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

bounden slave, August Hempel. Her husband she dismissed with affectionate disregard.

“Michael’s all right,” she had said on that day of their first meeting, “if you tell him what’s to be done. He’ll always do it. But Pa’s the one that thinks of things. He’s like a general, and Michael’s the captain. Well, now, Pa’ll be out tomorrow and I’ll probably come with him. I’ve got a committee meeting, but I can easily⁠—”

“You said⁠—did you say your father would be out tomorrow! Out where?”

“To your place. Farm.”

“But why should he? It’s a little twenty-five-acre truck farm, and half of it under water a good deal of the time.”

“Pa’ll find a use for it, never fear. He won’t say much, but he’ll think of things. And then everything will be all right.”

“It’s miles. Miles. Way out in High Prairie.”

“Well, if you could make it with those horses, Selina, I guess we can with Pa’s two grays that hold a record for a mile in three minutes or three miles in a minute, I forget which. Or in the auto, though Pa hates it. Michael is the only one in the family who likes it.”

A species of ugly pride now possessed Selina. “I don’t need help. Really I don’t, Julie dear. It’s never been like today. Never before. We were getting on very well, Pervus and I. Then after Pervus’s death so suddenly like that I was frightened. Terribly frightened. About Dirk. I wanted him to have everything. Beautiful things. I wanted his life to be beautiful. Life can be so ugly, Julie. You don’t know. You don’t know.”

“Well, now, that’s why I say. We’ll be out tomorrow, Pa and I. Dirk’s going to have everything beautiful. We’ll see to that.”

It was then that Selina had said, “But that’s just it. I want to do it myself, for him. I can. I want to give him all these things myself.”

“But that’s selfish.”

“I don’t mean to be. I just want to do the best thing for Dirk.”

It was shortly after noon that High Prairie, hearing the unaccustomed chug of a motor, rushed to its windows or porches to behold Selina DeJong in her mashed black felt hat and Dirk waving his battered straw wildly, riding up the Halsted road toward the DeJong farm in a bright red automobile that had shattered the nerves of every farmer’s team it had met on the way. Of the DeJong team and the DeJong dog Pom, and the DeJong vegetable wagon there was absolutely no sign. High Prairie was rendered unfit for work throughout the next twenty-four hours.

The idea had been Julie’s, and Selina had submitted rather than acquiesced, for by now she was too tired to combat anything or anyone. If Julie had proposed her entering High Prairie on the back of an elephant with a mahout perched between his ears Selina would have agreed⁠—rather, would have been unable to object.

“It’ll get you home in no time,” Julie had said, energetically. “You look like a ghost and the boy’s half asleep. I’ll telephone Pa and he’ll have one of the men from the barns drive your team out so it’ll be there by six. Just you leave it all to me. Haven’t you ever ridden in one! Why, there’s nothing to be scared of. I like the horses best, myself. I’m like Pa. He says if you use horses you get there.”

Dirk had accepted the new conveyance with the adaptability of childhood, had even predicted, grandly, “I’m going to have one when I grow up that’ll go faster ’n this, even.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to go faster than this, Dirk,” Selina had protested breathlessly as they chugged along at the alarming rate of almost fifteen miles an hour.

Jan Snip had been rendered speechless. Until the actual arrival of the team and wagon at six he counted them as mysteriously lost and DeJong’s widow clearly gone mad. August Hempel’s arrival next day with Julie seated beside him in the light spider-phaeton drawn by two slim wild-eyed quivering grays made little tumult in Jan’s stunned mind by now incapable of absorbing any fresh surprises.

In the twelve years’ transition from butcher to packer Aug Hempel had taken on a certain authority and distinction. Now, at fifty-five, his hair was gray, relieving the too-ruddy colour of his face. He talked almost without an accent; used the idiomatic American speech he heard about the yards, where the Hempel packing plant was situated. Only his d’s were likely to sound like t’s. The letter j had a slightly ch sound. In the last few years he had grown very deaf in one ear, so that when you spoke to him he looked at you intently. This had given him a reputation for keenness and great character insight, when it was merely the protective trick of a man who does not want to confess that he is hard of hearing. He wore square-toed shoes with soft tips and square-cut gray clothes and a large gray hat with a chronically inadequate sweatband. The square-cut boots were expensive, and the square-cut gray clothes and the large gray hat, but in them he always gave the effect of being dressed in the discarded garments of a much larger man.

Selina’s domain he surveyed with a keen and comprehensive eye.

“You want to sell?”

“No.”

“That’s good.” (It was nearly goot as he said it.) “Few years from now this land will be worth money.” He had spent a bare fifteen minutes taking shrewd valuation of the property from fields to barn, from barn to house. “Well, what do you want to do, heh, Selina?”

They were seated in the cool and unexpectedly pleasing little parlour, with its old Dutch lustre set gleaming softly in the cabinet, its three rows of books, its air of comfort and usage.

Dirk was in the yard with one of the Van Ruys boys, surveying the grays proprietorially. Jan was rooting in the fields. Selina clasped her hands tightly in her lap⁠—those hands that,