So Big

by Edna Ferber

  “Three evenings a week,” repeated Selina, then, from the depths of her ignorance. “Why, I’d love to. I’d—love to.”

  6

  The evenings turned out to be Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Supper was over by six-thirty in the Pool household. Pervus was there by seven, very clean as to shirt, his hair brushed till it shone; shy, and given to dropping his hat and bumping against chairs, and looking solemn. Selina was torn between pity and mirth. If only he had blustered. A blustering big man puts the world on the defensive. A gentle giant disarms it.

  Selina got out her McBride’s Grammar and Duffy’s Arithmetic, and together they started to parse verbs, paper walls, dig cisterns, and extract square roots. They found study impossible at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, with the Pool household eddying about it. Jakob built a fire in the parlour stove and there they sat, teacher and pupil, their feet resting cosily on the gleaming nickel railing that encircled the wood burner.

  On the evening of the first lesson Roelf had glowered throughout supper and had disappeared into the work-shed, whence issued a great sound of hammering, sawing, and general clatter. He and Selina had got into the way of spending much time together, in or out of doors. They skated on Vander Sijde’s pond; together with the shrieking pigtails they coasted on the little slope that led down from Kuyper’s woods to the main road, using sleds that had been put together by Roelf. On bad days they read or studied. Not Sundays merely, but many weekday evenings were spent thus. Selina was determined that Roelf should break away from the uncouth speech of the countryside; that he should at least share with her the somewhat sketchy knowledge gained at Miss Fister’s select school. She, the woman of almost twenty, never talked down to this boy of twelve. The boy worshipped her inarticulately. She had early discovered that he had a feeling for beauty—beauty of line, texture, colour, and grouping—that was rare in one of his years. The feel of a satin ribbon in his fingers; the orange and rose of a sunset; the folds of the wine-red cashmere dress; the cadence of a spoken line, brought a look to his face that startled her. She had a battered volume of Tennyson. When first she read him the line beginning, “Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat——” he had uttered a little exclamation. She, glancing up from her book, had found his eyes wide, bright, and luminous in his lean dark face.

  “What is it, Roelf?”

  He had flushed. “I didn’t say nothing—anything. Start over again how it goes, ‘Elaine——’ ”

  She had begun again the fragrant lines, “Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable . . .”

  Since the gathering at Ooms’s hall he had been moody and sullen; had refused to answer when she spoke to him of his bid for her basket. Urged, he would only say, “Oh, it was just fun to make old Ooms mad.”

  Now, with the advent of Pervus DeJong, Roelf presented that most touching and miserable of spectacles, a small boy jealous and helpless in his jealousy. Selina had asked him to join the tri-weekly evening lessons; had, indeed, insisted that he be a pupil in the class round the parlour stove. Maartje had said, on the night of Pervus DeJong’s first visit, “Roelf, you sit, too, and learn. Is good for you to learn out of books the way teacher says.” Klaas Pool, too, had approved the plan, since it would cost nothing and, furthermore, would in no way interfere with Roelf’s farm work. “Sure; learn,” he said, with a large gesture.

  Roelf would not. He behaved very badly; slammed doors, whistled, scuffled on the kitchen floor, made many mysterious trips through the parlour up the stairs that led off that room, ascending with a clatter; incited Geertje and Jozina to quarrels and tears; had the household in a hubbub; stumbled over Dunder, the dog, so that that anguished animal’s yelps were added to the din.

  Selina was frantic. Lessons were impossible amidst this uproar. “It has never been like this before,” she assured Pervus, almost tearfully. “I don’t know what’s the matter. It’s awful.”

  Pervus had looked up from his slate. His eyes were calm, his lips smiling. “Is all right. In my house is too still, evenings. Next time it goes better. You see.”

  Next time it did go better. Roelf disappeared into his work-shed after supper; did not emerge until after DeJong’s departure.

  There was something about the sight of this great creature bent laboriously over a slate, the pencil held clumsily in his huge fingers, that moved Selina strangely. Pity wracked her. If she had known to what emotion this pity was akin she might have taken away the slate and given him a tablet, and the whole course of her life would have been different. “Poor lad,” she thought. “Poor lad.” Chided herself for being amused at his childlike earnestness.

  He did not make an apt pupil, though painstaking. Usually the top draught of the stove was open, and the glow of the fire imparted to his face and head a certain roseate glory. He was very grave. His brow wore a troubled frown. Selina would go over a problem or a sentence again and again, patiently, patiently. Then, suddenly, like a hand passed over his face, his smile would come, transforming it. He had white strong teeth, too small, and perhaps not so white as they seemed because of his russet blondeur. He would smile like a child, and Selina should have been warned by the warm rush of joy that his smile gave her. She would smile, too. He was as pleased as though he had made a fresh and wonderful discovery.

  “It’s easy,” he would say, “when you know it once.” Like a boy.

  He usually went home by eight-thirty or nine. Often the Pools went to bed before he left. After he had gone Selina was wakeful. She would heat water and wash; brush her hair vigorously; feeling at once buoyant and depressed.

  Sometimes they fell to talking. His wife had died in the second year of their marriage, when the child was born. The child, too, had died. A girl. He was unlucky, like that. It was the same with the farm.

  “Spring, half of the land is under water. My piece, just. Bouts’s place, next to me, is high and rich. Bouts, he don’t even need deep ploughing. His land is quick land. It warms up in the spring early. After rain it works easy. He puts in fertilizer, any kind, and his plants jump, like. My place is bad for garden truck. Wet. All the time, wet; or in summer baked before I can loosen it again. Muckland.”

  Selina thought a moment. She had heard much talk between Klaas and Jakob, winter evenings. “Can’t you do something to it—fix it—so that the water will run off? Raise it, or dig a ditch or something?”

  “We-e-ell, maybe. Maybe you could. But it costs money, draining.”

  “It costs money not to, doesn’t it?”

  He considered this, ruminatively. “Guess it does. But you don’t have to have ready cash to let the land lay. To drain it you do.”

  Sellina shook her head impatiently. “That’s a very foolish, shortsighted way to reason.”

  He looked helpless as only the strong and powerful can look. Selina’s heart melted in pity. He would look down at the great calloused hands; up at her. One of the charms of Pervus DeJong lay in the things that his eyes said and his tongue did not. Women always imagined he was about to say what he looked, but he never did. It made otherwise dull conversation with him most exciting.

  His was in no way a shrewd mind. His respect for Selina was almost reverence. But he had this advantage: he had married a woman, had lived with her for two years. She had borne him a child. Selina was a girl in experience. She was a woman capable of a great deal of passion, but she did not know that. Passion was a thing no woman possessed, much less talked about. It simply did not exist, except in men, and then was something to be ashamed of, like a violent temper, or a weak stomach.

  By the first of March he could speak a slow, careful, and fairly grammatical English. He could master simple sums. By the middle of March the lessons would cease. There was too much work to do about the farm—night work as well as day. She found herself trying not to think about the time when the lessons should cease. She refused to look ahead to April.

  One night, late in February, Selina was conscious that she was trying to c
ontrol something. She was trying to keep her eyes away from something. She realized that she was trying not to look at his hands. She wanted, crazily, to touch them. She wanted to feel them about her throat. She wanted to put her lips on his hands—brush the backs of them, slowly, moistly, with her mouth, lingeringly. She was terribly frightened. She thought to herself: “I am going crazy. I am losing my mind. There is something the matter with me. I wonder how I look. I must look queer.”

  She said something to make him look up at her. His glance was mild, undismayed. So this hideous thing did not show in her face. She kept her eyes resolutely on the book. At half-past eight she closed her book suddenly. “I’m tired. I think it’s the spring coming on.” She smiled a little wavering smile. He rose and stretched himself, his great arms high above his head. Selina shivered.

  “Two more weeks,” he said, “is the last lesson. Well, do you think I have done pretty good—well?”

  “Very well,” Selina replied, evenly. She felt very tired.

  The first week in March he was ill, and did not come. A rheumatic affliction to which he was subject. His father, old Johannes DeJong, had had it before him. Working in the wet fields did it, they said. It was the curse of the truck farmer. Selina’s evenings were free to devote to Roelf, who glowed again. She sewed, too; read; helped Mrs. Pool with the housework in a gust of sympathy and found strange relief therein; made over an old dress; studied; wrote all her letters (few enough), even one to the dried-apple aunts in Vermont. She no longer wrote to Julie Hempel. She had heard that Julie was to be married to a Kansas man named Arnold. Julie herself had not written. The first week in March passed. He did not come. Nor did he come the following Tuesday or Thursday. After a terrific battle with herself Selina, after school on Thursday, walked past his house, busily, as though bent on an errand. Despised herself for doing it, could not help herself, found a horrible and tortuous satisfaction in not looking at the house as she passed it.

  She was bewildered, frightened. All that week she had a curious feeling—or succession of feelings. There was the sensation of suffocation followed by that of emptiness—of being hollow—boneless—bloodless. Then, at times, there was a feeling of physical pain; at others a sense of being disemboweled. She was restless, listless, by turns. Period of furious activity followed by days of inertia. It was the spring, Maartje said. Selina hoped she wasn’t going to be ill. She had never felt like that before. She wanted to cry. She was irritable to the point of waspishness with the children in the schoolroom.

  On Saturday—the fourteenth of March—he walked in at seven. Klaas, Maartje, and Roelf had driven off to a gathering at Low Prairie, leaving Selina with the pigtails and old Jakob. She had promised to make taffy for them, and was in the midst of it when his knock sounded at the kitchen door. All the blood in her body rushed to her head; pounded there hotly. He entered. There slipped down over her a complete armour of calmness, of self-possession; of glib how do you do Mr. DeJong and how are you feeling and won’t you sit down and there’s no fire in the parlour we’ll have to sit here.

  He took part in the taffy pulling. Selina wondered if Geertje and Jozina would ever have done squealing. It was half-past eight before she bundled them off to bed with a plate of chipped taffy lozenges between them. She heard them scuffling and scrimmaging about in the rare freedom of their parents’ absence.

  “Now, children!” she called. “You know what you promised your mother and father.”

  She heard Geertje’s tones mimicking her mincingly, “You know what you promised your mother and father.” Then a cascade of smothered giggles.

  Pervus had been to town, evidently, for he now took from his coat pocket a bag containing half a dozen bananas—that delicacy of delicacies to the farm palate. She half peeled two and brought them in to the pigtails. They ate them thickly rapturous, and dropped off to sleep immediately, surfeited.

  Pervus DeJong and Selina sat at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them on the oilcloth. The sweet heavy scent of the fruit filled the room. Selina brought the parlour lamp into the kitchen, the better to see. It was a nickel-bellied lamp with a yellow glass shade that cast a mellow golden glow.

  “You didn’t go to the meeting,” primly. “Mr. and Mrs. Pool went.”

  “No. No, I didn’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  She saw him swallow. “I got through too late. I went to town, and I got through too late. We’re fixing to sow tomato seeds in the hotbeds to-morrow.”

  Selina opened McBride’s Grammar. “Ahem!” a school-teacherly cough. “Now, then, we’ll parse this sentence: Blucher arrived on the field of Waterloo just as Wellington was receiving the last onslaught of Napoleon. ‘Just’ may be treated as a modifier of the dependent clause. That is: ‘Just’ means: at the time at which. Well. Just here modified at the time. And Wellington is the . . .”

  This for half an hour. Selina kept her eyes resolutely on the book. His voice went on with the dry business of parsing and its deep resonance struck a response from her as a harp responds when a hand is swept over its strings. Upstairs she could hear old Jakob clumping about in his preparations for bed. Then there was only stillness overhead. Selina kept her eyes resolutely on the book. Yet she saw, as though her eyes rested on them, his large, strong hands. On the backs of them was a fine golden down that deepened at his wrists. Heavier and darker at the wrists. She found herself praying a little for strength—for strength against this horror and wickedness. This sin, this abomination that held her. A terrible, stark, and pitiful prayer, couched in the idiom of the Bible.

  “Oh, God, keep my eyes and my thoughts away from him. Away from his hands. Let me keep my eyes and my thoughts away from the golden hairs on his wrists. Let me not think of his wrists. . . . “The owner of the southwest ¼ sells a strip 20 rods wide along the south side of his farm. How much does he receive at $150 per acre?”

  He triumphed in this transaction, began the struggle with the square root of 576. Square roots agonized him. She washed the slate clean with her little sponge. He was leaning close in his effort to comprehend the fiendish little figures that marched so tractably under Selina’s masterly pencil.

  She took it up, glibly. “The remainder must contain twice the product of the tens by the units plus the square of the units.” He blinked. Utterly bewildered. “And,” went on Selina, blithely, “twice the tens, times the units, plus the square of the units, is the same as the sum of twice the tens, and the units, times the units. Therefore”—with a flourish—“add 4 units to the 40 and multiply the result by 4. Therefore”—in final triumph—“the square root of 576 is 24.”

  She was breathing rather fast. The fire in the kitchen stove snapped and cracked. “Now, then, suppose you do that for me. We’ll wipe it out. There! What must the remainder contain?”

  He took it up, slowly, haltingly. The house was terribly still except for the man’s voice. “The remainder . . . twice . . . product . . . tens . . . units . . .” A something in his voice—a note—a timbre. She felt herself swaying queerly, as though the whole house were gently rocking. Little delicious agonizing shivers chased each other, hot and cold, up her arms, down her legs, over her spine. . . . “plus the square of the units is the same as the sum twice the tens . . . twice . . . the tens . . . the tens . . .” His voice stopped.

  Selina’s eyes leaped from the book to his hands, uncontrollably. Something about them startled her. They were clenched into fists. Her eyes now leaped from those clenched fists to the face of the man beside her. Her head came up, and back. Her wide startled eyes met his. His were a blaze of blinding blue in his tanned face. Some corner of her mind that was still working clearly noted this. Then his hands unclenched. The blue blaze scorched her, enveloped her. Her cheek knew the harsh cool feel of a man’s cheek. She sensed the potent, terrifying, pungent odour of close contact—a mixture of tobacco smoke, his hair, freshly laundered linen, an indefinable body smell. It was a mingling that disgusted and attracted her. She was
at once repelled and drawn. Then she felt his lips on hers and her own, incredibly, responding eagerly, wholly to that pressure.

  7

  They were married the following May, just two months later. The High Prairie school year practically ended with the appearance of the first tender shoots of green that meant onions, radishes, and spinach above the rich sandy loam. Selina’s classes broke, dwindled, shrank to almost nothing. The school became a kindergarten of five-year-old babies who wriggled and shifted and scratched in the warm spring air that came from the teeming prairie through the open windows. The schoolhouse stove stood rusty-red and cold. The drum in Selina’s bedroom was a black genie deprived of his power now to taunt her.

  Selina was at once bewildered and calm; rebellious and content. Over-laying these emotions was something like grim amusement. Beneath them, something like fright. High Prairie, in May, was green and gold and rose and blue. The spring flowers painted the fields and the roadside with splashes of yellow, of pink, of mauve, and purple. Violets, buttercups, mandrakes, marsh-marigolds, hepatica. The air was soft and cool from the lake. Selina had never known spring in the country before. It made her ache with an actual physical ache. She moved with a strange air of fatality. It was as if she were being drawn inexorably, against her will, her judgment, her plans, into something sweet and terrible. When with Pervus she was elated, gay, voluble. He talked little; looked at her dumbly, worshippingly. When he brought her a withered bunch of trilliums, the tears came to her eyes. He had walked to Updike’s woods to get them because he had heard her say she loved them, and there were none nearer. They were limp and listless from the heat, and from being held in his hand. He looked up at her from where he stood on the kitchen steps, she in the doorway. She took them, laid her hand on his head. It was as when some great gentle dog brings in a limp and bedraggled prize dug from the yard and, laying it at one’s feet, looks up at one with soft asking eyes.