So Big (21 page)

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.”

If those vague characteristics called (variously) magnetism, manner,
grace, distinction, attractiveness, fascination, go to make up that nebulous quality known as charm; and if the possessor of that quality is accounted fortunate in his equipment for that which the class-day orators style the battle of life, then Dirk DeJong was a lucky lad and life lay promisingly before him. Undoubtedly he had it; and undoubtedly it did. People said that things “came easy” for Dirk. He said so himself, not boastfully, but rather shyly. He was not one to talk a great deal. Perhaps that was one of his most charming qualities. He listened so well. And he was so quietly effortless. He listened while other people talked, his fine head inclined just a little to one side and bent toward you. Intent on what you were saying, and evidently impressed by it. You felt him immensely intelligent, appreciative. It was a gift more valuable than any other social talent he might have possessed. He himself did not know how precious an attribute this was to prove in a later day when to be allowed to finish a sentence was an experience all too rare. Older men especially said he was a smart young feller and would make his mark. This, surprisingly enough, after a conversation to which he had contributed not a word other than “Yes,” or “No,” or, “Perhaps you're right, sir,” in the proper places.

Selina thought constantly of Dirk's future. A thousand other thoughts might be racing through her mind during the day—plans for the farm, for the house—but always, over and above and through all these, like the steady beat of a drum penetrating sharper and more urgent sounds—was the thought of Dirk. He did well enough at high school. Not a brilliant student, nor even a very good one. But good enough. Average. And well liked.

It was during those careless years of Dirk's boyhood between nine and fifteen that Selina changed the DeJong acres from a wornout and down-at-heel truck farm whose scant products brought a second-rate price in a second-rate market to a prosperous and blooming vegetable garden whose output was sought a year in advance by the South Water Street commission merchants. DeJong asparagus with firm white thick stalk bases tapering to a rich green streaked with lavender at the tips. DeJong hothouse tomatoes in February, plump, scarlet, juicy. You paid for a pound a sum Pervus had been glad to get for a bushel.

These six or seven years of relentless labour had been no showy success with Selina posing grandly as the New Woman in Business. No, it had been a painful, grubbing, heart-breaking process as is any project that depends on the actual soil for its realization. She drove herself pitilessly. She literally tore a living out of the earth with her two bare hands. Yet there was nothing pitiable about this small energetic woman of thirty-five or forty with her fine soft dark eyes, her clean-cut jawline, her shabby decent clothes that were so likely to be spattered with the mud of the road or fields, her exquisite nose with the funny little wrinkle across the bridge when she laughed. Rather, there was something splendid about her; something rich, prophetic. It was the splendour and richness that achievement imparts.

It is doubtful that she ever could have succeeded without the money borrowed from August Hempel; without his shrewd counsel. She told him this, sometimes. He denied it. “Easier, yes. But you would have found a way, Selina. Some way. Julie, no. But you, yes. You are like that. Me, too. Say, plenty fellers that was butchers with me twenty years ago over in North Clark Street are butchers yet, cutting off a steak or a chop. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Kruger. What'll it be to-day?' ”

The Hempel Packing Company was a vast monster now stretching great arms into Europe, into South America. In some of the yellow journals that had cropped up in the last few years you even saw old Aug himself portrayed in cartoons as an octopus with cold slimy eyes and a hundred writhing reaching tentacles. These bothered Aug a little, though he pretended to laugh at them. “What do they want to go to work and make me out like that for? I sell good meat for all I can get for it. That's business, ain't it?”

Dirk had his tasks on the farm. Selina saw to that. But they were not heavy. He left for school at eight in the morning, driving, for the distance was too great for walking. Often it was dark on his return in the late afternoon. Between these hours Selina had accomplished the work of two men. She had two field-helpers on the place now during the busy season and a woman in the house, the wife of Adam Bras, one of the labourers. Jan Snip, too, still worked about the place in the barn, the sheds, tending the coldframes and hothouses, doing odd jobs of carpentering. He distrusted Selina's new-fangled methods, glowered at any modern piece of machinery, predicted dire things when Selina bought the twenty acres that comprised the old Bouts place adjoining the DeJong farm.

“You bit off more as you can chew,” he told her. “You choke yet. You see.”

By the time Dirk returned from school the rough work of the day was over. His food was always hot, appetizing, plentiful. The house was neat, comfortable. Selina had installed a bathroom—one of the two bathrooms in High Prairie. The neighbourhood was still rocking with the shock of this when it was informed by Jan that Selina and Dirk ate with candles lighted on the supper table. High Prairie slapped its thigh and howled with mirth.

“Cabbages is beautiful,” said old Klaas Pool when he heard this. “Cabbages is beautiful I betcha.”

Selina, during the years of the boy's adolescence, had never urged him to a decision about his future. That, she decided, would come. As the farm prospered and the pressure of necessity lifted she tried, in various ingenious ways, to extract from him some unconscious sign of definite preference for this calling, that profession. As in her leanest days she had bought an occasional book at the cost of much-needed shoes for herself so now she bought many of them with money that another woman would have used for luxury or adornments. Years of personal privation had not killed her love of fine soft silken things, mellow colouring, exquisite workmanship. But they had made it impossible for her to covet these things for herself. She loved to see them, to feel them. Could not wear them. Years later, when she could well afford a French hat in one of the Michigan Avenue millinery shops, she would look at the silk and satin trifles blooming in the windows like gay brilliant flowers in a conservatory—and would buy an untrimmed “shape” for $2.95 in Field's basement. The habit of a lifetime is strong. Just once she made herself buy one of these costly silk-and-feather extravagances, going about the purchase deliberately and coldly as a man gets drunk once for the experience. The hat had cost twenty-two dollars. She never had worn it.

Until Dirk was sixteen she had been content to let him develop as naturally as possible, and to absorb impressions unconsciously from the traps she so guilefully left about him. Books on the lives of great men—lives of Lincoln, of Washington, Gladstone, Disraeli, Voltaire. History. Books on painting, charmingly illustrated. Books on architecture; law; medicine, even. She subscribed to two of the best engineering magazines. There was a shed which he was free to use as a workshop, fitted up with all sorts of tools. He did not use it much, after the first few weeks. He was pleasantly and mildly interested in all these things; held by none of them. Selina had thought of Roelf when they were fitting up the workshop. The Pools had heard from Roelf just once since his flight from the farm. A letter had come from France. In it was a sum of money for Geertje and Jozina—a small sum to take the trouble to send all the way from an outlandish country, the well-to-do Pool household thought. Geertje was married now to Vander Sijde's son Gerrit and living on a farm out Low Prairie way. Jozina had a crazy idea that the impecunious young Paris art student had had to save it sou by sou. Selina had never heard from him. But one day years later she had come running to Dirk with an illustrated magazine in her hand.