So Big Edna Ferber (most romantic novels txt) 📖

“Please don’t call him Mike, Pa.”

“Michael, then. Not for ten million. And I need ten million right now.”

“And I suppose,” retorted Selina, spiritedly, “that when your son-in-law Michael Arnold is your age he’ll be telling Eugene how he roughed it in an office over at the yards in the old days. These will be the old days.”

August Hempel laughed good humouredly. “That can be, Selina. That can be.” He chewed his cigar and settled to the business at hand.

“You want to drain and tile. Plant high-grade stuff. You got to have a man on the place that knows what’s what, not this Rip Van Winkle we saw in the cabbage field. New horses. A wagon.” His eyes narrowed speculatively. Shrewd wrinkles radiated from their corners. “I betcha we’ll see the day when you truck farmers will run into town with your stuff in big automobile wagons that will get you there in under an hour. It’s bound to come. The horse is doomed, that’s chust what.” Then, abruptly, “I will get you the horses, a bargain, at the yards.” He took out a long flat check book. He began writing in it with a pen that he took from his pocket⁠—some sort of marvellous pen that seemed already filled with ink and that you unscrewed at the top and then screwed at the bottom. He squinted through his cigar smoke, the check book propped on his knee. He tore off the check with a clean rip. “For a starter,” he said. He held it out to Selina.

“There now!” exclaimed Julie, in triumphant satisfaction. That was more like it. Doing something.

But Selina did not take the check. She sat very still in her chair, her hands folded. “That isn’t the regular way,” she said.

August Hempel was screwing the top on his fountain pen again. “Regular way? for what?”

“I’m borrowing this money, not taking it. Oh, yes, I am! I couldn’t get along without it. I realize that now, after yesterday. Yesterday! But in five years⁠—seven⁠—I’ll pay it back.” Then, at a half-uttered protest from Julie, “That’s the only way I’ll take it. It’s for Dirk. But I’m going to earn it⁠—and pay it back. I want a⁠—” she was being enormously businesslike, and unconsciously enjoying it⁠—“a⁠—an I.O.U. A promise to pay you back just as⁠—as soon as I can. That’s business, isn’t it? And I’ll sign it.”

“Sure,” said Aug Hempel, and unscrewed his fountain pen again. “Sure that’s business.” Very serious, he scribbled again, busily, on a piece of paper. A year later, when Selina had learned many things, among them that simple and compound interest on money loaned are not mere problems devised to fill Duffy’s Arithmetic in her school-teaching days, she went to August Hempel between laughter and tears.

“You didn’t say one word about interest, that day. Not a word. What a little fool you must have thought me.”

“Between friends,” protested August Hempel.

But⁠—“No,” Selina insisted. “Interest.”

“I guess I better start me a bank pretty soon if you keep on so businesslike.”

Ten years later he was actually the controlling power in the Yards & Rangers’ Bank. And Selina had that original I.O.U. with its “Paid In Full. Aug Hempel,” carefully tucked away in the carved oak chest together with other keepsakes that she foolishly treasured⁠—ridiculous scraps that no one but she would have understood or valued⁠—a small school slate such as little children use (the one on which she had taught Pervus to figure and parse); a dried bunch of trilliums; a bustled and panniered wine-red cashmere dress, absurdly old-fashioned; a letter telling about the Infanta Eulalie of Spain, and signed Julie Hempel Arnold; a pair of men’s old side-boots with mud caked on them; a crude sketch, almost obliterated now, done on a torn scrap of brown paper and showing the Haymarket with the wagons vegetable-laden and the men gathered beneath the street-flares, and the patient farm horses⁠—Roelf’s childish sketch.

Among this rubbish she rummaged periodically in the years that followed. Indeed, twenty years later Dirk, coming upon her smoothing out the wrinkled yellow creases of the I.O.U. or shaking the camphor-laden folds of the wine-red cashmere, would say, “At it again! What a sentimental generation yours was, Mother. Pressed flowers! They went out with the attic, didn’t they? If the house caught fire you’d probably run for the junk in that chest. It isn’t worth two cents, the lot of it.”

“Perhaps not,” Selina said, slowly. “Still, there’d be some money value, I suppose, in an early original signed sketch by Rodin.”

“Rodin! You haven’t got a⁠—”

“No, but here’s one by Pool⁠—Roelf Pool⁠—signed. At a sale in New York last week one of his sketches⁠—not a finished thing at all⁠—just a rough drawing that he’d made of some figures in a group that went into the Doughboy statue⁠—brought one thous⁠—”

“Oh, well, that⁠—yes. But the rest of the stuff you’ve got there⁠—funny how people will treasure old stuff like that. Useless stuff. It isn’t even beautiful.”

“Beautiful!” said Selina, and shut the lid of the old chest. “Why, Dirk⁠—Dirk! You don’t even know what beauty is. You never will know.”

If those vague characteristics called (variously) magnetism, manner, grace, distinction, attractiveness, fascination, go to make up that nebulous quality known as charm; and if the possessor of that quality is accounted fortunate in his equipment for that which the class-day orators style the battle of life, then Dirk DeJong was a lucky lad and life lay promisingly before him. Undoubtedly he had it; and undoubtedly it did. People said that things “came easy” for Dirk. He said so himself, not boastfully, but rather shyly. He was not one to talk a great deal. Perhaps that was one of his most charming qualities. He listened so well. And he was so quietly effortless. He listened while other people talked, his fine head inclined just a little to one side and bent toward you. Intent on what you were saying, and evidently