. . . This is a vegetable farm, and they donât eat vegetables. I wonder why. . . . What a pity that she lets herself look like that, just because sheâs a farm woman. Her hair screwed into that knob, her skin rough and neglected. That hideous dress. Shapeless. Sheâs not bad looking, either. A red spot on either cheek, now; and her eyes so blue. A little like those women in the Dutch pictures Father took me to see inâwhere?âwhere?âNew York, years ago?âyes. A woman in a kitchen, a dark sort of room with pots of brass on a shelf; a high mullioned window. But that womanâs face was placid. This oneâs strained. Why need she look like that, frowsy, harried, old! . . . The boy is, somehow, foreign lookingâItalian. Queer. . . . They talk a good deal like some German neighbours we had in Milwaukee. They twist sentences. Literal translations from the Dutch, I suppose. . . .â
Jakob Hoogendunk was talking. Supper over, the men sat relaxed, pipe in mouth. Maartje was clearing the supper things, with Geertje and Jozina making a great pretense at helping. If they giggled like that in school, Selina thought, she would, in time, go mad, and knock their pigtailed heads together.
âYou got to have rich bottom land,â Hoogendunk was saying, âelse you get little tough stringy stuff. I seen it in market Friday, laying. Stick to vegetables that is vegetables and not new-fangled stuff. Celery! What is celery! It ainât rightly a vegetable, and it ainât a yerb. Look how Voorhees he used as much as one hundred fifty pounds nitrate of sody, let alone regular fertilizer, and what comes from it? Little stringy stuff. You got to have rich bottom land.â
Selina was interested. She had always thought that vegetables grew. You put them in the groundâseeds or somethingâand pretty soon things came popping upâpotatoes, cabbages, onions, carrots, beets. But what was this thing called nitrate of soda? It must have had something to do with the creamed cabbage at Mrs. Tebbittâs. And she had never known it. And what was regular fertilizer? She leaned forward.
âWhatâs a regular fertilizer?â
Klaas Pool and Jakob Hoogendunk looked at her. She looked at them, her fine intelligent eyes alight with interest. Pool then tipped back his chair, lifted a stove-lid, spat into the embers, replaced the lid and rolled his slow gaze in the direction of Jakob Hoogendunk. Hoogendunk rolled his slow gaze in the direction of Klaas Pool. Then both turned to look at this audacious female who thus interrupted menâs conversation.
Pool took his pipe from his mouth, blew a thin spiral, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. âRegular fertilizer isâregular fertilizer.â
Jakob Hoogendunk nodded his solemn confirmation of this.
âWhatâs in it?â persisted Selina.
Pool waved a huge red hand as though to waft away this trouble-some insect. He looked at Maartje. But Maartje was slamming about her work. Geertje and Jozina were absorbed in some game of their own behind the stove. Roelf, at the table, sat reading, one slim hand, chapped and gritty with rough work, outspread on the cloth. Selina noticed, without knowing she noticed, that the fingers were long, slim, and the broken nails thin and fine. âBut whatâs in it?â she said again. Suddenly life in the kitchen hung suspended. The two men frowned. Maartje half turned from her dishpan. The two little girls peered out from behind the stove. Roelf looked up from his book. Even the collie, lying in front of the stove half asleep, suddenly ran his tongue out, winked one eye. But Selina, all sociability, awaited her answer. She could not know that in High Prairie women did not brazenly intrude thus on menâs weighty conversation. The men looked at her, unanswering. She began to feel a little uncomfortable. The boy Roelf rose and went to the cupboard