Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue shirt. But that was all. As the 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 it all. A touch of rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella’s voice seemed never to stop its plaint.
“There ain’t no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you’ll die on me, and then I’ll have the whole shebang on my hands.” At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing down. He knew it. He wasn’t dying. He knew that, too. But something in him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that had made him master and superior in spite of everything.
In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person—a sturdy girl of twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to look at, and with honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.
“It’ll get worse an’ worse all the time,” Bella’s whine went on. “Everybody says the war’ll last prob’ly for years an’ years. You can’t make out alone. Everything’s goin’ to rack and ruin. You could rent out the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers’d take it, and glad. They got those three strappin’ louts that’s all flat-footed or slab-sided or cross-eyed or somethin’, and no good for the army. Let them run it on shares. Maybe they’ll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike’ll never come b–-“
But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter.
They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben Westerveld’s face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to camp was stamped there again—indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun County in the spring has much the beauty of California. There is a peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, though, as they 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 as though the past thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode of living—necessitated by a four-room flat—all these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been bred in the 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 own housework in drab garments and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They seemed to find a great deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling From seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called “running over to Ma’s for a minute.” The two quarreled a great deal, being so nearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring them together as well.
“I’m going downtown today to do a little shopping,” Minnie would say. “Do you want to come along, Ma?”
“What you got to get?”
“Oh, I thought I’d look at a couple little dresses for Pearlie.”
“When I was your age I made every stitch you wore.”
“Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain’t the farm. I got 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 tell me.”
The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown el together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-tencent store on the wrong side of State Street.
They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in the stifling air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as they went.
They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their hurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-by delicatessen.
Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger 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 over him. He couldn’t remember what yesterday had been. He counted back laboriously and decided that today must be Thursday. Not that it made any difference.
They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago’s crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie’s husband. Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he clumped down the main street of Commercial—if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and opinion—he said nothing.
Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shoveled coal. He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shoveling and scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odor of his pipe. It gave him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.
“You been monkeying with that furnace again!” Bella would scold. “If you want something to do, why don’t you plant a garden in the back yard and grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm.”
His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to gardening— he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.
On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful tiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He talked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy man. He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.