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

eyes, so that to Selina the mirthful tail of his right eye and his round red cheek with the golden fuzz on it gave him an incredibly roguish brownie look.

Selina laughed, too, even while she protested his laughter. “But they are!” she insisted. “They are beautiful. Like jade and Burgundy. No, like⁠—uh⁠—like⁠—what’s that in⁠—like chrysoprase and porphyry. All those fields of cabbages and the corn and the beet-tops together look like Persian patches.”

Which was, certainly, no way for a new school teacher to talk to a Holland truck gardener driving his team along the dirt road on his way to High Prairie. But then, Selina, remember, had read Byron at seventeen.

Klaas Pool knew nothing of chrysoprase and porphyry. Nor of Byron. Nor, for that matter, of jade and Burgundy. But he did know cabbages, both green and red. He knew cabbage from seed to sauerkraut; he knew and grew varieties from the sturdy Flat Dutch to the early Wakefield. But that they were beautiful; that they looked like jewels; that they lay like Persian patches, had never entered his head, and rightly. What has the head of a cabbage, or, for that matter, of a robust, soil-stained, toiling Dutch truck farmer to do with nonsense like chrysoprase, with jade, with Burgundy, with Persian patterns!

The horses clopped down the heavy country road. Now and again the bulk beside Selina was agitated silently, as before. And from between the golden fuzz of stubble beard she would hear, “Cabbages! Cabbages is⁠—” But she did not feel offended. She could not have been offended at anything today. For in spite of her recent tragedy, her nineteen years, her loneliness, the terrifying thought of this new home to which she was going, among strangers, she was conscious of a warm little thrill of elation, of excitement⁠—of adventure! That was it. “The whole thing’s just a grand adventure,” Simeon Peake had said. Selina gave a little bounce of anticipation. She was doing a revolutionary and daring thing; a thing that the Vermont and now, fortunately, inaccessible Peakes would have regarded with horror. For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel-strong frame; one brown lady’s-cloth, one wine-red cashmere; four hundred and ninety-seven dollars; and a gay, adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

So now, as they bumped and jolted along the road Selina thought herself lucky, though she was a little terrified. She turned her gaze from the flat prairie land to the silent figure beside her. Hers was a lively, volatile nature, and his uncommunicativeness made her vaguely uncomfortable. Yet there was nothing glum about his face. Upon it there even lingered, in the corners of his eyes and about his mouth, faint shadows of merriment.

Klaas Pool was a school director. She was to live at his house. Perhaps she should not have said that about the cabbages. So now she drew herself up primly and tried to appear the school teacher, and succeeded in looking as severe as a white pansy.

“Ahem!” (or nearly that). “You have three children, haven’t you, Mr. Pool? They’ll all be my pupils?”

Klaas Pool ruminated on this. He concentrated so that a slight frown marred the serenity of his brow. In this double question of hers, an attempt to give the conversation a dignified turn, she had apparently created some difficulty for her host. He was trying to shake his head two ways at the same time. This gave it a rotary motion. Selina saw, with amazement, that he was attempting to nod negation and confirmation at once.

“You mean you haven’t⁠—or they’re not?⁠—or⁠—?”

“I have got three children. All will not be your pupils.” There was something final, unshakable in his delivery of this.

“Dear me! Why not? Which ones won’t?”

This fusillade proved fatal. It served permanently to check the slight trickle of conversation which had begun to issue from his lips. They jogged on for perhaps a matter of three miles, in silence. Selina told herself then, sternly, that she must not laugh. Having told herself this, sternly, she began to laugh because she could not help it; a gay little sound that flew out like the whir of a bird’s wing on the crisp autumnal sunset air. And suddenly this light sound was joined by a slow rumbling that swelled and bubbled a good deal in the manner of the rich glubby sounds that issue from a kettle that has been simmering for a long time. So they laughed together, these two; the rather scared young thing who was trying to be prim, and the dull, unimaginative truck farmer because this alert, great-eyed, slim white creature perched birdlike on the wagon seat beside him had tickled his slow humour-sense.

Selina felt suddenly friendly and happy. “Do tell me which ones will and which won’t.”

“Geertje goes to school. Jozina goes to school. Roelf works by the farm.”

“How old is Roelf?” She was being school teacherly again.

“Roelf is twelve.”

“Twelve! And no longer at school! But why not!”

“Roelf he works by the farm.”

“Doesn’t Roelf like school?”

“But sure.”

“Don’t you think he ought to go to school?”

“But sure.”

Having begun, she could not go back. “Doesn’t your wife want Roelf to go to school any more?”

“Maartje? But sure.”

She gathered herself together; hurled herself behind the next question. “Then why doesn’t he go to school, for pity’s sake!”

Klaas Pool’s pale blue eyes were fixed on the spot between the horse’s ears. His face was serene, placid, patient.

“Roelf he works by the farm.”

Selina subsided, beaten.

She wondered about Roelf. Would he be a furtive, slinking boy, like Smike? Geertje and Jozina. Geertje⁠—Gertrude, of course. Jozina? Josephine. Maartje?⁠—m-m-m-m⁠—Martha, probably. At any rate, it was going to be interesting. It was going to be wonderful! Suppose she had gone to Vermont