Part 6

Scarlet, flooding her face, belied the widow’s outward air of composure. Pervus DeJong, standing beside Selina, viewed the proceedings with an air of detachment. High Prairie was looking at him expectantly, openly. The widow bit her red lip, tossed her head. Pervus DeJong returned the auctioneer’s meaning smirk with the mild gaze of a disinterested outsider. High Prairie, Low Prairie, and New Haarlem sat tense, like an audience at a play. Here, indeed, was drama being enacted in a community whose thrills were all too rare.

“Gents!” Adam Ooms’s voice took on a tearful note—the tone of one who is more hurt than angry. “Gents!” Slowly, with infinite reverence, he lifted one corner of the damask cloth that concealed the hamper’s contents—lifted it and peered within as at a treasure. At what he saw there he started back dramatically, at once rapturous, despairing, amazed. He rolled his eyes. He smacked his lips. He rubbed his stomach. The sort of dumb show that, since the days of the Greek drama, has been used to denote gastronomic delight.

“Eighty!” was wrenched suddenly from Goris Von Vuuren, the nineteen-year-old fat and gluttonous son of a prosperous New Haarlem farmer.

Adam Ooms rubbed brisk palms together. “Now then! A dollar! A dollar! It’s an insult to this basket to make it less than a dollar.” He lifted the cover again, sniffed, appeared overcome. “Gents, if it wasn’t for Mrs. Ooms sitting there I’d make it a dollar myself and a bargain. A dollar! Am I bid a dollar!” He leaned far forward over his improvised pulpit. “Did I hear you say a dollar, Pervus DeJong?” DeJong stared, immovable, unabashed. His very indifference was contagious. The widow’s bountiful basket seemed to shrink before one’s eyes. “Eighty-eighty-eighty-eighty—gents! I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to whisper a secret.” His lean face was veined with craftiness. “Gents. Listen. It isn’t chicken in this beautiful basket. It isn’t chicken. It’s”—a dramatic pause—“it’s _roast duck!_” He swayed back, mopped his brow with his red handkerchief, held one hand high in the air. His last card.

“Eighty-five!” groaned the fat Goris Von Vuuren.

“Eighty-five! Eighty-five! Eightyfiveeightyfiveeightyfive eighty-five! Gents! Gen-tle-men! Eighty-five once! Eighty-five—twice!” [Crash!] “Gone to Goris Von Vuuren for eighty-five.”

A sigh went up from the assemblage; a sigh that was the wind before the storm. There followed a tornado of talk. It crackled and thundered. The rich Widow Paarlenberg would have to eat her supper with Von Vuuren’s boy, the great thick Goris. And there in the doorway, talking to teacher as if they had known each other for years, was Pervus DeJong with his money in his pocket. It was as good as a play.

Adam Ooms was angry. His lean, fox-like face became pinched with spite. He prided himself on his antics as auctioneer; and his chef d’œuvre had brought a meagre eighty-five cents, besides doubtless winning him the enmity of that profitable store customer, the Widow Paarlenberg. Goris Von Vuuren came forward to claim his prize amidst shouting, clapping, laughter. The great hamper was handed down to him; an ample, rich-looking burden, its handle folded comfortably over its round stomach, its white cover so glistening with starch and ironing that it gave back the light from the big lamp above the auctioneer’s stand. As Goris Von Vuuren lifted it his great shoulders actually sagged. Its contents promised satiety even to such a feeder as he. A grin, half sheepish, half triumphant, creased his plump pink face.

Adam Ooms scuffled about among the many baskets at his feet. His nostrils looked pinched and his skinny hands shook a little as he searched for one small object.

When he stood upright once more he was smiling. His little eyes gleamed. His wooden sceptre pounded for silence. High in one hand, balanced daintily on his finger tips, he held Selina’s little white shoe box, with its red ribbon binding it, and the plume of evergreen stuck in the ribbon. Affecting great solicitude he brought it down then to read the name written on it; held it aloft again, smirking.

He said nothing. Grinning, he held it high. He turned his body at the waist from side to side, so that all might see. The eyes of those before him still held a mental picture of the huge hamper, food-packed, that had just been handed down. The contrast was too absurd, too cruel. A ripple of laughter swept the room; rose; swelled to a roar. Adam Ooms drew his mouth down solemnly. His little finger elegantly crooked, he pendulumed the box to right and left. He swerved his beady eyes from side to side. He waited with a nice sense of the dramatic until the laughter had reached its height, then held up a hand for silence. A great scraping “Ahem!” as he cleared his throat threatened to send the crowd off again.

“Ladies—_and_ gents! Here’s a dainty little tidbit. Here’s something not only for the inner man, but a feast for the eye. Well, boys, if the last lot was too much for you this lot ought to be just about right. If the food ain’t quite enough for you, you can tie the ribbon in the lady’s hair and put the posy in your buttonhole and there you are. _There_ you are! What’s more, the lady herself goes with it. You don’t get a country girl with this here box, gents. A city girl, you can tell by looking at it, just. And who is she? Who did up this dainty little box just big enough for two?” He inspected it again, solemnly, and added, as an after-thought, “If you ain’t feeling specially hungry. Who?——” He looked about, apishly.

Selina’s cheeks matched her gown. Her eyes were wide and dark with the effort she was making to force back the hot haze threatening them. Why had she mounted this wretched soap-box! Why had she come to this hideous party! Why had she come to High Prairie! Why! . . .

“Miss Selina Peake, that’s who. Miss Se-li-na Peake!”

A hundred balloon faces pulled by a single cord turned toward her as she stood there on the box for all to see. They swam toward her. She put up a hand to push them back.

“What’m I bid! What’m I bid! What’m I bid for this here lovely little toothful, gents! Start her up!”

“Five cents!” piped up old Johannes Ambuul, with a snicker. The tittering crowd broke into a guffaw. Selina was conscious of a little sick feeling at the pit of her stomach. Through the haze she saw the widow’s face, no longer sulky, but smiling now. She saw Roelf’s dear dark head. His face was set, like a man’s. He was coming toward her, or trying to, but the crowd wedged him in, small as he was among those great bodies. She lost sight of him. How hot it was! how hot . . . An arm at her waist. Some one had mounted the little box and stood teetering there beside her, pressed against her slightly, reassuringly. Pervus DeJong. Her head was on a level with his great shoulder now. They stood together in the doorway, on the soap-box, for all High Prairie to see.

“Five cents I’m bid for this lovely little mouthful put up by the school teacher’s own fair hands. Five cents! Five——”

“One dollar!” Pervus DeJong.

The balloon faces were suddenly punctured with holes. High Prairie’s jaw dropped with astonishment. Its mouth stood open.

There was nothing plain about Selina now. Her dark head was held high, and his fair one beside it made a vivid foil. The purchase of the wine-coloured cashmere was at last justified.

“And ten!” cackled old Johannes Ambuul, his rheumy eyes on Selina.

Art and human spitefulness struggled visibly for mastery in Adam Ooms’s face—and art won. The auctioneer triumphed over the man. The term “crowd psychology” was unknown to him, but he was artist enough to sense that some curious magic process, working through this roomful of people, had transformed the little white box, from a thing despised and ridiculed, into an object of beauty, of value, of infinite desirability. He now eyed it in a catalepsy of admiration.

“One-ten I’m bid for this box all tied with a ribbon to match the gown of the girl who brought it. Gents, you get the ribbon, the lunch, _and_ the girl. And only one-ten bid for all that. Gents! Gents! Remember, it ain’t only a lunch—it’s a picture. It pleases the eye. Do I hear one——”

“Five bits!” Barend DeRoo, of Low Prairie, in the lists. A strapping young Dutchman, the Brom Bones of the district. Aaltje Huff, in a fit of pique at his indifference, had married to spite him. Cornelia Vinke, belle of New Haarlem, was said to be languishing for love of him. He drove to the Haymarket with his load of produce and played cards all night on the wagon under the gas torches while the street girls of the neighbourhood assailed him in vain. Six feet three, his red face shone now like a harvest moon above the crowd. A merry, mischievous eye that laughed at Pervus DeJong and his dollar bid.

“Dollar and a half!” A high clear voice—a boy’s voice. Roelf.

“Oh, no!” said Selina aloud. But she was unheard in the gabble. Roelf had once confided to her that he had saved three dollars and fifty cents in the last three years. Five dollars would purchase a set of tools that his mind had been fixed on for months past. Selina saw Klaas Pool’s look of astonishment changing to anger. Saw Maartje Pool’s quick hand on his arm, restraining him.

“Two dollars!” Pervus DeJong.

“Twotwotwotwotwotwo!” Adam Ooms in a frenzy of salesmanship.

“And ten.” Johannes Ambuul’s cautious bid.

“Two and a quarter.” Barend DeRoo.

“Two-fifty!” Pervus DeJong.

“Three dollars!” The high voice of the boy. It cracked a little on the last syllable, and the crowd laughed.

“Three-three-three-three-threethreethree. Three once——”

“And a half.” Pervus DeJong.

“Three sixty.”

“Four!” DeRoo.

“And ten.”

The boy’s voice was heard no more.

“I wish they’d stop,” whispered Selina.

“Five!” Pervus DeJong.

“Six!” DeRoo, his face very red.

“And ten.”

“Seven!”

“It’s only jelly sandwiches,” said Selina to DeJong, in a panic.

“Eight!” Johannes Ambuul, gone mad.

“Nine!” DeRoo.

“Nine! Nine I’m bid! Nine-nine-nine! Who’ll make it——”

“Let him have it. The cup cakes fell a little. Don’t——”

“Ten!” said Pervus DeJong.

Barend DeRoo shrugged his great shoulders.

“Ten-ten-ten. Do I hear eleven? Do I hear ten-fifty! Ten-ten-ten tententententententen! Gents! Ten once. Ten twice! Gone!—for ten dollars to Pervus DeJong. And a bargain.” Adam Ooms mopped his bald head and his cheeks and the damp spot under his chin.

Ten dollars. Adam Ooms knew, as did all the countryside, this was not the sum of ten dollars merely. No basket of food, though it contained nightingales’ tongues, the golden apple of Atalanta, wines of rare vintage, could have been adequate recompense for these ten dollars. They represented sweat and blood; toil and hardship; hours under the burning prairie sun at mid-day; work doggedly carried on through the drenching showers of spring; nights of restless sleep snatched an hour at a time under the sky in the Chicago market place; miles of weary travel down the rude corduroy road between High Prairie and Chicago, now up to the hubs in mud, now blinded by dust and blowing sand.

A sale at Christie’s, with a miniature going for a million, could not have met with a deeper hush, a more dramatic babble following the hush.

They ate their lunch together in one corner of Adam Ooms’s hall. Selina opened the box and took out the devilled eggs, and the cup cakes that had fallen a little, and the apples, and the sandwiches sliced very, very thin. The coldly appraising eye of all High Prairie, Low Prairie, and New Haarlem watched this sparse provender emerge from the ribbon-tied shoe box. She offered him a sandwich. It looked infinitesimal in his great paw. Suddenly all Selina’s agony of embarrassment was swept away, and she was laughing, not wildly or hysterically, but joyously and girlishly. She sank her little white teeth into one of the absurd sandwiches and looked at him, expecting to find him laughing, too. But he wasn’t laughing. He looked very earnest, and his blue eyes were fixed hard on the bit of bread in his hand, and his face was very red and clean-shaven. He bit into the sandwich and chewed it solemnly. And Selina thought: “Why, the dear thing! The great big dear thing! And he might have been eating breast of duck . . . Ten dollars!” Aloud she said, “What made you do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Then, “You looked so little. And they were making fun. Laughing.” He looked very earnest, and his blue eyes were fixed hard on the sandwich, and his face was very red.

“That’s a very foolish reason for throwing away ten dollars,” Selina said, severely.

He seemed not to hear her; bit ruminantly into one of the cup cakes. Suddenly: “I can’t hardly write at all, only to sign my name and like that.”

“Read?”

“Only to spell out the words. Anyways I don’t get time for reading. But figuring I wish I knew. ’Rithmetic. I can figger some, but those fellows in Haymarket they are too sharp for me. They do numbers in their head—like that, so quick.”

Selina leaned toward him. “I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you.”

“How do you mean, teach me?”

“Evenings.”

He looked down at his great calloused palms, then up at her. “What would you take for pay?”

“Pay! I don’t want any pay.” She was genuinely shocked.

His face lighted up with a sudden thought. “Tell you what. My place is just this side the school, next to Bouts’s place. I could start for you the fire, mornings, in the school. And thaw the pump and bring in a pail of water. This month, and January and February and part of March, even, now I don’t go to market on account it’s winter, I could start you the fire. Till spring. And I could come maybe three times a week, evenings, to Pool’s place, for lessons.” He looked so helpless, so humble, so huge; and the more pathetic for his hugeness.

She felt a little rush of warmth toward him that was at once impersonal and maternal. She thought again, “Why, the dear thing! The great helpless big thing! How serious he is! And funny.” He was indeed both serious and funny, with the ridiculous cup cake in his great hand, his eyes wide and ruminant, his face ruddier than ever, his forehead knotted with earnestness. She laughed, suddenly, a gay little laugh, and he, after a puzzled pause, joined her companionably.

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

VI

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 week-day 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.”

Selina shook her head impatiently. “That’s a very foolish, short-sighted 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 control 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.