“Pervus! Pervus! if you’d only get mad—real mad! Fly into a rage. Break things! Beat me! Sell the farm! Run away!” She didn’t mean it, of course. It was the vital and constructive force in her resenting his apathy, his acceptance of things as they were.
“What is that for dumb talk?” He would regard her solemnly through a haze of smoke, his pipe making a maddening putt-putt of sleepy content.
Though she worked as hard as any woman in High Prairie, had as little, dressed as badly, he still regarded her as a luxury; an exquisite toy which, in a moment of madness, he had taken for himself. “Little Lina”—tolerantly, fondly. You would have thought that he spoiled her, pampered her. Perhaps he even thought he did.
When she spoke of modern farming, of books on vegetable gardening, he came very near to angry impatience, though his amusement at the idea saved him from it. College agricultural courses he designated as foolishness. Of Linnæus he had never heard. Burbank was, for him, non-existent, and he thought head-lettuce a silly fad. Selina sometimes talked of raising this last named green as a salad, with marketing value. Everyone knew that regular lettuce was leaf lettuce which you ate with vinegar and a sprinkling of sugar, or with hot bacon and fat sopping its wilted leaves.
He said, too, she spoiled the boy. Back of this may have been a lurking jealousy. “Always the boy; always the boy,” he would mutter when Selina planned for the child; shielded him; took his part (sometimes unjustly). “You will make a softy of him with your always babying.” So from time to time he undertook to harden Dirk. The result was generally disastrous. In one case the process terminated in what was perilously near to tragedy. It was during the midsummer school vacation. Dirk was eight. The woody slopes about High Prairie and the sand hills beyond were covered with the rich blue of huckleberries. They were dead ripe. One shower would spoil them. Geertje and Jozina Pool were going huckleberrying and had consented to take Dirk—a concession, for he was only eight and considered, at their advanced age, a tagger. But the last of the tomatoes on the DeJong place were also ripe and ready for picking. They hung, firm, juicy scarlet globes, prime for the Chicago market. Pervus meant to haul them to town that day. And this was work in which the boy could help. To Dirk’s, “Can I go berrying? The huckleberries are ripe. Geert and Jozina are going,” his father shook a negative head.
“Yes, well tomatoes are ripe, too, and that comes before huckleberries. There’s the whole patch to clean up this afternoon by four.”
Selina looked up, glanced at Pervus’s face, at the boy’s, said nothing. The look said, “He’s a child. Let him go, Pervus.”
Dirk flushed with disappointment. They were at breakfast. It was barely daybreak. He looked down at his plate, his lip quivered, his long lashes lay heavy on his cheeks. Pervus got up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a hard day ahead of him. “Time I was your age, Sobig, I would think it was an easy day when all I had to do was pick a tomato patch clean.”
Dirk looked up then, quickly. “If I get it all picked can I go?”
“It’s a day’s job.”