You are Forbidden! by Jerry Shelton

 

YOU ARE FORBIDDEN!

By JERRY SHELTON

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

Dr. Jules Craig, P.L.L., was unhappy. He was famous. He was young. He was talented, healthy, successful. He carried the distinguished degree of P.L.L. He had everything!

But he was unhappy.

He sat at his tastefully furnished desk, shuffling the Life-Line charts of the patient seated across from him. The patient awaiting the diagnosis was nervous.

Poor devil! Craig thought. This man is going to die. He doesn't know it—and I can't tell him.

A wave of pity swept through him, intensifying his own brooding unhappiness. Despite the fact he had instructed his psycho-color experts to design his inner consultation office in as soothing a shade as scientifically possible, the patient was sweating profusely, awaiting the verdict. The room was comfortably air-conditioned.

The patient was a little fat man. The face was putty-white. Eyes shifty, breathing rapid, voice shaky and twisting of the hat. This man would be dead in three weeks, and he, Dr. Jules Craig, had to lie to the man. With an unpleasant sensation, he summoned his resolution, looked at the name near the upper left-hand corner of the charts, and spoke.

"You have no cause for worry, Elder Wayman," he said. He forced his voice to sound as smoothly professional as possible. "The diagnosis of your Predictable Life-Lines are clear and definite. I know this matter has been a strain upon you, but you cooperated well. Your own reports, and the necessary Crystaleen Cell you have been wearing during these last three months gave all the details I needed."

He began to shuffle the Life-Line charts again as if reading them. He heard his voice go into the routine patter used on such unfortunate cases as this.

The irony of what his professional voice was saying to this little fat man burned another scar into his heart. The Predictograph had predicted this man would be dead within three weeks—and that wondrous, complex machine never erred. Yet, because of "Medical Ethics," he heard himself giving this innocent patient the old conversation, professionally used in such unhappy cases: "—everything is all right—" and, "your Life-Lines show a happy future—" and, "—you will be successful—" and, "—happy—" and, "—you should relax and enjoy yourself now that you have your future Life-Lines completed." He also said other things.

---

Craig felt sick. The Predictograph had predicted this little fat man would be killed in three weeks—in an accident! A gyro crash, with fire and an unpleasant death.

Outwardly, Dr. Craig knew he appeared cool and professional. But inwardly, his brain seethed and raged with questions that lashed his conscience.

If only the Supreme Medical Council would permit him to tell this man not, on pain of death, to get into any gyro—perhaps this little fat man wouldn't die. But, Quote:

"You are forbidden to tell a patient his true future when it is unfortunate."

"You are forbidden!" the Supreme Medical Council said.

Craig gritted his teeth. He knew the Degree of Predictable Life-Lines was the highest medical degree a human could attain. But cases like this made him doubtful that he should have ever worked for his P.L.L.

Why couldn't this be prevented? The question reminded him of what he, himself, was going to do today. He was going to break his oath! He intended to do something that the Supreme Medical Council had said was forbidden! His resolve, like a shot of adrenalin, strengthened him. He would carry out his plan.

He heard his voice speaking.

"Since your charts predict a happy, successful and—" the untrue word almost stuck in his throat, "—long life ahead of you, I suggest, now that your Life-Lines are completed, you go home, forget about your business, and the few little minor troubles I mentioned, and celebrate. You have fulfilled the Galactic Federation requirements by completing your Predictable Life-Lines and you are entitled to throw a real party."

He forced the professional twinkle into his eyes.

"Of course the Predictograph hinted you will have a super-hangover—after your party."

As the little fat man's tension broke and he began to chuckle, Craig nodded.

"You know the machine can't pick up small sensory lines like hangovers," Dr. Craig said. "We can learn only the major facts of your future with the usual possible ten-percent error of course."

He made himself smile.

"So perhaps you won't have a hangover. But if you react to such a splendid report as this, as most of my patients do, then you will throw a real brawl that should give you that super-hangover." He extended his hand. "Good-by! Speak to my secretary, Miss Evans, on your way out about the balance on your account. And congratulations."

The door closed behind the patient. Craig's head dropped. One more hopeless case he had lied to. He sat motionless at his desk. He let the lids close over his eyes, as his broad forehead wrinkled with conflicting thoughts. Unpleasant thoughts.

The Predictograph never missed! For the trained operator like himself, it picked up everything down to the slightest detail. He shouldn't have worked so long, so hard, to earn his P.L.L. He was beginning to realize he wasn't the psycho-type for this sometimes unhappy business. Patients with happy futures made him happy in turn. But when he diagnosed a future full of heartbreak, he couldn't remain cool and impersonal.

He continued to sit there, thinking of what he intended to do this day. He noticed the palms of his hands were becoming slippery with sweat. He could feel his heart beginning to hammer as if it were terrified. His breathing felt cramped and smothered.

Today was his day! He was going to learn his own future. Not in sugar-coated, pink-pill form, with any future horrible happenings omitted. He was going to know his true future. If the Supreme Medical Council found out that he was violating his doctor's oath, they would break him without mercy. But if he succeeded with his plan, it would forever guide humanity along paths of happiness undreamed.

---

He tried to pick up a cigarette. His hands were shaking so badly he had to make three attempts before he got it into his mouth. He puffed it alight. He managed a short laugh. Like all patients about to receive the diagnosis concerning their future life, he was nervous too. And patients were always told nice little "medical white-lies," if their futures were hopelessly unfortunate, instead of the truth.

But if there were bad times ahead of him, he would know them, down to the slightest horrible detail, before this day had crawled by. The cigarette was dry and tasteless.

"Doctor Craig?"

He jumped, startled. A blurred image before him sharpened into focus. It was his secretary, Miss Evans, crisp in her cool white uniform, standing across the desk from him.

"I plugged my call light into your interphone minutes ago," she said. "You didn't answer." She glanced at the brightly glowing signal on the desk, then at the doctor. "Is there anything wrong?"

He shook his head, switched off the light and mashed the life out of the tasteless cigarette.

Miss Evans pressed her lips together. "Electro-Transport just sent over your reservation. Your passage is arranged at Grand Terminus, through Booth Two-Seventeen. You'll be transmitted at Hour Eleven Hundred. Here is your ticket. I got you a round trip." Her voice, usually so impersonal, trembled on the last word. "Can I do anything else, Doctor Craig? Your face is so pale."

"Everything's fine," he mumbled. "After I leave, I want you to check on that last patient. Find out about his family, his insurance and all that. Be discreet of course. He has about three weeks left."

"Oh!" gasped Miss Evans. "Another one?"

"Yes, his lines are very definite. Find the usual angle, if you can, to see that his family gets the medical fee back through some sort of anonymous donation. If the family needs it in your opinion, add a thousand credits."

"But, Doctor Craig!" She hesitated. "You can't afford to keep giving away your money."

"Don't worry, Freckle-nose," he said, uttering the pet name before he thought.

The girl burst into tears. "Oh, Jules," she sobbed. "I know it's still business hours, but I can't stand it any longer." Her brown eyes wet with the long pent-up tears, blinked at him pleadingly. "Please, honey! Can't you tell me? Can't I help you? Why are you going to Mars? I'm so worried about you."

"Freckle-nose!" He moved from behind the desk and pulled her to him. "Don't worry. After today, I promise we'll have a lot of fun together. Just don't worry. That's all I can say until tonight when I return. I've got an idea, and if it works out, it might change the destiny of the human race." He lifted her chin and kissed her on the tip of her freckled nose. He forced his voice to sound cheerful. "You got another freckle there since this time yesterday."

The girl was trembling. She held him tightly a moment, then pushed herself from his arms. She straightened her hair and assumed her secretary manner.

"Right, Doctor Craig. When shall I expect you?"

"That's the girl!" He knuckled her under the chin. "I'll be back late—at about Seventeen Thirty Hours. Wait for me and we'll find a nice noisy spot somewhere, where we can resume our usual discussion about who is going to ask who to marry whom, and when and where. Okay?"

He stepped through the door, picking up his hat in the outer room. A thought swung him around.

"When a report is transported from Doctor Praggor concerning a patient named Bradbury, don't file it. I will want to see it first, tonight! It's a special case." He watched the door close slowly, shutting out the framed vision of a freckle-nosed girl in a crisp white uniform watching him with worried eyes.

He took a lift to the roof and signaled a cruising gyrocab. He climbed in, giving the Electro-Transport Grand Terminus address stamped on his reservation. As soon as they were air-borne, the cabbie pulled up to the two thousand-foot level and since traffic was light, they made good time. Below, the city drifted slowly behind like a chessboard of rioting colors, studded with gargantuan chessmen.

---

Craig settled back into the pneumatic seat and tried to relax. His muscles refused to obey. They shrieked their nervous alarm at him now that he was beginning to carry out the long-awaited, final phase of his plan.

There was no turning back. It was too late to hesitate now. His own life, his reputation and perhaps the happiness of countless billions of humans, yet unborn, depended on his courage.

A sickening doubt raced through him. How ironical it would be, if, when he appeared before his old classmate, Dr. William Praggor, P.L.L., presenting again the false name of William Bradbury as he had done three months previously, Praggor should suddenly recognize him as Dr. Jules Craig, P.L.L. Praggor would be compelled to report he had broken his oath! The Supreme Medical Council would be merciless.

If he were recognized, he wouldn't get a chance to finish the last, most important part of the experiment. And this experiment would force him to risk far more than his career—risk his own sanity!

Perhaps Praggor wouldn't recognize him this time either. They had changed during the long busy years since graduation. Praggor had become soft and fat, while he, Craig, still possessed the lean hard body of his youth. But his thick dark hair was graying at the temples. That graduation day had been only eleven years ago.

He remembered the silver-haired speaker, the head doctor whose name he couldn't even recall, walking to the center of the raised platform adjusting his glasses.

"Youngers, I congratulate you. You are about to receive the degree of P.L.L., the most sacred degree ever intrusted to man! The road behind you has been mind-racking. But now you hold in your brains the ability to determine the Predictable Life-Lines of any patient who, having received his order from the Galactic Federation when they have decided his life lines are necessary, will come to you for his diagnosis.

"The Galactic Foundation has its own vast Bureau of Public Records which, in combination with our services, has succeeded in keeping peace in our system for two centuries. Our work is vital to the proper functioning of their methods. But their own investigations are not to be put aside lightly.

"Their departments of mass psychology, propaganda, environmental and racial trends and all the rest of their methods, so necessary to keep a Galactic Empire running smoothly, are at your disposal to make an accurate diagnosis of the particular individual. Where the Federation deals in masses—you in turn have been trained to deal with the individual."

The doctor had paused to clear his throat impressively.

"Youngers—I know all of you have wondered about your own futures," he had continued. "What I am about to say now is such a top-secret matter that it is only revealed at this last moment of graduation. All men want to know their futures. That is their natural right." His voice had become firm. "But when you accept this degree of Doctor of Predictable Life-Lines, you will have forever severed yourself from normal humanity and the right to know your future. You are now declared a breed of man apart. You will never learn your own future. There is a reason for this, and the Galactic Federation is confident you will never cause trouble. No man who has ever stood in this room a Younger and walked out a doctor, has ever violated his oath. You have been investigated far more than you know. But all of you are human."

The speaker softened his voice.

"In a few moments you will be issued your own personal Predictograph. It will be your life-long companion. It is attuned and geared to you personally. It is part of you. While you have been students you worked with standard models to learn their functions.

"But the machine you will receive will be different. Do not think for a moment you can tell your own future with your own Predictograph. You cannot! It has a built-in principle guarding against that unfortunate possibility should you ever try to violate your oath.

"We have never tried to foretell your futures for you, since once you have worn the Crystaleen amplifier-recorder cell necessary for a Life-Line diagnosis for the required three months, the Supreme Medical Council has decided it upsets the delicate attunement of a Doctor of P.L.L. to his own Predictograph, upsets it to a degree which interferes with accurate diagnosis.

"It is unwise for any man to know his own exact future. Danton Marko, the inventor of the Predictograph, proved that two centuries ago when he diagnosed his own future and went hopelessly insane in three weeks."

---

The voice boomed suddenly like the clang of metal upon metal, and gathered itself into a rising crescendo of sound.

"Mankind has enjoyed peace for two centuries. The peace has proven that the Galactic Federation is right in compelling each human to submit, at the proper age of his development, to a Predictable Life-Line diagnosis. Consequently, no single human, has been able to succeed in planning disorder and chaos to a serious degree before being stopped.

"I admit that seems to be a paradox. I admit your logical minds may question this paradox and ask: If a human is forced to have a Life-Line made and his future indicates he is going to try to breed trouble and unrest, he must be executed. This fact will naturally show up in his diagnosis, which immediately must be filed with the Galactic Federation. Therefore, are you, as a doctor of P.L.L., responsible for the man's death, since you revealed he would cause trouble?" He raised his hand as if to stifle any sudden comment.

"It is a puzzling question, Youngers. The same as which was first—the chicken or the egg? There are things concerning the phenomena we deal with which we do not understand as fully as we some day hope to. But you have your sacred trust and obligation to file with the Council and Federation all Life-Lines you diagnose.

"Mankind has had no war for centuries. But mankind's massed life force and intelligence is a terrible, powerful blind energy that could wreck the entire Universe if it were not guided and controlled into the proper channels.

"Isn't it better to sacrifice a few—instead of a billion?" The lines in the lecturer's face became grim. "Youngers, as the years slip by, and you find yourself with a patient whose future is although not dangerous but full of misery and agony—always remember your training and your oath: You are forbidden to tell him his unhappy future and you are forbidden to tamper with your machine to tell your own future. Those are your medical ethics. Younger Praggor, step forward!"

Craig remembered how Praggor had mounted the platform a Younger and stepped down a Doctor, P.L.L. Like himself, minutes later. Eleven years ago. Eleven years of stepping aside and permitting men and women to walk blindly ahead to their doom. Eleven years of lies. Of cheating himself of his own self-respect.

These were some of the reasons he had decided to break his oath! He would make himself a guinea-pig. He would have his own future diagnosed in a way that he would know beyond the shadow of a doubt if he could actually change his own Predictable Life-Lines. That was why he had sent Praggor that letter three months ago:

25, Augusti, 243 G. T.
Stanton-Greenstone Center
5th, Wing, 82nd, Level
Greater NYC—EARTH.

TO: Dr. William Praggor, P.L.L.
Manya Clinic
New Paris, MARS

Dear Bill:

Sending you patient, Earthian rank of Younger, Ben Bradbury. Would run case myself but since he is friend, feel he has been too close to me for that. Suggested he see you for more impersonal diagnosis. He will probably request appointment pre-lim consultation within week. Send his charts to my secretary before you file them with Council.

Jules Craig, P.L.L.

He had been nervous, three months ago, when he had presented himself to Praggor's secretary with the false name of Bradbury. He had hoped the report he would turn in would be complete enough that Praggor would not have to go to the Federation's files for more data. If that happened, since the name of Ben Bradbury wouldn't be found in the files, he would be exposed immediately and all chance of making the experiment lost forever to him.

---

But Praggor's secretary had seemed cold and indifferent, like a machine. And although he had sweated out the fear Praggor would recognize him when he was admitted to the inner office, he saw that Praggor hardly even looked at him. Just another patient....

The sudden whine of the vanes of the gyrocab as it began to drop toward the landing-stage snapped him back to the present, and its new problems. He gradually pulled himself together as he saw Grand Terminus swell and expand in size beneath him. He felt the landing gear bump. He climbed out, paid the cabbie and walked to the information desk presenting his reservation for transport.

In a bored voice, the clerk issued instructions for finding Booth 217. Down the corridor, through the hall, down the lift, and into the booth. The attendant ripped off the receipt, opened the door. Craig entered and sat down in the metal chair. He waited.

His hands still felt wet. He tried to reason with himself that there was no sense in getting nervous now. That could come after he diagnosed his own charts.

Distantly, he heard the attendant drone:

"Grand Terminus, Earth—calling New Paris, Mars. Reservation Twenty-six B. Doctor Jules Craig, Earthian, awaiting transport, Booth Two-Seventeen to New Paris. Please verify. Over."

The lights inside the booth were bright, hot and dazzling. He could hear the vague hum and whir of the scanners as the invisible technicians adjusted the transmitting beam in relationship to his mass. The spacial chit-chat, with no time lag since it was sub-ether stuff, was incomprehensible to the layman. It continued:

"New Paris, Mars, to Booth Two-Seventeen, Grand Terminus, Earth. Doctor Jules Craig, Earthian, in sync for transport. Will adjust. Over."

Craig felt a tingle sweep through him, and as it continued, he puffed a cigarette alight. He blew a swirling cloud of smoke.

"New Paris to Grand Terminus. Adjustment complete on Two-Seventeen. Go ahead. Over."

Craig tensed himself against the unpleasant sensation of a bad transport. But he felt nothing. He waited until the "All Clear" signal flashed, and stood up. It had been a smooth trip. Even the puff of smoke had come along with him.

He waited half a minute until the lights blinked off and walked through the opposite door. It had been as simple as that. No sensation. Good transport.

The air was thin and cold. His breathing quickened, and since he felt a bit dizzy he made his way slowly to the nearest move-walks. He noticed, however, that he could breathe more easily than the last time he had come to Mars to see Praggor. That meant the Federation, at last, was beginning to get some results with the new oxygen-output machines.

The Manya Clinic swarmed with patients. The lift shot him up to Praggor's office. The waiting room was crowded and the unsmiling secretary took his false name without comment. He found a place to sit, and began to wait.

Irritated, Craig pulled out a cigarette and tried to smoke, but his hands shook so noticeably and the cigarette tasted so muggish, he threw it away.

The waiting was nerve-racking. Good grief! he thought. Is this the refined mental torture all his patients went through in his own waiting room? Is this why all his patients were so nervous despite his efforts to assure them worrying wouldn't help things? Is this the way they felt while waiting for his diagnosis—with the mind building up possible or imaginary terrible future happenings?

Craig noticed his hands were sweating more than ever, and furious with himself, he tried to clench them together as if to push the cold, clammy moisture back where it came from. He had never considered this part of a diagnosis so seriously before.

---

Without warning, the nasty little thought he had been trying to fight down and out of his consciousness ever since he had started the experiment struck him like a blow from an invisible fist.

"Is this experiment too big for one man, Doctor Craig?"

Would there be an inevitable punishment for trying to tamper with the lines and forces of space and time? Were humans still too small and insignificant and ignorant to try to sway the very basic structure of the entire Universe?

Relentlessly, the long submerged, nasty little voice beat at his brain with questions.

"Suppose, Doctor Jules Craig, by breaking your oath, you learn your future is to be a fearsome thing crammed with disease, heartbreak, disfigurement and an early painful death and that it is impossible to change your future? Is that why Marko went mad? Can you keep your own sanity?"

---

Chaotic thoughts rushed through Dr. Craig's mind and he wondered whether he dared read his report from Praggor.

---

He almost shouted aloud. He realized he was sitting stiff and tense on the edge of his chair. He took a desperate grip on himself and forced his body into a more relaxed pose.

He waited, with the sweat drenching his body.

"Younger Bradbury?" The secretary was calling him.

Wearily, he stood up and walked into the inner office. He saw Praggor sitting behind his desk, fatter than the last time. He wondered if the doctor would recognize him at this last moment.

Praggor didn't. Praggor hardly looked at him as he shuffled charts importantly, looking professional.

"Younger Bradbury, your great day has come. You have finished your P.L.L. Nice report. Notes you supplied my secretary were exact." He looked oddly at Craig. "You know—your reports were almost as complete as if a doctor himself had made them out. Usually it is difficult to convince a patient of the importance of detailing every movement, contact, every bit of food and drink, every thought so as to enable the machine to get the Life-Lines well centered and to wear the Crystaleen Cell at all times. But you followed my instructions perfectly."

Praggor laughed and continued: "Of course your charts have the small error of ten percent which we always have to allow for. Some of your unimportant detail lines are fuzzy."

A blasting fear, like exploding petrol, swept through Craig. Here he was sitting in front of a desk, waiting for a diagnosis, the most important thing in his life—and he had to listen to this kind of rubbish! Error of ten percent? The machine never missed! With the care he had taken, checking his own behavior, he knew he had turned in probably the most accurate report ever filed into any Predictograph. He had wanted to be sure.

He listened, the fear inside of him growing and swelling until it was choking him in the throat, as the doctor spouted off with medical rubbish that sounded like Page 310, of Chapter IV, of Marko's "The Necessity of Telling the Patient What He Wants to Hear."

This was a diagnosis like telling futures with tea-leaves and palm-reading, when he wanted to know! And now Praggor was giving him the old stuff about: "—you'll take a nice long trip—" and "make money—nothing to worry about—celebrate—" and the chuckles about, "—a beautiful blond with long legs—"

Praggor wasn't telling him the truth! There never would be a blond with long legs. All he wanted was Freckle-nose. Praggor was lying to him! The thought rose up monstrous in his mind. Good heavens! What did it mean?

"I'll send these charts to Doctor Jules Craig tonight," Praggor was saying. "He will give you additional lines in detail if you should so desire. Don't bankrupt yourself on that celebration. Congratulations. See my secretary about your account on the way out. Good-by."

In a daze he paid his bill, forced himself calmly to go down the lift, onto the move-walks and into the Transport Building.

Dully, he noticed his hands hurt. His fists were clenched, his nails had dug into the flesh, and his palms were bleeding. The spreading flecks of crimson mingled splotchily with the sweat. He should go somewhere and disinfect the wounds.

But that could wait. He had to get back to his office and read the true report. Praggor was probably transporting the charts and diagnosis at this instant.

---

He entered Booth 217 and sat down. In minutes now he would know whether his basic theory was correct—that man could be master of his own destiny, and could change his predicted Life-Lines. His theory had to be correct!

It was futile and useless to think that man was nothing more than a helpless pawn—with his life laid out from birth until death by some Unknown Great Factor in some Great Unknown Game. That would be a devastating knowledge.

But no! He would learn his own future and change it! Then he would take his evidence to the Supreme Medical Council and prove that mankind could avoid certain unhappy paths of life if warned in advance. Then doctors like himself would be able to lead people along lines to ultimate happiness.

His tension increased as the technicians droned on and on with their adjustments. If only his own future wasn't too bad! If only he could keep his sanity!

The "All Clear" signal flashed, the lights winked off. He hurried out of the booth and into a gyrocab, up to his office, through the door, and saw Freckle-nose sitting at her desk, calmly powdering her nose.

"Well," she said, wrinkling her nose so the freckles quivered, "you're seven minutes late. Why can't handsome young doctors ever be on time?"

"Sorry," he said breathlessly. "That report on Bradbury. Where is it?"

"Oh—that? It just came through. I put it on your desk. Let it wait until tomorrow. I don't want you to get wrapped up in a P.L.L. diagnosis for hours and hours when we've got a date. I've found a new place to go."

"Sorry, honey," he muttered. "This is important."

He ran into his inner office and ripped open the report,

26, Novemberi, 243 G. T.
Manya Clinic
New Paris, MARS

TO: Dr. Jules Craig, P.L.L.
Stanton-Greenstone Center
5th., Wing, 82nd., Level
Greater NYC—EARTH

Dear Jules:

Thanks for the patient. An interesting, but unfortunate case. Since he was a friend of yours I was extremely careful in the diagnosis.

Younger Bradbury turned in excellent reports. But since I definitely did not like the diagnosis on the first run, I ran it through three times personally, to make sure. Inclosed you will find copies of all three charts. Since this man was a friend of yours I am deeply sorry. I advise you to stay away from him from this moment on.

The energy line, in this patient's case, that I find bewildering is the sudden rise of the mental factor C3. You will notice on Chart II that it rises rapidly up and beyond Marko's Constant with an intensity of 3.017 degrees. I have never been confronted with a case of such extreme mental deterioration in such a short period of time. This man will soon become dangerously insane.

You will see in his charts that from some unknown phobia buried in his own mind that this man is going quickly insane, and in his insanity will unknowingly commit three horrible murders before he is apprehended and executed. And one of these unfortunate murders will be the death of someone very close to him.

Naturally, my medical ethics would not permit me to inform this man of his unhappy destiny. I gave him the usual, routine soothing talk so necessary in sad cases.

In an attempt to account for his sudden mental breakdown, I traced the K4 and K5 lines, the physical and love factors, and found a sharp break which I interpreted as a sudden, unexplainable reversal of feeling, or intention, due to some hidden fear only apparent to himself, toward someone very dear in his emotional background.

However, I don't understand how a physical factor or reversal of feeling, is strong enough to cause such a mental breakdown as indicated. I think these are secondary reactions from some hidden fear or else some sudden unexpected shock. I wish we knew more about this type of case. I wish I could have said something to this patient, but with his tragic future, as you know, it is forbidden.

Be sure to attend the Medical Reunion. Like to see you.

Sincerely, your old classmate,

William Praggor, P.L.L.
Level 186—Bldg. 12
Manya Clinic
New Paris, MARS

Silently, the door opened.

"There you are, reading some of those old charts again." Freckle-nose edged her slim body up on the desk and pulled the charts from his lax fingers. "Tonight is my turn to ask you to marry me—remember?"

"No!" Dr. Craig said in a dull voice, and felt the first part of the phobia steal slyly into his brain.

"You see?" it said mockingly, and hungrily began to eat away at his brain.

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Farmer in the Dell by Edna Ferber

Farmer in the Dell

by Edna Ferber

Old Ben Westerveld was taking it easy. Every muscle taut, every nerve tense, his keen eyes vainly straining to pierce the blackness of the stuffy room--there lay Ben Westerveld in bed, taking it easy. And it was hard. Hard. He wanted to get up. He wanted so intensely to get up that the mere effort of lying there made him ache all over. His toes were curled with the effort. His fingers were clenched with it. His breath came short, and his thighs felt cramped. Nerves. But old Ben Westerveld didn't know that. What should a retired and well-to-do farmer of fifty-eight know of nerves, especially when he has moved to the city and is taking it easy?

If only he knew what time it was. Here in Chicago you couldn't tell whether it was four o'clock or seven unless you looked at your watch. To do that it was necessary to turn on the light. And to turn on the light meant that he would turn on, too, a flood of querulous protest from his wife, Bella, who lay asleep beside him.

When for forty-five years of your life you have risen at four-thirty daily, it is difficult to learn to loll. To do it successfully, you must be a natural- born loller to begin with and revert. Bella Westerveld was and had. So there she lay, asleep. Old Ben wasn't and hadn't. So there he lay, terribly wide- awake, wondering what made his heart thump so fast when he was lying so still. If it had been light, you could have seen the lines of strained resignation in the sagging muscles of his patient face.

They had lived in the city for almost a year, but it was the same every morning. He would open his eyes, start up with one hand already reaching for the limp, drab work-worn garments that used to drape the chair by his bed. Then he would remember and sink back while a great wave of depression swept over him. Nothing to get up for. Store clothes on the chair by the bed. He was taking it easy.

Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so close that the bed- room was in twilight even at midday. On the farm he could tell by the feeling--an intangible thing, but infallible. He could gauge the very quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the cocks, the stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the ghostly light --these things he had never needed. He had known. But here in the un- sylvan section of Chicago which bears the bosky name of Englewood, the very darkness had a strange quality.

A hundred unfamiliar noises misled him. There were no cocks, no cattle, no elm. Above all, there was no instinctive feeling. Once, when they first came to the city, he had risen at twelve-thirty, thinking it was morning, and had gone clumping about the flat, waking up everyone and loosing from his wife's lips a stream of acid vituperation that seared even his case-hardened sensibilities. The people sleeping in the bedroom of the flat next door must have heard her.

"You big rube! Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the back yard and sleep there if you're so dumb you can't tell night from day."

Even after thirty-three years of marriage he had never ceased to be appalled at the coarseness of her mind and speech--she who had seemed so mild and fragile and exquisite when he married her. He had crept back to bed shamefacedly. He could hear the couple in the bedroom of the flat just across the little court grumbling and then laughing a little, grudgingly, and yet with appreciation. That bedroom, too, had still the power to appall him. Its nearness, its forced intimacy, were daily shocks to him whose most immediate neighbor, back on the farm, had been a quarter of a mile away. The sound of a shoe dropped on the hardwood floor, the rush of water in the bathroom, the murmur of nocturnal confidences, the fretful cry of a child in the night, all startled and distressed him whose ear had found music in the roar of the thresher and had been soothed by the rattle of the tractor and the hoarse hoot of the steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the Mississippi rolling grandly by.

Since they had moved into town, he had found only one city sound that he really welcomed--the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had until the winter months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he had begun to take it easy, six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in motion by his own big work-callused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way, as if they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of his hands and around the thumbs.

"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up."

He got a little bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gendeman, the druggist, white- coated and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly--while it lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped back into his old apathy.

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 the highlights 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 other men 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."

"Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road. They got a calf at Aug Tietjens' with five legs."

"I heard. I'd just as lief walk a little piece. I'm kind of beat, though. We've got the threshers day after tomorrow. We've been cooking up."

Beneath Ben's bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness. The two would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of embarrassment. The neighbors were right in their surmise that there was no definite understanding between them. But the thing was settled in the minds of both. Once Ben had said: "Pop says I can have the north eighty on easy payments if--when----"

Emma Byers had flushed up brightly, but had answered equably: "That's a fine piece. Your pop is an awful good man."

The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her butter and eggs and garden stuff brought higher prices at Commercial, twelve miles away, than did any other's in the district. She was not a pretty girl, according to the local standards, but there was about her, even at twenty-two, a clear- headedness and a restful serenity that promised well for Ben Westerveld's future happiness.

But Ben Westerveld's future was not to lie in Emma Byers' capable hands. He knew that as soon as he saw Bella Huckins. Bella Huckins was the daughter of old "Red Front" Huckins, who ran the saloon of that cheerful name in Commercial. Bella had elected to teach school, not from any bent toward learning but because teaching appealed to her as being a rather elegant occupation. The Huckins family was not elegant. In that day a year or two of teaching in a country school took the place of the present-day normal-school diploma. Bella had an eye on St. Louis, forty miles from the town of Commercial. So she used the country school as a step toward her ultimate goal, though she hated the country and dreaded her apprenticeship.

"I'll get a beau," she said, "who'll take me driving and around. And Saturdays and Sundays I can come to town."

The first time Ben Westerveld saw her she was coming down the road toward him in her tight-fitting black alpaca dress. The sunset was behind her. Her hair was very golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought or speech.

He knew at once this was the new schoolteacher. He had heard of her coming, though at the time the conversation had interested him not at all. Bella knew who he was, too. She had learned the name and history of every eligible young man in the district two days after her arrival. That was due partly to her own bold curiosity and partly to the fact that she was boarding with the Widow Becker, the most notorious gossip in the county. In Bella's mental list of the neighborhood swains Ben Westerveld already occupied a position at the top of the column.

He felt his face redden as they approached each other. To hide his embarrassment he swung his little hickory switch gaily and called to his dog Dunder, who was nosing about by the roadside. Dunder bounded forward, spied the newcomer, and leaped toward her playfully and with natural canine curiosity.

Bella screamed. She screamed and ran to Ben and clung to him, clasping her hands about his arm. Ben lifted the hickory switch in his free hand and struck Dunder a sharp cut with it. It was the first time in his life that he had done such a thing. If he had had a sane moment from that time until the day he married Bella Huckins, he never would have forgotten the dumb hurt in Dunder's stricken eyes and shrinking, quivering body.

Bella screamed again, still clinging to him. Ben was saying: "He won't hurt you. He won't hurt you," meanwhile patting her shoulder reassuringly. He looked down at her pale face. She was so slight, so childlike, so apparently different from the sturdy country girls. From--well, from the girls he knew. Her helplessness, her utter femininity, appealed to all that was masculine in him. Bella, the experienced, clinging to him, felt herself swept from head to foot by a queer electric tingling that was very pleasant but that still had in it something of the sensation of a wholesale bumping of one's crazy bone. If she had been anything but a stupid little flirt, she would have realized that here was a specimen of the virile male with which she could not trifle. She glanced up at him now, smiling faintly. "My, I was scared!" She stepped away from him a little--very little.

"Aw, he wouldn't hurt a flea."

But Bella looked over her shoulder fearfully to where Dunder stood by the roadside, regarding Ben with a look of uncertainty. He still thought that perhaps this was a new game. Not a game that he cared for, but still one to be played if his master fancied it. Ben stooped, picked up a stone, and threw it at Dunder, striking him in the flank.

"Go on home!" he commanded sternly. "Go home!" He started toward the dog with a well-feigned gesture of menace. Dunder, with a low howl, put his tail between his legs and loped off home, a disillusioned dog.

Bella stood looking up at Ben. Ben looked down at her. "You're the new teacher, ain't you?"

"Yes. I guess you must think I'm a fool, going on like a baby about that dog."

"Most girls would be scared of him if they didn't know he wouldn't hurt nobody. He's pretty big."

He paused a moment, awkwardly. "My name's Ben Westerveld."

"Pleased to meet you," said Bella. "Which way was you going? There's a dog down at Tietjens' that's enough to scare anybody. He looks like a pony, he's so big."

"I forgot something at the school this afternoon, and I was walking over to get it." Which was a lie. "I hope it won't get dark before I get there. You were going the other way, weren't you?"

"Oh, I wasn't going no place in particular. I'll be pleased to keep you company down to the school and back." He was surprised at his own sudden masterfulness.

They set off together, chatting as freely as if they had known one another for years. Ben had been on his way to the Byers farm, as usual. The Byers farm and Emma Byers passed out of his mind as completely as if they had been whisked away on a magic rug.

Bella Huckins had never meant to marry him. She hated farm life.

She was contemptuous of farmer folk. She loathed cooking and drudgery. The Huckinses lived above the saloon in Commercial and Mrs. Huckins was always boiling ham and tongue and cooking pigs' feet and shredding cabbage for slaw, all these edibles being destined for the free-lunch counter downstairs. Bella had early made up her mind that there should be no boiling and stewing and frying in her life. Whenever she could find an excuse she loitered about the saloon. There she found life and talk and color. Old Red Front Huckins used to chase her away, but she always turned up again, somehow, with a dish for the lunch counter or with an armful of clean towels.

Ben Westerveld never said clearly to himself, "I want to marry Bella." He never dared meet the thought. He intended honestly to marry Emma Byers. But this thing was too strong for him. As for Bella, she laughed at him, but she was scared, too. They both fought the thing, she selfishly, he unselfishly, for the Byers girl, with her clear, calm eyes and her dependable ways, was heavy on his heart. Ben's appeal for Bella was merely that of the magnetic male. She never once thought of his finer qualities. Her appeal for him was that of the frail and alluring woman. But in the end they married. The neighborhood was rocked with surprise.

Usually in a courtship it is the male who assumes the bright colors of pretense in order to attract a mate. But Ben Westerveld had been too honest to be anything but himself. He was so honest and fundamentally truthful that he refused at first to allow himself to believe that this slovenly shrew was the fragile and exquisite creature he had married. He had the habit of personal cleanliness, had Ben, in a day when tubbing was a ceremony in an environment that made bodily nicety difficult. He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of old Red Front Huckins' bar.

They had three children, a girl and two boys. Ben Westerveld prospered in spite of his wife. As the years went on he added eighty acres here, eighty acres there, until his land swept down to the very banks of the Mississippi. There is no doubt that she hindered him greatly, but he was too expert a farmer to fail. At threshing time the crew looked forward to working for Ben, the farmer, and dreaded the meals prepared by Bella, his wife. She was notoriously the worst cook and housekeeper in the county. And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her plaint was the same-- "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm all my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day and night, I'd rather have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here."

Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as slovenly as her dress. She grew stout, too, and unwieldy, and her skin coarsened from lack of care and from overeating. And in her children's ears she continually dinned a hatred of farm life and farming. "You can get away from it," she counseled her daughter, Minnie. "Don't you be a rube like your pa," she cautioned John, the older boy. And they profited by her ad- vice. Minnie went to work in Commercial when she was seventeen, an overdeveloped girl with an inordinate love of cheap finery. At twenty, she married an artisan, a surly fellow with roving tendencies. They moved from town to town. He never stuck long at one job. John, the older boy, was as much his mother's son as Minnie was her mother's daughter. Restless, dissatisfied, emptyheaded, he was the despair of his father. He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not have hurt him, but evidently he had been dragged almost a mile before his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood and the reins.

That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her hatred of the locality and the life.

"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your hand at Dike now for a change."

Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked, stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by thrusting his finger into the hole in the dike and holding it there until help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained.

Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The boy was cropwise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you might see the two walking about the farm, looking at the pigs--great black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock; speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April, with rich patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter wheat was a fine prospect Ben Westerveld, listening tolerantly to the boy's opinions, felt a great surge of joy that he did not show. Here, at last, was compensation for all the misery and sordidness and bitter disappointment of his married life.

That married life had endured now for more than thirty years. Ben Westerveld still walked with a light, quick step--for his years. The stocky, broad-shouldered figure was a little shrunken. He was as neat and clean at fifty-five as he had been at twenty-five-a habit that, on a farm, is fraught with difficulties. The community knew and respected him. He was a man of standing. When he drove into town on a bright winter morning, in his big sheepskin coat and his shaggy cap and his great boots, and entered the First National Bank, even Shumway, the cashier, would look up from his desk to say:

"Hello, Westerveld! Hello! Well, how goes it?"

When Shumway greeted a farmer in that way you knew that there were no unpaid notes to his discredit.

All about Ben Westerveld stretched the fruit of his toil; the work of his hands. Orchards, fields, cattle, barns, silos. All these things were dependent on him for their future well-being--on him and on Dike after him. His days were full and running over. Much of the work was drudgery; most of it was backbreaking and laborious. But it was his place. It was his reason for being. And he felt that the reason was good, though he never put that thought into words, mental or spoken. He only knew that he was part of the great scheme of things and that he was functioning ably. If he had expressed himself at all, he might have said:

"Well, I got my work cut out for me, and I do it, and do it right."

There was a tractor, now, of course; and a sturdy, middle-class automobile in which Bella lolled red-faced when they drove into town.

As Ben Westerveld had prospered, his shrewish wife had reaped her benefits. Ben was not the selfish type of farmer who insists on twentieth- century farm implements and medieval household equipment. He had added a bedroom here, a cool summer kitchen there, an icehouse, a commodious porch, a washing machine, even a bathroom. But Bella remained unplacated. Her face was set toward the city. And slowly, surely, the effect of thirty years of nagging was beginning to tell on Ben Westerveld. He was the finer metal, but she was the heavier, the coarser. She beat him and molded him as iron beats upon gold.

Minnie was living in Chicago now--a good-natured creature, but slack like her mother. Her surly husband was still talking of his rights and crying down with the rich. They had two children.

Minnie wrote of them, and of the delights of city life. Movies every night. Halsted Street just around the corner. The big stores. State Street. The el took you downtown in no time. Something going on all the while. Bella Westerveld, after one of those letters, was more than a chronic shrew; she became a terrible termagant.

When Ben Westerveld decided to concentrate on hogs and wheat he didn't dream that a world would be clamoring for hogs and wheat for four long years. When the time came, he had them, and sold them fabulously. But wheat and hogs and markets became negligible things on the day that Dike, with seven other farm boys from the district, left for the nearest training camp that was to fit them for France and war.

Bella made the real fuss, wailing and mouthing and going into hysterics. Old Ben took it like a stoic. He drove the boy to town that day. When the train pulled out, you might have seen, if you had looked close, how the veins and cords swelled in the lean brown neck above the clean blue shirt. But that was all. As the weeks went on, the quick, light step began to lag a little. He had lost more than a son; his right-hand helper was gone. There were no farm helpers to be had. Old Ben couldn't do it all. A touch of rheumatism that winter half crippled him for eight weeks. Bella's voice seemed never to stop its plaint.

"There ain't no sense in you trying to make out alone. Next thing you'll die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands." At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance was wearing down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too. But something in him was. Something that had resisted her all these years. Something that had made him master and superior in spite of everything.

In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a fool, and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about the room, never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third person--a sturdy girl of twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to look at, and with honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.

"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on. "Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent out the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it, and glad. They got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or slab-sided or cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let them run it on shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out. Maybe Dike'll never come b----"

But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter.

They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on Ben Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him to camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed. Calhoun County in the spring has much the beauty of California. There is a peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze. Ben Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look back, though, as they do in a play. He dared not.

They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the past thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen stores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the crashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode of living--necessitated by a four-room flat--all these urban adjuncts seemed as natural to her as though she had been bred in the midst of them.

She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was a respectable neighborhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They seemed to find a great deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling From seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to Ma's for a minute." The two quarreled a great deal, being so nearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring them together as well.

"I'm going downtown today to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. "Do you want to come along, Ma?"

"What you got to get?"

"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple little dresses for Pearlie."

"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore."

"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I can do to tend to the house, without sewing."

"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' besides----"

"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me."

The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown el together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent store on the wrong side of State Street.

They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bits of stuff in the stifling air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as they went.

They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their hurried dinner with hastily bought food from the near-by delicatessen.

Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another day. What day was it? L'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday. A little feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had been. He counted back laboriously and decided that today must be Thursday. Not that it made any difference.

They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he clumped down the main street of Commercial--if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and opinion--he said nothing.

Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shoveled coal. He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shoveling and scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odor of his pipe. It gave him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.

"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the back yard and grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm."

His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to gardening-- he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.

On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful tiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He talked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy man. He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.

"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop, with about 917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say."

"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is that Farmer Ben was right.

Minnie got into the habit of using him as a sort of nursemaid. It gave her many hours of freedom for gadding and gossiping.

"Pa, will you look after Pearlie for a little while this morning? I got to run downtown to match something and she gets so tired and mean-acting if I take her along. Ma's going with me."

He loved the feel of Pearlie's small, velvet-soft hand in his big fist. He called her "little feller," and fed her forbidden dainties. His big brown fingers were miraculously deft at buttoning and unbuttoning her tiny garments, and wiping her soft lips, and performing a hundred tender offices. He was playing a sort of game with himself, pretending this was Dike become a baby again. Once the pair managed to get over to Lincoln Park, where they spent a glorious day looking at the animals, eating popcorn, and riding on the miniature railway.

They returned, tired, dusty, and happy, to a double tirade.

Bella engaged in a great deal of what she called worrying about Dike. Ben spoke of him seldom, but the boy was always present in his thoughts. They had written him of their move, but he had not seemed to get the impression of its permanence. His letters indicated that he thought they were visiting Minnie, or taking a vacation in the city. Dike's letters were few. Ben treasured them, and read and reread them. When the Armistice news came, and with it the possibility of Dike's return, Ben tried to fancy him fitting into the life of the city. And his whole being revolted at the thought.

He saw the pimply-faced, sallow youths standing at the corner of Halsted and Sixty-third, spitting languidly and handling their limp cigarettes with an amazing labial dexterity. Their conversation was low-voiced, sinister, and terse, and their eyes narrowed as they watched the overdressed, scarlet-lipped girls go by. A great fear clutched at Ben Westerveld's heart.

The lack of exercise and manual labor began to tell on Ben. He did not grow fat from idleness. Instead his skin seemed to sag and hang on his frame, like a garment grown too large for him. He walked a great deal. Perhaps that had something to do with it. He tramped miles of city pave- ments. He was a very lonely man. And then, one day, quite by accident, he came upon South Water Street. Came upon it, stared at it as a water-crazed traveler in a desert gazes upon the spring in the oasis, and drank from it, thirstily, gratefully.

South Water Street feeds Chicago. Into that close-packed thoroughfare come daily the fruits and vegetables that will supply a million tables. Ben had heard of it, vaguely, but had never attempted to find it. Now he stumbled upon it and, standing there, felt at home in Chicago for the first time in more than a year. He saw ruddy men walking about in overalls and carrying whips in their hands--wagon whips, actually. He hadn't seen men like that since he had left the farm. The sight of them sent a great pang of homesickness through him. His hand reached out and he ran an accustomed finger over the potatoes in a barrel on the walk. His fingers lingered and gripped them, and passed over them lovingly.

At the contact something within him that had been tight and hungry seemed to relax, satisfied. It was his nerves, feeding on those familiar things for which they had been starving.

He walked up one side and down the other. Crates of lettuce, bins of onions, barrels of apples. Such vegetables! The radishes were scarlet globes. Each carrot was a spear of pure orange. The green and purple of fancy asparagus held his expert eye. The cauliflower was like a great bouquet, fit for a bride; the cabbages glowed like jade.

And the men! He hadn't dreamed there were men like that in this big, shiny-shod, stiffly laundered, white-collared city. Here were rufous men in overalls--worn, shabby, easy-looking overalls and old blue shirts, and mashed hats worn at a careless angle. Men, jovial, good-natured, with clear eyes, and having about them some of the revivifying freshness and wholesomeness of the products they handled.

Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and garlic and of the earth that seemed to cling to the vegetables, washed clean though they were. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and felt strangely at peace.

It was a busy street. A hundred times he had to step quickly to avoid a hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon. And yet the busy men found time to greet him friendlily. "H'are you!" they said genially. "H'are you this morning!"

He was marketwise enough to know that some of these busy people were commission men, and some grocers, and some buyers, stewards, clerks. It was a womanless thoroughfare. At the busiest business corner, though, in front of the largest commission house on the street, he saw a woman. Evidently she was transacting business, too, for he saw the men bringing boxes of berries and vegetables for her inspection. A woman in a plain blue skirt and a small black hat.

A funny job for a woman. What weren't they mixing into nowadays!

He turned sidewise in the narrow, crowded space in order to pass her little group. And one of the men--a red-cheeked, merry-looking young fellow in a white apron--laughed and said: "Well, Emma, you win. When it comes to driving a bargain with you, I quit. It can't be did!"

Even then he didn't know her. He did not dream that this straight, slim, tailored, white-haired woman, bargaining so shrewdly with these men, was the Emma Byers of the old days. But he stopped there a moment, in frank curiosity, and the woman looked up. She looked up, and he knew those intelligent eyes and that serene brow. He had carried the picture of them in his mind for more than thirty years, so it was not so surprising.

He did not hesitate. He might have if he had thought a moment, but he acted automatically. He stood before her. "You're Emma Byers, ain't you?"

She did not know him at first. Small blame to her, so completely had the roguish, vigorous boy vanished in this sallow, sad-eyed old man. Then: "Why, Ben!" she said quietly. And there was pity in her voice, though she did not mean to have it there. She put out one hand--that capable, reassuring hand--and gripped his and held it a moment. It was queer and significant that it should be his hand that lay within hers.

"Well, what in all get-out are you doing around here, Emma?" He tried to be jovial and easy. She turned to the aproned man with whom she had been dealing and smiled.

"What am I doing here, Joe?"

Joe grinned, waggishly. "Nothin'; only beatin' every man on the street at his own game, and makin' so much money that----"

But she stopped him there. "I guess I'll do my own explaining." She turned to Ben again. "And what are you doing here in Chicago?"

Ben passed a faltering hand across his chin. "Me? Well, I'm--we're living here, I s'pose. Livin' here."

She glanced at him sharply. "Left the farm, Ben?"

"Yes."

"Wait a minute." She concluded her business with Joe; finished it briskly and to her own satisfaction. With her bright brown eyes and her alert manner and her quick little movements she made you think of a wren--a businesslike little wren--a very early wren that is highly versed in the worm-catching way.

At her next utterance he was startled but game.

"Have you had your lunch?"

"Why, no; I----"

"I've been down here since seven, and I'm starved. Let's go and have a bite at the little Greek restaurant around the corner. A cup of coffee and a sandwich, anyway."

Seated at the bare little table, she surveyed him with those intelligent, understanding, kindly eyes, and he felt the years slip from him. They were walking down the country road together, and she was listening quietly and advising him.

She interrogated him gently. But something of his old masterfulness came back to him. "No, I want to know about you first. I can't get the rights of it, you being here on South Water, tradin' and all."

So she told him briefly. She was in the commission business. Successful. She bought, too, for such hotels as the Blackstone and the Congress, and for half a dozen big restaurants. She gave him bare facts, but he was shrewd enough and sufficiently versed in business to know that here was a woman of established commercial position.

"But how does it happen you're keepin' it up, Emma, all this time? Why, you must be anyway--it ain't that you look it--but----" He floundered, stopped.

She laughed. "That's all right, Ben. I couldn't fool you on that. And I'm working because it keeps me happy. I want to work till I die. My children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that. I'm not going to rust out. I want to wear out." Then, at an unspoken question in his eyes: "He's dead. These twenty years. It was hard at first, when the children were small. But I knew garden stuff if I didn't know anything else. It came natural to me. That's all."

So then she got his story from him bit by bit. He spoke of the farm and of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice. He spoke of Bella, and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie. And the words came falteringly. He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for deception. When he had finished:

"Now, listen, Ben. You go back to your farm."

"I can't. She--I can't."

She leaned forward, earnestly. "You go back to the farm."

He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat. "I can't."

"You can't stay here. It's killing you. It's poisoning you. Did you ever hear of toxins? That means poisons, and you're poisoning yourself. You'll die of it. You've got another twenty years of work in you. What's ailing you? You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger job in the world than that."

For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own inspiring personality. But it died again. When they rose to go, his shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged. At the doorway he paused a moment, awkward in farewell. He blushed a little, stammered.

"Emma--I always wanted to tell you. God knows it was luck for you the way it turned out--but I always wanted to----"

She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright brown eyes were on him. "I never held it against you, Ben. I had to live a long time to understand it. But I never held a grudge. It just wasn't to be, I suppose. But listen to me, Ben. You do as I tell you. You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs. There isn't a bigger man-size job in the world. It's where you belong."

Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again. Again they sagged. And so they parted, the two.

He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and miles of city streets. He must have lost his way, too, for when he looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one.

So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected. He took the right streetcar at last and got off at his own corner at seven o'clock, or later. He was in for a scolding, he knew.

But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within. High-pitched voices. Bella's above all the rest, of course, but there was Minnie's too, and Gus's growl, and Pearlie's treble, and the boy Ed's and----

At the other voice his hand trembled so that the knob rattled in the door, and he could not turn it. But finally he did turn it, and stumbled in, breathing hard. And that other voice was Dike's.

He must have just arrived. The flurry of explanation was still in progress. Dike's knapsack was still on his back, and his canteen at his hip, his helmet slung over his shoulder. A brown, hard, glowing Dike, strangely tall and handsome and older, too. Older.

All this Ben saw in less than one electric second. Then he had the boy's two shoulders in his hands, and Dike was saying, "Hello, Pop."

Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and marveling, and asking questions.

"He come in to--what's that place, Dike?--Hoboken--yesterday only. An' he sent a dispatch to the farm. Can't you read our letters, Dike, that you didn't know we was here now? And then he's only got an hour more. They got to go to Camp Grant to be, now, demobilized. He came out to Minnie's on a chance. Ain't he big!"

But Dike and his father were looking at each other quietly. Then Dike spoke. His speech was not phlegmatic, as of old. He had a new clipped way of uttering his words:

"Say, Pop, you ought to see the way the Frenchies farm! They got about an acre each, and, say, they use every inch of it. If they's a little dirt blows into the crotch of a tree, they plant a crop in there. I never seen nothin' like it. Say, we waste enough stuff over here to keep that whole country in food for a hundred years. Yessir. And tools! Outta the ark, believe me. If they ever saw our tractor, they'd think it was the Germans comin' back. But they're smart at that. I picked up a lot of new ideas over there. And you ought to see the old birds--womenfolks and men about eighty years old-- runnin' everything on the farm. They had to. I learned somethin' off them about farmin'."

"Forget the farm," said Minnie.

"Yeh," echoed Gus, "forget the farm stuff. I can get you a job here out at the works for four-fifty a day, and six when you learn it right."

Dike looked from one to the other, alarm and unbelief on his face. "What d'you mean, a job? Who wants a job! What you all----"

Bella laughed jovially. "F'r heaven's sakes, Dike, wake up! We're livin' here. This is our place. We ain't rubes no more."

Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick- tempered mother.

"But I been countin' on the farm," he said miserably. "I just been livin' on the idea of comin' back to it. Why, I---- The streets here, they're all narrow and choked up. I been countin' on the farm. I want to go back and be a farmer. I want----"

And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld--the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.

"That's all right, Dike," he said. "You're going back. So'm I. I've got another twenty years of work in me. We're going back to the farm."

Bella turned on him, a wildcat. "We ain't! Not me! We ain't! I'm not agoin' back to the farm."

But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. "You're goin' back, Bella," he said quietly, "an' things are goin' to be different. You're goin' to run the house the way I say, or I'll know why. If you can't do it, I'll get them in that can. An' me and Dike, we're goin' back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain't a bigger man-size job in the world."

About the Author 

Edna Ferber (1885 - 1968) wrote short stories, plays and novels which were adapting into sizzling, popular movies. Ferber's work generally featured strong female protagonists, supported by characters who had to overcome some form of discrimination, or who weren't the "pretty people." She tended to favor these characters the most, perhaps as a result of her straight-forward midwestern upbringing. Ferber spent her early years in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, attended Lawrence University briefly, then became a reporter. She covered both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for the United Press Association before turning to writing her popular novels.

 

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace, which also received a film adaptation in 1960. Wikipedia

 

Born: August 15, 1885, Kalamazoo, MI
Died: April 16, 1968, New York, NY
Notable awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1925)
Parents: Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia Ferber

 

Edna Ferber Books at Amazon

 

 

A Bush League Hero
by Edna Ferber 

 

"I don't care if you don't know a spitball from a fadeaway when you see it. You'll be out in the air all afternoon, and there'll be some excitement. All the girls go. You'll like it. They're playing Marshalltown." 

 

My Chinese Marriage by Mae M. Franking and Katherine Anne Porter

MY CHINESE
MARRIAGE

By M. T. F.

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED
LONDON   MCMXXII

---

[Pg 4]

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

---

[Pg 5]

TO MY CHINESE FATHER AND MOTHER
WITH THE GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION
OF THEIR AMERICAN DAUGHTER THIS
VOLUME IS DEDICATED

---

[Pg 7]

 

 In 1907, a seventeen-year-old Scotch-Irish girl named Mae Munro Watkins met nineteen-year-old Tiam Hock Franking of Amoy, China, while attending high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their growing love intensified later while both were students at the University of Michigan, where Mae studied Latin and German and Tiam prepared for a career in international law. Because of the legal and social restrictions in the early 1900s, interracial relationships such as theirs were bitterly and publicly discouraged. Nevertheless, despite opposition to their relationship from both their families, Mae and Tiam married and later moved to China. There Mae raised three children, taught college English, and helped Tiam with his own teaching and legal work. And, by her own conscious choice, Mae also succeeded in becoming a proper Chinese wife and daughter-in-law. Working from interviews with Mae Franking and from material contained in Franking's original manuscript, Katherine Anne Porter ghostwrote Mae's story in 1920 for Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient. Asia published My Chinese Marriage as a four-part series, and subsequently Duffield and Company published it unchanged in book form. Mae Franking's original manuscript was lost, so there can be no direct comparison between Franking's manuscript and Porter's work. This annotated edition contains the full text of My Chinese Marriage as it appeared in Asia. In addition, the Franking's granddaughter, Holly Franking, provides a narrative account of Mae's life, as well as private letters and contemporary newspaper clippings (the marriage was deplored by racist editors in Ann Arbor and Detroit). This previously unavailable material will enable KatherineAnne Porter scholars to assess her stylistic and fictional contributions to the text.

 

CONTENTS

I       In America    3
II       In Shanghai    49
III      First Daughter-in-Law    97
IV      The Eternal Hills    141


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Show Boat by Edna Ferber

SHOW BOAT

 

BY

EDNA FERBER

 

AUTHOR  OF

“SO  BIG,”  Etc.

 

 

 

 

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS          NEW YORK

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COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY EDNA FERBER.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN

THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY

LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

---

To

Winthrop  Ames

Who  First  Said   Show Boat

to  Me

 

 

Edna Ferber Books at Amazon 

 

Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater on a steamboat that travels between small towns along the banks of the Mississippi River, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction Era riverboat to Gilded Age Chicago to Roaring Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi River. Wikipedia

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If your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file.

 

About the Author 

 Edna Ferber (1885 - 1968) wrote short stories, plays and novels which were adapting into sizzling, popular movies. Ferber's work generally featured strong female protagonists, supported by characters who had to overcome some form of discrimination, or who weren't the "pretty people." She tended to favor these characters the most, perhaps as a result of her straight-forward midwestern upbringing. Ferber spent her early years in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, attended Lawrence University briefly, then became a reporter. She covered both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for the United Press Association before turning to writing her popular novels.

 

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace, which also received a film adaptation in 1960. Wikipedia

 

Born: August 15, 1885, Kalamazoo, MI
Died: April 16, 1968, New York, NY
Notable awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1925)
Parents: Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia Ferber

 

Edna Ferber Books at Amazon

 

So Big by Edna Ferber

SO BIG

 

BY

EDNA FERBER

 

AUTHOR OF

THE GIRLS, FANNY HERSELF,

ROAST BEEF MEDIUM, Etc.

 

 

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

 

Made in the United States of America

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COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COPYRIGHT, 1923, 1924, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

 

Edna Ferber Books at Amazon

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So Big is a 1924 novel written by Edna Ferber. The book was inspired by the life of Antje Paarlberg in the Dutch community of South Holland, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. It was a best-seller in the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1925. Wikipedia

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If your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file.

 

About the Author 

 Edna Ferber (1885 - 1968) wrote short stories, plays and novels which were adapting into sizzling, popular movies. Ferber's work generally featured strong female protagonists, supported by characters who had to overcome some form of discrimination, or who weren't the "pretty people." She tended to favor these characters the most, perhaps as a result of her straight-forward midwestern upbringing. Ferber spent her early years in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, attended Lawrence University briefly, then became a reporter. She covered both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for the United Press Association before turning to writing her popular novels.

 

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace, which also received a film adaptation in 1960. Wikipedia

 

Born: August 15, 1885, Kalamazoo, MI
Died: April 16, 1968, New York, NY
Notable awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1925)
Parents: Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia Ferber

 

Edna Ferber Books at Amazon