Bildungsromans; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; Gamblers -- Family relationships -- Fiction
Klaas Pool, driving his team of horses down the muddy Halsted road, was
looking straight ahead, his eyes fastened seemingly on an invisible spot
between the off-horse’s ears. His was not the kind of brain that acts
quickly, nor was his body’s mechanism the sort that quickly responds to
that brain’s message. His eyes were china-blue in a round red face that
was covered with a stubble of stiff golden hairs. His round moon of a
head was set low and solidly between his great shoulders, so that as he
began to turn it now, slowly, you marvelled at the process and waited
fearfully to hear a creak. He was turning his head toward Selina, but
keeping his gaze on the spot between his horse’s ears. Evidently the
head and the eyes revolved by quite distinct processes. Now he faced
Selina almost directly. Then he brought his eyes around, slowly, until
they focussed on her cameo-like face all alight now with her enjoyment
of the scene around her; with a certain elation at this new venture into
which she was entering; and with excitement such as she used to feel
when the curtain rose with tantalizing deliberateness on the first act
of a play which she was seeing with her father. She was well bundled up
against the sharp October air in her cloak and muffler, with a shawl
tucked about her knees and waist. The usual creamy pallor of her fine
clear skin showed an unwonted pink, and her eyes were wide, dark, and
bright. Beside this sparkling delicate girl’s face Klaas Pool’s heavy
features seemed carved from the stuff of another clay and race. His pale
blue eyes showed incomprehension.
“Beautiful?” he echoed, in puzzled interrogation. “What is beautiful?”
Selina’s slim arms flashed out from the swathings of cloak, shawl, and
muffler and were flung wide in a gesture that embraced the landscape on
which the late afternoon sun was casting a glow peculiar to that lake
region, all rose and golden and mist-shimmering.
“This! The—the cabbages.”
A slow-dawning film of fun crept over the blue of Klaas Pool’s stare.
This film spread almost imperceptibly so that it fluted his broad
nostrils, met and widened his full lips, reached and agitated his
massive shoulders, tickled the round belly, so that all Klaas Pool, from
his eyes to his waist, was rippling and shaking with slow, solemn, heavy
Dutch mirth.
“Cabbages is beautiful!” his round pop eyes staring at her in a fixity
of glee. “Cabbages is beautiful!” His silent laughter now rose and
became audible in a rich throaty chortle. It was plain that laughter,
with Klaas Pool, was not a thing to be lightly dismissed, once raised.
“Cabbages——” he choked a little, and spluttered, overcome. Now he
began to shift his gaze back to his horses and the road, by the same
process of turning his head first and then his eyes, so that to Selina
the mirthful tail of his right eye and his round red cheek with the
golden fuzz on it gave him an incredibly roguish brownie look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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