by Edna Ferber
“Terry Sheehan, I know you’ve quarreled, and I know just what it was about. Oh, I don’t mean the very thing it was about; but the kind of thing. I’m going to do something for you, Terry, that I wouldn’t take the trouble to do for most women. But I guess I ain’t had all the softness knocked out of me yet, though it’s a wonder. And I guess I remember too plain the decent kid you was in the old days. What was the name of that little small-time house me and Jim used to play? Bijou, that’s it; Bijou.”
The band struck up a new tune. Leon Sammett—slim, sleek, lithe in his evening clothes—appeared with a little fair girl in pink chiffon. The woman reached across the table and put one pudgy, jeweled hand on Terry’s arm. “He’ll be through in ten minutes. Now listen to me. I left Jim four years ago, and there hasn’t been a minute since then, day or night, when I wouldn’t have crawled back to him on my hands and knees if I could. But I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have me now. How could he? How do I know you’ve quarreled? I can see it in your eyes. They look just the way mine have felt for four years, that’s how. I met up with this boy, and there wasn’t anybody to do the turn for me that I’m trying to do for you. Now get this. I left Jim because when he ate corn on the cob he always closed his eyes and it drove me wild. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” said Terry.
“Women are like that. One night—we was playing Fond du Lac; I remember just as plain—we was eating supper before the show and Jim reached for one of those big yellow ears, and buttered and salted it, and me kind of hanging on to the edge of the table with my nails. Seemed to me if he shut his eyes when he put his teeth into that ear of corn I’d scream. And he did. And I screamed. And that’s all.”
Terry sat staring at her with a wide-eyed stare, like a sleepwalker. Then she wet her lips slowly. “But that’s almost the very–-“
“Kid, go on back home. I don’t know whether it’s too late or not, but go anyway. If you’ve lost him I suppose it ain’t any more than you deserve; but I hope to God you don’t get your deserts this time. He’s almost through. If he sees you going he can’t quit in the middle of his song to stop you. He’ll know I put you wise, and he’ll prob’ly half kill me for it. But it’s worth it. You get.”
And Terry—dazed, shaking, but grateful—fled. Down the noisy aisle, up the stairs, to the street. Back to her rooming house. Out again, with her suitcase, and into the right railroad station somehow, at last. Not another Wetona train until midnight. She shrank into a remote corner of the waiting room and there she huddled until midnight, watching the entrances like a child who is fearful of ghosts in the night.
The hands of the station clock seemed fixed and immovable. The hour between eleven and twelve was endless. She was on the train. It was almost morning. It was morning. Dawn was breaking. She was home! She had the house key clutched tightly in her hand long before she turned Schroeder’s corner. Suppose he had come home! Suppose he had jumped a town and come home ahead of his schedule. They had quarreled once before, and he had done that.
Up the front steps. Into the house. Not a sound. She stood there a moment in the early-morning half-light. She peered into the dining room. The table, with its breakfast debris, was as she had left it. In the kitchen the coffeepot stood on the gas stove. She was home. She was safe. She ran up the stairs, got out of her clothes and into gingham morning things. She flung open windows everywhere. Downstairs once more she plunged into an orgy of cleaning. Dishes, table, stove, floor, rugs. She washed, scoured, swabbed, polished. By eight o’clock she had done the work that would ordinarily have taken until noon. The house was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds.
During all this time she had been listening, listening, with her subconscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to name definitely in her mind, but listening, just the same; waiting.
And then, at eight o’clock, it came. The rattle of a key in the lock. The boom of the front door. Firm footsteps.
He did not go to meet her, and she did not go to meet him. They came together and were in each other’s arms. She was weeping.
“Now, now, old girl. What’s there to cry about? Don’t, honey; don’t. It’s all right.” She raised her head then, to look at him. How fresh and rosy and big he seemed, after that little sallow restaurant rat.
“How did you get here? How did you happen–-?”
“Jumped all the way from Ashland. Couldn’t get a sleeper, so I sat up all night. I had to come back and square things with you, Terry. My mind just wasn’t on my work. I kept thinking how I’d talked—how I’d talked–-“
“Oh, Orville, don’t! I can’t bear–- Have you had your breakfast?”
“Why, no. The train was an hour late. You know that Ashland train.”
But she was out of his arms and making for the kitchen. “You go and clean up. I’ll have hot biscuits and everything in no time. You poor boy. No breakfast!”
She made good her promise. It could not have been more than half an hour later when he was buttering his third feathery, golden-brown biscuit. But she had eaten nothing. She watched him, and listened, and again her eyes were somber, but for a different reason. He broke open his egg. His elbow came up just a fraction of an inch. Then he remembered, and flushed like a schoolboy, and brought it down again, carefully. And at that she gave a tremulous cry, and rushed around the table to him.
“Oh, Orville!” She took the offending elbow in her two arms, and bent and kissed the rough coat sleeve.
“Why, Terry! Don’t, honey. Don’t!”
“Oh, Orville, listen–-“
“Yes.”
“Listen, Orville–-“
“I’m listening, Terry.”
“I’ve got something to tell you. There’s something you’ve got to know.”
“Yes, I know it, Terry. I knew you’d out with it, pretty soon, if I just waited.”
She lifted an amazed face from his shoulder then, and stared at him. “But how could you know? You couldn’t! How could you?”
He patted her shoulder then, gently. “I can always tell. When you have something on your mind you always take up a spoon of coffee, and look at it, and kind of joggle it back and forth in the spoon, and then dribble it back into the cup again, without once tasting it. It used to get me nervous, when we were first married, watching you. But now I know it just means you’re worried about something, and I wait, and pretty soon–-“
“Oh, Orville!” she cried then. “Oh, Orville!”
“Now, Terry. Just spill it, hon. Just spill it to Daddy. And you’ll feel better.”
Farmer in the Dell [1919]
Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the stuffy room—there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld didn’t know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and is taking it easy?
If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn’t tell whether it was four o’clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him.
When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully, you must be a natural-born loller to begin with and revert. Bella Westerveld was and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn’t and hadn’t. So there he lay, terribly wide-awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast when he was lying so still. If it had been light, you could have seen the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient face.
&nbs
p; They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.
Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the bedroom was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the feeling—an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the ghostly light —these things he had never needed. He had known. But here in the un-sylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality.
A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had gone clumping about the flat, waking up everyone and loosing from his wife’s lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the flat next door must have heard her.
“You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around like cattle. You’d better build a shed in the back yard and sleep there if you’re so dumb you can’t tell night from day.”
Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech—she who had seemed so mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily shocks to him whose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm, had been a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm’s edge had been marked by the Mississippi rolling grandly by.
Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city sound that he really welcomed—the rattle and clink that marked the milkman’s matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who released Ben Westerveld from durance vile—or had until the winter months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The milkman’s coming would soon again mark old Ben’s rising hour. Before he had begun to take it easy, six o’clock had seen the entire mechanism of his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in motion by his own big work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way, as if they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of his hands and around the thumbs.
“Guess it’s my liver,” he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. “She gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring tonic wouldn’t go bad. Tone me up.”
He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gendeman, the druggist, white-coated and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly—while it lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped back into his old apathy.
Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago’s teeming, gritty streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than tragedy—waste.
For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before sunset. In the process he had taken on something of the color and the rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with the background of nature so as to be almost undistinguishable from it, as were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substance are the same.
Ben Westerveld didn’t know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is not given to introspection. For that matter, anyone knows that a farmer in town is a comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, have marked him a fair target for ridicule. Perhaps one should know him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of the Mississippi bottomlands clinging to his boots.
At twenty-five, given a tasseled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous. A serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression. As he grew older, the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him, even the ghost of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.
The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds of years since the first Westervelds came to America, and they had married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical Westerveld mind, hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him. He seemed instinctively to know facts about the kin ship of soil and seed that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to be a saying in that section that “Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock.”
At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who took part in the rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at arm’s length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. There was that almost primitive strength which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to neighborhood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld’s. There was what the neighbors called an understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him. You saw him going down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven. He had a
quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. The switch and the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits. He never so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.
An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.
“Hello, Emma.”
“How do, Ben.”
“Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf at Aug Tietjens’ with five legs.”
“I heard. I’d just as lief walk a little piece. I’m kind of beat, though. We’ve got the threshers day after tomorrow. We’ve been cooking up.”
Beneath Ben’s bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of embarrassment. The neighbors were right in their surmise that there was no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the minds of both. Once Ben had said: “Pop says I can have the north eighty on easy payments if—when–-“
Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: “That’s a fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man.”
The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers’ thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her father and brother. She was known as “that smart Byers girl.” Her butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, twelve miles away, than did any other’s in the district. She was not a pretty girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at twenty-two, a clear-headedness and a restful serenity that promised well for Ben Westerveld’s future happiness.