So Big

by Edna Ferber

  The idea had been Julie’s, and Selina had submitted rather than acquiesced, for by now she was too tired to combat anything or any one. If Julie had proposed her entering High Prairie on the back of an elephant with a mahout perched between his ears Selina would have agreed—rather, would have been unable to object.

  “It’ll get you home in no time,” Julie had said, energetically. “You look like a ghost and the boy’s half asleep. I’ll telephone Pa and he’ll have one of the men from the barns drive your team out so it’ll be there by six. Just you leave it all to me. Haven’t you ever ridden in one! Why, there’s nothing to be scared of. I like the horses best, myself. I’m like Pa. He says if you use horses you get there.”

  Dirk had accepted the new conveyance with the adaptability of childhood, had even predicted, grandly, “I’m going to have one when I grow up that’ll go faster’n this, even.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t want to go faster than this, Dirk,” Selina had protested breathlessly as they chugged along at the alarming rate of almost fifteen miles an hour.

  Jan Snip had been rendered speechless. Until the actual arrival of the team and wagon at six he counted them as mysteriously lost and DeJong’s widow clearly gone mad. August Hempel’s arrival next day with Julie seated beside him in the light spider-phaeton drawn by two slim wild-eyed quivering grays made little tumult in Jan’s stunned mind by now incapable of absorbing any fresh surprises.

  In the twelve years’ transition from butcher to packer Aug Hempel had taken on a certain authority and distinction. Now, at fifty-five, his hair was gray, relieving the too-ruddy colour of his face. He talked almost without an accent; used the idiomatic American speech he heard about the yards, where the Hempel packing plant was situated. Only his d’s were likely to sound like t’s. The letter j had a slightly ch sound. In the last few years he had grown very deaf in one ear, so that when you spoke to him he looked at you intently. This had given him a reputation for keenness and great character insight, when it was merely the protective trick of a man who does not want to confess that he is hard of hearing. He wore square-toed shoes with soft tips and square-cut gray clothes and a large gray hat with a chronically inadequate sweat-band. The square-cut boots were expensive, and the square-cut gray clothes and the large gray hat, but in them he always gave the effect of being dressed in the discarded garments of a much larger man.

  Selina’s domain he surveyed with a keen and comprehensive eye.

  “You want to sell?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.” (It was nearly goot as he said it.) “Few years from now this land will be worth money.” He had spent a bare fifteen minutes taking shrewd valuation of the property from fields to barn, from barn to house “Well, what do you want to do, heh, Selina?”

  They were seated in the cool and unexpectedly pleasing little parlour, with its old Dutch lustre set gleaming softly in the cabinet, its three rows of books, its air of comfort and usage. Dirk was in the yard with one of the Van Ruys boys, surveying the grays proprietorially. Jan was rooting in the fields. Selina clasped her hands tightly in her lap—those hands that, from much grubbing in the soil, had taken on something of the look of the gnarled things they tended. The nails were short, discoloured, broken. The palms rough, calloused. The whole story of the last twelve years of Selina’s life was written in her two hands.

  “I want to stay here, and work the farm, and make it pay. I can. By next spring my asparagus is going to begin to bring in money. I’m not going to grow just the common garden stuff any more—not much, anyway. I’m going to specialize in the fine things—the kind the South Water Street commission men want. I want to drain the low land. Tile it. That land hasn’t been used for years. It ought to be rich growing land by now, if once it’s properly drained. And I want Dirk to go to school. Good schools. I never want my son to go to the Haymarket. Never. Never.”

  Julie stirred with a little rustle and click of silk and beads. Her gentle amiability was vaguely alarmed by the iron quality of determination in the other’s tone.

  “Yes, but what about you, Selina?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, of course. You talk as though you didn’t count. Your life. Things to make you happy.”

  “My life doesn’t count, except as something for Dirk to use. I’m done with anything else. Oh, I don’t mean that I’m discouraged, or disappointed in life, or anything like that. I mean I started out with the wrong idea. I know better now. I’m here to keep Dirk from making the mistakes I made.”

  Here Aug Hempel, lounging largely in his chair and eyeing Selina intently, turned his gaze absently through the window to where the grays, a living equine statue, stood before the house. His tone was one of meditation, not of argument. “It don’t work out that way, seems. About mistakes it’s funny. You got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.” He whistled softly through his teeth following this utterance and tapped the chair seat with his finger nails.

  “It’s beauty!” Selina said then, almost passionately. Aug Hempel and Julie plainly could make nothing of this remark so she went on, eager, explanatory. “I used to think that if you wanted beauty—if you wanted it hard enough and hopefully enough—it came to you. You just waited, and lived your life as best you could, knowing that beauty might be just around the corner. You just waited, and then it came.”

  “Beauty!” exclaimed Julie, weakly. She stared at Selina in the evident belief that this work-worn haggard woman was bemoaning her lack of personal pulchritude.

  “Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it.” The word self-expression was not in cant use then, and Selina hadn’t it to offer them. They would not have known what she meant if she had. She threw out her hands now in a futile gesture. “That’s what I mean by beauty. I want Dirk to have it.”

  Julie blinked and nodded with the wise amiable look of comprehension assumed by one who has understood no single word of what has been said. August Hempel cleared his throat.

  “I guess I know what you’re driving at Selina, maybe. About Julie I felt just like that. She should have everything fine. I wanted her to have everything. And she did, too. Cried for the moon she had it.”

  “I never did have it, Pa, any such thing!”

  “Never cried for it, I know of.”

  “For pity’s sake!” pleaded Julie, the literal, “let’s stop talking and do something. My goodness, anybody with a little money can have books and candles and travel around and look at pictures, if that’s all. So let’s do something. Pa, you’ve probably got it all fixed in your mind long ago. It’s time we heard it. Here Selina was one of the most popular girls in Miss Fister’s school, and lots of people thought the prettiest. And now just look at her!”

  A flicker of the old flame leaped up in Selina. “Flatterer!” she murmured.

  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.”

  13

  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.