So Big quotes

She saw Fanny Davenport in Pique. Simeon even took her to a performance of that shocking and delightful form of new entertainment, the Extravaganza. She thought the plump creature in tights and spangles, descending the long stairway, the most beautiful being she had ever seen.

“The thing I like about plays and books is that anything can happen. Anything! You never know,” Selina said, after one of these evenings.

“No different from life,” Simeon Peake assured her. “You’ve no idea the things that happen to you if you just relax and take them as they come.”

“I want you to see all kinds,” he would say to her. “I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.”

“Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much”⁠—he used the gambler’s term, unconsciously⁠—“just so much velvet.”

But Selina, somehow, understood. “You mean that anything’s better than being Aunt Sarah and Aunt Abbie.”

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry.

Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

So now, as they bumped and jolted along the road Selina thought herself lucky, though she was a little terrified. She turned her gaze from the flat prairie land to the silent figure beside her.

“Twelve! And no longer at school! But why not!”

“Roelf he works by the farm.”

“Don’t you think he ought to go to school?”

It remained as coolly indifferent to the blasts breathed upon it as a girl hotly besieged by an unwelcome lover. This was to influence a number of Selina’s habits, including nocturnal reading and matutinal bathing.

Selina was a daily morning bather in a period which looked upon the daily bath as an eccentricity, or, at best, an affectation.

It would be charming to be able to record that she continued the practice in the Pool household;

She took out her neat pile of warm woollen underwear, her stout shoes. She shook out the crushed folds of the wine-coloured cashmere. Now, if ever, she should have regretted its purchase. But she didn’t.

No one, she reflected, as she spread it rosily on the bed, possessing a wine-coloured cashmere could be altogether downcast.

The wine cashmere on the bed, the photographs on the drum, her clothes hanging comfortably on wall-hooks with a calico curtain on a cord protecting them, her stock of books on the closed trunk. Already the room wore the aspect of familiarity.

“Little!” She drew herself up from her vantage point of the soapbox.

“I’m bigger than you are.”

They laughed at that as at an exquisite piece of repartee.

Pervus was there by seven, very clean as to shirt, his hair brushed till it shone; shy, and given to dropping his hat and bumping against chairs, and looking solemn. Selina was torn between pity and mirth. If only he had blustered.

A blustering big man puts the world on the defensive. A gentle giant disarms it.

Selina got out her McBride’s Grammar and Duffy’s Arithmetic, and together they started to parse verbs, paper walls, dig cisterns, and extract square roots. They found study impossible at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, with the Pool household eddying about it.

He looked helpless as only the strong and powerful can look. Selina’s heart melted in pity. He would look down at the great calloused hands; up at her.

One of the charms of Pervus DeJong lay in the things that his eyes said and his tongue did not.

Women always imagined he was about to say what he looked, but he never did. It made otherwise dull conversation with him most exciting.

Maartje elucidated her philosophy without being in the least aware that it could be called by any such high-sounding name.

“You can’t run away far enough. Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.”

The girlish look had fled. She was world-old. Her strong arms ceased their pounding and thumping for a moment. On the steps just outside Klaas and Jakob were scanning the weekly reports preparatory to going into the city late that afternoon.

Sometimes, in a moment’s respite from her work about the house, she would stand in the kitchen doorway, her flushed face turned toward the fields. Wave on wave of green, wave on wave, until the waves melted into each other and became a verdant sea.

As cabbages had been cabbages, and no more, to Klaas Pool, so, to Pervus, these carrots, beets, onions, turnips, and radishes were just so much produce, to be planted, tended, gathered, marketed.

But to Selina, during that summer, they became a vital part in the vast mechanism of a living world. Pervus, earth, sun, rain, all elemental forces that laboured to produce the food for millions of humans. The sordid, grubby little acreage became a kingdom;

He rarely showed temper. Selina often wished he would. Sometimes, in a sort of hysteria of hopelessness, she would rush at him, ruffle up his thick coarse hair, now beginning to be threaded with gray; shake his great impassive shoulders.

“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.

“Remember the two sparrows. ‘One of them shall not fall on the ground without’ —Matthew 10:29.”

“I don’t see,” replied Selina, simply, “what good that does the sparrow, once it’s fallen.”

By Monday afternoon the parlour curtains of every High Prairie farmhouse that faced the Halsted road were agitated as though by a brisk wind between the hours of three and five, when the market wagons were to be seen moving toward Chicago.

Selina turned the horses’ heads toward the city.

“You’d be surprised, Jan, to know of all the things you’re going to hear of some day that you’ve never heard of before.”

Still, when twenty years had passed and the Ford, the phonograph, the radio, and the rural mail delivery had dumped the world at Jan’s plodding feet he liked to tell of that momentous day when Selina DeJong had driven off to market like a man …

“Selina Peake, aren’t you ashamed of yourself! You’re a wicked woman! Feeling almost gay when you ought to be sad. … Poor Pervus … the farm … Dirk … and you can feel almost gay! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

But she wasn’t, and knew it.

For even as she thought this the little wave of elation came flooding over her again.

Over her shoulder Selina called out from the wagon seat.

“You just go until you come to a closed door. And you say ‘Open Sesame!’ and there you are.”

Bewilderment shadowed Mrs. Pool’s placid face. As the wagon lurched on down the road it was Selina who was smiling and Mrs. Pool who was serious.

She was a little contrite, but not very. “Well, not really, perhaps.

But ’most any place is Baghdad if you don’t know what will happen in it.

And this is an adventure, isn’t it, that we’re going on? How can you tell! All kind of things can happen. All kinds of people. People in disguise in the Haymarket. Caliphs, and princes, and slaves, and thieves, and good fairies, and witches.”

“I’ll stop. I’ve stopped now. I was just laughing at my ignorance.

Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage.

Did you know that, Julie? One doesn’t despise them as food, knowing that. … Come, climb down, Dirk. Here’s a lady mother used to know—oh, years and years ago, when she was a girl. Thousands of years ago.”

About mistakes it’s funny. You got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.” He whistled softly through his teeth following this utterance and tapped the chair seat with his finger nails.

“It’s beauty!” Selina said then, almost passionately.

Aug Hempel and Julie plainly could make nothing of this remark so she went on, eager, explanatory. “I used to think that if you wanted beauty—if you wanted it hard enough and hopefully enough—it came to you.

“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.”

I have had experience, bittersweet experience. I have known the battle. See, here are my scars. I can bring to your classrooms much that is valuable. I ask only for bread—the bread of knowledge.”

And the University gave them a stone.

“Get on to the hat!” said the Classifieds, humorously, crossing the campus. “A fright!”

I get a thrill out of just being here. ‘I’m crossing the campus,’ I say to myself. ‘I’m a student—a girl student—in Midwest University and now I’m crossing the campus of my university to go to a class.’ ”

Her face was very greasy and earnest and fine.

“Well, that’s great,” Dirk replied, weakly. “That’s cer’nly great.”

She tramped the road. She scuffled through the leaves in the woods, wore a scarlet maple leaf in her hair, slept like one gloriously dead from ten until six; ate prodigiously of cream, fruits, vegetables, eggs, sausage, cake.

“It got so I hated to do all those things on the farm,” she said, laughing a little shamefacedly.

“I guess it was because I had to. But now it comes back to me and I enjoy it because it’s natural to me, I suppose. Anyway, I’m having a grand time, Mrs. DeJong. The grandest time I ever had in my life.”

“You make fun, huh?” she said, wistfully, “you and Roelf. You make fun.” And Roelf, the dark vivid boy, misunderstood. Roelf, the genius. He was always one of the company.

Oh, Selina DeJong never was lonely on these winter evenings before her fire.

She and Dirk sat there one fine sharp evening in early April. It was Saturday. Of late Dirk had not always come to the farm for the weekend. Eugene and Paula Arnold had been home for the Easter holidays.

After all, he had nothing in mind but the health of the human race.” After which grand period Selina grinned at Dirk, and Dirk grinned at Selina and the two giggled together there by the fireplace, companionably.

“Mother, you’re simply wonderful!⁠—only your native Chicago dwelling seems to be mostly porch.”

Selina waved such carping criticism away with a careless hand. “Oh, well, any house that has enough porches, and two or three bathrooms and at least eight closets can be lived in comfortably, no matter what else it has or hasn’t got.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he began, “the expense—”

“Pigs,” said Selina, serenely.

“Pigs!” He looked around, bewildered; stared at his mother.

He said that the war had disillusioned him. It was a word you often heard uttered as a reason or an excuse for abandoning the normal. “Disillusioned.”

“What did you think war was going to do?” said Selina. “Purify! It never has yet.”

It was understood, by Selina at least, that Dirk’s abandoning of his profession was a temporary thing. Quick as she usually was to arrive at conclusions, she did not realize until too late that this son of hers had definitely deserted building for bonds;

“Oh, what nonsense, Mother. I’m happy.

You can’t live somebody else’s life.

You used to tell me, when I was a kid I remember, that life wasn’t just an adventure, to be taken as it came, with the hope that something glorious was always hidden just around the corner.

“Desert who?” He was startled.

“Beauty! Self-expression. Whatever you want to call it. You wait! She’ll turn on you some day. Some day you’ll want her, and she won’t be there.”

Inwardly he had been resentful of this bedside conversation with his mother. She made little of him, he thought, while outsiders appreciated his success.

Paula herself was wise enough to know that to hold him she must not let him feel indebted to her.

She knew that the debtor hates his creditor.

She lay awake at night planning for him, scheming for his advancement, then suggested these schemes to him so deftly as to make him think he himself had devised them.

He would flush a little (one of his assets) and smile, and look at them, and say nothing. He found that to be all that was necessary.

He got on enormously.

Yet they were capable, too, in a mechanical sort of way. Theirs were mechanical jobs. They answered telephones, pressed levers, clicked buttons, tapped typewriters, jotted down names.

They were lovely creatures with the minds of fourteen-year-old children.

Their hair was shining, perfectly undulated, as fine and glossy and tenderly curling as a young child’s. Their breasts were flat, their figures singularly sexless like that of a very young boy. They were wise with the wisdom of the serpent.

She had stood in the centre of the room, a small plain figure in the midst of these massive sombre carved tables, chairs, chests. A little smile had quirked the corner of her mouth.

“I think it’s as cosy as a cathedral.”

Sometimes Selina remonstrated with him, though of late she had taken on a strange reticence. She no longer asked him about the furnishings of the houses he visited (Italian villas on Ohio Street), or the exotic food he ate at splendid dinners. The farm flourished.

“

Not any crazier than the prices you top-notchers get.

”

“

Arrived! Heavens, no! I’ve started.

”

“

Well, then, in another minute I’ll be telling you the story of my life.

”

She smiled again her slow wide smile; turned to leave.

Dirk decided that while most women’s mouths were merely features this girl’s was a decoration.

She was gone. Miss Ethelinda Quinn et al., in the outer office, appraised the costume of Miss Dallas O’Mara from her made-to-order footgear to her made-in-France millinery and achieved a lightning mental reconstruction of their own costumes.

“

I hope you didn’t think it was going to be a picture of a woman buying bonds.

” She went on working. She squinted one eye, picked up a funny little mirror thing which she held to one side, looked into, and put down.

In the theatre he came out to the edge of the runway and took the audience in his arms.

He talked like a bootblack and sang like an angel.

Dallas at the piano, he leaning over it, were doing “blues.” The two were rapt, ecstatic. I got the blues—I said the blues—I got the this or that—the somethingorother—blue—hoo-hoos. They scarcely noticed Dirk. Dallas had nodded when he came in, and had gone on playing.

“It looks too much like a Roman bath. The pillars scare me. Let’s go to the Blackstone.

I’ll always be sufficiently from Texas to think the Blackstone French room the last word in elegance.

”

“

I think you’re a nice young man.

”

Some people are nine tenths splendour and one tenth tawdriness, like Gene Meran. And some are nine tenths tawdriness and one tenth splendour, like Sam Huebch.

But some people are all just a nice even pink without a single patch of royal purple.

”

Dallas stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “

They usually tell me about it.

”

The reflection of cafeteria and cigar-shop windows on either side were slender shafts of light along the canal. An enchanting sight. Dirk thought suddenly that Dallas was a good deal like that—like Chicago.

A mixture of grandeur and cheapness; of tawdriness and magnificence; of splendour and ugliness.

“Nice,” said Dallas. A long breath. She was a part of all this.

The women were slim and perfectly tailored but wore their hunting clothes a trifle uneasily and self-consciously like girls in their first low-cut party dresses. Most of the men had turned stubborn on the subject of pink coats, but Captain Stokes-Beatty wore his handsomely.

The fox⁠—a worried and somewhat dejected-looking animal⁠—had been shipped in a crate from the south and on being released had a way of sitting sociably in an Illinois corn field instead of leaping fleetly to cover.

At the finish you had a feeling of guilt, as though you had killed a cockroach.

The fox—a worried and somewhat dejected-looking animal—had been shipped in a crate from the south and on being released had a way of sitting sociably in an Illinois corn field instead of leaping fleetly to cover.

At the finish you had a feeling of guilt, as though you had killed a cockroach.

Dirk had told Selina about it, feeling rather magnificent. A fox hunt.

The fox hunts, for example. Lake Forest had taken to fox hunting, and the Tippecanoe crowd kept kennels. Dirk had learned to ride—pretty well. An Englishman—a certain Captain Stokes-Beatty—had initiated the North Shore into the mysteries of fox hunting. Huntin’.

The North Shore learned to say nec’s’ry and conservat’ry.

Captain Stokes-Beatty was a tall, bowlegged, and somewhat horse-faced young man, remote in manner. The nice Farnham girl seemed fated to marry him.