So Big · Chapter 11 (2/2)

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, streetcars, 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, humpbacked conservatories, porte-cochères, 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 nearby 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.”