So Big Edna Ferber (most romantic novels txt) 📖

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 weekday 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 tomorrow, 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 peddlers 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 peddlers all at church today and all the others not peddlers bought in Saturday for two days. Chicken men down the street got empty coops and will have till tomorrow. 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 today’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