So Big by Edna Ferber (read books for money .txt) 📕

Pervus DeJong, Roelf presented that most touching and miserable of spectacles, a small boy jealous and helpless in his jealousy. Selina had asked him to join the tri-weekly evening lessons; had, indeed, insisted that he be a pupil in the class round the parlour stove. Maartje had said, on the night of Pervus DeJong’s first visit, “Roelf, you sit, too, and learn. Is good for you to learn out of books the way teacher says.” Klaas Pool, too, had approved the plan, since it would cost nothing and, furthermore, would in no way interfere with Roelf’s farm work. “Sure; learn,” he said, with a large gesture.

Roelf would not. He behaved very badly; slammed doors, whistled, scuffled on the kitchen floor, made many mysterious trips through the parlour up the stairs that led off that room, ascending with a clatter; incited Geertje and Jozina to quarrels and tears; had the household in a hubbub; stumbled over Dunder, the dog, so that that anguished animal’s yelps were added to the din.

Selina was frantic. Lessons were impossible amidst this uproar. “It has never been like this before,” she assured Pervus, almost tearfully. “I don’t know what’s the matter. It’s awful.”

Pervus had looked up from his slate. His eyes were calm, his lips smiling. “Is all right. In my house is too still, evenings. Next time it goes better. You see.”

Next time it did go better. Roelf disappeared into his work-shed after supper; did not emerge until after DeJong’s departure.

There was something about the sight of this great creature bent laboriously over a slate, the pencil held clumsily in his huge fingers, that moved Selina strangely. Pity wracked her. If she had known to what emotion this pity was akin she might have taken away the slate and given him a tablet, and the whole course of her life would have been different. “Poor lad,” she thought. “Poor lad.” Chided herself for being amused at his childlike earnestness.

He did not make an apt pupil, though painstaking. Usually the top draught of the stove was open, and the glow of the fire imparted to his face and head a certain roseate glory. He was very grave. His brow wore a troubled frown. Selina would go over a problem or a sentence again and again, patiently, patiently. Then, suddenly, like a hand passed over his face, his smile would come, transforming it. He had white strong teeth, too small, and perhaps not so white as they seemed because of his russet blondeur. He would smile like a child, and Selina should have been warned by the warm rush of joy that his smile gave her. She would smile, too. He was as pleased as though he had made a fresh and wonderful discovery.

“It’s easy,” he would say, “when you know it once.” Like a boy.

He usually went home by eight-thirty or nine. Often the Pools went to bed before he left. After he had gone Selina was wakeful. She would heat water and wash; brush her hair vigorously; feeling at once buoyant and depressed.

Sometimes they fell to talking. His wife had died in the second year of their marriage, when the child was born. The child, too, had died. A girl. He was unlucky, like that. It was the same with the farm.

“Spring, half of the land is under water. My piece, just. Bouts’s place, next to me, is high and rich. Bouts, he don’t even need deep ploughing. His land is quick land. It warms up in the spring early. After rain it works easy. He puts in fertilizer, any kind, and his plants jump, like. My place is bad for garden truck. Wet. All the time, wet; or in summer baked before I can loosen it again. Muckland.”

Selina thought a moment. She had heard much talk between Klaas and Jakob, winter evenings. “Can’t you do something to it⁠—fix it⁠—so that the water will run off? Raise it, or dig a ditch or something?”

“We-e-ell, maybe. Maybe you could. But it costs money, draining.”

“It costs money not to, doesn’t it?”

He considered this, ruminatively. “Guess it does. But you don’t have to have ready cash to let the land lay. To drain it you do.”

Selina shook her head impatiently. “That’s a very foolish, shortsighted way to reason.”

He looked helpless as only the strong and powerful can look. Selina’s heart melted in pity. He would look down at the great calloused hands; up at her. One of the charms of Pervus DeJong lay in the things that his eyes said and his tongue did not. Women always imagined he was about to say what he looked, but he never did. It made otherwise dull conversation with him most exciting.

His was in no way a shrewd mind. His respect for Selina was almost reverence. But he had this advantage: he had married a woman, had lived with her for two years. She had borne him a child. Selina was a girl in experience. She was a woman capable of a great deal of passion, but she did not know that. Passion was a thing no woman possessed, much less talked about. It simply did not exist, except in men, and then was something to be ashamed of, like a violent temper, or a weak stomach.

By the first of March he could speak a slow, careful, and fairly grammatical English. He could master simple sums. By the middle of March the lessons would cease. There was too much work to do about the farm⁠—night work as well as day. She found herself trying not to think about the time when the lessons should cease. She refused to look ahead to April.

One night, late in February, Selina was conscious that she was trying to control something. She was trying to keep her eyes away from something. She realized that she was trying not to look at his hands. She wanted, crazily, to touch them. She wanted to feel them about her throat. She wanted to put her lips on his hands⁠—brush