Page:So Big (1924).djvu/110

 He usually went home by eight-thirty or nine. Often the Pools went to bed before he left. After he had gone Selina was wakeful. She would heat water and wash; brush her hair vigorously; feeling at once buoyant and depressed.

Sometimes they fell to talking. His wife had died in the second year of their marriage, when the child was born. The child, too, had died. A girl. He was unlucky, like that. It was the same with the farm.

“Spring, half of the land is under water. My piece, just. Bouts’s place, next to me, is high and rich. Bouts, he don’t even need deep ploughing. His land is quick land. It warms up in the spring early. After rain it works easy. He puts in fertilizer, any kind, and his plants jump, like. My place is bad for garden truck. Wet. All the time, wet; or in summer baked before I can loosen it again. Muckland.”

Selina thought a moment. She had heard much talk between Klaas and Jakob, winter evenings. “Can’t you do something to it—fix it—so that the water will runoff? Raise it, or dig a ditch or something?”

“We-e-ell, maybe. Maybe you could. But it costs money, draining.”

“It costs money not to, doesn’t it?”

He considered this, ruminatively. “Guess it does. But you don’t have to have ready cash to let the land lay. To drain it you do.”

Selina shook her head impatiently. “That’s a very foolish, short-sighted way to reason.”

He looked helpless as only the strong and powerful