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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty streets, was a tragedy.
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.
"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 no, not a new, but the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.
"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.
Ben Westerveld breathed in the strong, pungent smell of onions and garlic and of the good 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 hand truck, or dray, or laden wagon.
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