by Edna Ferber
Dirk was grateful. Her notes were always copious, perfect. She never hesitated to let him copy them. They got in the way of walking out of the classroom together, across the campus. She told him something of herself.
“Your people farmers!” Surprised, she looked at his well-cut clothes, his slim, strong, unmarked hands, his smart shoes and cap. “Why, so are mine. Iowa.” She pronounced it Ioway. “I lived on the farm all my life till I was twenty-seven. I always wanted to go away to school, but we never had the money and I couldn’t come to town to earn because I was the oldest, and Ma was sickly after Emma—that’s the youngest—there are nine of us—was born. Ma was anxious I should go and Pa was willing, but it couldn’t be. No fault of theirs. One year the summer would be so hot, with no rain hardly from spring till fall, and the corn would just dry up on the stalks, like paper. The next year it would be so wet the seed would rot in the ground. Ma died when I was twenty-six. The kids were all pretty well grown up by that time. Pa married again in a year and I went to Des Moines to work. I stayed there six years but I didn’t save much on account of my brother. He was kind of wild. He had come to Des Moines, too, after Pa married. He and Aggie—that’s the second wife—didn’t get along. I came to Chicago about five years ago. . . . I’ve done all kinds of work, I guess, except digging in a coal mine. I’d have done that if I’d had to.”
She told him all this ingenuously, simply. Dirk felt drawn toward her, sorry for her. His was a nature quick to sympathy. Something she said now stirred him while it bewildered him a little, too.
“You can’t have any idea what it means to me to be here . . . All those years! I used to dream about it. Even now it seems to me it can’t be true. I’m conscious of my surroundings all the time and yet I can’t believe them. You know, like when you are asleep and dream about something beautiful, and then wake up and find it’s actually true. I get a thrill out of just being here. ‘I’m crossing the campus,’ I say to myself. ‘I’m a student—a girl student—in Midwest University and now I’m crossing the campus of my university to go to a class.’ ”
Her face was very greasy and earnest and fine.
“Well, that’s great,” Dirk replied, weakly. “That’s cer’nly great.”
He told his mother about her. Usually he went home on Friday nights to stay until Monday morning. His first Monday-morning class was not until ten. Selina was deeply interested and stirred. “Do you think she’d spend some Saturday and Sunday here with us on the farm? She could come with you on Friday and go back Sunday night if she wanted to. Or stay until Monday morning and go back with you. There’s the spare room, all quiet and cool. She could do as she liked. I’d give her cream and all the fresh fruit and vegetables she wanted. And Meena would bake one of her fresh cocoanut cakes. I’d have Adam bring a fresh cocoanut from South Water Street.”
Mattie came one Friday night. It was the end of October, and Indian summer, the most beautiful time of the year on the Illinois prairie. A mellow golden light seemed to suffuse everything. It was as if the very air were liquid gold, and tonic. The squash and pumpkins next the good brown earth gave back the glow, and the frost-turned leaves of the maples in the sun. About the countryside for miles was the look of bounteousness, of plenty, of prophecy fulfilled as when a beautiful and fertile woman having borne her children and found them good, now sits serene-eyed, gracious, ample-bosomed, satisfied.
Into the face of Mattie Schwengauer there came a certain glory. When she and Selina clasped hands Selina stared at her rather curiously, as though startled. Afterward she said to Dirk, aside, “But I thought you said she was ugly!”
“Well, she is, or—well, isn’t she?”
“Look at her!”
Mattie Schwengauer was talking to Meena Bras, the house worker. She was standing with her hands on her ample hips, her fine head thrown back, her eyes alight, her lips smiling so that you saw her strong square teeth. A new cream separator was the subject of their conversation. Something had amused Mattie. She laughed. It was the laugh of a young girl, care-free, relaxed, at ease.
For two days Mattie did as she pleased, which meant she helped pull vegetables in the garden, milk the cows, saddle the horses; rode them without a saddle in the pasture. She tramped the road. She scuffled through the leaves in the woods, wore a scarlet maple leaf in her hair, slept like one gloriously dead from ten until six; ate prodigiously of cream, fruits, vegetables, eggs, sausage, cake.
“It got so I hated to do all those things on the farm,” she said, laughing a little shamefacedly. “I guess it was because I had to. But now it comes back to me and I enjoy it because it’s natural to me, I suppose. Anyway, I’m having a grand time, Mrs. DeJong. The grandest time I ever had in my life.” Her face was radiant and almost beautiful.
“If you want me to believe that,” said Selina, “you’ll come again.”
But Mattie Schwengauer never did come again.
Early the next week one of the university students approached Dirk. He was a Junior, very influential in his class, and a member of the fraternity to which Dirk was practically pledged. A decidedly desirable frat.
“Say, look here, DeJong, I want to talk to you a minute. Uh, you’ve got to cut out that girl—Swinegour or whatever her name is—or it’s all off with the fellows in the frat.”
“What d’you mean! Cut out! What’s the matter with her!”
“Matter! She’s Unclassified, isn’t she! And do you know what the story is? She told it herself as an economy hint to a girl who was working her way through. She bathes with her union suit and white stockings on to save laundry soap. Scrubs ’em on her! ’S the God’s truth.”
Into Dirk’s mind there flashed a picture of this large girl in her tight knitted union suit and her white stockings sitting in a tub half full of water and scrubbing them and herself simultaneously. A comic picture, and a revolting one. Pathetic, too, but he would not admit that.
“Imagine!” the frat brother-to-be was saying. “Well, we can’t have a fellow who goes around with a girl like that. You got to cut her out, see! Completely. The fellahs won’t stand for it.”
Dirk had a mental picture of himself striking a noble attitude and saying, “Won’t stand for it, huh! She’s worth more than the whole caboodle of you put together. And you can all go to hell!”
Instead he said, vaguely, “Oh. Well. Uh—”
Dirk changed his seat in the classroom, avoided Mattie’s eyes, shot out of the door the minute class was over. One day he saw her coming toward him on the campus and he sensed that she intended to stop and speak to him—chide him laughingly, perhaps. He quickened his pace, swerved a little to one side, and as he passed lifted his cap and nodded, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Out of the tail of his eye he could see her standing a moment irresolutely in the path.
He got into the fraternity. The fellahs liked him from the first. Selina said once or twice, “Why don’t you bring that nice Mattie home with you again some time soon? Such a nice girl—woman, rather. But she seemed so young and care-free while she was here, didn’t she? A fine mind, too, that girl. She’ll make something of herself. You’ll see. Bring her next week, h’m?”
Dirk shuffled, coughed, looked away. “Oh, I dunno. Haven’t seen her lately. Guess she’s busy with another crowd, or something.”
He tried not to think of what he had done, for he was honestly ashamed. Terribly ashamed. So he said to himself, “Oh, what of it!” and hid his shame. A month later Selina again said, “I wish you’d invite Mattie for Thanksgiving dinner. Unless she’s going home, which I doubt. We’ll have turkey and pumpkin pie and all the rest of it. She’ll love it.”
“Mattie?” He had actually forgotten her name.
“Yes, of course. Isn’t that right? Mattie Schwengauer?”
“Oh, her. Uh—well—I haven’t been seeing her lately.”
“Oh, Dirk, you haven’t quarrelled with that nice girl!”
He decided to have it out. “Listen, Mother. There are a lot of diff
erent crowds at the U, see? And Mattie doesn’t belong to any of ’em. You wouldn’t understand, but it’s like this. She—she’s smart and jolly and everything but she just doesn’t belong. Being friends with a girl like that doesn’t get you anywhere. Besides, she isn’t a girl. She’s a middle-aged woman, when you come to think of it.”
“Doesn’t get you anywhere!” Selina’s tone was cool and even. Then, as the boy’s gaze did not meet hers: “Why, Dirk DeJong, Mattie Schwengauer is one of my reasons for sending you to a university. She’s what I call part of a university education. Just talking to her is learning something valuable. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t naturally prefer pretty young girls of your own age to go around with, and all. It would be queer if you didn’t. But this Mattie—why, she’s life. Do you remember that story of when she washed dishes in the kosher restaurant over on Twelfth Street and the proprietor used to rent out dishes and cutlery for Irish and Italian neighbourhood weddings where they had pork and goodness knows what all, and then use them next day in the restaurant again for the kosher customers?”
Yes, Dirk remembered. Selina wrote Mattie, inviting her to the farm for Thanksgiving, and Mattie answered gratefully, declining. “I shall always remember you,” she wrote in that letter, “with love.”
14
Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it. They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to give an informal talk to the men before some university even they would start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs——” At the dances they were not above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.
Two of Dirk’s classes were conducted by women professors. They were well on toward middle age, or past it; desiccated women. Only their eyes were alive. Their clothes were of some indefinite dark stuff, brown or drab-gray; their hair lifeless; their hands long, bony, unvital. They had seen classes and classes and classes. A roomful of fresh young faces like round white pencil marks manipulated momentarily on a slate, only to be sponged off to give way to other round white marks. Of the two women one—the elder—was occasionally likely to flare into sudden life; a flame in the ashes of a burned-out grate. She had humour and a certain caustic wit, qualities that had managed miraculously to survive even the deadly and numbing effects of thirty years in the classroom. A fine mind, and iconoclastic, hampered by the restrictions of a conventional community and the soul of a congenital spinster.
Under the guidance of these Dirk chafed and grew restless. Miss Euphemia Hollingswood had a way of emphasizing every third or fifth syllable, bringing her voice down hard on it, thus:
“In the consideration of all the facts in the case presented before us we must first review the history and attempt to analyze the outstanding——”
He found himself waiting for that emphasis and shrinking from it as from a sledge-hammer blow. It hurt his head.
Miss Lodge droned. She approached a word with a maddening uh-uh-uh-uh. In the uh-uh-uh face of the uh-uh-uh-uh geometrical situation of the uh-uh-uh uh——
He shifted restlessly in his chair, found his hands clenched into fists, and took refuge in watching the shadow cast by an oak branch outside the window on a patch of sunlight against the blackboard behind her.
During the early spring Dirk and Selina talked things over again, seated before their own fireplace in the High Prairie farmhouse. Selina had had that fireplace built five years before and her love of it amounted to fire-worship. She had it lighted always on winter evenings and in the spring when the nights were sharp. In Dirk’s absence she would sit before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth. High Prairie, driving by from some rare social gathering or making a late trip to market as they sometimes were forced to do, saw the rosy flicker of Mrs. DeJong’s fire dancing on the wall and warmed themselves by it even while they resented it.
“A good heater in there and yet anyway she’s got to have a fire going in a grate. Always she does something funny like that. I should think she’d be lonesome sitting there like that with her dog only.”
They never knew how many guests Selina entertained there before her fire those winter evenings—old friends and new. Sobig was there, the plump earth-grimed baby who rolled and tumbled in the fields while his young mother wiped the sweat from her face to look at him with fond eyes. Dirk DeJong of ten years hence was there. Simeon Peake, dapper, soft-spoken, ironic, in his shiny boots and his hat always a little on one side. Pervus DeJong, a blue-shirted giant with strong tender hands and little fine golden hairs on the backs of them. Fanny Davenport, the actress-idol of her girlhood came back to her, smiling, bowing; and the gorgeous spangled creatures in the tights and bodices of the old Extravaganzas. In strange contrast to these was the patient, tireless figure of Maartje Pool standing in the doorway of Roelf’s little shed, her arms tucked in her apron for warmth. “You make fun, huh?” she said, wistfully, “you and Roelf. You make fun.” And Roelf, the dark vivid boy, misunderstood. Roelf, the genius. He was always one of the company.
Oh, Selina DeJong never was lonely on these winter evenings before her fire.
She and Dirk sat there one fine sharp evening in early April. It was Saturday. Of late Dirk had not always come to the farm for the weekend. Eugene and Paula Arnold had been home for the Easter holidays. Julie Arnold had invited Dirk to the gay parties at the Prairie Avenue house. He had even spent two entire week-ends there. After the brocaded luxury of the Prairie Avenue house his farm bedroom seemed almost startlingly stark and bare. Selina frankly enjoyed Dirk’s somewhat fragmentary accounts of these visits: extracted from them as much vicarious pleasure as he had had in the reality—more, probably.
“Now tell me what you had to eat,” she would say, sociably, like a child. “What did you have for dinner, for example? Was it grand? Julie tells me they have a butler now. Well! I can’t wait till I hear Aug Hempel on the subject.”
He would tell her of the grandeurs of the Arnold ménage. She would interrupt and exclaim: “Mayonnaise! On fruit! Oh, I don’t believe I’d like that. You did! Well, I’ll have it for you next week when you come home. I’ll get the recipe from Julie.”
He didn’t think he’d be home next week. One of the fellows he’d met at the Arnolds’ had invited him to their place out north, on the lake. He had a boat.
“That’ll be lovely!” Selina exclaimed, after an almost unnoticeable moment of silence—silence with panic in it. “I’ll try not to fuss and be worried like an old hen every minute of the time I think you’re on the water. . . . Now do go on, Sobig. First fruit with mayonnaise, h’m? What kind of soup?”
He was not a naturally talkative person. There was nothing surly about his silence. It was a taciturn streak inherited from his Dutch ancestry. This time, though, he was more voluble than usual. “Paula . . .” came again and again into his conversation. “Paula . . . Paula . . .” and again “. . . Paula.” He did not seem conscious of the repetition, but Selina’s quick ear caught it.
“I haven’t seen her,” Selina said, “since she went away to school the first year. She must be—let’s see—she’s a year older than you are. She’s nineteen going on twenty. Last time I saw her I thought she was a dark scrawny little thing. Too bad she didn’t inherit Julie’s lovely gold
colouring and good looks, instead of Eugene, who doesn’t need ’em.”
“She isn’t!” said Dirk, hotly. “She’s dark and slim and sort of—uh—sensuous”—Selina started visibly, and raised her hand quickly to her mouth to hide a smile—“like Cleopatra. Her eyes are big and kind of slanting—not squinty I don’t mean, but slanting up a little at the corners. Cut out, kind of, so that they look bigger than most people’s.”
“My eyes used to be considered rather fine,” said Selina, mischievously; but he did not hear.
“She makes all the other girls look sort of blowzy.” He was silent a moment. Selina was silent, too, and it was not a happy silence. Dirk spoke again, suddenly, as though continuing aloud a train of thought, “—all but her hands.”
Selina made her voice sound natural, not sharply inquisitive. “What’s the matter with her hands, Dirk?”
He pondered a moment, his brows knitted. At last, slowly, “Well, I don’t know. They’re brown, and awfully thin and sort of—grabby. I mean it makes me nervous to watch them. And when the rest of her is cool they’re hot when you touch them.”
He looked at his mother’s hands that were busy with some sewing. The stuff on which she was working was a bit of satin ribbon; part of a hood intended to grace the head of Geertje Pool Vander Sijde’s second baby. She had difficulty in keeping her rough fingers from catching on the soft surface of the satin. Manual work, water, sun, and wind had tanned those hands, hardened them, enlarged the knuckles, spread them, roughened them. Yet how sure they were, and strong, and cool and reliable—and tender. Suddenly, looking at them, Dirk said, “Now your hands. I love your hands, Mother.”
She put down her work hastily, yet quietly, so that the sudden rush of happy grateful tears in her eyes should not sully the pink satin ribbon. She was flushed, like a girl. “Do you, Sobig?” she said.