She interrogated him gently. But something of his old masterfulness came back to him. “No, I want to know about you first. I can’t get the rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin’ and all.”
So she told him briefly. She was in the commission business. Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know that here was a woman of established commercial position.
“But how does it happen you’re keepin’ it up, Emma, all this time? Why, you must be anyway—it ain’t that you look it—but–-” He floundered, stopped.
She laughed. “That’s all right, Ben. I couldn’t fool you on that. And I’m working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I’m not going to rust out. I want to wear out.” Then, at an unspoken question in his eyes: “He’s dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first, when the children were small. 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 the farm and of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke 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. “I can’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’re poisoning yourself. You’ll die of it. You’ve got another twenty years of work in you. What’s ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn’t a bigger job in the world than that.”
For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go, his shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered.
“Emma—I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you 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 never held a grudge. It just wasn’t to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn’t a bigger man-size job in the world. It’s where you belong.”
Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And so they parted, the two.
He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one.
So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the right streetcar at last and got off at his own corner at seven o’clock, or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.
But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. High-pitched voices. Bella’s above all the rest, of course, but there was Minnie’s too, and Gus’s growl, and Pearlie’s treble, and the boy Ed’s and–-
At the other voice his hand trembled so that the knob rattled in the door, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike’s.
He must have just arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in progress. Dike’s knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen 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 had the 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. The others were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and marveling, and asking questions.
“He come in to—what’s that place, Dike?—Hoboken—yesterday only. An’ he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can’t you read our letters, Dike, that you didn’t know we was here now? And then he’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 he big!”
But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped way of uttering his words:
“Say, Pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they’s a little dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I never seen nothin’ like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they’d think it was the Germans comin’ back. But they’re smart at that. I picked up a lot of new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds—womenfolks and men about eighty years old— runnin’ everything on the farm. They had to. I learned somethin’ off them about farmin’.”
“Forget the farm,” said Minnie.
“Yeh,” echoed Gus, “forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out at the works for four-fifty a day, and six when you learn it right.”
Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. “What d’you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all–-“
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 his face. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick-tempered mother.
“But I been countin’ on the farm,” he said miserably. “I just been livin’ on the idea of comin’ back to it. Why, I–- The streets 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 Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.
“That’s all right, Dike,” he said. “You’re going back. So’m I. I’ve got another twenty years of work in me. We’re going back 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’re goin’ back, Bella,” he said quietly, “an’ things are goin’ to be different. You’re goin’ to run the house the way I say, or I’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 and our hogs. Yessir! There ain’t a bigger man-size job in the world.”
Un Morso doo Pang [1919]
When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset had wrung from her only a casual tribute, such as: “My! Look how red the sky is!” delivered as unemotionally as a weather bulletin.
Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert heap in a cotton house coat and scuffed slippers. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no answering radiance in the girl’s face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.