alstead Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, 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 oblit
|