Pervus swung her down from the seat of the buggy, his hand about her waist, and held her so for a moment, close. Selina said, “You must have that wagon painted, Pervus. And the seat-springs fixed and the sideboard mended.”
He stared. “Wagon!”
“Yes. It looks a sight.”
The house was tidy enough, but none too clean. Old Mrs. Voorhees had not been minded to keep house too scrupulously for a man who would be unlikely to know whether or not it was clean. Pervus lighted the lamps. There was a fire in the kitchen stove. It made the house seem stuffy on this mild May night. Selina thought that her own little bedroom at the Pools’, no longer hers, must be deliciously cool and still with the breeze fanning fresh from the west. Pervus was putting the horse into the barn. The bedroom was off the sitting room. The window was shut. This last year had taught Selina to prepare the night before for next morning’s rising, so as to lose the least possible time. She did this now, unconsciously. She took off her white muslin underwear with its frills and embroidery—the three stiff petticoats, and the stiffly starched corset-cover, and the high-bosomed corset and put them into the bureau drawer that she herself had cleaned and papered neatly the week before. She brushed her hair, laid out to-morrow’s garments, put on her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown and got into this strange bed. She heard Pervus DeJong shut the kitchen door; the latch clicked, the lock turned. Heavy quick footsteps across the bare kitchen floor. This man was coming into her room . . . “You can’t run far enough,” Maartje Pool had said. “Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”
Next morning it was dark when he awakened her at four. She started up with a little cry and sat up, straining her ears, her eyes. “Is that you, Father?” She was little Selina Peake again, and Simeon Peake had come in, gay, debonair, from a night’s gaming.
Pervus DeJong was already padding about the room in stocking feet. “What—what time is it? What’s the matter, Father? Why are you up? Haven’t you gone to bed . . .” Then she remembered.
Pervus DeJong laughed and came toward her. “Get up, little lazy bones. It’s after four. All yesterday’s work I’ve got to do, and all to-day’s. Breakfast, little Lina, breakfast. You are a farmer’s wife now.”
VIII
By October High Prairie Housewives told each other that Mrs. Pervus DeJong was “expecting.” Dirk DeJong was born in the bedroom off the sitting room on the fifteenth day of March, of a bewildered, somewhat resentful, but deeply interested mother; and a proud, foolish, and vainglorious father whose air of achievement, considering the really slight part he had played in the long, tedious, and racking business, was disproportionate. The name Dirk had sounded to Selina like something tall, straight, and slim. Pervus had chosen it. It had been his grandfather’s name.
Sometimes, during those months, Selina would look back on her first winter in High Prairie—that winter of the icy bedroom, the chill black drum, the schoolhouse fire, the chilblains, the Pool pork—and it seemed a lovely dream; a time of ease, of freedom, of careless happiness. That icy room had been her room; that mile of road traversed on bitter winter mornings a mere jaunt; the schoolhouse stove a toy, fractious but fascinating.