So Big · Chapter 14 (1/3)

XIV

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 event 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 that appeared briefly only to be replaced by another 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 sledgehammer 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 weekends 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.

After a moment she took up her sewing again. Her face looked young, eager, fresh, like the face of the girl who had found cabbages so beautiful that night when she bounced along the rutty Halsted road with Klaas Pool, many years ago. It came into her face, that look, when she was happy, exhilarated, excited. That was why those who loved her and brought that look into her face thought her beautiful, while those who did not love her never saw the look and consequently considered her a plain woman.

There was another silence between the two. Then: “Mother, what would you think of my going East next fall, to take a course in architecture?”

“Would you like that, Dirk?”

“Yes, I think so⁠—yes.”

“Then I’d like it better than anything in the world. I⁠—it makes me happy just to think of it.”

“It would⁠—cost an awful lot.”

“I’ll manage. I’ll manage.⁠ ⁠… What made you decide on architecture?”

“I don’t know, exactly. The new buildings at the university⁠—Gothic, you know⁠—are such a contrast to the old. Then Paula and I were talking the other day. She hates their house on Prairie⁠—terrible old lumpy gray stone pile, with the black of the I.C. trains all over it. She wants her father to build north⁠—an Italian villa or French château. Something of that sort. So many of her friends are moving to the north shore, away from these hideous south-side and north-side Chicago houses with their stoops, and their bay windows, and their terrible turrets. Ugh!”

“Well, now, do you know,” Selina remonstrated mildly, “I like ’em. I suppose I’m wrong, but to me they seem sort of natural and solid and unpretentious, like the clothes that old August Hempel wears, so square-cut and baggy. Those houses look dignified to me, and fitting. They may be ugly⁠—probably are⁠—but anyway they’re not ridiculous. They have a certain rugged grandeur. They’re Chicago. Those French and Italian gimcracky things they⁠—they’re incongruous. It’s as if Abraham Lincoln were to appear suddenly in pink satin knee breeches and buckled shoes, and lace ruffles at his wrists.”

Dirk could laugh at that picture. But he protested, too. “But there’s no native architecture, so what’s to be done! You wouldn’t call those smoke-blackened old stone and brick piles with their iron fences and their conservatories and cupolas and gingerbread exactly native, would you?”

“No,” Selina admitted, “but those Italian villas and French châteaux in north Chicago suburbs are a good deal like a lace evening gown in the Arizona desert. It wouldn’t keep you cool in the daytime, and it wouldn’t be warm enough at night. I suppose a native architecture is evolved from building for the local climate and the needs of the community, keeping beauty in mind as you go. We don’t need turrets and towers any more than we need drawbridges and moats. It’s all right to keep them, I suppose, where they grew up, in a country where the feudal system meant that any day your next-door neighbour might take it into his head to call his gang around him and sneak up to steal your wife and tapestries and gold drinking cups.”

Dirk was interested and amused. Talks with his mother were likely to affect him thus. “What’s your idea of a real Chicago house, Mother?”

Selina answered quickly, as if she had thought often about it; as if she would have liked just such a dwelling on the site of the old DeJong farmhouse in which they now were seated so comfortably. “Well, it would need big porches for the hot days and nights so’s to catch the prevailing southwest winds from the prairies in the summer⁠—a porch that would be swung clear around to the east, too⁠—or a terrace or another porch east so that if the precious old lake breeze should come up just when you think you’re dying of the heat, as it sometimes does, you could catch that, too. It ought to be built⁠—the house, I mean⁠—rather squarish and tight and solid against our cold winters and northeasters. Then sleeping porches, of course. There’s a grand American institution for you! England may have its afternoon tea on the terrace, and Spain may have its patio, and France its courtyard, and Italy its pergola, vine-covered; but America’s got the sleeping porch⁠—the screened-in open-air sleeping porch, and I shouldn’t wonder if the man who first thought of that would get precedence, on Judgment Day, over the men who invented the aeroplane, the talking machine, and the telephone. After all, he had nothing in mind but the health of the human race.” After which grand period Selina grinned at Dirk, and Dirk grinned at Selina and the two giggled together there by the fireplace, companionably.

“Mother, you’re simply wonderful!⁠—only your native Chicago dwelling seems to be mostly porch.”

Selina waved such carping criticism away with a careless hand. “Oh, well, any house that has enough porches, and two or three bathrooms and at least eight closets can be lived in comfortably, no matter what else it has or hasn’t got.”

Next day they were more serious. The eastern college and the architectural career seemed to be settled things. Selina was content, happy. Dirk was troubled about the expense. He spoke of it at breakfast next morning (Dirk’s breakfast; his mother had had hers hours before and now as he drank his coffee, was sitting with him a moment and glancing at the paper that had come in the rural mail delivery). She had been out in the fields overseeing the transplanting of young tomato seedlings from hotbed to field. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned up tight, for the air was still sharp. On her head was a battered black felt soft hat (an old one of Dirk’s) much like the one she had worn to the Haymarket that day ten years ago. Selina’s cheeks were faintly pink from her walk across the fields in the brisk morning air.

She sniffed. “That coffee smells wonderful. I think I’ll just⁠—” She poured herself a half cup with the air of virtue worn by one who really longs for a whole cup and doesn’t take it.

“I’ve been thinking,” he began, “the expense⁠—”

“Pigs,” said Selina, serenely.

“Pigs!” He looked around, bewildered; stared at his mother.

“Pigs’ll do it,” Selina explained, calmly. “I’ve been wanting to put them in for three or four years. It’s August Hempel’s idea. Hogs, I should have said.”

Again, as before, he echoed, “Hogs!” rather faintly.

“High-bred hogs. They’re worth their weight in silver this minute, and will be for years to come. I won’t go in for them extensively. Just enough to make an architect out of Mr. Dirk DeJong.” Then, at the expression in his face: “Don’t look so pained, son. There’s nothing revolting about a hog⁠—not my kind, brought up in a pen as sanitary as a tiled bathroom and fed on corn. He’s a handsome, impressive-looking animal, the hog, when he isn’t treated like one.”

He looked dejected. “I’d rather not go to school on⁠—hogs.”