Farmer in the Dell

by Edna Ferber

Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, everynerve tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce theblackness 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 lyingthere made him ache all over. His toes were curled with theeffort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath cameshort, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old BenWesterveld didn't know that. What should a retired andwell-to-do farmer of fifty-eight know of nerves, especially whenhe has moved to the city and is taking it easy?If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn'ttell whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked atyour 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, aflood of querulous protest from his wife, Bella, who lay asleepbeside him.When for forty-five years of your life you have risen atfour-thirty daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do itsuccessfully, you must be a natural- born loller to begin withand revert. Bella Westerveld was and had. So there she lay,asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there he lay, terriblywide- awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast when hewas lying so still. If it had been light, you could have seenthe lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of hispatient face.They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the sameevery morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one handalready reaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that usedto drape the chair by his bed. Then he would remember and sinkback while a great wave of depression swept over him. Nothing toget up for. Store clothes on the chair by the bed. He wastaking it easy.Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hourthe instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was soclose that the bed- room was in twilight even at midday. On thefarm he could tell by the feeling--an intangible thing, butinfallible. He could gauge the very quality of the blacknessthat comes just before dawn. The crowing of the cocks, thestamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the oldelm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in theghostly light --these things he had never needed. He had known.But here in the un- sylvan section of Chicago which bears thebosky name of Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality.A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, nocattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling.Once, when they first came to the city, he had risen attwelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had gone clumpingabout the flat, waking up everyone and loosing from his wife'slips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even hiscase-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroomof the flat next door must have heard her."You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night andstomping around like cattle. You'd better build a shed in theback yard and sleep there if you're so dumb you can't tell nightfrom day."Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased tobe appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who hadseemed so mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. Hehad crept back to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple inthe bedroom of the flat just across the little court grumblingand then laughing a little, grudgingly, and yet withappreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the power to appallhim. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily shocks to himwhose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm, had been aquarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on thehardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur ofnocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night,all startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in theroar of the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of thetractor and the hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at thelanding. His farm's edge had been marked by the Mississippirolling grandly by.Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city soundthat he really welcomed--the rattle and clink that marked themilkman's matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he wasthe good fairy who released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--orhad until the winter months made his coming later and later, sothat he became worse than useless as a timepiece. But now it waslate March, and mild. The milkman's coming would soon again markold Ben's rising hour. Before he had begun to take it easy, sixo'clock had seen the entire mechanism of his busy little worldhumming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in motion by his ownbig work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. He oftenlooked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way, as ifthey belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smoothand soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from roughwork as they used to. Of late there were little splotches ofbrown on the backs of his hands and around the thumbs."Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spotsthoughtfully. "She gets kind of sluggish from me not doinganything. Maybe a little spring tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone meup."He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggiston Halstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gendeman, thedruggist, white- coated and dapper, stepping affably about thefragrant-smelling store. The reddish-brown mixture had toned oldBen 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, hisincongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming,gritty streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, nowdangling so limply from inert wrists, had wrested a living fromthe soil; those strangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness ofvision which comes from scanning great stretches of earth andsky; the stocky, square-shouldered body suggested powerunutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse thantragedy--waste.For almost half a century this man had combated the elements,head set, eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind andsun, rain and drought, scourge and flood. He had risen beforedawn and slept before sunset. In the process he had taken onsomething of the color and the rugged immutability of the fieldsand hills and trees among which he toiled. Something of theirdignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see itbeneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of thehighlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blendin with the background of nature so as to be almostundistinguishable from it, as were the furred and featheredcreatures. This farmer differed from the city man as a hillockdiffers from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substanceare the same.Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy. Your farmer is notgiven to introspection. For that matter, anyone knows that afarmer in town is a comedy. Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sundaysupplement, the comic papers, have marked him a fair target forridicule. Perhaps one should know him in his overalled,stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of the Mississippibottomlands clinging to his boots.At twenty-five, given a tasseled cap, doublet and hose, and along, slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype ofone of those rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out atyou from a Frans Hals canvas. A roguish fellow with a merry eye;red-cheeked, vigorous. A serious mouth, though, and greatsweetness of expression. As he grew older, the seriousness creptup and up and almost entirely obliterated the roguishness. Bythe time the life of ease claimed him, even the ghost of thatruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had beenhundreds of years since the first Westervelds came to America,and they had married and intermarried until the original Hollandstrain had almost entirely disappeared. They had drifted tosouthern Illinois by one of those slow processes of migration andhad settled in Calhoun County, then almost a wilderness, butmagnificent with its rolling hills, majestic rivers, andgold-and-purple distances. But to the practical Westerveld mind,hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their relationto crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his faceup to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens forclouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch thewhirring flight of a partridge across the meadow. He likedfarming. Even the drudgery of it never made him grumble. He wasa natural farmer as men are natural mechanics or musicians orsalesmen. Things grew for him. He seemed instinctively to knowfacts about the kin ship of soil and seed that other men had tolearn from books or experience. It grew to be a saying in thatsection that "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock."At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther andrun faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys whotook part in the rough games. And he could pick up a girl withone hand and hold her at arm's length while she shrieked withpretended fear and real ecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. Therewas that almost primitive strength which appealed to the untamedin them as his gentleness appealed to their softer side. Heliked the girls, too, and could have had his pick of them. Heteased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about toneighbor- hood parties. But by the time he was twenty-five thething had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoiningWesterveld's. There was what the neighbors called anunderstanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked theByers girl to marry him. You saw him going down the road towardthe Byers place four nights out of the seven. He had a quick,light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very differentfrom the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He hada habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut froma tree. This he would twirl blithely as he walked along. Theswitch and the twirl represented just so much energy and animalspirits. 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 gota calf at Aug Tietjens' with five legs.""I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind ofbeat, though. We've got the threshers day after tomorrow. We'vebeen cooking up."Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness.The two would plod along the road together in a sort of blissfulagony of embarrassment. The neighbors were right in theirsurmise that there was no definite understanding between them.But the thing was settled in the minds of both. Once Ben hadsaid: "Pop says I can have the north eighty on easy paymentsif--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 andforceful. Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyeswould have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kepthouse for her father and brother. She was known as "that smartByers girl." Her butter and eggs and garden stuff broughthigher prices at Commercial, twelve miles away, than did anyother's in the district. She was not a pretty girl, according tothe local standards, but there was about her, even at twenty-two,a clear- headedness and a restful serenity that promised well forBen Westerveld's future happiness.But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers' capablehands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. BellaHuckins was the daughter of old "Red Front" Huckins, who ranthe saloon of that cheerful name in Commercial. Bella hadelected to teach school, not from any bent toward learning butbecause teaching appealed to her as being a rather elegantoccupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that day ayear or two of teaching in a country school took the place of thepresent-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St.Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial. So she used thecountry school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though shehated the country and dreaded her apprenticeship."I'll get a beau," she said, "who'll take me driving andaround. And Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town."The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down theroad toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. Thesunset was behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day oftiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's twohands. He discovered that later. Just now he thought he hadnever seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did notput it that way. Ben was not glib of thought or speech.He knew at once this was the new schoolteacher. He had heard ofher coming, though at the time the conversation had interestedhim not at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned thename and history of every eligible young man in the district twodays after her arrival. That was due partly to her own boldcuriosity and partly to the fact that she was boarding with theWidow Becker, the most notorious gossip in the county. InBella's mental list of the neighborhood swains Ben Westerveldalready occupied a position at the top of the column.He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hidehis embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily andcalled to his dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside.Dunder bounded forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward herplayfully and with natural canine curiosity.Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him,clasping her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switchin his free hand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It wasthe first time in his life that he had done such a thing. If hehad had a sane moment from that time until the day he marriedBella Huckins, he never would have forgotten the dumb hurt inDunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, quivering body.Bella screamed again, still clinging to him. Ben was saying:"He won't hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting hershoulder reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She wasso slight, so childlike, so apparently different from the sturdycountry girls. From--well, from the girls he knew. Herhelplessness, her utter femininity, appealed to all that wasmasculine in him. Bella, the experienced, clinging to him, feltherself swept from head to foot by a queer electric tingling thatwas very pleasant but that still had in it something of thesensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. If she hadbeen anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have realizedthat here was a specimen of the virile male with which she couldnot trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, Iwas scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little."Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea."But Bella looked over her shoulder fearfully to where Dunderstood by the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty.He still thought that perhaps this was a new game. Not a gamethat he cared for, but still one to be played if his masterfancied it. Ben stooped, picked up a stone, and threw it atDunder, striking him in the flank."Go on home!" he commanded sternly. "Go home!" He startedtoward the dog with a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder,with a low howl, put his tail between his legs and loped offhome, a disillusioned dog.Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. "You'rethe new teacher, ain't you?""Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a babyabout that dog.""Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know hewouldn't hurt nobody. He's pretty big."He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben Westerveld.""Pleased to meet you," said Bella. "Which way was you going?There's a dog down at Tietjens' that's enough to scare anybody.He looks like a pony, he's so big.""I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I waswalking over to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won'tget dark before I get there. You were going the other way,weren't you?""Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased tokeep you company down to the school and back." He was surprisedat his own sudden masterfulness.They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had knownone another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byersfarm, as usual. The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of hismind as completely as if they had been whisked away on a magicrug.Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life.She was contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking anddrudgery. The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial andMrs. Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs'feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles beingdestined for the free-lunch counter downstairs. Bella had earlymade up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing andfrying in her life. Whenever she could find an excuse sheloitered about the saloon. There she found life and talk andcolor. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but shealways turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunchcounter or with an armful of clean towels.Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, "I want to marryBella." He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestlyto marry Emma Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. Asfor Bella, she laughed at him, but she was scared, too. Theyboth fought the thing, she selfishly, he unselfishly, for theByers girl, with her clear, calm eyes and her dependable ways,was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella was merely thatof the magnetic male. She never once thought of his finerqualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluringwoman. But in the end they married. The neighborhood was rockedwith surprise.Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the brightcolors of pretense in order to attract a mate. But BenWesterveld had been too honest to be anything but himself. Hewas so honest and fundamentally truthful that he refused at firstto allow himself to believe that this slovenly shrew was thefragile and exquisite creature he had married. He had the habitof personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing was aceremony in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. Hediscovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearanceof fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a naturalclearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair sweptaway in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was aslattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been acredit to any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins' bar.They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveldprospered in spite of his wife. As the years went on he addedeighty acres here, eighty acres there, until his land swept downto the very banks of the Mississippi. There is no doubt that shehindered him greatly, but he was too expert a farmer to fail. Atthreshing time the crew looked forward to working for Ben, thefarmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, his wife. Shewas notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the county.And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, herplaint was the same-- "If I'd thought I was going to stick downon a farm all my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day andnight, I'd rather have died. Might as well be dead as rottin'here."Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was asslovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, andher skin coarsened from lack of care and from overeating. And inher children's ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm lifeand farming. "You can get away from it," she counseled herdaughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube like your pa," shecautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by her ad-vice. Minnie went to work in Commercial when she was seventeen,an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery.At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with rovingtendencies. They moved from town to town. He never stuck longat one job. John, the older boy, was as much his mother's son asMinnie was her mother's daughter. Restless, dissatisfied,emptyheaded, he was the despair of his father. He drove the farmhorses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill and downdale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedlinghis mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was beforethe day of the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those presentadjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his career muchearlier. As it was, they found him lying by the roadside at dawnone morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with thewreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolenthe horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had ledthem stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to arendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might nothave hurt him, but evidently he had been dragged almost a milebefore his battered body became somehow disentangled from thesplintered wood and the reins.That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and hiswife together, but it did not. It only increased her bitternessand her hatred of the locality and the life."I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endlessreproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was boundyou'd make a farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job.You better try your hand at Dike now for a change."Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try hishand at him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. Hehad come honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression,and manner he was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Hollandancestors. Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhatphlegmatic. When, at school, they had come to the story of theDutch boy who saved his town from flood by thrusting his fingerinto the hole in the dike and holding it there until help came,the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in thereader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike heremained.Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspokenfeeling. The boy was cropwise, as his father had been at hisage. On Sundays you might see the two walking about the farm,looking at the pigs--great black fellows worth almost theirweight in silver; eying the stock; speculating on the winterwheat showing dark green in April, with rich patches that werealmost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious pipe,spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was afine prospect Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy'sopinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here,at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness andbitter disappointment of his married life.That married life had endured now for more than thirty years.Ben Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step--for hisyears. The stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a littleshrunken. He was as neat and clean at fifty-five as he had beenat twenty-five-a habit that, on a farm, is fraught withdifficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was aman of standing. When he drove into town on a bright wintermorning, in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and hisgreat boots, and entered the First National Bank, even Shumway,the cashier, would look up from his desk to say:"Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?"When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that therewere no unpaid notes to his discredit.All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; thework of his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. Allthese things were dependent on him for their futurewell-being--on him and on Dike after him. His days were full andrunning over. Much of the work was drudgery; most of it wasbackbreaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was hisreason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, thoughhe never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He onlyknew that he was part of the great scheme of things and that hewas functioning ably. If he had expressed himself at all, hemight have said:"Well, I got my work cut out for me, and I do it, and do itright."There was a tractor, now, of course; and a sturdy, middle-classautomobile in which Bella lolled red-faced when they drove intotown.As Ben Westerveld had prospered, his shrewish wife had reaped herbenefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists ontwentieth- century farm implements and medieval householdequipment. He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchenthere, an icehouse, a commodious porch, a washing machine, even abathroom. But Bella remained unplacated. Her face was settoward the city. And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty yearsof nagging was beginning to tell on Ben Westerveld. He was thefiner metal, but she was the heavier, the coarser. She beat himand molded him as iron beats upon gold.Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, butslack like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking ofhis rights and crying down with the rich. They had two children.Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Moviesevery night. Halsted Street just around the corner. The bigstores. State Street. The el took you downtown in no time.Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, after one ofthose letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became aterrible termagant.When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat hedidn't dream that a world would be clamoring for hogs and wheatfor four long years. When the time came, he had them, and soldthem fabulously. But wheat and hogs and markets becamenegligible things on the day that Dike, with seven other farmboys from the district, left for the nearest training camp thatwas to fit them for France and war.Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going intohysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy totown that day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen,if you had looked close, how the veins and cords swelled in thelean brown neck above the clean blue shirt. But that was all. Asthe weeks went on, the quick, light step began to lag a little.He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone.There were no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do itall. A touch of rheumatism that winter half crippled him foreight weeks. Bella's voice seemed never to stop its plaint."There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Nextthing you'll die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang onmy hands." At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by thestove. His resistance was wearing down. He knew it. He wasn'tdying. He knew that, too. But something in him was. Somethingthat had resisted her all these years. Something that had madehim master and superior in spite of everything.In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory ofEmma Byers came to him often. She had left that districttwenty-eight years ago, and had married, and lived in Chicagosomewhere, he had heard, and was prosperous. He wasted no timein idle regrets. He had been a fool, and he paid the price offools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, never suspectedthe presence in the untidy place of a third person--a sturdy girlof twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to look at, and withhonest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow."It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine wenton. "Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an'years. You can't make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack andruin. You could rent out the farm for a year, on trial. TheBurdickers'd take it, and glad. They got those three strappin'louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or cross-eyed orsomethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on shares.Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll nevercome b----"But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl ofunaccustomed rage that broke from him, even she ceased herclatter.They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that hadbeen on Ben Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the trainthat carried him to camp was stamped there again--indelibly thistime, it seemed. Calhoun County in the spring has much thebeauty of California. There is a peculiar golden light about it,and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben Westerveld, walking downhis path to the gate, was more poignantly dramatic than anyfigure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, though, asthey do in a play. He dared not.They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's.Bella was almost amiable these days. She took to city life asthough the past thirty years had never been. White kid shoes,delicatessen stores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, thecrowds, the crashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode ofliving--necessitated by a four-room flat--all these urbanadjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been bred inthe midst of them.She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping.Theirs was a respectable neighborhood of well-paid artisans,bookkeepers, and small shopkeepers. The women did their ownhousework in drab garments and soiled boudoir caps that hid amultitude of unkempt heads. They seemed to find a great deal oftime for amiable, empty gabbling From seven to four you might seea pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite bedroom windows,conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of sweepingfront steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocerybundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running overto Ma's for a minute." The two quarreled a great deal, being sonearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated eachother seemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring themtogether as well."I'm going downtown today to do a little shopping," Minniewould say. "Do you want to come along, Ma?""What you got to get?""Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple little dresses forPearlie.""When I was your age I made every stitch you wore.""Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. Igot all I can do to tend to the house, without sewing.""I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an'besides----""A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tellme."The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took thedowntown el together. You saw them, flushed of face, withtwitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spendingin the five-and-ten-cent store on the wrong side of State Street.They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in thestifling air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack ofsalted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bagof the greasy pink candy piled in profusion on the counter, andthis they would munch as they went.They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented theirhurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-bydelicatessen.Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer.And so now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervousforefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that,well, here was another day. What day was it? L'see now.Yesterday was--yesterday. A little feeling of panic came overhim. He couldn't remember what yesterday had been. He countedback laboriously and decided that today must be Thursday. Notthat it made any difference.They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city hadnot digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not beassimilated. There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributingnothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar amblingaimlessly about Halsted Street or State downtown. You saw himconversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who wasjanitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben used to follow himaround pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the day. Benknew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, thefirebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Benthought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had always beengreeted when he clumped down the main street of Commercial--if hethought of how the farmers for miles around had come to him forexpert advice and opinion--he said nothing.Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to thefurnace of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes,shoveled coal. He tinkered and rattled and shook things. Youheard him shoveling and scraping down there, and smelled theacrid odor of his pipe. It gave him something to do. He wouldemerge sooty and almost happy."You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella wouldscold. "If you want something to do, why don't you plant agarden in the back yard and grow something? You was crazy aboutit on the farm."His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explainto her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing aboutan inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would notallow him to stoop to gardening-- he who had reigned over sixhundred acres of bountiful soil.On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whilingaway one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smellingatmosphere of the place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came tohim. He saw beautiful tiger-women twining fair, false arms aboutthe stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins.He was only mildly interested. He talked to anyone who wouldtalk to him, though he was naturally a shy man. He talked to thebarber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar conductor, themilkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not interestthese gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheat wasthe most vital topic of conversation in the world."Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop,with about 917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that'swhat's going to win the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning,that's what I say.""Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer partof it is that Farmer Ben was right.Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid.It gave her many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping."Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while thismorning? I got to run downtown to match something and she getsso tired and mean-acting if I take her along. Ma's going withme."He loved the feel of Pearlie's small, velvet-soft hand in his bigfist. He called her "little feller," and fed her forbiddendainties. His big brown fingers were miraculously deft atbuttoning and unbuttoning her tiny garments, and wiping her softlips, and performing a hundred tender offices. He was playing asort of game with himself, pretending this was Dike become a babyagain. Once the pair managed to get over to Lincoln Park, wherethey spent a glorious day looking at the animals, eating popcorn,and riding on the miniature railway.They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying aboutDike. Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present inhis thoughts. They had written him of their move, but he had notseemed to get the impression of its permanence. His lettersindicated that he thought they were visiting Minnie, or taking avacation in the city. Dike's letters were few. Ben treasuredthem, and read and reread them. When the Armistice news came,and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben tried to fancyhim fitting into the life of the city. And his whole beingrevolted at the thought.He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths standing at the corner ofHalsted and Sixty-third, spitting languidly and handling theirlimp cigarettes with an amazing labial dexterity. Theirconversation was low-voiced, sinister, and terse, and their eyesnarrowed as they watched the overdressed, scarlet-lipped girls goby. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's heart.The lack of exercise and manual labor began to tell on Ben. Hedid not grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sagand hang on his frame, like a garment grown too large for him.He walked a great deal. Perhaps that had something to do withit. He tramped miles of city pave- ments. He was a very lonelyman. And then, one day, quite by accident, he came upon SouthWater Street. Came upon it, stared at it as a water-crazedtraveler in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, anddrank from it, thirstily, gratefully.South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packedthoroughfare come daily the fruits and vegetables that willsupply a million tables. Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but hadnever attempted to find it. Now he stumbled upon it and,standing there, felt at home in Chicago for the first time inmore than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in overalls andcarrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. He hadn'tseen men like that since he had left the farm. The sight of themsent a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reachedout and he ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrelon the walk. His fingers lingered and gripped them, and passedover them lovingly.At the contact something within him that had been tight andhungry seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding onthose familiar things for which they had been starving.He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce,bins of onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! Theradishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pureorange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his experteye. The cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride;the cabbages glowed like jade.And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in thisbig, shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Herewere rufous men in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overallsand old blue shirts, and mashed hats worn at a careless angle.Men, jovial, good-natured, with clear eyes, and having about themsome of the revivifying freshness and wholesomeness of theproducts they handled.Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onionsand garlic and of the earth that seemed to cling to thevegetables, washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply,gratefully, and felt strangely at peace.It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly toavoid a hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busymen found time to greet him friendlily. "H'are you!" they saidgenially. "H'are you this morning!"He was marketwise enough to know that some of these busy peoplewere commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards,clerks. It was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiestbusiness corner, though, in front of the largest commission houseon the street, he saw a woman. Evidently she was transactingbusiness, too, for he saw the men bringing boxes of berries andvegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain blue skirt anda small black hat.A funny job for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays!He turned sidewise in the narrow, crowded space in order to passher little group. And one of the men--a red-cheeked,merry-looking young fellow in a white apron--laughed and said:"Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving a bargain withyou, I quit. It can't be did!"Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that thisstraight, slim, tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining soshrewdly with these men, was the Emma Byers of the old days. Buthe stopped there a moment, in frank curiosity, and the womanlooked up. She looked up, and he knew those intelligent eyes andthat serene brow. He had carried the picture of them in his mindfor more than thirty years, so it was not so surprising.He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment,but he acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're EmmaByers, ain't you?"She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completelyhad the roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyedold man. Then: "Why, Ben!" she said quietly. And there waspity in her voice, though she did not mean to have it there. Sheput out one hand--that capable, reassuring hand--and gripped hisand held it a moment. It was queer and significant that itshould be his hand that lay within hers."Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?"He tried to be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned manwith whom she had been dealing and smiled."What am I doing here, Joe?"Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on thestreet at his own game, and makin' so much money that----"But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my ownexplaining." She turned to Ben again. "And what are you doinghere in Chicago?"Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well,I'm--we're living here, I s'pose. Livin' here."She glanced at him sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?""Yes.""Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finishedit briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright browneyes and her alert manner and her quick little movements she madeyou think of a wren--a businesslike little wren--a very earlywren that is highly versed in the worm-catching way.At her next utterance he was startled but game."Have you had your lunch?""Why, no; I----""I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go andhave a bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. Acup of coffee and a sandwich, anyway."Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with thoseintelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the yearsslip from him. They were walking down the country road together,and she was listening quietly and advising him.She interrogated him gently. But something of his oldmasterfulness came back to him. "No, I want to know about youfirst. I can't get the rights of it, you being here on SouthWater, tradin' and all."So she told him briefly. She was in the commission business.Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstoneand the Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gavehim bare facts, but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versedin business to know that here was a woman of establishedcommercial position."But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all thistime? Why, you must be anyway--it ain't that you lookit--but----" He floundered, stopped.She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you onthat. And I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to worktill I die. My children keep telling me to stop, but I knowbetter than that. I'm not going to rust out. I want to wearout." Then, at an unspoken question in his eyes: "He's dead.These twenty years. It was hard at first, when the children weresmall. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything else.It came natural to me. That's all."So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of thefarm and of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. Hespoke of Bella, and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie.And the words came falteringly. He was trying to hide something,and he was not made for deception. When he had finished:"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm.""I can't. She--I can't."She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm."He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "Ican't.""You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you.Did you ever hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you'repoisoning yourself. You'll die of it. You've got another twentyyears of work in you. What's ailing you? You go back to yourwheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger job inthe world than that."For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her owninspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go,his shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorwayhe paused a moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little,stammered."Emma--I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck foryou the way it turned out--but I always wanted to----"She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly,bright brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you,Ben. I had to live a long time to understand it. But I neverheld a grudge. It just wasn't to be, I suppose. But listen tome, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go back to your wheat andyour apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger man-size job inthe world. It's where you belong."Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again theysagged. And so they parted, the two.He must have walked almost all the long way home, through milesand miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, forwhen he looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliarone.So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He tookthe right streetcar at last and got off at his own corner atseven o'clock, or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even histardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came fromwithin. High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, ofcourse, but there was Minnie's too, and Gus's growl, andPearlie's treble, and the boy Ed's and----At the other voice his hand trembled so that the knob rattled inthe door, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it,and stumbled in, breathing hard. And that other voice wasDike's.He must have just arrived. The flurry of explanation was stillin progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and hiscanteen at his hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown,hard, glowing Dike, strangely tall and handsome and older, too.Older.All this Ben saw in less than one electric second. Then he hadthe boy's two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying,"Hello, Pop."Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. Theothers were taking up the explanation and going over it again andagain, and marveling, and asking questions."He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterdayonly. An' he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read ourletters, Dike, that you didn't know we was here now? And thenhe's only got an hour more. They got to go to Camp Grant to be,now, demobilized. He came out to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't hebig!"But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. ThenDike spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had anew clipped way of uttering his words:"Say, Pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! Theygot about an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. Ifthey's a little dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they planta crop in there. I never seen nothin' like it. Say, we wasteenough stuff over here to keep that whole country in food for ahundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta the ark, believe me.If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was the Germanscomin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot ofnew ideas over there. And you ought to see the oldbirds--womenfolks and men about eighty years old-- runnin'everything on the farm. They had to. I learned somethin' offthem about farmin'.""Forget the farm," said Minnie."Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you ajob here out at the works for four-fifty a day, and six when youlearn it right."Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on hisface. "What d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What youall----"Bella laughed jovially. "F'r heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up!We're livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more."Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into hisface. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about itthat suddenly made old Ben think of Pearlie when she had beenslapped by her quick- tempered mother."But I been countin' on the farm," he said miserably. "I justbeen livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I---- Thestreets here, they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin'on the farm. I want to go back and be a farmer. I want----"And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--the old BenWesterveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over sixhundred acres of bounteous bottomland."That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'mI. I've got another twenty years of work in me. We're goingback to the farm."Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't!I'm not agoin' back to the farm."But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You'regoin' back, Bella," he said quietly, "an' things are goin' tobe different. You're goin' to run the house the way I say, orI'll know why. If you can't do it, I'll get them in that can.An' me and Dike, we're goin' back to our wheat and our apples andour hogs. Yessir! There ain't a bigger man-size job in theworld."

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