So Big

by Edna Ferber

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

“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.”

For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel-strong frame; one brown lady’s-cloth, one wine-red cashmere; four hundred and ninety-seven dollars; and a gay, adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully.

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

Just a phase; a brief chapter in the adventure. Something to remember and look back on with a mingling of amusement and wonder.

All that week she had a curious feeling—or succession of feelings. There was the sensation of suffocation followed by that of emptiness—of being hollow—boneless—bloodless. Then, at times, there was a feeling of physical pain; at others a sense of being disembowelled. She was restless, listless, by turns. Period of furious activity followed by days of inertia.

High Prairie, in May, was green and gold and rose and blue. The spring flowers painted the fields and the roadside with splashes of yellow, of pink, of mauve, and purple. Violets, buttercups, mandrakes, marsh-marigolds, hepatica. The air was soft and cool from the lake.

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

One of her bad dreams was that in which she saw herself overwhelmed, drowned, swallowed up by a huge welter and boiling of undarned, unmended nightshirts, drawers, socks, aprons, overalls.

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.

It is hard to be hopeful at three in the morning, before breakfast.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to go faster than this, Dirk,” Selina had protested breathlessly as they chugged along at the alarming rate of almost fifteen miles an hour.

“My life doesn’t count, except as something for Dirk to use. I’m done with anything else. Oh, I don’t mean that I’m discouraged, or disappointed in life, or anything like that. I mean I started out with the wrong idea. I know better now. I’m here to keep Dirk from making the mistakes I made.” Here Aug Hempel, lounging largely in his chair and eyeing Selina intently, turned his gaze absently through the window to where the grays, a living equine statue, stood before the house. His tone was one of meditation, not of argument. “It don’t work out that way, seems. 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. You just waited, and lived your life as best you could, knowing that beauty might be just around the corner. You just waited, and then it came.” “Beauty!” exclaimed Julie, weakly. She stared at Selina in the evident belief that this work-worn haggard woman was bemoaning her lack of personal pulchritude. “Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it.” The word self-expression was not in cant use then, and Selina hadn’t it to offer them. They would not have known what she meant if she had. She threw out her hands now in a futile gesture. “That’s what I mean by beauty. I want Dirk to have it.”

He would tell her of the grandeurs of the Arnold ménage. She would interrupt and exclaim: “Mayonnaise! On fruit! Oh, I don’t believe I’d like that. You did! Well, I’ll have it for you next week when you come home. I’ll get the recipe from Julie.”

She had difficulty in keeping her rough fingers from catching on the soft surface of the satin. Manual work, water, sun, and wind had tanned those hands, hardened them, enlarged the knuckles, spread them, roughened them. Yet how sure they were, and strong, and cool and reliable—and tender. Suddenly, looking at them, Dirk said, “Now your hands. I love your hands, Mother.”

There’s a grand American institution for you! England may have its afternoon tea on the terrace, and Spain may have its patio, and France its courtyard, and Italy its pergola, vine-covered; but America’s got the sleeping porch—the screened-in open-air sleeping porch, and I shouldn’t wonder if the man who first thought of that would get precedence, on Judgment Day, over the men who invented the aeroplane, the talking machine, and the telephone. After all, he had nothing in mind but the health of the human race.”

Her life was full, pleasant, prolific.

He talked little. He was amazingly effective.