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
bedroom 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 unsylvan 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 backyard 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 neighbour, 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 been 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-calloused 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 bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted
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 colour 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
high lights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with
the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable 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 any one 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 even you should know
him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of
the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots.
At twenty-five, given a tasselled 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 Westerveld 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 kinship of soil and seed
that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a
saying in that section "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock."
At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run
faster and pull harder than any of the 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 about his 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 neighbourhood 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 neighbours 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 to-morrow. 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 neighbours 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."
Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine
and forceful. Emma Byers's 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 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's 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, "that'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 that this was the new school-teacher. 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 neighbourhood swains Ben
Westerveld already occupied a two-star position, top of column.
He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his
embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gayly and called to his
dog Dunder that 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 would never 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 shoulders 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." He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben
Westerveld."
"Pleased to meet you," said Bella, twiddling her fingers in assumed
shyness.
"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 pig's 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 colour. 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 neighbourhood was rocked with
surprise. In fact, the only unsurprised party to the transaction was the
dame known as Nature. She has a way of playing these tricks on men and
women for the furtherance of her own selfish ends.
Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colours of
pretence 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 and 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 blonde 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 habitués of Old
Red Front Huckins's 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 men folks day and night, I'd rather
have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here."
Her school-teacher 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 overeating. And in her children's ears
she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get
away from it," she counselled 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 at Commercial when she was seventeen, an
over-developed girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty
she married an artisan, a surly fellow with anarchistic 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, empty-headed, 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 he evidently 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 hand 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 crop-wise, 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
requires much personal courage on a farm and that 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 and entered
the First National Bank in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and
his great boots, 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 back-breaking 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, an' I do it an' do it right."
There was a tractor now, of course; a phonograph with expensive records,
so that Caruso and McCormack and Elman were household words; a sturdy,
middle-class automobile, in which Bella lolled red-faced in a lacy and
beribboned boudoir cap when they drove into town. On a Saturday
afternoon you saw more boudoir caps skimming up and down the main street
in Commercial than you might see in a century of French farces.
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 ice house, a
commodious porch, a washing machine, even a crude bathroom. But Bella
remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly,
surely, the effect of thirty-odd 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 L 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 clamouring 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 neighbourhood 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 deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time 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 quarrelled 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 to-day 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 of 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 L
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 bins of stuff in the fetid 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 vile 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 and so-called food from the near-by
delicatessen.
Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we
find him lying 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? Le'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 to-day 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, Ill.--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, shovelled coal. He
tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and
scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour 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 backyard and
grow something. You was crazy enough 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 Petrograd 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 any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy
man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the
street-car 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 unearned 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 goin' 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. I think that he was playing a sort of game with himself, and
that he pretended 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 in their one-button suits and
striped shirts 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 over-dressed,
scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's
heart.
The lack of exercise and manual labour 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 traveller 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 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 blue 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 good 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
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 market-wise 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.
He caught a glimpse of white-streaked hair beneath the 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 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. And time deals kindly with women who have intelligent eyes
and serene brows.
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?" she said.
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
livin' here, I s'pose. Livin' here."