So Big

by Edna Ferber

  Stewards from the best Chicago hotels of that day—the Sherman House, the Auditorium, the Palmer House, the Wellington, the Stratford—came to Will Talcott for their daily supplies. The grocers who catered to the well-to-do north-side families and those in the neighbourhood of fashionable Prairie Avenue on the south bought of him.

  Now, in his doorway, he eyed the spare little figure that appeared before him all in rusty black, with its strained anxious face, its great deep-sunk eyes.

  “DeJong, eh? Sorry to hear about your loss, ma’am. Pervus was a fine lad. No great shakes at truck farming, though. His widow, h’m? Hm.” Here, he saw, was no dull-witted farm woman; no stolid Dutch woman truckster. He went out to her wagon, tweaked the boy’s brown cheek. “Wa-al now, Mis’ DeJong, you got a right smart lot of garden stuff here and it looks pretty good. Yessir, pretty good. But you’re too late. Ten, pret’ near.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Selina. “Oh, no! Not too late!” And at the agony in her voice he looked at her sharply.

  “Tell you what, mebbe I can move half of’em along for you. But stuff don’t keep this weather. Turns wilty and my trade won’t touch it . . . First trip in?”

  She wiped her face that was damp and yet cold to the touch. “First—trip in.” Suddenly she was finding it absurdly hard to breathe.

  He called from the sidewalk to the men within: “George! Ben! Hustle this stuff in. Half of it. The best. Send you check to-morrow, Mis’ DeJong. Picked a bad day, didn’t you, for your first day?”

  “Hot, you mean?”

  “Wa-al, hot, yes. But I mean a holiday like this peddlers mostly ain’t buying.”

  “Holiday?”

  “You knew it was a Jew holiday, didn’t you? Didn’t!—Wa-al, my sakes! Worst day in the year. Jew peddlers all at church to-day and all the others not peddlers bought in Saturday for two days. Chicken men down the street got empty coops and will have till to-morrow. Yessir. Biggest chicken eaters, Jews are, in the world . . . Hm . . . Better just drive along home and just dump the rest that stuff, my good woman.”

  One hand on the seat she prepared to climb up again—did step to the hub. You saw her shabby, absurd side-boots that were so much too big for the slim little feet. “If you’re just buying my stuff because you’re sorry for me——” The Peake pride.

  “Don’t do business that way. Can’t afford to, ma’am. My da’ter she’s studying to be a singer. In Italy now, Car’line is, and costs like all getout. Takes all the money I can scrape together, just about.”

  There was a little colour in Selina’s face now. “Italy! Oh, Mr. Talcott!” You’d have thought she had seen it, from her face. She began to thank him, gravely.

  “Now, that’s all right, Mis’ DeJong. I notice your stuff’s bunched kind of extry, and all of a size. Fixin’ to do that way right along?”

  “Yes. I thought—they looked prettier that way—of course vegetables aren’t supposed to look pretty, I expect——” she stammered, stopped.

  “You fix ’em pretty like that and bring ’em in to me first thing, or send ’em. My trade, they like their stuff kind of special. Yessir.”

  As she gathered up the reins he stood again in his doorway, cool, remote, his unlighted cigar in his mouth, while hand-trucks rattled past him, barrels and boxes thumped to the sidewalk in front of him, wheels and hoofs and shouts made a great clamour all about him.

  “We going home now?” demanded Dirk. “We going home now? I’m hungry.”

  “Yes, lamb.” Two dollars in her pocket. All yesterday’s grim toil, and all to-day’s, and months of labour behind those two days. Two dollars in the pocket of her black calico petticoat. “We’ll get something to eat when we drive out a ways. Some milk and bread and cheese.”

  The sun was very hot. She took the boy’s hat off, passed her tender work-calloused hand over the damp hair that clung to his forehead. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” she said. “Like an adventure. Look at all the kind people we’ve met. Mr. Spanknoebel, and Mr. Talcott——”

  “And Mabel.”

  Startled, “And Mabel.”

  She wanted suddenly to kiss him, knew he would hate it with all the boy and all the Holland Dutch in him, and did not.

  She made up her mind to drive east and then south. Pervus had sometimes achieved a late sale to outlying grocers. Jan’s face if she came home with half the load still on the wagon! And what of the unpaid bills? She had perhaps, thirty dollars, all told. She owed four hundred. More than that. There were seedlings that Pervus had bought in April to be paid for at the end of the growing season, in the fall. And now fall was here.

  Fear shook her. She told herself she was tired, nervous. That terrible week. And now this. The heat. Soon they’d be home, she and Dirk. How cool and quiet the house would seem. The squares of the kitchen tablecloth. Her own neat bedroom with the black walnut bed and dresser. The sofa in the parlour with the ruffled calico cover. The old chair on the porch with the cane seat sagging where warp and woof had become loosened with much use and stuck out in ragged tufts. It seemed years since she had seen all this. The comfort of it, the peace of it. Safe, desirable, suddenly dear. No work for a woman, this. Well, perhaps they were right.

  Down Wabash Avenue, with the L trains thundering overhead and her horses, frightened and uneasy with the unaccustomed roar and clangour of traffic, stepping high and swerving stiffly, grotesque and angular in their movements. A dowdy farm woman and a sunburned boy in a rickety vegetable wagon absurdly out of place in this canyon of cobblestones, shops, street-cars, drays, carriages, bicycles, pedestrians. It was terribly hot.

  The boy’s eyes popped with excitement and bewilderment.

  “Pretty soon,” Selina said. The muscles showed white beneath the skin of her jaw. “Pretty soon. Prairie Avenue. Great big houses, and lawns, all quiet.” She even managed a smile.

  “I like it better home.”

  Prairie Avenue at last, turning in at Sixteenth Street. It was like calm after a storm. Selina felt battered, spent.

  There were groceries near Eighteenth, and at the other cross-streets—Twenty-second, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-first, Thirty-fifth. They were passing the great stone houses of Prairie Avenue of the ’90s. Turrets and towers, cornices and cupolas, hump-backed conservatories, porte-cocheres, bow windows—here lived Chicago’s rich that had made their riches in pork and wheat and dry goods; the selling of necessities to a city that clamoured for them.

  “Just like me,” Selina thought, humorously. Then another thought came to her. Her vegetables, canvas covered, were fresher than those in the near-by markets. Why not try to sell some of them here, in these big houses? In an hour she might earn a few dollars this way at retail prices slightly less than those asked by the grocers of the neighbourhood.

  She stopped her wagon in the middle of the block on Twenty-fourth Street. Agilely she stepped down the wheel, gave the reins to Dirk. The horses were no more minded to run than the wooden steeds on a carrousel. She filled a large market basket with the finest and freshest of her stock and with this on her arm looked up a moment at the house in front of which she had stopped. It was a four-story brownstone, with a hideous high stoop. Beneath the steps were a little vestibule and a door that was the tradesmen’s entrance. The kitchen entrance, she knew, was by way of the alley at the back, but this she would not take. Across the sidewalk, down a little flight of stone steps, into the vestibule under the porch. She looked at the bell—a brass knob. You pulled it out, shoved it in, and there sounded a jangling down the dim hallway beyond. Simple enough. Her hand was on the bell. “Pull it!” said the desperate Selina. “I can’t! I can’t!” cried all the prim dim Vermont Peakes, in chorus. “All right. Starve to death and let them take the farm and Dirk, then.”

  At that she pulled the knob hard. Jangle went the bell in the hall. Again. Again.

  Footsteps up the hall. The door opened to disclose a large woman, high cheek-boned, in a work apron; a cook, apparently.

  “Good morning,” said
Selina. “Would you like some fresh country vegetables?”

  “No.” She half shut the door, opening it again to ask, “Got any fresh eggs or butter?” At Selina’s negative she closed the door, bolted it. Selina, standing there, basket on arm, could hear her heavy tread down the passageway toward the kitchen. Well, that was all right. Nothing so terrible about that, Selina told herself. Simply hadn’t wanted any vegetables. The next house. The next house, and the next, and the next. Up one side of the street, and down the other. Four times she refilled her basket. At one house she sold a quarter’s worth. Fifteen at another. Twenty cents here. Almost fifty there. “Good morning,” she always said at the door in her clear, distinct way. They stared, usually. But they were curious, too, and did not often shut the door in her face.

  “Do you know of a good place?” one kitchen maid said. “This place ain’t so good. She only pays me three dollars. You can get four now. Maybe you know a lady wants a good girl.”

  “No,” Selina answered. “No.”

  At another house the cook had offered her a cup of coffee, noting the white face, the look of weariness. Selina refused it, politely. Twenty-first Street—Twenty-fifth—Twenty-eighth. She had over four dollars in her purse. Dirk was weary now and hungry to the point of tears. “The last house,” Selina promised him, “the very last one. After this one we’ll go home.” She filled her basket again. “We’ll have something to eat on the way, and maybe you’ll go to sleep with the canvas over you, high, fastened to the seat like a tent. And we’ll be home in a jiffy.”

  The last house was a new gray stone one, already beginning to turn dingy from the smoke of the Illinois Central suburban trains that puffed along the lake front a block to the east. The house had large bow windows, plump and shining. There was a lawn, with statues, and a conservatory in the rear. Real lace curtains at the downstairs windows with plush hangings behind them. A high iron grille ran all about the property giving it an air of aloofness, of security. Selina glanced at this wrought-iron fence. And it seemed to bar her out. There was something forbidding about it—menacing. She was tired, that was it. The last house. She had almost five dollars, earned in the last hour. “Just five minutes,” she said to Dirk, trying to make her tone bright, her voice gay. Her arms full of vegetables which she was about to place in the basket at her feet she heard at her elbow:

  “Now, then, where’s your license?”

  She turned. A policeman at her side. She stared up at him. How enormously tall, she thought; and how red his face. “License?”

  “Yeh, you heard me. License. Where’s your peddler’s license? You got one, I s’pose.”

  “Why, no. No.” She stared at him, still.

  His face grew redder. Selina was a little worried about him. She thought, stupidly, that if it grew any redder——

  “Well, say, where d’ye think you are, peddlin’ without a license! A good mind to run you in. Get along out of here, you and the kid. Leave me ketch you around here again!”

  “What’s the trouble, Officer?” said a woman’s voice. A smart open carriage of the type known as a victoria, with two chestnut horses whose harness shone with metal. Spanking, was the word that came to Selina’s mind, which was acting perversely certainly; crazily. A spanking team. The spankers disdainfully faced Selina’s comic bony nags which were grazing the close-cropped grass that grew in the neat little lawn-squares between curb and sidewalk. “What’s the trouble, Reilly?”

  The woman stepped out of the victoria. She wore a black silk Eton suit, very modish, and a black hat with a plume.

  “Woman peddling without a license, Mrs. Arnold. You got to watch ’em like a hawk. . . . Get along wid you, then.” He put a hand on Selina’s shoulder and gave her a gentle push.

  There shook Selina from head to foot such a passion, such a storm of outraged sensibilities, as to cause street, victoria, silk-clad woman, horses, and policeman to swim and shiver in a haze before her eyes. The rage of a fastidious woman who had had an alien male hand put upon her. Her face was white. Her eyes glowed black, enormous. She seemed tall, majestic even.

  “Take your hand off me!” Her speech was clipped, vibrant. “How dare you touch me! How dare you! Take your hand!——” The blazing eyes in the white mask. He took his hand from her shoulder. The red surged into her face. A tanned weather-beaten toil-worn woman, her abundant hair skewered into a knob and held by a long gray-black hairpin, her full skirt grimed with the mud of the wagon wheel, a pair of old side-boots on her slim feet, a grotesquely battered old felt hat (her husband’s) on her head, her arms full of ears of sweet corn, and carrots, and radishes and bunches of beets; a woman with bad teeth, flat breasts—even then Julie had known her by her eyes. And she had stared and then run to her in her silk dress and her plumed hat, crying, “Oh, Selina! My dear! My dear!” with a sob of horror and pity. “My dear!” And had taken Selina, carrots, beets, corn, and radishes in her arms. The vegetables lay scattered all about them on the sidewalk in front of Julie Hempel Arnold’s great stone house on Prairie Avenue. But strangely enough it had been Selina who had done the comforting, patting Julie’s plump silken shoulder and saying, over and over, soothingly, as to a child, “There, there! It’s all right, Julie. It’s all right. Don’t cry. What’s there to cry for! Sh-sh! It’s all right.”

  Julie lifted her head in its modish black plumed hat, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. “Get along with you, do,” she said to Reilly, the policeman, using his very words to Selina. “I’m going to report you to Mr. Arnold, see if I don’t. And you know what that means.”

  “Well, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am, I was only doing my duty. How cud I know the lady was a friend of yours. Sure, I——” He surveyed Selina, cart, jaded horses, wilted vegetables. “Well, how cud I, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am!”

  “And why not!” demanded Julie with superb unreasonableness. “Why not, I’d like to know. Do get along with you.”

  He got along, a defeated officer of the law, and a bitter. And now it was Julie who surveyed Selina, cart, Dirk, jaded horses, wilted leftover vegetables. “Selina, whatever in the world! What are you doing with——” She caught sight of Selina’s absurd boots then and she began to cry again. At that Selina’s overwrought nerves snapped and she began to laugh, hysterically. It frightened Julie, that laughter. “Selina, don’t! Come in the house with me. What are you laughing at! Selina!”

  With shaking finger Selina was pointing at the vegetables that lay tumbled at her feet. “Do you see that cabbage, Julie? Do you remember how I used to despise Mrs. Tebbitt’s because she used to have boiled cabbage on Monday nights?”

  “That’s nothing to laugh at, is it? Stop laughing this minute, Selina Peake!”

  “I’ll stop. I’ve stopped now. I was just laughing at my ignorance. Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn’t despise them as food, knowing that. . . . Come, climb down, Dirk. Here’s a lady mother used to know—oh, years and years ago, when she was a girl. Thousands of years ago.”

  12

  The best thing for Dirk. The best thing for Dirk. It was the phrase that repeated itself over and over in Selina’s speech during the days that followed. Julie Arnold was all for taking him into her gray stone house, dressing him like Lord Fauntleroy and sending him to the north-side private school attended by Eugene, her boy, and Pauline, her girl. In this period of bewilderment and fatigue Julie had attempted to take charge of Selina much as she had done a dozen years before at the time of Simeon Peake’s dramatic death. And now, as then, she pressed into service her wonder-working father and bounden slave, August Hempel. Her husband she dismissed with affectionate disregard.

  “Michael’s all right,” she had said on that day of their first meeting, “if you tell him what’s to be done. He’ll always do it. But Pa’s the one that thinks of things. He’s like a general, and Michael’s the captain. Well, now, Pa’ll be out to-morrow and I’ll probably come with him. I’ve got a committee meeting, but I
can easily——”

  “You said—did you say your father would be out to-morrow! Out where?”

  “To your place. Farm.”

  “But why should he? It’s a little twenty-five-acre truck farm, and half of it under water a good deal of the time.”

  “Pa’ll find a use for it, never fear. He won’t say much, but he’ll think of things. And then everything will be all right.”

  “It’s miles. Miles. Way out in High Prairie.”

  “Well, if you could make it with those horses, Selina, I guess we can with Pa’s two grays that hold a record for a mile in three minutes or three miles in a minute, I forget which. Or in the auto, though Pa hates it. Michael is the only one in the family who likes it.”

  A species of ugly pride now possessed Selina. “I don’t need help. Really I don’t, Julie dear. It’s never been like to-day. Never before. We were getting on very well, Pervus and I. Then after Pervus’s death so suddenly like that I was frightened. Terribly frightened. About Dirk. I wanted him to have everything. Beautiful things. I wanted his life to be beautiful. Life can be so ugly, Julie. You don’t know. You don’t know.”

  “Well, now, that’s why I say. We’ll be out to-morrow, Pa and I. Dirk’s going to have everything beautiful. We’ll see to that.”

  It was then that Selina had said, “But that’s just it. I want to do it myself, for him. I can. I want to give him all these things myself.”

  “But that’s selfish.”

  “I don’t mean to be. I just want to do the best thing for Dirk.”

  It was shortly after noon that High Prairie, hearing the unaccustomed chug of a motor, rushed to its windows or porches to behold Selina DeJong in her mashed black felt hat and Dirk waving his battered straw wildly, riding up the Halsted road toward the DeJong farm in a bright red automobile that had shattered the nerves of every farmer’s team it had met on the way. Of the DeJong team and the DeJong dog Pom, and the DeJong vegetable wagon there was absolutely no sign. High Prairie was rendered unfit for work throughout the next twenty-four hours.