So Big by Edna Ferber

Author:Edna Ferber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

12

The best thing for Dirk. The best thing for Dirk. It was the phrase that repeated itself over and over in Selina’s speech during the days that followed. Julie Arnold was all for taking him into her gray stone house, dressing him like Lord Fauntleroy and sending him to the north-side private school attended by Eugene, her boy, and Pauline, her girl. In this period of bewilderment and fatigue Julie had attempted to take charge of Selina much as she had done a dozen years before at the time of Simeon Peake’s dramatic death. And now, as then, she pressed into service her wonder-working father and 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 to-morrow 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 to-morrow! 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 to-day. 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 to-morrow, 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.

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