Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty streets, was a tragedy.Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body suggested power unutilized.All these spelled tragedy.Worse than tragedy--waste.
For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, eyes wary, shoulders squared.He had fought wind and sun, rain and drought, scourge and flood.He had risen before dawn and slept before sunset.In the process he had taken on something of the color and the rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he toiled.Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior.He had about him none of thehighlights and sharp points of the city man.He seemed to blend in with the background of nature so as to be almost undistinguishable from it, as were the furred and feathered creatures.This farmer differed from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substance are the same.
Ben Westerveld didn't know he was a tragedy.Your farmer is not given to introspection.For that matter, anyone knows that a farmer in town is a comedy.Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, have marked him a fair target for ridicule.Perhaps one should know him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of the Mississippi bottomlands clinging to his boots.
At twenty-five, given a tasseled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals canvas.A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous.A serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression.As he grew older, the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated the roguishness.By the time the life of ease claimed him, even the ghost of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.
The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name.It had been hundreds of years since the first Westervelds came to America, and they had married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost entirely disappeared.They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances.But to the practical Westerveld mind, hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their relation to crops and weather.Ben, though, had a way of turning his face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for clouds.You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring flight of a partridge across the meadow.He liked farming.Even the drudgery of it never made him grumble.He was a natural farmer as men are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen.Things grew for him.He seemed instinctively to know facts about the kin ship of soil and seed that othermen had to learn from books or experience.It grew to be a saying in that section that "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock."At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who took part in the rough games.And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy.The girls all liked Ben.There was that almost primitive strength which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to their softer side.He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick of them.He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to neighbor- hood parties.But by the time he was twenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld's.There was what the neighbors called an understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him.You saw him going down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven.He had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer.He had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a tree.This he would twirl blithely as he walked along.The switch and the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits.He never so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.
An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship."Hello, Emma.""How do, Ben."
