But if I do pick the patch—if I get through early enough—can I go?”

In his mind’s eye Pervus saw the tomato patch, more scarlet than green,

so thick hung the fruit upon the bushes. He smiled. “Yes. You pick them

tomatoes and you can go. But no throwing into the baskets and getting

’em all softed up.”

Secretly Selina resolved to help him, but she knew that this could not

be until afternoon. The berry patches were fully three miles from the

DeJong farm. Dirk would have to finish by three o’clock, at the latest,

to get there. Selina had her morning full with the housework.

He was in the patch before six; fell to work, feverishly. He picked,

heaped the fruit into hillocks. The scarlet patches glowed, blood-red,

in the sun. The child worked like a machine, with an economy of gesture

calculated to the fraction of an inch. He picked, stooped, heaped the

mounds in the sultry heat of the August morning. The sweat stood out on

his forehead, darkened his blond hair, slid down his cheeks that were

pink, then red, then tinged with a purplish tone beneath the summer tan.

When dinner time came he gulped a dozen alarming mouthfuls and was out

again in the broiling noonday glare. Selina left her dinner dishes

unwashed on the table to help him, but Pervus intervened. “The boy’s got

to do it alone,” he insisted.

“He’ll never do it, Pervus. He’s only eight.”

“Time I was eight——”

He actually had cleared the patch by three. He went to the well and took

a huge draught of water; drank two great dippersful, lipping it down

thirstily, like a colt. It was cool and delicious beyond belief. Then he

sloshed a third and a fourth dipperful over his hot head and neck, took

an empty lard pail for berries and was off down the dusty road and

across the fields, running fleetly in spite of the quivering heat waves

that seemed to dance between fiery heaven and parched earth. Selina

stood in the kitchen doorway a moment, watching him. He looked very

small and determined.

He found Geertje and Jozina, surfeited with fruit, berry stained and

bramble torn, lolling languidly in Kuyper’s woods. He began to pick the

plump blue balls but he ate them listlessly, though thriftily, because

that was what he had come for and his father was Dutch. When Geertje and

Jozina prepared to leave not an hour after he had come he was ready to

go, yet curiously loath to move. His lard pail was half filled. He

trotted home laboriously through the late afternoon, feeling giddy and

sick, with horrid pains in his head. That night he tossed in delirium,

begged not to be made lie down, came perilously near to death.

Selina’s heart was an engine pumping terror, hate, agony through her

veins. Hate for her husband who had done this to the boy.

“You did it! You did it! He’s a baby and you made him work like a man.

If anything happens to him! If anything happens to him!——”

“Well, I didn’t think the kid would go for to do it. I didn’t ask him to

pick and then go berrying. He said could he and I said yes. If I had

said no it would have been wrong, too, maybe.”

“You’re all alike. Look at Roelf Pool! They tried to make a farmer of

him, too. And ruined him.”

“What’s the matter with farming? What’s the matter with a farmer? You

said farm work was grand work, once.”

“Oh, I did. It is. It could be. It—— Oh, what’s the use of talking

like that now! Look at him! Don’t, Sobig! Don’t, baby. How hot his head

is! Listen! Is that Jan with the doctor? No. No, it isn’t. Mustard

plasters. Are you sure that’s the right thing?”

It was before the day of the omnipresent farmhouse telephone and the

farmhouse Ford. Jan’s trip to High Prairie village for the doctor and

back to the farm meant a delay of hours. But within two days the boy was

again about, rather pale, but otherwise seeming none the worse for his

experience.

That was Pervus. Thrifty, like his kind, but unlike them in shrewdness.

Penny wise, pound foolish; a characteristic that brought him his death.

September, usually a succession of golden days and hazy opalescent

evenings on the Illinois prairie land, was disastrously cold and rainy

that year. Pervus’s great frame was racked by rheumatism. He was forty

now, and over, still of magnificent physique, so that to see him

suffering gave Selina the pangs of pity that one has at sight of the

very strong or the very weak in pain. He drove the weary miles to market

three times a week, for September was the last big month of the truck

farmer’s season. After that only the hardier plants survived the

frosts—the cabbages, beets, turnips, carrots, pumpkins, squash. The

roads in places were morasses of mud into which the wheels were likely

to sink to the hubs. Once stuck you had often to wait for a friendly

passing team to haul you out. Pervus would start early, detour for miles

in order to avoid the worst places. Jan was too stupid, too old, too

inexpert to be trusted with the Haymarket trading. Selina would watch

Pervus drive off down the road in the creaking old market wagon, the

green stuff protected by canvas, but Pervus wet before ever he climbed

into the seat. There never seemed to be enough waterproof canvas for

both.

“Pervus, take it off those sacks and put it over your shoulders.”

“That’s them white globe onions. The last of ’em. I can get a fancy

price for them but not if they’re all wetted down.”

“Don’t sleep on the wagon to-night, Pervus. Sleep in. Be sure. It saves

in the end. You know the last time you were laid up for a week.”

“It’ll clear. Breaking now over there in the west.”

The clouds did break late in the afternoon; the false sun came out hot

and bright. Pervus slept out in the Haymarket, for the night was close

and humid. At midnight the lake wind sprang up, cold and treacherous,

and with it came the rain again. Pervus was drenched by morning,

chilled, thoroughly miserable. A hot cup of coffee at four and another

at ten when the rush of trading was over stimulated him but little. When

he reached home it was mid-afternoon. Beneath the bronze wrought by the

wind and sun of many years the gray-white of sickness shone dully, like

silver under enamel. Selina put him to bed against his half-hearted

protests. Banked him with hot water jars, a hot iron wrapped in flannel

at his feet. But later came fever instead of the expected relief of

perspiration. Ill though he was he looked more ruddy and hale than most

men in health; but suddenly Selina, startled, saw black lines like

gashes etched under his eyes, about his mouth, in his cheeks.

In a day when pneumonia was known as lung fever and in a locality that

advised closed windows and hot air as a remedy, Pervus’s battle was lost

before the doctor’s hooded buggy was seen standing in the yard for long

hours through the night. Toward morning the doctor had Jan Steen stable

the horse. It was a sultry night, with flashes of heat lightning in the

west.

“I should think if you opened the windows,” Selina said to the old High

Prairie doctor over and over, emboldened by terror, “it would help him

to breathe. He—he’s breathing so—he’s breathing so——” She could not

bring herself to say so terribly. The sound of the words wrung her as

did the sound of his terrible breathing.

X

Perhaps the most poignant and touching feature of the days that followed

was not the sight of this stricken giant, lying majestic and aloof in

his unwonted black; nor of the boy Dirk, mystified but elated, too, with

the unaccustomed stir and excitement; nor of the shabby little farm that

seemed to shrink and dwindle into further insignificance beneath the

sudden publicity turned upon it. No; it was the sight of Selina,

widowed, but having no time for decent tears. The farm was there; it

must be tended. Illness, death, sorrow—the garden must be tended, the

vegetables pulled, hauled to market, sold. Upon the garden depended the

boy’s future, and hers.

For the first few days following the funeral one or another of the

neighbouring farmers drove the DeJong team to market, aided the

blundering Jan in the fields. But each had his hands full with his own

farm work. On the fifth day Jan Steen had to take the garden truck to

Chicago, though not without many misgivings on Selina’s part, all of

which were realized when he returned late next day with half the load

still on his wagon and a sum of money representing exactly zero in

profits. The wilted left-over vegetables were dumped behind the barn to

be used later as fertilizer.

“I didn’t do so good this time,” Jan explained, “on account I didn’t get

no right place in the market.”

“You started early enough.”

“Well, they kind of crowded me out, like. They see I was a new hand and

time I got the animals stabled and come back they had the wagon crowded

out, like.”

Selina was standing in the kitchen doorway, Jan in the yard with the

team. She turned her face toward the fields. An observant person (Jan

Steen was not one of these) would have noted the singularly determined

and clear-cut jaw-line of this drably calicoed farm woman.

“I’ll go myself Monday.”

Jan stared. “Go? Go where, Monday?”

“To market.”

At this seeming pleasantry Jan Steen smiled uncertainly, shrugged his

shoulders, and was off to the barn. She was always saying things that

didn’t make sense. His horror and unbelief were shared by the rest of

High Prairie when on Monday Selina literally took the reins in her own

slim work-scarred hands.

“To market!” argued Jan as excitedly as his phlegmatic nature would

permit. “A woman she don’t go to market. A woman——”

“This woman does.” Selina had risen at three in the morning. Not only

that, she had got Jan up, grumbling. Dirk had joined them in the fields

at five. Together the three of them had pulled and bunched a wagon load.

“Size them,” Selina ordered, as they started to bunch radishes, beets,

turnips, carrots. “And don’t leave them loose like that. Tie them tight

at the heads, like this. Twice around with the string, and through. Make

bouquets of them, not bunches. And we’re going to scrub them.”

High Prairie washed its vegetables desultorily; sometimes not at all.

Higgledy piggledy, large and small, they were bunched and sold as

vegetables, not objets d’art. Generally there was a tan crust of good

earth coating them which the housewife could scrub off at her own

kitchen sink. What else had housewives to do!

Selina, scrubbing the carrots vigorously under the pump, thought they

emerged from their unaccustomed bath looking like clustered spears of

pure gold. She knew better, though, than to say this in Jan’s hearing.

Jan, by now, was sullen with bewilderment. He refused to believe that

she actually intended to carry out her plan. A woman—a High Prairie

farmer’s wife—driving to market like a man! Alone at night in the

market place—or at best in one of the cheap rooming houses! By Sunday

somehow, mysteriously, the news had filtered through the district. High

Prairie attended the Dutch Reformed church with a question hot on its

tongue and Selina did not attend the morning services. A fine state of

things, and she a widow of a week! High Prairie called at the DeJong

farm on Sunday afternoon and was told that the widow was over in the wet

west sixteen, poking about with the boy Dirk at her heels.

The Reverend Dekker appeared late Sunday afternoon on his way to evening

service. A dour dominie, the Reverend Dekker, and one whose talents were

anachronistic. He would have been invaluable in the days when New York

was New Amsterdam. But the second and third generations of High Prairie

Dutch were beginning to chafe under his old-world régime. A hard blue

eye, had the Reverend Dekker, and a fanatic one.

“What is this talk I hear, Mrs. DeJong, that you are going to the

Haymarket with the garden stuff, a woman alone?”

“Dirk goes with me.”

“You don’t know what you are doing, Mrs. DeJong. The Haymarket is no

place for a decent woman. As for the boy! There is card-playing,

drinking—all manner of wickedness—daughters of Jezebel on the street,

going among the wagons.”

“Really!” said Selina. It sounded thrilling, after twelve years on the

farm.

“You must not go.”

“The vegetables are rotting in the ground. And Dirk and I must live.”

“Remember the two sparrows. ‘One of them shall not fall on the ground

without’—Matthew X-29.”

“I don’t see,” replied Selina, simply, “what good that does the sparrow,

once it’s fallen.”

By Monday afternoon the parlour curtains of every High Prairie farmhouse

that faced the Halsted road were agitated as though by a brisk wind

between the hours of three and five, when the market wagons were to be

seen moving toward Chicago. Klaas Pool at dinner that noon had spoken of

Selina’s contemplated trip with a mingling of pity and disapproval.

“It ain’t decent a woman should drive to market.”

Mrs. Klaas Pool (they still spoke of her as the Widow Paarlenberg)

smiled her slippery crooked smile. “What could you expect! Look how

she’s always acted.”

Klaas did not follow this. He was busy with his own train of thought.

“It don’t seem hardly possible. Time she come here school teacher I

drove her out and she was like a little robin or what, set up on the

seat. She says, I remember like yesterday, cabbages was beautiful. I bet

she learned different by this time.”

But she hadn’t. So little had Selina learned in these past eleven years

that now, having loaded the wagon in the yard she surveyed it with more

sparkle in her eye than High Prairie would have approved in a widow of

little more than a week. They had picked and bunched only the best of

the late crop—the firmest reddest radishes, the roundest juiciest

beets; the carrots that tapered a good seven inches from base to tip;

kraut cabbages of the drumhead variety that were flawless green balls;

firm juicy spears of cucumber; cauliflower (of her own planting; Pervus

had opposed it) that looked like a bride’s bouquet. Selina stepped back

now and regarded this riot of crimson and green, of white and gold and

purple.

“Aren’t they beautiful! Dirk, aren’t they beautiful!”

Dirk, capering in his excitement at the prospect of the trip before him,

shook his head impatiently. “What? I don’t see anything beautiful.

What’s beautiful?”

Selina flung out her arms. “The—the whole wagon load. The cabbages.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Dirk. “Let’s go, Mother. Aren’t we

going now? You said as soon as the load was on.”

“Oh, Sobig, you’re just exactly like your——” She stopped.

“Like my what?”

“We’ll go now, son. There’s cold meat for your supper, Jan, and potatoes

all sliced for frying and half an apple pie left from noon. Wash your

dishes—don’t leave them cluttering around the kitchen. You ought to get

in the rest of the squash and pumpkins by evening. Maybe I can sell the

lot instead of taking them in by the load. I’ll see a commission man.

Take less, if I have to.”

She had dressed the boy in his home-made suit cut down from one of his

father’s. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat which he hated. Selina had

made him an overcoat of stout bean-sacking and this she tucked under the

wagon seat, together with an old black fascinator, for though the

September afternoon was white-hot she knew that the evenings were likely

to be chilly, once the sun, a great crimson Chinese balloon, had burned

itself out in a blaze of flame across the prairie horizon. Selina

herself, in a full-skirted black-stuff dress, mounted the wagon agilely,

took up the reins, looked down at the boy seated beside her, clucked to

the horses. Jan Steen gave vent to a final outraged bellow.

“Never in my life did I hear of such a thing!”

Selina turned the horses’ heads toward the city. “You’d be surprised,

Jan, to know of all the things you’re going to hear of some day that

you’ve never heard of before.” Still, when twenty years had passed and

the Ford, the phonograph, the radio, and the rural mail delivery had

dumped the world at Jan’s plodding feet he liked to tell of that

momentous day when Selina DeJong had driven off to market like a man

with a wagon load of hand-scrubbed garden truck and the boy Dirk perched

beside her on the seat.

If, then, you had been travelling the Halsted road, you would have seen

a decrepit wagon, vegetable-laden, driven by a too-thin woman, sallow,

bright-eyed, in a shapeless black dress, a battered black felt hat that

looked like a man’s old “fedora” and probably was. Her hair was

unbecomingly strained away from the face with its high cheek bones, so

that unless you were really observant you failed to notice the exquisite

little nose or the really fine eyes so unnaturally large now in the

anxious face. On the seat beside her you would have seen a farm boy of

nine or thereabouts—a brown freckle-faced lad in a comically home-made

suit of clothes and a straw hat with a broken and flopping brim which he

was forever jerking off only to have it set firmly on again by the woman

who seemed to fear the effects of the hot afternoon sun on his

close-cropped head. But in the brief intervals when the hat was off you

must have noted how the boy’s eyes were shining.

At their feet was the dog Pom, a mongrel whose tail bore no relation to

his head, whose ill-assorted legs appeared wholly at variance with his

sturdy barrel of a body. He dozed now, for it had been his duty to watch

the wagon load at night, while Pervus slept.

A shabby enough little outfit, but magnificent, too. Here was Selina

DeJong driving up the Halsted road toward the city instead of sitting,

black-robed, in the farm parlour while High Prairie came to condole. In

Selina, as they jogged along the hot dusty way, there welled up a

feeling very like elation. Conscious of this, the New England strain in

her took her to task. “Selina Peake, aren’t you ashamed of yourself!

You’re a wicked woman! Feeling almost gay when you ought to be

sad. . . . Poor Pervus . . . the farm . . . Dirk . . . and you can feel

almost gay! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

But she wasn’t, and knew it. For even as she thought this the little

wave of elation came flooding over her again. More than ten years ago

she had driven with Klaas Pool up that same road for the first time, and

in spite of the recent tragedy of her father’s death, her youth, her

loneliness, the terrifying thought of the new home to which she was

going, a stranger among strangers, she had been conscious of a warm

little thrill of elation, of excitement—of adventure! That was it. “The

whole thing’s just a grand adventure,” her father, Simeon Peake, had

said. And now the sensations of that day were repeating themselves. Now,

as then, she was doing what was considered a revolutionary and daring

thing; a thing that High Prairie regarded with horror. And now, as then,

she took stock. Youth was gone, but she had health, courage; a boy of

nine; twenty-five acres of wornout farm land; dwelling and out-houses in

a bad state of repair; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to

die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the

end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps

painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade

and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a

woman like that.

And the wine-red cashmere. She laughed aloud.

“What are you laughing at, Mom?”

That sobered her. “Oh, nothing, Sobig. I didn’t know I was laughing. I

was just thinking about a red dress I had when I first came to High

Prairie a girl. I’ve got it yet.”

“What’s that to laugh at?” He was following a yellow-hammer with his

eyes.

“Nothing. Mother said it was nothing.”

“Wisht I’d brought my sling-shot.” The yellow-hammer was perched on the

fence by the roadside not ten feet away.

“Sobig, you promised me you wouldn’t throw at any more birds, ever.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t hit it. I would just like to aim at it.”

Down the hot dusty country road. She was serious enough now. The cost of

the funeral to be paid. The doctor’s bills. Jan’s wage. All the

expenses, large and small, of the poor little farm holding. Nothing to

laugh at, certainly. The boy was wiser than she.

“There’s Mrs. Pool on her porch, Mom. Rocking.”

There, indeed, was the erstwhile Widow Paarlenberg on her porch,

rocking. A pleasant place to be in mid-afternoon of a hot September day.

She stared at the creaking farm wagon, vegetable laden; at the boy

perched on the high seat; at the sallow shabby woman who was charioteer

for the whole crazy outfit. Mrs. Klaas Pool’s pink face creased in a

smile. She sat forward in her chair and ceased to rock.

“Where you going this hot day, Mis’ DeJong?”

Selina sat up very straight. “To Bagdad, Mrs. Pool.”

“To—Where’s that? What for?”

“To sell my jewels, Mrs. Pool. And to see Aladdin, and Harun-al-Rashid

and Ali Baba. And the Forty Thieves.”

Mrs. Pool had left her rocker and had come down the steps. The wagon

creaked on past her gate. She took a step or two down the path, and

called after them. “I never heard of it. Bag—How do you get there?”

Over her shoulder Selina called out from the wagon seat. “You just go

until you come to a closed door. And you say ‘Open Sesame!’ and there

you are.”

Bewilderment shadowed Mrs. Pool’s placid face. As the wagon lurched on

down the road it was Selina who was smiling and Mrs. Pool who was

serious.

The boy, round eyed, was looking up at his mother. “That’s out of

_Arabian Nights_, what you said. Why did you say that?” Suddenly

excitement tinged his voice. “That’s out of the book. Isn’t it? Isn’t

it! We’re not really——”

She was a little contrite, but not very. “Well, not really, perhaps. But

’most any place is Bagdad if you don’t know what will happen in it. And

this is an adventure, isn’t it, that we’re going on? How can you tell!

All kind of things can happen. All kinds of people. People in disguise

in the Haymarket. Caliphs, and princes, and slaves, and thieves, and

good fairies, and witches.”

“In the Haymarket! That Pop went to all the time! That is just dumb

talk.”

Within Selina something cried out, “Don’t say that, Sobig! Don’t say

that!”

On down the road. Here a head at a front room window. There a woman’s

calicoed figure standing in the doorway. Mrs. Vander Sijde on the porch,

fanning her flushed face with her apron; Cornelia Snip in the yard

pretending to tie up the drooping stalks of the golden-glow and eyeing

the approaching team with the avid gossip’s gaze. To these Selina waved,

bowed, called.

“How d’you do, Mrs. Vander Sijde!”

A prim reply to this salutation. Disapproval writ large on the

farm-wife’s flushed face.

“Hello, Cornelia!”

A pretended start, notable for its bad acting. “Oh, is it you, Mrs.

DeJong! Sun’s in my eyes. I couldn’t think it was you like that.”

Women’s eyes, hostile, cold, peering.

Five o’clock. Six. The boy climbed over the wheel, filled a tin pail

with water at a farmhouse well. They ate and drank as they rode along,

for there was no time to lose. Bread and meat and pickles and pie. There

were vegetables in the wagon, ripe for eating. There were other

varieties that Selina might have cooked at home in preparation for this

meal—German celery root boiled tender and soaked in vinegar; red beets,

pickled; onions; coleslaw; beans. They would have regarded these with an

apathetic eye all too familiar with the sight of them. Selina knew now

why the Pools’ table, in her school-teacher days, had been so lacking in

the green stuff she had craved. The thought of cooking the spinach which

she had planted, weeded, spaded, tended, picked, washed, bunched, filled

her with a nausea of distaste such as she might have experienced at the

contemplation of cannibalism.

The boy had started out bravely enough in the heat of the day, sitting

up very straight beside his mother, calling to the horses, shrieking and

waving his arms at chickens that flew squawking across the road. Now he

began to droop. Evening was coming on. A cool blanket of air from the

lake on the east enveloped them with the suddenness characteristic of

the region, and the mist began to drift across the prairie, softening

the autumn stubble, cooling the dusty road, misting the parched willows

by the roadside, hazing the shabby squat farmhouses.

She brushed away the crumbs, packed the remaining bread and meat

thriftily into the basket and covered it with a napkin against the boy’s

future hunger should he waken in the night.

“Sleepy, Sobig?”

“No. Should say not.” His lids were heavy. His face and body, relaxed,

took on the soft baby contours that come with weariness. The sun was

low. Sunset gloried the west in a final flare of orange and crimson.

Dusk. The boy drooped against her heavy, sagging. She wrapped the old

black fascinator about him. He opened his eyes, tugged at the wrapping

about his shoulders. “Don’t want the old thing . . . fas’nator . . .

like a girl . . .” drooped again with a sigh and found the soft curve

where her side just cushioned his head. In the twilight the dust gleamed

white on weeds, and brush, and grass. The far-off mellow sonance of a

cowbell. Horses’ hoofs clopping up behind them, a wagon passing in a

cloud of dust, a curious backward glance, or a greeting exchanged.

One of the Ooms boys, or Jakob Boomsma. “You’re never going to market,

Mis’ DeJong!” staring with china-blue eyes at her load.

“Yes, I am, Mr. Boomsma.”

“That ain’t work for a woman, Mis’ DeJong. You better stay home and let

the men folks go.”

Selina’s men folks looked up at her—one with the asking eyes of a

child, one with the trusting eyes of a dog. “My men folks are going,”

answered Selina. But then, they had always thought her a little queer,

so it didn’t matter much.

She urged the horses on, refusing to confess to herself her dread of the

destination which they were approaching. Lights now, in the houses along

the way, and those houses closer together. She wrapped the reins around

the whip, and holding the sleeping boy with one hand reached beneath the

seat with the other for the coat of sacking. This she placed around him

snugly, folded an empty sack for a pillow, and lifting the boy in her

arms laid him gently on the lumpy bed formed by the bags of potatoes

piled up just behind the seat in the back of the wagon. So the boy

slept. Night had come on.

The figure of the woman drooped a little now as the old wagon creaked on

toward Chicago. A very small figure in the black dress and a shawl over

her shoulders. She had taken off her old black felt hat. The breeze

ruffled her hair that was fine and soft, and it made a little halo about

the white face that gleamed almost luminously in the darkness as she

turned it up toward the sky.

“I’ll sleep out with Sobig in the wagon. It won’t hurt either of us. It

will be warm in town, there in the Haymarket. Twenty-five cents—maybe

fifty for the two of us, in the rooming house. Fifty cents just to

sleep. It takes hours of work in the fields to make fifty cents.”

She was sleepy now. The night air was deliciously soft and soothing. In

her nostrils was the smell of the fields, of grass dew-wet, of damp

dust, of cattle; the pungent prick of goldenrod, and occasionally a

scented wave that meant wild phlox in a near-by ditch. She sniffed all

this gratefully, her mind and body curiously alert to sounds, scents,

forms even, in the darkness. She had suffered much in the past week; had

eaten and slept but little. Had known terror, bewilderment, agony,

shock. Now she was relaxed, receptive, a little light-headed perhaps,

what with under-feeding and tears and over-work. The racking process had

cleared brain and bowels; had washed her spiritually clean; had

quickened her perceptions abnormally. Now she was like a delicate and

sensitive electric instrument keyed to receive and register; vibrating

to every ether wave.

She drove along in the dark, a dowdy farm woman in shapeless garments;

just a bundle on the rickety seat of a decrepit truck wagon. The boy

slept on his hard lumpy bed like the little vegetable that he was. The

farm lights went out. The houses were blurs in the black. The lights of

the city came nearer. She was thinking clearly, if disconnectedly,

without bitterness, without reproach.

“My father was wrong. He said that life was a great adventure—a fine

show. He said the more things that happen to you the richer you are,

even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living, he said. No matter

what happens to you, good or bad, it’s just so much—what was that word

he used?—so much—oh, yes—‘velvet.’ Just so much velvet. Well, it

isn’t true. He had brains, and charm, and knowledge and he died in a

gambling house, shot while looking on at some one else who was to have

been killed. . . . Now we’re on the cobblestones. Will Dirk wake up? My

little So Big. . . . No, he’s asleep. Asleep on a pile of potato sacks

because his mother thought that life was a grand adventure—a fine

show—and that you took it as it came. A lie! I’ve taken it as it came

and made the best of it. That isn’t the way. You take the best, and make

the most of it . . . Thirty-fifth Street, that was. Another hour and a

half to reach the Haymarket. . . . I’m not afraid. After all, you just

sell your vegetables for what you can get. . . . Well, it’s going to be

different with him. I mustn’t call him Sobig any more. He doesn’t like

it. Dirk. That’s a fine name. Dirk DeJong. . . . No drifting along for

him. I’ll see that he starts with a plan, and follows it. He’ll have

every chance. Every chance. Too late for me, now, but he’ll be

different. . . . Twenty-second Street . . . Twelfth . . . Look at all

the people! . . . I’m enjoying this. No use denying it. I’m enjoying

this. Just as I enjoyed driving along with Klaas Pool that evening,

years and years ago. Scared, but enjoying it. Perhaps I oughtn’t to

be—but that’s hypocritical and sneaking. Why not, if I really do enjoy

it! I’ll wake him. . . . Dirk! Dirk, we’re almost there. Look at all the

people, and the lights. We’re almost there.”

The boy awoke, raised himself from his bed of sacking, looked about,

blinked, sank back again and curled into a ball. “Don’t want to see the

lights . . . people . . .”

He was asleep again. Selina guided the horses skilfully through the

downtown streets. She looked about with wide ambient eyes. Other wagons

passed her. There was a line of them ahead of her. The men looked at her

curiously. They called to one another, and jerked a thumb in her

direction, but she paid no heed. She decided, though, to have the boy on

the seat beside her. They were within two blocks of the Haymarket, on

Randolph Street.

“Dirk! Come, now. Come up here with mother.” Grumbling, he climbed to

the seat, yawned, smacked his lips, rubbed his knuckles into his eyes.

“What are we here for?”

“So we can sell the garden truck and earn money.”

“What for?”

“To send you to school to learn things.”

“That’s funny. I go to school already.”

“A different school. A big school.”

He was fully awake now, and looking about him interestedly. They turned

into the Haymarket. It was a tangle of horses, carts, men. The wagons

were streaming in from the German truck farms that lay to the north of

Chicago as well as from the Dutch farms that lay to the southwest,

whence Selina came. Fruits and vegetables—tons of it—acres of

it—piled in the wagons that blocked the historic square. An unarmed

army bringing food to feed a great city. Through this little section,

and South Water Street that lay to the east, passed all the verdant

growing things that fed Chicago’s millions. Something of this came to

Selina as she manœuvred her way through the throng. She felt a little

thrill of significance, of achievement. She knew the spot she wanted for

her own. Since that first trip to Chicago with Pervus in the early days

of her marriage she had made the journey into town perhaps not more than

a dozen times, but she had seen, and heard, and remembered. A place near

the corner of Des Plaines, not at the curb, but rather in the double

line of wagons that extended down the middle of the road. Here the

purchasing pedlers and grocers had easy access to the wagons. Here

Selina could display her wares to the best advantage. It was just across

the way from Chris Spanknoebel’s restaurant, rooming house, and saloon.

Chris knew her; had known Pervus for years and his father before him;

would be kind to her and the boy in case of need.

Dirk was wide awake now; eager, excited. The lights, the men, the

horses, the sound of talk, and laughter, and clinking glasses from the

eating houses along the street were bewilderingly strange to his

country-bred eyes and ears. He called to the horses; stood up in the

wagon; but clung closer to her as they found themselves in the thick of

the mêlée.

On the street corners where the lights were brightest there were stands

at which men sold chocolate, cigars, collar buttons, suspenders, shoe

strings, patent contrivances. It was like a fair. Farther down the men’s

faces loomed mysteriously out of the half light. Stolid, sunburned faces

now looked dark, terrifying, the whites of the eyes very white, the

mustaches very black, their shoulders enormous. Here was a crap game

beneath the street light. There stood two girls laughing and chatting

with a policeman.

“Here’s a good place, Mother. Here! There’s a dog on that wagon like

Pom.”

Pom, hearing his name, stood up, looked into the boy’s face, quivered,

wagged a nervous tail, barked sharply. The Haymarket night life was an

old story to Pom, but it never failed to stimulate him. Often he had

guarded the wagon when Pervus was absent for a short time. He would

stand on the seat ready to growl at any one who so much as fingered a

radish in Pervus’s absence.

“Down, Pom! Quiet, Pom!” She did not want to attract attention to

herself and the boy. It was still early. She had made excellent time.

Pervus had often slept in snatches as he drove into town and the horses

had lagged, but Selina had urged them on to-night. They had gained a

good half hour over the usual time. Halfway down the block Selina espied

the place she wanted. From the opposite direction came a truck farmer’s

cart obviously making for the same stand. For the first time that night

Selina drew the whip out of its socket and clipped sharply her surprised

nags. With a start and a shuffle they broke into an awkward lope. Ten

seconds too late the German farmer perceived her intention, whipped up

his own tired team, arrived at the spot just as Selina, blocking the

way, prepared to back into the vacant space.

“Heh, get out of there you——” he roared; then, for the first time,

perceived in the dim light of the street that his rival was a woman. He

faltered, stared open-mouthed, tried other tactics. “You can’t go in

there, missus.”

“Oh, yes, I can.” She backed her team dexterously.

“Yes, we can!” shouted Dirk in an attitude of fierce belligerence.

From the wagons on either side heads were lifted. “Where’s your man?”

demanded the defeated driver, glaring.

“Here,” replied Selina; put her hand on Dirk’s head.

The other, preparing to drive on, received this with incredulity. He

assumed the existence of a husband in the neighbourhood—at Chris

Spanknoebel’s probably, or talking prices with a friend at another wagon

when he should be here attending to his own. In the absence of this, her

natural protector, he relieved his disgruntled feelings as he gathered

up the reins. “Woman ain’t got no business here in Haymarket, anyway.

Better you’re home night time in your kitchen where you belong.”

This admonition, so glibly mouthed by so many people in the past few

days, now was uttered once too often. Selina’s nerves snapped. A

surprised German truck farmer found himself being harangued from the

driver’s seat of a vegetable wagon by an irate and fluent woman in a

mashed black hat.

“Don’t talk to me like that, you great stupid! What good does it do a

woman to stay home in her kitchen if she’s going to starve there, and

her boy with her! Staying home in my kitchen won’t earn me any money.

I’m here to sell the vegetables I helped raise and I’m going to do it.

Get out of my way, you. Go along about your business or I’ll report you

to Mike, the street policeman.”

Now she clambered over the wagon wheel to unhitch the tired horses. It

is impossible to tell what interpretation the dumfounded north-sider put

upon her movements. Certainly he had nothing to fear from this small

gaunt creature with the blazing eyes. Nevertheless as he gathered up his

reins terror was writ large on his rubicund face.

“_Teufel!_ What a woman!” Was off in a clatter of wheels and hoofs on

the cobblestones.

Selina unharnessed swiftly. “You stay here, Dirk, with Pom. Mother’ll be

back in a minute.” She marched down the street driving the horses to the

barns where, for twenty-five cents, the animals were to be housed in

more comfort than their owner. She returned to find Dirk deep in

conversation with two young women in red shirtwaists, plaid skirts that

swept the ground, and sailor hats tipped at a saucy angle over pyramidal

pompadours.

“I can’t make any sense out of it, can you, Elsie? Sounds like Dirt to

me, but nobody’s going to name a kid that, are they? Stands to reason.”

“Oh, come on. Your name’ll be mud first thing you know. Here it’s after

nine already and not a——” she turned and saw Selina’s white face.

“There’s my mother,” said Dirk, triumphantly, pointing. The three women

looked at each other. Two saw the pathetic hat and the dowdy clothes,

and knew. One saw the red shirtwaists and the loose red lips, and knew.

“We was just talking to the kid,” said the girl who had been puzzled by

Dirk’s name. Her tone was defensive. “Just asking him his name, and like

that.”

“His name is Dirk,” said Selina, mildly. “It’s a Dutch name—Holland,

you know. We’re from out High Prairie way, south. Dirk DeJong. I’m Mrs.

DeJong.”

“Yeh?” said the other girl. “I’m Elsie. Elsie from Chelsea, that’s me.

Come on, Mabel. Stand gabbin’ all night.” She was blonde and shrill. The

other was older, dark-haired. There was about her a paradoxical

wholesomeness.

Mabel, the older one, looked at Selina sharply. From the next wagon came

loud snores issuing from beneath the seat. From down the line where a

lantern swung from the tailboard of a cart came the rattle of dice.

“What you doing down here, anyway?”

“I’m here to sell my stuff to-morrow morning. Vegetables. From the

farm.”

Mabel looked around. Hers was not a quick mind. “Where’s your man?”

“My husband died a week ago.” Selina was making up their bed for the

night. From beneath the seat she took a sack of hay, tight-packed, shook

out its contents, spread them evenly on the floor of the wagon, at the

front, first having unhinged the seat and clapped it against the wagon

side as a headboard. Over the hay she spread empty sacking. She shook

out her shawl, which would serve as cover. The girl Mabel beheld these

preparations. Her dull eyes showed a gleam of interest which deepened to

horror.

“Say, you ain’t never going to sleep out here, are you? You and the kid.

Like that!”

“Yes.”

“Well, for——” She stared, turned to go, came back. From her belt that

dipped so stylishly in the front hung an arsenal of jangling metal

articles—purse, pencil, mirror, comb—a chatelaine, they called it. She

opened the purse now and took from it a silver dollar. This she tendered

Selina, almost roughly. “Here. Get the kid a decent roost for the night.

You and the kid, see.”

Selina stared at the shining round dollar; at Mabel’s face. The quick

sting of tears came to her eyes. She shook her head, smiled. “We don’t

mind sleeping out here. Thank you just the same—Mabel.”

The girl put her dollar plumply back into her purse. “Well, takes all

kinds, I always say. I thought I had a bum deal but, say, alongside of

what you got I ain’t got it so worse. Place to sleep in, anyways, even

if it is—well, good-night. Listen to that Elsie, hollering for me. I’m

comin’! Shut up!”

You heard the two on their way up the street, arm in arm, laughing.

“Come Dirk.”

“Are we going to sleep here!” He was delighted.

“Right here, all snug in the hay, like campers.”

The boy lay down, wriggling, laughing. “Like gypsies. Ain’t it, Mom?”

“‘Isn’t it,’ Dirk—not ‘ain’t it’.” The school teacher.

She lay down beside him. The boy seemed terribly wide awake. “I liked

the Mabel one best, didn’t you? She was the nicest, h’m?”

“Oh, much the nicest,” said Selina, and put one arm around him and drew

him to her, close. And suddenly he was asleep, deeply. The street became

quieter. The talking and laughter ceased. The lights were dim at Chris

Spanknoebel’s. Now and then the clatter of wheels and horses’ hoofs

proclaimed a late comer seeking a place, but the sound was not near by,

for this block and those to east and west were filled by now. These men

had been up at four that morning, must be up before four the next.

The night was cool, but not cold. Overhead you saw the wide strip of sky

between the brick buildings on either side of the street. Two men came

along singing. “Shut up!” growled a voice from a wagon along the curb.

The singers subsided. It must be ten o’clock and after, Selina thought.

She had with her Pervus’s nickel watch, but it was too dark to see its

face, and she did not want to risk a match. Measured footsteps that

passed and repassed at regular intervals. The night policeman.

She lay looking up at the sky. There were no tears in her eyes. She was

past tears. She thought, “Here I am, Selina Peake, sleeping in a wagon,

in the straw, like a bitch with my puppy snuggled beside me. I was going

to be like Jo in Louisa Alcott’s book. On my feet are boots and on my

body a dyed dress. How terribly long it is going to be until morning

. . . I must try to sleep. . . . I must try to sleep . . .”

She did sleep, miraculously. The September stars twinkled brightly down

on them. As she lay there, the child in her arms, asleep, peace came to

the haggard face, relaxed the tired limbs. Much like another woman who

had lain in the straw with her child in her arms almost two thousand

years before.