Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve
tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the
stuffy room--there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it
was hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up
that the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes
were curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His
breath came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben
Westerveld didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do
farmer of fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to
the city and is taking it easy?
If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell
whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch.
To do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the
light meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest
from his wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him.
When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty
daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully, you
must be a natural-born loller to begin with and revert. Bella
Westerveld was and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and
hadn't. So there he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his
heart thump so fast when he was lying so still. If it had been light,
you could have seen the lines of strained resignation in the sagging
muscles of his patient face.
They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every
morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already
reaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that used to drape the
chair by his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great
wave of depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store
clothes on the chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.
Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the
instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the
bed-room was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by
the feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the
very quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing
of the cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds
in the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in
the ghostly light--these things he had never needed. He had known. But
here in the un-sylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of
Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality.
A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, no
cattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling. Once,
when they first came to the city, he had risen at twelve-thirty,
thinking it was morning, and had gone clumping about the flat, waking
up everyone and loosing from his wife's lips a stream of acid
vituperation that seared even his case-hardened sensibilities. The
people sleeping in the bedroom of the flat next door must have heard
her.
"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping
around like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the back yard and
sleep there if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day."
Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be
appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed
so mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept
back to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of
the flat just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a
little, grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had
still the power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were
daily shocks to him whose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm,
had been a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the
hardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of
nocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all
startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of
the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the
hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge
had been marked by the Mississippi rolling grandly by.
Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city sound that
he really welcomed--the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's
matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy
who released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had until the winter
months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than
useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The
milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before
he had begun to take it easy, six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism
of his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in
motion by his own big work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled him
now. He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way,
as if they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth
and soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work
as they used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the
backs of his hands and around the thumbs.
"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully.
"She gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little
spring tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up."
He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on
Halstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist,
white-coated and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling
store. The reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up
surprisingly--while it lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on
discontinuing it he slumped back into his old apathy.
Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his
incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty
streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so
limply from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those
strangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from
scanning great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky,
square-shouldered body suggested power unutilized. All these spelled
tragedy. Worse than tragedy--waste.
For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set,
eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and
drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before
sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the color and the
rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he
toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller
might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none
of the highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend
in with the background of nature so as to be almost undistinguishable
from it, as were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer
differed from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf
bunker, though form and substance are the same.
Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given
to introspection. For that matter, anyone knows that a farmer in town
is a comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic
papers, have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps one should
know him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black
loam of the Mississippi bottomlands clinging to his boots.
At twenty-five, given a tasseled cap, doublet and hose, and a long,
slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those
rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans
Hals canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous.
A serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew
older, the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated
the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him, even the
ghost of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.
The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds
of years since the first Westervelds came to America, and they had
married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost
entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of
those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County,
then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills,
majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical
Westerveld mind, hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their
relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his
face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for
clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring
flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the
drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men
are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him.
He seemed instinctively to know facts about the kin ship of soil and
seed that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to
be a saying in that section that "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on
rock."
At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run
faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who took part
in the rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold
her at arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real
ecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. There was that almost primitive
strength which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness
appealed to their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have
had his pick of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding,
beaued them about to neighbor-hood parties. But by the time he was
twenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm
adjoining Westerveld's. There was what the neighbors called an
understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byers
girl to marry him. You saw him going down the road toward the Byers
place four nights out of the seven. He had a quick, light step at
variance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy,
slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He had a habit of carrying in
his hand a little twig or switch cut from a tree. This he would twirl
blithely as he walked along. The switch and the twirl represented just
so much energy and animal spirits. He never so much as flicked a
dandelion head with it.
An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.
"Hello, Emma."
"How do, Ben."
"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf
at Aug Tietjens' with five legs."
"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat,
though. We've got the threshers day after tomorrow. We've been
cooking up."
Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two
would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of
embarrassment. The neighbors were right in their surmise that there
was no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled
in the minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the
north eighty on easy payments if--when----"
Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a
fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man."
The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful.
Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have
revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her
father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her
butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial,
twelve miles away, than did any other's in the district. She was not a
pretty girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her,
even at twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that
promised well for Ben Westerveld's future happiness.
But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers' capable
hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins
was the daughter of old "Red Front" Huckins, who ran the saloon of that
cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not
from any bent toward learning but because teaching appealed to her as
being a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant.
In that day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the
place of the present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on
St. Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the
country school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the
country and dreaded her apprenticeship.
"I'll get a beau," she said, "who'll take me driving and around. And
Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town."
The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road
toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was
behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers
could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered
that later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so
fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not
glib of thought or speech.
He knew at once this was the new schoolteacher. He had heard of her
coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not at
all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history
of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival.
That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact
that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip
in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighborhood swains Ben
Westerveld already occupied a position at the top of the column.
He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his
embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily and called to
his dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded
forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with
natural canine curiosity.
Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping
her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free
hand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in
his life that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment
from that time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he never would
have forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking,
quivering body.
Bella screamed again, still clinging to him. Ben was saying: "He won't
hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder
reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so
childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls.
From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter
femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella, the
experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a
queer electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it
something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone.
If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have
realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she
could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I
was scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little.
"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea."
But Bella looked over her shoulder fearfully to where Dunder stood by
the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still
thought that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared
for, but still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped,
picked up a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank.
"Go on home!" he commanded sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the
dog with a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl,
put his tail between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog.
Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. "You're the
new teacher, ain't you?"
"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about
that dog."
"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt
nobody. He's pretty big."