The best thing for Dirk. The best thing for Dirk. It was the phrase that
repeated itself over and over in Selina’s speech during the days that
followed. Julie Arnold was all for taking him into her gray stone house,
dressing him like Lord Fauntleroy and sending him to the north-side
private school attended by Eugene, her boy, and Pauline, her girl. In
this period of bewilderment and fatigue Julie had attempted to take
charge of Selina much as she had done a dozen years before at the time
of Simeon Peake’s dramatic death. And now, as then, she pressed into
service her wonder-working father and bounden slave, August Hempel. Her
husband she dismissed with affectionate disregard.
“Michael’s all right,” she had said on that day of their first meeting,
“if you tell him what’s to be done. He’ll always do it. But Pa’s the one
that thinks of things. He’s like a general, and Michael’s the captain.
Well, now, Pa’ll be out to-morrow and I’ll probably come with him. I’ve
got a committee meeting, but I can easily——”
“You said—did you say your father would be out to-morrow! Out where?”
“To your place. Farm.”
“But why should he? It’s a little twenty-five-acre truck farm, and half
of it under water a good deal of the time.”
“Pa’ll find a use for it, never fear. He won’t say much, but he’ll think
of things. And then everything will be all right.”
“It’s miles. Miles. Way out in High Prairie.”
“Well, if you could make it with those horses, Selina, I guess we can
with Pa’s two grays that hold a record for a mile in three minutes or
three miles in a minute, I forget which. Or in the auto, though Pa hates
it. Michael is the only one in the family who likes it.”
A species of ugly pride now possessed Selina. “I don’t need help. Really
I don’t, Julie dear. It’s never been like to-day. Never before. We were
getting on very well, Pervus and I. Then after Pervus’s death so
suddenly like that I was frightened. Terribly frightened. About Dirk. I
wanted him to have everything. Beautiful things. I wanted his life to be
beautiful. Life can be so ugly, Julie. You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“Well, now, that’s why I say. We’ll be out to-morrow, Pa and I. Dirk’s
going to have everything beautiful. We’ll see to that.”
It was then that Selina had said, “But that’s just it. I want to do it
myself, for him. I can. I want to give him all these things myself.”
“But that’s selfish.”
“I don’t mean to be. I just want to do the best thing for Dirk.”
It was shortly after noon that High Prairie, hearing the unaccustomed
chug of a motor, rushed to its windows or porches to behold Selina
DeJong in her mashed black felt hat and Dirk waving his battered straw
wildly, riding up the Halsted road toward the DeJong farm in a bright
red automobile that had shattered the nerves of every farmer’s team it
had met on the way. Of the DeJong team and the DeJong dog Pom, and the
DeJong vegetable wagon there was absolutely no sign. High Prairie was
rendered unfit for work throughout the next twenty-four hours.
The idea had been Julie’s, and Selina had submitted rather than
acquiesced, for by now she was too tired to combat anything or any one.
If Julie had proposed her entering High Prairie on the back of an
elephant with a mahout perched between his ears Selina would have
agreed—rather, would have been unable to object.
“It’ll get you home in no time,” Julie had said, energetically. “You
look like a ghost and the boy’s half asleep. I’ll telephone Pa and he’ll
have one of the men from the barns drive your team out so it’ll be there
by six. Just you leave it all to me. Haven’t you ever ridden in one!
Why, there’s nothing to be scared of. I like the horses best, myself.
I’m like Pa. He says if you use horses you get there.”
Dirk had accepted the new conveyance with the adaptability of childhood,
had even predicted, grandly, “I’m going to have one when I grow up
that’ll go faster ’n this, even.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to go faster than this, Dirk,” Selina had
protested breathlessly as they chugged along at the alarming rate of
almost fifteen miles an hour.
Jan Snip had been rendered speechless. Until the actual arrival of the
team and wagon at six he counted them as mysteriously lost and DeJong’s
widow clearly gone mad. August Hempel’s arrival next day with Julie
seated beside him in the light spider-phaeton drawn by two slim
wild-eyed quivering grays made little tumult in Jan’s stunned mind by
now incapable of absorbing any fresh surprises.
In the twelve years’ transition from butcher to packer Aug Hempel had
taken on a certain authority and distinction. Now, at fifty-five, his
hair was gray, relieving the too-ruddy colour of his face. He talked
almost without an accent; used the idiomatic American speech he heard
about the yards, where the Hempel packing plant was situated. Only his
d’s were likely to sound like t’s. The letter j had a slightly ch sound.
In the last few years he had grown very deaf in one ear, so that when
you spoke to him he looked at you intently. This had given him a
reputation for keenness and great character insight, when it was merely
the protective trick of a man who does not want to confess that he is
hard of hearing. He wore square-toed shoes with soft tips and square-cut
gray clothes and a large gray hat with a chronically inadequate
sweat-band. The square-cut boots were expensive, and the square-cut gray
clothes and the large gray hat, but in them he always gave the effect of
being dressed in the discarded garments of a much larger man.
Selina’s domain he surveyed with a keen and comprehensive eye.
“You want to sell?”
“No.”
“That’s good.” (It was nearly goot as he said it.) “Few years from now
this land will be worth money.” He had spent a bare fifteen minutes
taking shrewd valuation of the property from fields to barn, from barn
to house. “Well, what _do_ you want to do, heh, Selina?”
They were seated in the cool and unexpectedly pleasing little parlour,
with its old Dutch lustre set gleaming softly in the cabinet, its three
rows of books, its air of comfort and usage.
Dirk was in the yard with one of the Van Ruys boys, surveying the grays
proprietorially. Jan was rooting in the fields. Selina clasped her hands
tightly in her lap—those hands that, from much grubbing in the soil,
had taken on something of the look of the gnarled things they tended.
The nails were short, discoloured, broken. The palms rough, calloused.
The whole story of the last twelve years of Selina’s life was written in
her two hands.
“I want to stay here, and work the farm, and make it pay. I can. By next
spring my asparagus is going to begin to bring in money. I’m not going
to grow just the common garden stuff any more—not much, anyway. I’m
going to specialize in the fine things—the kind the South Water Street
commission men want. I want to drain the low land. Tile it. That land
hasn’t been used for years. It ought to be rich growing land by now, if
once it’s properly drained. And I want Dirk to go to school. Good
schools. I never want my son to go to the Haymarket. Never. Never.”
Julie stirred with a little rustle and click of silk and beads. Her
gentle amiability was vaguely alarmed by the iron quality of
determination in the other’s tone.
“Yes, but what about you, Selina?”
“Me?”
“Yes, of course. You talk as though you didn’t count. Your life. Things
to make you happy.”
“My life doesn’t count, except as something for Dirk to use. I’m done
with anything else. Oh, I don’t mean that I’m discouraged, or
disappointed in life, or anything like that. I mean I started out with
the wrong idea. I know better now. I’m here to keep Dirk from making the
mistakes I made.”
Here Aug Hempel, lounging largely in his chair and eyeing Selina
intently, turned his gaze absently through the window to where the
grays, a living equine statue, stood before the house. His tone was one
of meditation, not of argument. “It don’t work out that way, seems.
About mistakes it’s funny. You got to make your own; and not only that,
if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.” He whistled
softly through his teeth following this utterance and tapped the chair
seat with his finger nails.
“It’s beauty!” Selina said then, almost passionately. Aug Hempel and
Julie plainly could make nothing of this remark so she went on, eager,
explanatory. “I used to think that if you wanted beauty—if you wanted
it hard enough and hopefully enough—it came to you. You just waited,
and lived your life as best you could, knowing that beauty might be just
around the corner. You just waited, and then it came.”
“Beauty!” exclaimed Julie, weakly. She stared at Selina in the evident
belief that this work-worn haggard woman was bemoaning her lack of
personal pulchritude.
“Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in
candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures.
People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and
watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then
developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it.” The word
self-expression was not in cant use then, and Selina hadn’t it to offer
them. They would not have known what she meant if she had. She threw out
her hands now in a futile gesture. “That’s what I mean by beauty. I want
Dirk to have it.”
Julie blinked and nodded with the wise amiable look of comprehension
assumed by one who has understood no single word of what has been said.
August Hempel cleared his throat.
“I guess I know what you’re driving at Selina, maybe. About Julie I felt
just like that. She should have everything fine. I wanted her to have
everything. And she did, too. Cried for the moon she had it.”
“I never did have it Pa, any such thing!”
“Never cried for it, I know of.”
“For pity’s sake!” pleaded Julie, the literal, “let’s stop talking and
do something. My goodness, anybody with a little money can have books
and candles and travel around and look at pictures, if that’s all. So
let’s _do_ something. Pa, you’ve probably got it all fixed in your mind
long ago. It’s time we heard it. Here Selina was one of the most popular
girls in Miss Fister’s school, and lots of people thought the prettiest.
And now just look at her!”
A flicker of the old flame leaped up in Selina. “Flatterer!” she
murmured.
Aug Hempel stood up. “If you think giving your whole life to making the
boy happy is going to make him happy you ain’t so smart as I took you
for. You go trying to live somebody else’s life for them.”
“I’m not going to live his life for him. I want to show him how to live
it so that he’ll get full value out of it.”
“Keeping him out of the Haymarket if the Haymarket’s the natural place
for him to be won’t do that. How can you tell! Monkeying with what’s to
be. I’m out at the yards every day, in and out of the cattle pens,
talking to the drovers and herders, mixing in with the buyers. I can
tell the weight of a hog and what he’s worth just by a look at him, and
a steer, too. My son-in-law Michael Arnold sits up in the office all day
in our plant, dictating letters. His clothes they never stink of the
pens like mine do. . . . Now I ain’t saying anything against him, Julie.
But I bet my grandson Eugene”—he repeated it, stressing the name so
that you sensed his dislike of it—“Eugene, if he comes into the
business at all when he grows up, won’t go within smelling distance of
the yards. His office I bet will be in a new office building on, say
Madison Street, with a view of the lake. Life! You’ll be hoggin’ it all
yourself and not know it.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Julie interposed. “He goes on like
that. Old yards!”
August Hempel bit off the end of a cigar, was about to spit out the
speck explosively, thought better of it and tucked it in his vest
pocket. “I wouldn’t change places with Mike, not——”
“Please don’t call him Mike, Pa.”
“Michael, then. Not for ten million. And I need ten million right now.”
“And I suppose,” retorted Selina, spiritedly, “that when your son-in-law
Michael Arnold is your age he’ll be telling Eugene how he roughed it in
an office over at the yards in the old days. These will be the old
days.”
August Hempel laughed good humouredly. “That can be, Selina. That can
be.” He chewed his cigar and settled to the business at hand.
“You want to drain and tile. Plant high-grade stuff. You got to have a
man on the place that knows what’s what, not this Rip Van Winkle we saw
in the cabbage field. New horses. A wagon.” His eyes narrowed
speculatively. Shrewd wrinkles radiated from their corners. “I betcha
we’ll see the day when you truck farmers will run into town with your
stuff in big automobile wagons that will get you there in under an hour.
It’s bound to come. The horse is doomed, that’s chust what.” Then,
abruptly, “I will get you the horses, a bargain, at the yards.” He took
out a long flat check book. He began writing in it with a pen that he
took from his pocket—some sort of marvellous pen that seemed already
filled with ink and that you unscrewed at the top and then screwed at
the bottom. He squinted through his cigar smoke, the check book propped
on his knee. He tore off the check with a clean rip. “For a starter,” he
said. He held it out to Selina.
“There now!” exclaimed Julie, in triumphant satisfaction. That was more
like it. Doing something.
But Selina did not take the check. She sat very still in her chair, her
hands folded. “That isn’t the regular way,” she said.
August Hempel was screwing the top on his fountain pen again. “Regular
way? for what?”
“I’m borrowing this money, not taking it. Oh, yes, I am! I couldn’t get
along without it. I realize that now, after yesterday. Yesterday! But in
five years—seven—I’ll pay it back.” Then, at a half-uttered protest
from Julie, “That’s the only way I’ll take it. It’s for Dirk. But I’m
going to earn it—and pay it back. I want a——” she was being
enormously businesslike, and unconsciously enjoying it——“a—an I. O.
U. A promise to pay you back just as—as soon as I can. That’s business,
isn’t it? And I’ll sign it.”
“Sure,” said Aug Hempel, and unscrewed his fountain pen again. “Sure
that’s business.” Very serious, he scribbled again, busily, on a piece
of paper. A year later, when Selina had learned many things, among them
that simple and compound interest on money loaned are not mere problems
devised to fill Duffy’s Arithmetic in her school-teaching days, she went
to August Hempel between laughter and tears.
“You didn’t say one word about interest, that day. Not a word. What a
little fool you must have thought me.”
“Between friends,” protested August Hempel.
But—“No,” Selina insisted. “Interest.”
“I guess I better start me a bank pretty soon if you keep on so
businesslike.”
Ten years later he was actually the controlling power in the Yards &
Rangers’ Bank. And Selina had that original I. O. U. with its “Paid In
Full. Aug Hempel,” carefully tucked away in the carved oak chest
together with other keepsakes that she foolishly treasured—ridiculous
scraps that no one but she would have understood or valued—a small
school slate such as little children use (the one on which she had
taught Pervus to figure and parse); a dried bunch of trilliums; a
bustled and panniered wine-red cashmere dress, absurdly old-fashioned; a
letter telling about the Infanta Eulalie of Spain, and signed Julie
Hempel Arnold; a pair of men’s old side-boots with mud caked on them; a
crude sketch, almost obliterated now, done on a torn scrap of brown
paper and showing the Haymarket with the wagons vegetable-laden and the
men gathered beneath the street-flares, and the patient farm
horses—Roelf’s childish sketch.
Among this rubbish she rummaged periodically in the years that followed.
Indeed, twenty years later Dirk, coming upon her smoothing out the
wrinkled yellow creases of the I. O. U. or shaking the camphor-laden
folds of the wine-red cashmere, would say, “At it again! What a
sentimental generation yours was, Mother. Pressed flowers! They went out
with the attic, didn’t they? If the house caught fire you’d probably run
for the junk in that chest. It isn’t worth two cents, the lot of it.”
“Perhaps not,” Selina said, slowly. “Still, there’d be some money value,
I suppose, in an early original signed sketch by Rodin.”
“Rodin! You haven’t got a——”
“No, but here’s one by Pool—Roelf Pool—signed. At a sale in New York
last week one of his sketches—not a finished thing at all—just a rough
drawing that he’d made of some figures in a group that went into the
Doughboy statue—brought one thous——”
“Oh, well, that—yes. But the rest of the stuff you’ve got there—funny
how people will treasure old stuff like that. Useless stuff. It isn’t
even beautiful.”
“Beautiful!” said Selina, and shut the lid of the old chest. “Why,
Dirk—Dirk! You don’t even know what beauty is. You never will know.”