# So Big/Chapter 11

XI
IT WOULD be enchanting to be able to record that Selina, next day, had phenomenal success, disposing of her carefully bunched wares to great advantage, driving smartly off up Halsted Street toward High Prairie with a goodly profit jingling in her scuffed leather purse. The truth is that she had a day so devastating, so catastrophic, as would have discouraged most men and certainly any woman less desperate and determined.
She had awakened, not to daylight, but to the three o’clock blackness. The street was already astir. Selina brushed her skirt to rid it of the clinging hay, tidied herself as best she could. Leaving Dirk still asleep, she called Pom from beneath the wagon to act as sentinel at the dashboard, and crossed the street to Chris Spanknoebel’s. She knew Chris, and he her. He would let her wash at the faucet at the rear of the eating house. She would buy hot coffee for herself and Dirk to warm and revivify them. They would eat the sandwiches left from the night before.
Chris himself, a pot-paunched Austrian, blond, benevolent, was standing behind his bar, wiping the slab with a large moist cloth. With the other hand ​he swept the surface with a rubber-tipped board about the size of a shingle. This contrivance gathered up such beads of moisture as might be left by the cloth. Two sweeps of it rendered the counter dry and shining. Later Chris allowed Dirk to wield this rubber-tipped contrivance—a most satisfactory thing to do, leaving one with a feeling of perfect achievement.
Spanknoebel seemed never to sleep, yet his colour was ruddy, his blue eyes clear. The last truckster coming in at night for a beer or a cup of coffee and a sandwich was greeted by Chris, white-aproned, pink-cheeked, wide awake, swabbing the bar’s shining surface with the thirsty cloth, swishing it with the sly rubber-tipped board. “Well, how goes it all the while?” said Chris. The earliest morning trader found Chris in a fresh white apron crackling with starch and ironing. He would swab the bar with a gesture of welcome, of greeting. “Well, how goes it all the while?”
As Selina entered the long room now there was something heartening, reassuring about Chris’s clean white apron, his ruddy colour, the very sweep of his shirt-sleeved arm as it encompassed the bar-slab. From the kitchen at the rear came the sounds of sizzling and frying, and the gracious scent of coffee and of frying pork and potatoes. Already the market men were seated at the tables eating huge and hurried breakfasts: hunks of ham; eggs in pairs; potatoes cut in great cubes; cups of steaming coffee and chunks of bread that they plastered liberally with butter.
​Selina approached Chris. His round face loomed out through the smoke like the sun in a fog. “Well, how goes it all the while?” Then he recognized her. “Um Gottes!—why, it’s Mis’ DeJong!” He wiped his great hand on a convenient towel, extended it in sympathy to the widow. “I heerd,” he said, “I heerd.” His inarticulateness made his words doubly effective.
“I’ve come in with the load, Mr. Spanknoebel. The boy and I. He’s still asleep in the wagon. May I bring him over here to clean him up a little before breakfast?”
“Sure! Sure!’ A sudden suspicion struck him. “You ain’t slept in the wagon, Mis’ DeJong! Um Gottes——”
“Yes. It wasn’t bad. The boy slept the night through. I slept, too, quite a little.”
“Why you didn’t come here! Why——” At the look in Selina’s face he knew then. “For nothing you and the boy could sleep here.”
“I knew that! That’s why.”
“Don’t talk dumb, Mrs. DeJong. Half the time the rooms is vacant. You and the boy chust as well—twenty cents, then, and pay me when you got it. But any way you don’t come in reg’lar with the load, do you? That ain’t for womans.”
“There’s no one to do it for me, except Jan. And he’s worse than nobody. Just through September and October. After that, maybe——” Her voice trailed off. It is hard to be hopeful at three in the morning, before breakfast.
​She went to the little wash room at the rear, felt better immediately she had washed vigorously, combed her hair. She returned to the wagon to find a panic-stricken Dirk sure of nothing but that he had been deserted by his mother. Fifteen minutes later the two were seated at a table on which was spread what Chris Spanknoebel considered an adequate breakfast. A heartening enough beginning for the day, and a deceptive.
The Haymarket buyers did not want to purchase its vegetables from Selina DeJong. It wasn’t used to buying of women, but to selling to them. Pedlers and small grocers swarmed in at four—Greeks, Italians, Jews. They bought shrewdly, craftily, often dishonestly. They sold their wares to the housewives. Their tricks were many. They would change a box of tomatoes while your back was turned; filch a head of cauliflower. There was little system or organization.
Take Luigi. Luigi peddled on the north side. He called his wares through the alleys and side streets of Chicago, adding his raucous voice to the din of an inchoate city. A swarthy face had Luigi, a swift brilliant smile, a crafty eye. The Haymarket called him Loogy. When prices did not please Luigi he pretended not to understand. Then the Haymarket would yell, undeceived, “Heh, Loogy, what de mattah! Spika da Engleesh!” They knew him.
Selina had taken the covers off her vegetables. They were revealed crisp, fresh, colourful. But Selina knew ​they must be sold now, quickly. When the leaves began to wilt, when the edges of the cauliflower heads curled ever so slightly, turned brown and limp, their value decreased by half, even though the heads themselves remained white and firm.
Down the street came the buyers—little black-eyed swarthy men; plump, shirt-sleeved, greasy men; shrewd, tobacco-chewing men in overalls. Stolid red Dutch faces, sunburned. Lean dark foreign faces. Shouting, clatter, turmoil.
“Heh! Get your horse outta here! What the hell!”
“How much for the whole barrel?”
“Got any beans? No, don’t want no cauliflower, Beans!”
“Tough!”
“Well, keep ’em. I don’t want ’em.”
“Quarter for the sack.”
“G’wan, them ain’t five-pound heads. Bet they don’t come four pounds to the head.”
“Who says they don’t!”
“Gimme five bushels them.”
Food for Chicago’s millions. In and out of the wagons. Under horses’ hoofs. Bare-footed children, baskets on their arms, snatching bits of fallen vegetables from the cobbles. Gutter Annie, a shawl pinned across her pendulous breasts, scavengering a potato there, an onion fallen to the street, scraps of fruit and green stuff in the ditch. Big Kate buying carrots, parsley, turnips, beets, all slightly wilted ​and cheap, which she would tie into bunches with her bit of string and sell to the real grocers for soup greens.
The day broke warm. The sun rose red. It would be a humid September day such as frequently came in the autumn to this lake region. Garden stuff would have to move quickly this morning. Afternoon would find it worthless.
Selina stationed herself by her wagon. She saw the familiar faces of a half dozen or more High Prairie neighbours. These called to her, or came over briefly to her wagon, eyeing her wares with a calculating glance. “How you making out, Mis’ DeJong? Well, you got a good load there. Move it along quick this morning. It’s going to be hot I betcha.” Their tone was kindly, but disapproving, too. Their look said, “No place for a woman. No place for a woman.”
The pedlers looked at her bunched bouquets, glanced at her, passed her by. It was not unkindness that prompted them, but a certain shyness, a fear of the unaccustomed. They saw her pale fine face with its great sombre eyes; the slight figure in the decent black dress; the slim brown hands clasped so anxiously together. Her wares were tempting but they passed her by with the instinct that the ignorant have against that which is unusual.
By nine o'clock trading began to fall off. In a panic Selina realized that the sales she had made amounted to little more than two dollars. If she ​stayed there until noon she might double that, but no more. In desperation she harnessed the horses, threaded her way out of the swarming street, and made for South Water Street farther east. Here were the commission houses. The district was jammed with laden carts and wagons exactly as the Haymarket had been, but trading was done on a different scale. She knew that Pervus had sometimes left his entire load with an established dealer here, to be sold on commission. She remembered the name—Talcott—though she did not know the exact location.
“Where we going now, Mom?” The boy had been almost incredibly patient and good. He had accepted his bewildering new surroundings with the adaptability of childhood. He had revelled richly in Chris Spanknoebel’s generous breakfast. He had thought the four dusty artificial palms that graced Chris’s back room luxuriantly tropical. He had been fascinated by the kitchen with its long glowing range, its great tables for slicing, paring, cutting. He liked the ruddy cheer of it, the bustle, the mouth-watering smells. At the wagon he had stood sturdily next his mother, had busied himself vastly assisting her in her few pitiful sales; had plucked wilted leaves, brought forward the freshest and crispest vegetables. But now she saw that he was drooping a little as were her wares, with the heat and the absence from accustomed soil. “Where we going now, Mom?”
“To another street, Sobig——”
“Dirk!”
​“—Dirk, where there’s a man who'll buy all our stuff at once—maybe. Won't that be fine! Then we'll go home. You help mother find his name over the store. Talcott—T-a-l-c-o-double t.”
South Water Street was changing with the city’s growth. Yankee names they used to be—Flint—Keen—Rusk—Lane. Now you saw Cuneo—Meleges—Garibaldi—Campagna. There it was: William Talcott. Fruits and Vegetables.
William Talcott, standing in the cool doorway of his great deep shed-like store, was the antithesis of the feverish crowded street which he so calmly surveyed. He had dealt for forty years in provender. His was the unruffled demeanour of a man who knows the world must have what he has to sell. Every week-day morning at six his dim shaded cavern of a store was packed with sacks, crates, boxes, barrels from which peeped ruffles and sprigs of green; flashes of scarlet, plum-colour, orange. He bought the best only; sold at high prices. He had known Pervus, and Pervus’s father before him, and had adjudged them honest, admirable men. But of their garden truck he had small opinion. The Great Lakes boats brought him choice Michigan peaches and grapes; refrigerator cars brought him the products of California’s soil in a day when out-of-season food was a rare luxury. He wore neat pepper-and-salt pants and vest; shirt sleeves a startling white in that blue-shirted overalled world; a massive gold watch chain spanning his middle; square-toed boots; a straw fedora set well back; a pretty good ​cigar, unlighted, in his mouth. Shrewd blue eyes he had; sparse hair much the colour of his suit. Like a lean laconic god he stood in his doorway niche while toilers offered for his inspection the fruits of the earth.
“Nope. Can’t use that lot, Jake. Runty. H’m. Wa-a-al, guess you’d better take them farther up the street, Tunis. Edges look kind of brown. Wilty.”
Stewards from the best Chicago hotels of that day—the Sherman House, the Auditorium, the Palmer House, the Wellington, the Stratford—came to Will Talcott for their daily supplies. The grocers who catered to the well-to-do north-side families and those in the neighbourhood of fashionable Prairie Avenue on the south bought of him.
Now, in his doorway, he eyed the spare little figure that appeared before him all in rusty black, with its strained anxious face, its great deep-sunk eyes.
“DeJong, eh? Sorry to hear about your loss, ma’am. Pervus was a fine lad. No great shakes at truck farming, though. His widow, h’m? Hm.” Here, he saw, was no dull-witted farm woman; no stolid Dutch woman truckster. He went out to her wagon, tweaked the boy’s brown cheek. “Wa-al now, Mis’ DeJong, you got a right smart lot of garden stuff here and it looks pretty good. Yessir, pretty good. But you're too late. Ten, pret’ near.”
“Oh, no!” cried Selina. “Oh, no! Not too late!” And at the agony in her voice he looked at her sharply.
“Tell you what, mebbe I can move half of ’em along ​for you. But stuff don’t keep this weather. Turns wilty and my trade won’t touch it. . . First trip in?”
She wiped her face that was damp and yet cold to the touch. “First—trip in.” Suddenly she was finding it absurdly hard to breathe.
He called from the sidewalk to the men within: “George! Ben! Hustle this stuff in. Half of it. The best. Send you check to-morrow, Mis’ DeJong. Picked a bad day, didn’t you, for your first day?”
“Hot, you mean?”
“Wa-al, hot, yes. But I mean a holiday like this pedlers mostly ain’t buying.”
“Holiday?”
“You knew it was a Jew holiday, didn’t you? Didn’t!—Wa-al, my sakes! Worst day in the year. Jew pedlers all at church to-day and all the others not pedlers bought in Saturday for two days. Chicken men down the street got empty coops and will have till to-morrow. Yessir. Biggest chicken eaters, Jews are, in the world. . . Hm . . . Better just drive along home and just dump the rest that stuff, my good woman.”
One hand on the seat she prepared to climb up again—did step to the hub. You saw her shabby, absurd side-boots that were so much too big for the slim little feet. “If you’re just buying my stuff because you're sorry for me——” The Peake pride.
“Don’t do business that way. Can’t afford to, ma’am. My da’ter she’s studying to be a singer. In ​Italy now, Car’line is, and costs like all get-out. Takes all the money I can scrape together, just about.”
There was a little colour in Selina’s face now. “Italy! Oh, Mr. Talcott!’ You'd have thought she had seen it, from her face. She began to thank him, gravely.
“Now, that’s all right, Mis’ DeJong. I notice your stuff’s bunched kind of extry, and all of a size. Fixin’ to do that way right along?”
“Yes. I thought—they looked prettier that way—of course vegetables aren’t supposed to look pretty, I expect———” she stammered, stopped.
“You fix ’em pretty like that and bring ’em in to me first thing, or send’em. My trade, they like their stuff kind of special. Yessir.”
As she gathered up the reins he stood again in his doorway, cool, remote, his unlighted cigar in his mouth, while hand-trucks rattled past him, barrels and boxes thumped to the sidewalk in front of him, wheels and hoofs and shouts made a great clamour all about him.
“We going home now?” demanded Dirk. “We going home now? I’m hungry.”
“Yes, lamb.” Two dollars in her pocket. All yesterday's grim toil, and all to-day’s, and months of labour behind: those two days. Two dollars in the pocket of her black calico petticoat. “We'll get something to eat when we drive out a ways. Some milk and bread and cheese.”
The sun was very hot. She took the boy’s hat off, ​passed her tender work-calloused hand over the damp hair that clung to his forehead. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” she said. “Like an adventure. Look at all the kind people we’ve met. Mr. Spanknoebel, and Mr. Talcott——”
“And Mabel.”
Startled, “And Mabel.”
She wanted suddenly to kiss him, knew he would hate it with all the boy and all the Holland Dutch in him, and did not.
She made up her mind to drive east and then south. Pervus had sometimes achieved a late sale to outlying grocers. Jan’s face if she came home with half the load still on the wagon! And what of the unpaid bills? She had, perhaps, thirty dollars, all told. She owed four hundred. More than that. There were seedlings that Pervus had bought in April to be paid for at the end of the growing season, in the fall. And now fall was here.
Fear shook her. She told herself she was tired, nervous. That terrible week. And now this. The heat. Soon they'd be home, she and Dirk. How cool and quiet the house would seem. The squares of the kitchen tablecloth. Her own neat bedroom with the black walnut bed and dresser. The sofa in the parlour with the ruffled calico cover. The old chair on the porch with the cane seat sagging where warp and woof had become loosened with much use and stuck out in ragged tufts. It seemed years since she had seen all this. The comfort of it, the peace of it. ​Safe, desirable, suddenly dear. No work for a woman, this. Well, perhaps they were right.
Down Wabash Avenue, with the L trains thundering overhead and her horses, frightened and uneasy with the unaccustomed roar and clangour of traffic, stepping high and swerving stiffly, grotesque and angular in their movements. A dowdy farm woman and a sunburned boy in a rickety vegetable wagon absurdly out of place in this canyon of cobblestones, shops, street-cars, drays, carriages, bicycles, pedestrians. It was terribly hot.
The boy’s eyes popped with excitement and bewilderment.
“Pretty soon,” Selina said. The muscles showed white beneath the skin of her jaw. “Pretty soon. Prairie Avenue. Great big houses, and lawns, all quiet.” She even managed a smile.
“I like it better home.”
Prairie Avenue at last, turning in at Sixteenth Street. It was like calm after a storm. Selina felt battered, spent.
There were groceries near Eighteenth, and at the other cross-streets—Twenty-second, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-first, Thirty-fifth. They were passing the great stone houses of Prairie Avenue of the ’90s. Turrets and towers, cornices and cupolas, hump-backed conservatories, porte-cochères, bow windows—here lived Chicago’s rich that had made their riches in pork and wheat and dry goods; the selling of necessities to a city that clamoured for them.
​“Just like me,” Selina thought, humorously. Then another thought came to her. Her vegetables, canvas covered, were fresher than those in the near-by markets. Why not try to sell some of them here, in these big houses? In an hour she might earn a few dollars this way at retail prices slightly less than those asked by the grocers of the neighbourhood.
She stopped her wagon in the middle of the block on Twenty-fourth Street. Agilely she stepped down the wheel, gave the reins to Dirk. The horses were no more minded to run than the wooden steeds on a carrousel. She filled a large market basket with the finest and freshest of her stock and with this on her arm looked up a moment at the house in front of which she had stopped. It was a four-story brownstone, with a hideous high stoop. Beneath the steps were a little vestibule and a door that was the tradesmen’s entrance. The kitchen entrance, she knew, was by way of the alley at the back, but this she would not take. Across the sidewalk, down a little flight of stone steps, into the vestibule under the porch. She looked at the bell—a brass knob. You pulled it out, shoved it in, and there sounded a jangling down the dim hallway beyond. Simple enough. Her hand was on the bell. “Pull it!” said the desperate Selina. “I can’t! I can’t!” cried all the prim dim Vermont Peakes, in chorus. “All right. Starve to death and let them take the farm and Dirk, then.”
At that she pulled the knob hard. Jangle went the bell in the hall. Again. Again.
​Footsteps up the hall. The door opened to disclose a large woman, high cheek-boned, in a work apron; a cook, apparently.
“Good morning,” said Selina. “Would you like some fresh country vegetables?”
“No.” She half shut the door, opening it again to ask, “Got any fresh eggs or butter?” At Selina’s negative she closed the door, bolted it. Selina, standing there, basket on arm, could hear her heavy tread down the passageway toward the kitchen. Well, that was all right. Nothing so terrible about that, Selina told herself. Simply hadn’t wanted any vegetables. The next house. The next house, and the next, and the next. Up one side of the street, and down the other. Four times she refilled her basket. At one house she sold a quarter’s worth. Fifteen at another. Twenty cents here. Almost fifty there. “Good morning,” she always said at the door in her clear, distinct way. They stared, usually. But they were curious, too, and did not often shut the door in her face.
“Do you know of a good place?” one kitchen maid said. “This place ain’t so good. She only pays me three dollars. You can get four now. Maybe you know a lady wants a good girl.”
“No,” Selina answered. “No.”
At another house the cook had offered her a cup of coffee, noting the white face, the look of weariness. Selina refused it, politely. Twenty-first Street—Twenty-fifth—Twenty-eighth. She had over four dollars in her purse. Dirk was weary now and ​hungry to the point of tears. “The last house,” Selina promised him, “the very last one. After this one we'll go home.” She filled her basket again. “We'll have something to eat on the way, and maybe you'll go to sleep with the canvas over you, high, fastened to the seat like a tent. And we'll be home in a jiffy.”
The last house was a new gray stone one, already beginning to turn dingy from the smoke of the Illinois Central suburban trains that puffed along the lake front a block to the east. The house had large bow windows, plump and shining. There was a lawn, with statues, and a conservatory in the rear. Real lace curtains at the downstairs windows with plush hangings behind them. A high iron grille ran all about the property giving it an air of aloofness, of security. Selina glanced at this wrought-iron fence. And it seemed to bar her out. There was something forbidding about it—menacing. She was tired, that was it. The last house. She had almost five dollars, earned in the last hour. “Just five minutes,” she said to Dirk, trying to make her tone bright, her voice gay. Her arms full of vegetables which she was about to place in the basket at her feet she heard at her elbow:
“Now, then, where’s your license?”
She turned. A policeman at her side. She stared up at him. How enormously tall, she thought; and how red his face. “License?”
“Yeh, you heard me. License. Where’s your pedler’s license? You got one, I s’pose.”
“Why, no. No.” She stared at him, still.
​His face grew redder. Selina was a little worried about him. She thought, stupidly, that if it grew any redder——
“Well, say, where d’ye think you are, peddlin’ without a license! A good mind to run you in. Get along out of here, you and the kid. Leave me ketch you around here again!”
“What’s the trouble, Officer?” said a woman's voice. A smart open carriage of the type known as a victoria, with two chestnut horses whose harness shone with metal. Spanking, was the word that came to Selina’s mind, which was acting perversely certainly; crazily. A spanking team. The spankers disdainfully faced Selina’s comic bony nags which were grazing the close-cropped grass that grew in the neat little lawn-squares between curb and sidewalk. “What's the trouble, Reilly?”
The woman stepped out of the victoria. She wore a black silk Eton suit, very modish, and a black hat with a plume.
“Woman peddling without a license, Mrs. Arnold. You got to watch 'em like a hawk. . . Get along wid you, then.” He put a hand on Selina’s shoulder and gave her a gentle push.
There shook Selina from head to foot such a passion, such a storm of outraged sensibilities, as to cause street, victoria, silk-clad woman, horses, and policeman to swim and shiver in a haze before her eyes. The rage of a fastidious woman who had had an alien male hand put upon her. Her face was white. Her ​eyes glowed black, enormous. She seemed tall, majestic even.
“Take your hand off me!” Her speech was clipped, vibrant. “How dare you touch me! How dare you! Take your hand!——” The blazing eyes in the white mask. He took his hand from her shoulder. The red surged into her face. A tanned weather-beaten toil-worn woman, her abundant hair skewered into a knob and held by a long gray-black hairpin, her full skirt grimed with the mud of the wagon wheel, a pair of old side-boots on her slim feet, a grotesquely battered old felt hat (her husband’s) on her head, her arms full of ears of sweet corn, and carrots, and radishes and bunches of beets; a woman with bad teeth, flat breasts—even then Julie had known her by her eyes. And she had stared and then run to her in her silk dress and her plumed hat, crying, “Oh, Selina! My dear! My dear!” with a sob of horror and pity. “My dear!” And had taken Selina, carrots, beets, corn, and radishes in her arms. The vegetables lay scattered all about them on the sidewalk in front of Julie Hempel Arnold’s great stone house on Prairie Avenue. But strangely enough it had been Selina who had done the comforting, patting Julie’s plump silken shoulder and saying, over and over, soothingly, as to a child, “There, there! It’s all right, Julie. It’s all right. Don’t cry. What’s there to cry for! Sh-sh! It’s all right.”
Julie lifted her head in its modish black plumed hat, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. “Get along with you, ​do,” she said to Reilly, the policeman, using his very words to Selina. “I’m going to report you to Mr. Arnold, see if I don’t. And you know what that means.”
“Well, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am, I was only doing my duty. How cud I know the lady was a friend of yours. Sure, I——” He surveyed Selina, cart, jaded horses, wilted vegetables. “Well, how cud I, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am!”
“And why not!” demanded Julie with superb unreasonableness. “Why not, I’d like to know. Do get along with you.”
He got along, a defeated officer of the law, and a bitter. And now it was Julie who surveyed Selina, cart, Dirk, jaded horses, wilted left-over vegetables. “Selina, whatever in the world! What are you doing with——” She caught sight of Selina’s absurd boots then and she began to cry again. At that Selina’s overwrought nerves snapped and she began to laugh, hysterically. It frightened Julie, that laughter. “Selina, don’t! Come in the house with me. What are you laughing at! Selina!”
With shaking finger Selina was pointing at the vegetables that lay tumbled at her feet. “Do you see that cabbage, Julie? Do you remember how I used to despise Mrs. Tebbitt’s because she used to have boiled cabbage on Monday nights?”
“That’s nothing to laugh at, is it? Stop laughing this minute, Selina Peake!”
“I'll stop. I’ve stopped now. I was just ​laughing at my ignorance. Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn’t despise them as food, knowing that.. . . Come, climb down, Dirk. Here’s a lady mother used to know—oh, years and years ago, when she was a girl. Thousands of years ago.”