"Pleased to meet you," said Bella. "Which way was you going? There's a
dog down at Tietjens' that's enough to scare anybody. He looks like a
pony, he's so big."
"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking
over to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I
get there. You were going the other way, weren't you?"
"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep
you company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own
sudden masterfulness.
They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one
another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as
usual. The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as
completely as if they had been whisked away on a magic rug.
Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life.
She was contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery.
The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was
always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs' feet and shredding
cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch
counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should
be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could
find an excuse she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and
talk and color. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she
always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or
with an armful of clean towels.
Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, "I want to marry Bella."
He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma
Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she
laughed at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing,
she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm
eyes and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for
Bella was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of
his finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and
alluring woman. But in the end they married. The neighborhood was
rocked with surprise.
Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colors of
pretense in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too
honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally
truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this
slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married.
He had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when
tubbing was a ceremony in an environment that made bodily nicety
difficult. He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her
appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a
natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept
away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a
slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit
to any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins' bar.
They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered
in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here,
eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the
Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he
was too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked
forward to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared
by Bella, his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper
in the county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness,
her plaint was the same--"If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a
farm all my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day and night, I'd
rather have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here."
Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as
slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin
coarsened from lack of care and from overeating. And in her children's
ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You
can get away from it," she counseled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you
be a rube like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they
profited by her advice. Minnie went to work in Commercial when she was
seventeen, an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheap
finery. At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with roving
tendencies. They moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one
job. John, the older boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was
her mother's daughter. Restless, dissatisfied, emptyheaded, he was the
despair of his father. He drove the farm horses as if they were
racers, lashing them up hill and down dale. He was forever lounging
off to the village or wheedling his mother for money to take him to
Commercial. It was before the day of the ubiquitous automobile. Given
one of those present adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his
career much earlier. As it was, they found him lying by the roadside
at dawn one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with the
wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolen the
horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led them
stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a rendezvous of
his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not have hurt him, but
evidently he had been dragged almost a mile before his battered body
became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood and the reins.
That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife
together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her
hatred of the locality and the life.
"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless
reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make
a farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your
hand at Dike now for a change."
Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at
him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come
honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he
was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors.
Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at
school, they had come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town
from flood by thrusting his finger into the hole in the dike and
holding it there until help came, the class, after one look at the
accompanying picture in the reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld.
And Dike he remained.
Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling.
The boy was cropwise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays
you might see the two walking about the farm, looking at the
pigs--great black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying
the stock; speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April,
with rich patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn
and judicious pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the
winter wheat was a fine prospect Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly
to the boy's opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show.
Here, at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and
bitter disappointment of his married life.
That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben
Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step--for his years. The
stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat
and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five-a habit that, on
a farm, is fraught with difficulties. The community knew and respected
him. He was a man of standing. When he drove into town on a bright
winter morning, in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and his
great boots, and entered the First National Bank, even Shumway, the
cashier, would look up from his desk to say:
"Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?"
When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no
unpaid notes to his discredit.
All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of
his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things
were dependent on him for their future well-being--on him and on Dike
after him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was
drudgery; most of it was backbreaking and laborious. But it was his
place. It was his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was
good, though he never put that thought into words, mental or spoken.
He only knew that he was part of the great scheme of things and that he
was functioning ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might
have said:
"Well, I got my work cut out for me, and I do it, and do it right."
There was a tractor, now, of course; and a sturdy, middle-class
automobile in which Bella lolled red-faced when they drove into town.
As Ben Westerveld had prospered, his shrewish wife had reaped her
benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on
twentieth-century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He
had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an icehouse, a
commodious porch, a washing machine, even a bathroom. But Bella
remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly,
surely, the effect of thirty years of nagging was beginning to tell on
Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the
coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.
Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack
like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and
crying down with the rich. They had two children.
Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Movies every
night. Halsted Street just around the corner. The big stores. State
Street. The el took you downtown in no time. Something going on all
the while. Bella Westerveld, after one of those letters, was more than
a chronic shrew; she became a terrible termagant.
When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't
dream that a world would be clamoring for hogs and wheat for four long
years. When the time came, he had them, and sold them fabulously. But
wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that
Dike, with seven other farm boys from the district, left for the
nearest training camp that was to fit them for France and war.
Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into
hysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that
day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked
close, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the
clean blue shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on, the quick,
light step began to lag a little. He had lost more than a son; his
right-hand helper was gone. There were no farm helpers to be had. Old
Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of rheumatism that winter half
crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice seemed never to stop its
plaint.
"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing
you'll die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands."
At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance
was wearing down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too.
But something in him was. Something that had resisted her all these
years. Something that had made him master and superior in spite of
everything.
In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma
Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years
ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and
was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a
fool, and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about
the room, never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third
person--a sturdy girl of twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to look
at, and with honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.
"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on.
"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't
make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent
out the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it, and glad.
They got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or
slab-sided or cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let
them run it on shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out.
Maybe Dike'll never come b----"
But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed
rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter.
They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on
Ben Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him
to camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed.
Calhoun County in the spring has much the beauty of California. There
is a peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze.
Ben Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly
dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look
back, though, as they do in a play. He dared not.
They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella
was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the
past thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen
stores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the
crashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode of living--necessitated by
a four-room flat--all these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as
though she had been bred in the midst of them.
She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was
a respectable neighborhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and
small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments
and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They
seemed to find a great deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling From
seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from
opposite bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in
the task of sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden
with grocery bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running
over to Ma's for a minute." The two quarreled a great deal, being so
nearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated each other
seemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring them together as
well.
"I'm going downtown today to do a little shopping," Minnie would say.
"Do you want to come along, Ma?"
"What you got to get?"
"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple little dresses for Pearlie."
"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore."
"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all
I can do to tend to the house, without sewing."
"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an'
besides----"
"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me."
The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown
el together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers,
indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent
store on the wrong side of State Street.
They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in the stifling
air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts from
the great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candy
piled in profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as they
went.
They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their
hurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-by delicatessen.
Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so
now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the
edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another
day. What day was it? L'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday. A little
feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday
had been. He counted back laboriously and decided that today must be
Thursday. Not that it made any difference.
They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not
digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated.
There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining
nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted
Street or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the
gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick
flats. Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the
talk of the day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's
husband. Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his
contempt. If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had
always been greeted when he clumped down the main street of
Commercial--if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had come
to him for expert advice and opinion--he said nothing.
Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace
of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shoveled coal.
He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shoveling and
scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odor of his pipe. It gave
him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.
"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If
you want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the back yard
and grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm."
His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her
that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate
little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to
gardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.
On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away
one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the
place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful
tiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding
forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He
talked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy
man. He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar
conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not
interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheat
was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.
"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop, with about
917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win
the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say."
"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is
that Farmer Ben was right.
Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave
her many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping.
"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I
got to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and
mean-acting if I take her along. Ma's going with me."
He loved the feel of Pearlie's small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist.
He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big
brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her
tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred
tender offices. He was playing a sort of game with himself, pretending
this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair managed to get over
to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day looking at the
animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature railway.
They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.
Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike.
Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his
thoughts. They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to
get the impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he
thought they were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city.
Dike's letters were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them.
When the Armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's
return, Ben tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And
his whole being revolted at the thought.
He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths standing at the corner of
Halsted and Sixty-third, spitting languidly and handling their limp
cigarettes with an amazing labial dexterity. Their conversation was
low-voiced, sinister, and terse, and their eyes narrowed as they
watched the overdressed, scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear
clutched at Ben Westerveld's heart.
The lack of exercise and manual labor began to tell on Ben. He did not
grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his
frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal.
Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city
pavements. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by
accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it
as a water-crazed traveler in a desert gazes upon the spring in the
oasis, and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully.
South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare
come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables.
Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now
he stumbled upon it and, standing there, felt at home in Chicago for
the first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in
overalls and carrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. He
hadn't seen men like that since he had left the farm. The sight of
them sent a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached
out and he ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on
the walk. His fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them
lovingly.
At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry
seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those
familiar things for which they had been starving.
He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of
onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! The radishes were scarlet
globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure orange. The green and purple
of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The cauliflower was like a
great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages glowed like jade.
And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big,
shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous
men in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue
shirts, and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men, jovial,
good-natured, with clear eyes, and having about them some of the
revivifying freshness and wholesomeness of the products they handled.
Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and
garlic and of the earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, washed
clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt
strangely at peace.
It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid
a hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time
to greet him friendlily. "H'are you!" they said genially. "H'are you
this morning!"
He was marketwise enough to know that some of these busy people were
commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks.
It was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner,
though, in front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw
a woman. Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the
men bringing boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A
woman in a plain blue skirt and a small black hat.
A funny job for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays!
He turned sidewise in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her
little group. And one of the men--a red-cheeked, merry-looking young
fellow in a white apron--laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When
it comes to driving a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!"
Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight,
slim, tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these
men, was the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a
moment, in frank curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up,
and he knew those intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had
carried the picture of them in his mind for more than thirty years, so
it was not so surprising.
He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he
acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't
you?"
She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had
the roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man.
Then: "Why, Ben!" she said quietly. And there was pity in her voice,
though she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand--that
capable, reassuring hand--and gripped his and held it a moment. It was
queer and significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers.
"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried
to be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had
been dealing and smiled.
"What am I doing here, Joe?"
Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street
at his own game, and makin' so much money that----"
But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She
turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?"
Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm--we're
living here, I s'pose. Livin' here."