The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Prairie Mother, by Arthur Stringer
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Title: The Prairie Mother
Author: Arthur Stringer
Illustrator: Arthur E. Becher
Release Date: July 8, 2008 [EBook #26011]
Language: English
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[Illustration]
THE PRAIRIE MOTHER
[Illustration: "Swing twenty paces out from one another and circle this
shack!"]
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THE
PRAIRIE MOTHER
_By_
ARTHUR STRINGER
AUTHOR OF
THE PRAIRIE WIFE, THE HOUSE OF INTRIGUE
THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP, ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1920
The Pictorial Review Company
----------
Copyright 1920
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
_Printed in the United States of America_
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
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THE PRAIRIE MOTHER
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Prairie Mother
_Sunday the Fifteenth_
I opened my eyes and saw a pea-green world all around me. Then I heard
the doctor say: "Give 'er another whiff or two." His voice sounded
far-away, as though he were speaking through the Simplon Tunnel, and
not merely through his teeth, within twelve inches of my nose.
I took my whiff or two. I gulped at that chloroform like a thirsty
Bedouin at a wadi-spring. I went down into the pea-green emptiness
again, and forgot about the Kelly pad and the recurring waves of pain
that came bigger and bigger and tried to sweep through my racked old
body like breakers through the ribs of a stranded schooner. I forgot
about the hateful metallic clink of steel things against an
instrument-tray, and about the loganberry pimple on the nose of the
red-headed surgical nurse who'd been sent into the labor room to help.
I went wafting off into a feather-pillowy pit of infinitude. I even
forgot to preach to myself, as I'd been doing for the last month or
two. I knew that my time was upon me, as the Good Book says. There are
a lot of things in this life, I remembered, which woman is able to
squirm out of. But here, Mistress Tabbie, was one you couldn't escape.
Here was a situation that _had_ to be faced. Here was a time I had to
knuckle down, had to grin and bear it, had to go through with it to
the bitter end. For other folks, whatever they may be able to do for
you, aren't able to have your babies for you.
Then I ebbed up out of the pea-green depths again, and was troubled by
the sound of voices, so thin and far-away I couldn't make out what
they were saying. Then came the beating of a tom-tom, so loud that it
hurt. When that died away for a minute or two I caught the sound of
the sharp and quavery squall of something, of something which had
never squalled before, a squall of protest and injured pride, of
maltreated youth resenting the ignominious way it must enter the
world. Then the tom-tom beating started up again, and I opened my eyes
to make sure it wasn't the Grenadiers' Band going by.
I saw a face bending over mine, seeming to float in space. It was the
color of a half-grown cucumber, and it made me think of a tropical
fish in an aquarium when the water needed changing.
"She's coming out, Doctor," I heard a woman's voice say. It was a
voice as calm as God's and slightly nasal. For a moment I thought I'd
died and gone to Heaven. But I finally observed and identified the
loganberry pimple, and realized that the tom-tom beating was merely
the pounding of the steam-pipes in that jerry-built western hospital,
and remembered that I was still in the land of the living and that the
red-headed surgical nurse was holding my wrist. I felt infinitely hurt
and abused, and wondered why my husband wasn't there to help me with
that comforting brown gaze of his. And I wanted to cry, but didn't
seem to have the strength, and then I wanted to say something, but
found myself too weak.
It was the doctor's voice that roused me again. He was standing beside
my narrow iron bed with his sleeves still rolled up, wiping his arms
with a big white towel. He was smiling as he scrubbed at the corners
of his nails, as though to make sure they were clean. The nurse on the
other side of the bed was also smiling. So was the carrot-top with the
loganberry beauty-spot. All I could see, in fact, was smiling faces.
But it didn't seem a laughing matter to me. I wanted to rest, to
sleep, to get another gulp or two of that God-given smelly stuff out
of the little round tin can.
"How're you feeling?" asked the doctor indifferently. He nodded down
at me as he proceeded to manicure those precious nails of his. They
were laughing, the whole four of them. I began to suspect that I
wasn't going to die, after all.
"Everything's fine and dandy," announced the barearmed farrier as he
snapped his little pen-knife shut. But that triumphant grin of his
only made me more tired than ever, and I turned away to the tall young
nurse on the other side of my bed.
There was perspiration on her forehead, under the eaves of the pale
hair crowned with its pointed little cap. She was still smiling, but
she looked human and tired and a little fussed.
"Is it a girl?" I asked her. I had intended to make that query a
crushingly imperious one. I wanted it to stand as a reproof to them,
as a mark of disapproval for all such untimely merriment. But my
voice, I found, was amazingly weak and thin. And I wanted to know.
"_It's both_," said the tired-eyed girl in the blue and white uniform.
And she, too, nodded her head in a triumphant sort of way, as though
the credit for some vast and recent victory lay entirely in her own
narrow lap.
"It's both?" I repeated, wondering why she too should fail to give a
simple answer to a simple question.
"It's twins!" she said, with a little chirrup of laughter.
"Twins?" I gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the last of the
pea-green mist out of that room with the dead white walls.
"Twins," proclaimed the doctor, "_twins_!" He repeated the monosyllable,
converting it into a clarion-call that made me think of a rooster
crowing.
"A lovely boy and girl," cooed the third nurse with a bottle of
olive-oil in her hand. And by twisting my head a little I was able to
see the two wire bassinets, side by side, each holding a little mound
of something wrapped in a flannelette blanket.
I shut my eyes, for I seemed to have a great deal to think over.
Twins! A boy and girl! Two little new lives in the world! Two warm and
cuddling little bairns to nest close against my mother-breast.
"I see _your_ troubles cut out for you," said the doctor as he rolled
down his shirt-sleeves.
They were all laughing again. But to me it didn't seem quite such a
laughing matter. I was thinking of my layette, and trying to count
over my supply of binders and slips and shirts and nighties and
wondering how I could out-Solomon Solomon and divide the little dotted
Swiss dress edged with the French Val lace of which I'd been so proud.
Then I fell to pondering over other problems, equally prodigious, so
that it was quite a long time before my mind had a chance to meander
on to Dinky-Dunk himself.
And when I did think of Dinky-Dunk I had to laugh. It seemed a joke on
him, in some way. He was the father of twins. Instead of one little
snoozer to carry on his name and perpetuate his race in the land, he
now had _two_. Fate, without consulting him, had flung him double
measure. No wonder, for the moment, those midnight toilers in that
white-walled house of pain were wearing the smile that refused to come
off! That's the way, I suppose, that all life ought to be welcomed
into this old world of ours. And now, I suddenly remembered, I could
speak of _my children_--and that means so much more than talking about
one's child. Now I was indeed a mother, a prairie mother with three
young chicks of her own to scratch for.
I forgot my anxieties and my months of waiting. I forgot those weeks
of long mute protest, of revolt against wily old Nature, who so
cleverly tricks us into the ways she has chosen. A glow of glory went
through my tired body--it was hysteria, I suppose, in the basic
meaning of the word--and I had to shut my eyes tight to keep the tears
from showing.
But that great wave of happiness which had washed up the shore of my
soul receded as it came. By the time I was transferred to the
rubber-wheeled stretcher they called "the Wagon" and trundled off to a
bed and room of my own, the reaction set in. I could think more
clearly. My Dinky-Dunk didn't love me, or he'd never have left me at
such a time, no matter what his business calls may have been. The
Twins weren't quite so humorous as they seemed. There was even
something disturbingly animal-like in the birth of more offspring than
one at a time, something almost revolting in this approach to the
littering of one's young. They all tried to unedge that animality by
treating it as a joke, by confronting it with their conspiracies of
jocularity. But it would be no joke to a nursing mother in the middle
of a winter prairie with the nearest doctor twenty long miles away.
I countermanded my telegram to Dinky-Dunk at Vancouver, and cried
myself to sleep in a nice relaxing tempest of self-pity which my
"special" accepted as calmly as a tulip-bed accepts a shower. But
lawdy, lawdy, how I slept! And when I woke up and sniffed warm air and
that painty smell peculiar to new buildings, and heard the radiators
sing with steam and the windows rattle in the northeast blizzard that
was blowing, I slipped into a truer realization of the intricate
machinery of protection all about me, and thanked my lucky stars that
I wasn't in a lonely prairie shack, as I'd been when my almost
three-year-old Dinkie was born. I remembered, with little tidal waves
of contentment, that my ordeal was a thing of the past, and that I was
a mother twice over, and rather hungry, and rather impatient to get a
peek at my God-given little babes.
Then I fell to thinking rather pityingly of my forsaken little Dinkie
and wondering if Mrs. Teetzel would keep his feet dry and cook his
cream-of-wheat properly, and if Iroquois Annie would have brains
enough not to overheat the furnace and burn Casa Grande down to the
ground. Then I decided to send the wire to Dinky-Dunk, after all, for
it isn't every day in the year a man can be told he's the father of
twins....
I sent the wire, in the secret hope that it would bring my lord and
master on the run. But it was eight days later, when I was up on a
back-rest and having my hair braided, that Dinky-Dunk put in an
appearance. And when he did come he chilled me. I can't just say why.
He seemed tired and preoccupied and unnecessarily self-conscious
before the nurses when I made him hold Pee-Wee on one arm and Poppsy
on the other.
"Now kiss 'em, Daddy," I commanded. And he had to kiss them both on
their red and puckered little faces. Then he handed them over with all
too apparent relief, and fell into a brown study.
"What are you worrying over?" I asked him.
"I'm wondering how in the world you'll ever manage," he solemnly
acknowledged. I was able to laugh, though it took an effort.
"For every little foot God sends a little shoe," I told him,
remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. "And the sooner you
get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the happier I'll be. For I'm tired of this
place and the smell of the formalin and ether and I'm nearly worried
to death about Dinkie. And in all the wide world, O Kaikobad, there's
no place like one's own home!"
Dinky-Dunk didn't answer me, but I thought he looked a little wan and
limp as he sat down in one of the stiff-backed chairs. I inspected him
with a calmer and clearer eye.
"Was that sleeper too hot last night?" I asked, remembering what a bad
night could do to a big man.
"I don't seem to sleep on a train the way I used to," he said, but his
eye evaded mine. And I suspected something.
"Dinky-Dunk," I demanded, "did you have a berth last night?"
He flushed up rather guiltily. He even seemed to resent my questioning
him. But I insisted on an answer.
"No, I sat up," he finally confessed.
"Why?" I demanded.
And still again his eye tried to evade mine.
"We're a bit short of ready cash." He tried to say it indifferently,
but the effort was a failure.
"Then why didn't you tell me that before?" I asked, sitting up and
spurning the back-rest.
"You had worries enough of your own," proclaimed my weary-eyed lord
and master. It gave me a squeezy feeling about the heart to see him
looking so much like an unkempt and overworked and altogether
neglected husband. And there I'd been lying in the lap of luxury, with
quick-footed ladies in uniform to answer my bell and fly at my
bidding.
"But I've a right, Dunkie, to know your worries, and stand my share of
'em," I promptly told him. "And that's why I want to get out of this
smelly old hole and back to my home again. I may be the mother of
twins, and only too often reminded that I'm one of the Mammalia, but
I'm still your cave-mate and life-partner, and I don't think children
ought to come between a man and wife. I don't intend to allow _my_
children to do anything like that."
I said it quite bravely, but there was a little cloud of doubt
drifting across the sky of my heart. Marriage is so different from
what the romance-fiddlers try to make it. Even Dinky-Dunk doesn't
approve of my mammalogical allusions. Yet milk, I find, is one of the
most important issues of motherhood--only it's impolite to mention the
fact. What makes me so impatient of life as I see it reflected in
fiction is its trick of overlooking the important things and
over-accentuating the trifles. It primps and tries to be genteel--for
Biology doth make cowards of us all.
I was going to say, very sagely, that life isn't so mysterious after
you've been the mother of three children. But that wouldn't be quite
right. It's mysterious in an entirely different way. Even love itself
is different, I concluded, after lying there in bed day after day and
thinking the thing over. For there are so many different ways, I find,
of loving a man. You are fond of him, at first, for what you consider
his perfections, the same as you are fond of a brand-new traveling
bag. There isn't a scratch on his polish or a flaw in his make-up.
Then you live with him for a few years. You live with him and find
that life is making a few dents in his loveliness of character, that
the edges are worn away, that there's a weakness or two where you
imagined only strength to be, and that instead of standing a saint and
hero all in one, he's merely an unruly and unreliable human being with
his ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. But, bless his
battered old soul, you love him none the less for all that. You no
longer fret about him being unco guid, and you comfortably give up
trying to match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still love
him, but you love him differently. There's a touch of pity in your
respect for him, a mellowing compassion, a little of the eternal
mother mixed up with the eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you
will no longer demand the impossible of him. Being a woman, you will
still want to be loved. But being a woman of discernment, you will
remember that in some way and by some means, if you want to be loved,
you must remain lovable.
_Thursday the Nineteenth_
I had to stay in that smelly old hole of a hospital and in that bald
little prairie city fully a week longer than I wanted to. I tried to
rebel against being bullied, even though the hand of iron was padded
with velvet. But the powers that be were too used to handling perverse
and fretful women. They thwarted my purpose and broke my will and kept
me in bed until I began to think I'd take root there.
But once I and my bairns were back here at Casa Grande I could see
that they were right. In the first place the trip was tiring, too
tiring to rehearse in detail. Then a vague feeling of neglect and
desolation took possession of me, for I missed the cool-handed
efficiency of that ever-dependable "special." I almost surrendered to
funk, in fact, when both Poppsy and Pee-Wee started up a steady duet
of crying. I sat down and began to sniffle myself, but my sense of
humor, thank the Lord, came back and saved the day. There was
something so utterly ridiculous in that briny circle, soon augmented
and completed by the addition of Dinkie, who apparently felt as lonely
and overlooked as did his spineless and sniffling mother.
So I had to tighten the girths of my soul. I took a fresh grip on
myself and said: "Look here, Tabbie, this is never going to do. This
is not the way Horatius held the bridge. This is not the spirit that
built Rome. So, up, Guards, and at 'em! Excelsior! _Audaces fortuna
juvat!_"
So I mopped my eyes, and readjusted the Twins, and did what I could to
placate Dinkie, who continues to regard his little brother and sister
with a somewhat hostile eye. One of my most depressing discoveries on
getting back home, in fact, was to find that Dinkie has grown away
from me in my absence. At first he even resented my approaches, and he
still stares at me, now and then, across a gulf of perplexity. But the
ice is melting. He's beginning to understand, after all, that I'm his
really truly mother and that he can come to me with his troubles. He's
lost a good deal of his color, and I'm beginning to suspect that his
food hasn't been properly looked after during the last few weeks. It's
a patent fact, at any rate, that my house hasn't been properly looked
after. Iroquois Annie, that sullen-eyed breed servant of ours, will
never have any medals pinned on her pinny for neatness. I'd love to
ship her, but heaven only knows where we'd find any one to take her
place. And I simply _must_ have help, during the next few months.
Casa Grande, by the way, looked such a little dot on the wilderness,
as we drove back to it, that a spear of terror pushed its way through
my breast as I realized that I had my babies to bring up away out here
on the edge of this half-settled no-man's land. If only our dreams had
come true! If only the plans of mice and men didn't go so aft agley!
If only the railway had come through to link us up with civilization,
and the once promised town had sprung up like a mushroom-bed about our
still sad and solitary Casa Grande! But what's the use of repining,
Tabbie McKail? You've the second-best house within thirty miles of
Buckhorn, with glass door-knobs and a laundry-chute, and a brood to
rear, and a hard-working husband to cook for. And as the kiddies get
older, I imagine, I'll not be troubled by this terrible feeling of
loneliness which has been weighing like a plumb-bob on my heart for
the last few days. I wish Dinky-Dunk didn't have to be so much away
from home....
Old Whinstane Sandy, our hired man, has presented me with a hand-made
swing-box for Poppsy and Pee-Wee, a sort of suspended basket-bed that
can be hung up in the porch as soon as my two little snoozers are able
to sleep outdoors. Old Whinnie, by the way, was very funny when I
showed him the Twins. He solemnly acknowledged that they were nae sae
bad, conseederin'. I suppose he thought it would be treason to Dinkie
to praise the newcomers who threatened to put little Dinkie's nose out
of joint. And Whinnie, I imagine, will always be loyal to Dinkie. He
says little about it, but I know he loves that child. He loves him in
very much the same way that Bobs, our collie dog, loves me. It was
really Bobs' welcome, I think, across the cold prairie air, that took
the tragedy out of my homecoming. There were gladness and trust in
those deep-throated howls of greetings. He even licked the snow off my
overshoes and nested his head between my knees, with his bob-tail
thumping the floor like a flicker's beak. He sniffed at the Twins
rather disgustedly. But he'll learn to love them, I feel sure, as time
goes on. He's too intelligent a dog to do otherwise....
I'll be glad when spring comes, and takes the razor-edge out of this
northern air. We'll have half a month of mud first, I suppose. But
"there's never anything without something," as Mrs. Teetzel very
sagely announced the other day. That sour-apple philosopher, by the
way, is taking her departure to-morrow. And I'm not half so sorry as I
pretend to be. She's made me feel like an intruder in my own home. And
she's a soured and venomous old ignoramus, for she sneered openly at
my bath-thermometer and defies Poppsy and Pee-Wee to survive the
winter without a "comfort." After I'd announced my intention of
putting them outdoors to sleep, when they were four weeks old, she
lugubriously acknowledged that there were more ways than one of
murderin' infant children. _Her_ ideal along this line, I've
discovered, is slow asphyxiation in a sort of Dutch-oven made of an
eider-down comforter, with as much air as possible shut off from their
uncomfortable little bodies. But the Oracle is going, and I intend to
bring up my babies in my own way. For I know a little more about the
game now than I did when little Dinkie made his appearance in this
vale of tears. And whatever my babies may or may not be, they are at
least healthy little tikes.
_Sunday the Twenty-second_
I seem to be fitting into things again, here at Casa Grande. I've got
my strength back, and an appetite like a Cree pony, and the day's work
is no longer a terror to me. I'm back in the same old rut, I was going
to say--but it is not the same. There is a spirit of unsettledness
about it all which I find impossible to define, an air of something
impending, of something that should be shunned as long as possible.
Perhaps it's merely a flare-back from my own shaken nerves. Or perhaps
it's because I haven't been able to get out in the open air as much as
I used to. I am missing my riding. And Paddy, my pinto, will give us a
morning of it, when we try to get a saddle on his scarred little back,
for it's half a year now since he has had a bit between his teeth.
It's Dinky-Dunk that I'm really worrying over, though I don't know
why. I heard him come in very quietly last night as I was tucking
little Dinkie up in his crib. I went to the nursery door, half hoping
to hear my lord and master sing out his old-time "Hello, Lady-Bird!"
or "Are you there, Babushka?" But instead of that he climbed the
stairs, rather heavily, and passed on down the hall to the little room
he calls his study, his sanctum-sanctorum where he keeps his desk and
papers and books--and the duck-guns, so that Dinkie can't get at them.
I could hear him open the desk-top and sit down in the squeaky Bank of
England chair.
When I was sure that Dinkie was off, for good, I tiptoed out and shut
the nursery door. Even big houses, I began to realize as I stood there
in the hall, could have their drawbacks. In the two-by-four shack
where we'd lived and worked and been happy before Casa Grande was
built there was no chance for one's husband to shut himself up in his
private boudoir and barricade himself away from his better-half. So I
decided, all of a sudden, to beard the lion in his den. There was such
a thing as too much formality in a family circle. Yet I felt a bit
audacious as I quietly pushed open that study door. I even weakened in
my decision about pouncing on Dinky-Dunk from behind, like a
leopardess on a helpless stag. Something in his pose, in fact, brought
me up short.
Dinky-Dunk was sitting with his head on his hand, staring at the
wall-paper. And it wasn't especially interesting wall-paper. He was
sitting there in a trance, with a peculiar line of dejection about his
forward-fallen shoulders. I couldn't see his face, but I felt sure it
was not a happy face.
I even came to a stop, without speaking a word, and shrank rather
guiltily back through the doorway. It was a relief, in fact, to find
that I was able to close the door without making a sound.
When Dinky-Dunk came down-stairs, half an hour later, he seemed his
same old self. He talked and laughed and inquired if Nip and
Tuck--those are the names he sometimes takes from his team and pins on
Poppsy and Pee-Wee--had given me a hard day of it and explained that
Francois--our man on the Harris Ranch--had sent down a robe of plaited
rabbit-skin for them.
I did my best, all the time, to keep my inquisitorial eye from
fastening itself on Dunkie's face, for I knew that he was playing up
to me, that he was acting a part which wasn't coming any too easy. But
he stuck to his rôle. When I put down my sewing, because my eyes were
tired, he even inquired if I hadn't done about enough for one day.
"I've done about half what I ought to do," I told him. "The trouble
is, Dinky-Dunk, I'm getting old. I'm losing my bounce!"
That made him laugh a little, though it was rather a wistful laugh.
"Oh, no, Gee-Gee," he announced, momentarily like his old self,
"whatever you lose, you'll never lose that undying girlishness of
yours!"
It was not so much what he said, as the mere fact that he could say
it, which sent a wave of happiness through my maternal old body. So I
made for him with my Australian crawl-stroke, and kissed him on both
sides of his stubbly old face, and rumpled him up, and went to bed
with a touch of silver about the edges of the thunder-cloud still
hanging away off somewhere on the sky-line.
_Wednesday the Twenty-fifth_
There was indeed something wrong. I knew that the moment I heard
Dinky-Dunk come into the house. I knew it by the way he let the
storm-door swing shut, by the way he crossed the hall as far as the
living-room door and then turned back, by the way he slowly mounted
the stairs and passed leaden-footed on to his study. And I knew that
this time there'd be no "Are you there, Little Mother?" or "Where
beest thou, _Boca Chica_?"
I'd Poppsy and Pee-Wee safe and sound asleep in the swing-box that
dour old Whinstane Sandy had manufactured out of a packing-case, with
Francois' robe of plaited rabbit-skin to keep their tootsies warm. I'd
finished my ironing and bathed little Dinkie and buttoned him up in
his sleepers and made him hold his little hands together while I said
his "Now-I-lay-me" and tucked him up in his crib with his broken
mouth-organ and his beloved red-topped shoes under the pillow, so that
he could find them there first thing in the morning and bestow on them
his customary matutinal kiss of adoration. And I was standing at the
nursery window, pretty tired in body but foolishly happy and serene in
spirit, staring out across the leagues of open prairie at the last of
the sunset.
It was one of those wonderful sunsets of the winter-end that throw
wine-stains back across this bald old earth and make you remember that
although the green hasn't yet awakened into life there's release on
the way. It was a sunset with an infinite depth to its opal and gold
and rose and a whisper of spring in its softly prolonged afterglow. It
made me glad and sad all at once, for while there was a hint of vast
re-awakenings in the riotous wine-glow that merged off into pale green
to the north, there was also a touch of loneliness in the flat and
far-flung sky-line. It seemed to recede so bewilderingly and so
oppressively into a silence and into an emptiness which the lonely
plume of smoke from one lonely shack-chimney both crowned and
accentuated with a wordless touch of poignancy.
That pennon of shack-smoke, dotting the northern horizon, seemed to
become something valorous and fine. It seemed to me to typify the
spirit of man pioneering along the fringes of desolation, adventuring
into the unknown, conquering the untamed realms of his world. And it
was a good old world, I suddenly felt, a patient and bountiful old
world with its Browningesque old bones set out in the last of the
sun--until I heard my Dinky-Dunk go lumbering up to his study and
quietly yet deliberately shut himself in, as I gave one last look at
Poppsy and Pee-Wee to make sure they were safely covered. Then I stood
stock-still in the center of the nursery, wondering whether, at such a
time, I ought to go to my husband or keep away from him.
I decided, after a minute or two of thought, to bide a wee. So I
slipped quietly down-stairs and stowed Dinkie's overturned kiddie-car
away in the cloak-room and warned Iroquois Annie--the meekest-looking
Redskin ever togged out in the cap and apron of domestic servitude--not
to burn my fricassee of frozen prairie-chicken and not to scorch the
scones so beloved by my Scotch-Canadian lord and master. Then I
inspected the supper table and lighted the lamp with the Ruskin-green
shade and supplanted Dinky-Dunk's napkin that had a coffee-stain along
its edge with a fresh one from the linen-drawer. Then, after airing the
house to rid it of the fumes from Iroquois Annie's intemperate griddle
and carrying Dinkie's muddied overshoes back to the kitchen and
lighting the Chinese hall-lamp, I went to the bottom of the stairs to
call my husband down to supper.
But still again that wordless feeling of something amiss prompted me
to hesitate. So instead of calling blithely out of him, as I had
intended, I went silently up the stairs. Then I slipped along the hall
and just as silently opened his study door.
My husband was sitting at his desk, confronted by a litter of papers
and letters, which I knew to be the mail he had just brought home and
flung there. But he wasn't looking at anything on his desk. He was
merely sitting there staring vacantly out of the window at the paling
light. His elbows were on the arms of his Bank of England swivel-chair
for which I'd made the green baize seat-pad, and as I stared in at
him, half in shadow, I had an odd impression of history repeating
itself. This puzzled me, for a moment, until I remembered having
caught sight of him in much the same attitude, only a few days before.
But this time he looked so tired and drawn and spineless that a
fish-hook of sudden pity tugged at my throat. For my Dinky-Dunk sat
there without moving, with the hope and the joy of life drawn utterly
out of his bony big body. The heavy emptiness of his face, as rugged
as a relief-map in the side-light, even made me forget the smell of
the scones Iroquois Annie was vindictively scorching down in the
kitchen. He didn't know, of course, that I was watching him, for he
jumped as I signaled my presence by slamming the door after stepping
in through it. That jump, I knew, wasn't altogether due to edgy
nerves. It was also an effort at dissimulation, for his sudden
struggle to get his scattered lines of manhood together still carried
a touch of the heroic. But I'd caught a glimpse of his soul when it
wasn't on parade. And I knew what I knew. He tried to work his poor
old harried face into a smile as I crossed over to his side. But, like
Topsy's kindred, it died a-borning.
[Illustration: "What's happened?" I asked]
"What's happened?" I asked, dropping on my knees close beside him.
Instead of answering me, he swung about in the swivel-chair so that he
more directly faced the window. The movement also served to pull away
the hand which I had almost succeeded in capturing. Nothing, I've
found, can wound a real man more than pity.
"What's happened?" I repeated. For I knew, now, that something was
really and truly and tragically wrong, as plainly as though Dinky-Dunk
had up and told me so by word of mouth. You can't live with a man for
nearly four years without growing into a sort of clairvoyant knowledge
of those subterranean little currents that feed the wells of mood and
temper and character. He pushed the papers on the desk away from him
without looking at me.
"Oh, it's nothing much," he said. But he said it so listlessly I knew
he was merely trying to lie like a gentleman.
"If it's bad news, I want to know it, right slam-bang out," I told
him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a
meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook
tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part
of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be
confronted by a woman in tears. Then a touch of cool desperation crept
up into his eyes.
"Our whole apple-cart's gone over," he slowly and quietly announced,
with those coldly narrowed eyes still intent on my face, as though
very little and yet a very great deal depended on just how I was going
to accept that slightly enigmatic remark. And he must have noticed the
quick frown of perplexity which probably came to my face, for that
right hand of his resting on the table opened and then closed again,
as though it were squeezing a sponge very dry. "They've got me," he
said. "They've got me--to the last dollar!"
I stood up in the uncertain light, for it takes time to digest strong
words, the same as it takes time to digest strong meat.
I remembered how, during the last half-year, Dinky-Dunk had been on the
wing, hurrying over to Calgary, and Edmonton, flying east to Winnipeg,
scurrying off to the Coast, poring over township maps and blue-prints
and official-looking letters from land associations and banks and loan
companies. I had been called in to sign papers, with bread-dough on my
arms, and asked to witness signatures, with Dinkie on my hip, and
commanded by my absent hearth-mate to send on certain documents by the
next mail. I had also gathered up scattered sheets of paper covered
with close-penciled rows of figures, and had felt that Dinky-Dunk for a
year back had been giving more time to his speculations than to his
home and his ranch. I had seen the lines deepen a little on that lean
and bony face of his and the pepper-and-salt above his ears turning
into almost pure salt. And I'd missed, this many a day, the old boyish
note in his laughter and the old careless intimacies in his talk. And
being a woman of almost ordinary intelligence--preoccupied as I was
with those three precious babies of mine--I had arrived at the not
unnatural conclusion that my spouse was surrendering more and more to
that passion of his for wealth and power.
Wealth and power, of course, are big words in the language of any man.
But I had more than an inkling that my husband had been taking a
gambler's chance to reach the end in view. And now, in that twilit
shadow-huddled cubby-hole of a room, it came over me, all of a heap,
that having taken the gambler's chance, we had met a fate not uncommon
to gamblers, and had lost.
"So we're bust!" I remarked, without any great show of emotion,
feeling, I suppose, that without worldly goods we might consistently
be without elegance. And in the back of my brain I was silently
revising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into
In land-booms we trusted
And in land-booms we busted.
But it wasn't a joke. You can't have the bottom knocked out of your
world, naturally, and find an invisible Nero blithely fiddling on your
heart-strings. And I hated to see Dinky-Dunk sitting there with that
dead look in his eyes. I hated to see him with his spirit broken, with
that hollow and haggard misery about the jowls, which made me think of
a hound-dog mourning for a dead master.
But I knew better than to show any pity for Dinky-Dunk at such a time.
It would have been effective as a stage-picture, I know, my reaching
out and pressing his tired head against a breast sobbing with
comprehension and shaking with compassion. But pity, with real
men-folks in real life, is perilous stuff to deal in. I was equally
afraid to feel sorry for myself, even though my body chilled with the
sudden suspicion that Casa Grande and all it held might be taken away
from me, that my bairns might be turned out of their warm and
comfortable beds, overnight, that the consoling sense of security
which those years of labor had builded up about us might vanish in a
breath. And I needed new flannelette for the Twins' nighties, and a
reefer for little Dinky-Dunk, and an aluminum double-boiler that
didn't leak for me maun's porritch. There were rafts of things I
needed, rafts and rafts of them. But here we were bust, so far as I
could tell, on the rocks, swamped, stranded and wrecked.
I held myself in, however, even if it _did_ take an effort. I crossed
casually over to the door, and opened it to sniff at the smell of
supper.
"Whatever happens, Dinky-Dunk," I very calmly announced, "we've got to
eat. And if that she-Indian scorches another scone I'll go down there
and scalp her."
My husband got slowly and heavily up out of the chair, which gave out
a squeak or two even when relieved of his weight. I knew by his face
in the half-light that he was going to say that he didn't care to eat.
But, instead of saying that, he stood looking at me, with a tragically
humble sort of contriteness. Then, without quite knowing he was doing
it, he brought his hands together in a sort of clinch, with his face
twisted up in an odd little grimace of revolt, as though he stood
ashamed to let me see that his lip was quivering.
"It's such a rotten deal," he almost moaned, "to you and the kiddies."
"Oh, we'll survive it," I said with a grin that was plainly forced.
"But you don't seem to understand what it means," he protested. His
impatience, I could see, was simply that of a man overtaxed. And I
could afford to make allowance for it.
"I understand that it's almost an hour past supper-time, my Lord, and
that if you don't give me a chance to stoke up I'll bite the edges off
the lamp-shade!"
I was rewarded by just the ghost of a smile, a smile that was much too
wan and sickly to live long.
"All right," announced Dinky-Dunk, "I'll be down in a minute or two."
There was courage in that, I saw, for all the listlessness of the tone
in which it had been uttered. So I went skipping down-stairs and
closed my baby grand and inspected the table and twisted the glass
bowl that held my nasturtium-buds about, to the end that the telltale
word of "Salt" embossed on its side would not betray the fact that it
had been commandeered from the kitchen-cabinet. Then I turned up the
lamp and smilingly waited until my lord and master seated himself at
the other side of the table, grateful beyond words that we had at
least that evening alone and were not compelled to act up to a part
before the eyes of strangers.
Yet it was anything but a successful meal. Dinky-Dunk's pretense at
eating was about as hollow as my pretense at light-heartedness. We
each knew that the other was playing a part, and the time came when to
keep it up was altogether too much of a mockery.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said after a silence that was too abysmal to be
ignored, "let's look this thing squarely in the face."
"I can't!"
"Why not?"
"I haven't the courage."
"Then we've got to get it," I insisted. "I'm ready to face the music,
if you are. So let's get right down to hard-pan. Have they--have they
really cleaned you out?"
"To the last dollar," he replied, without looking up.
"What did it?" I asked, remaining stubbornly and persistently ox-like
in my placidity.
"No one thing did it, Chaddie, except that I tried to bite off too
much. And for the last two years, of course, the boom's been
flattening out. If our Associated Land Corporation hadn't gone
under--"
"Then it _has_ gone under?" I interrupted, with a catch of the breath,
for I knew just how much had been staked on that venture.
Dinky-Dunk nodded his head. "And carried me with it," he grimly
announced. "But even that wouldn't have meant a knock-out, if the
government had only kept its promise and taken over my Vancouver
Island water-front."
That, I remembered, was to have been some sort of a shipyard. Then I
remembered something else.
"When the Twins were born," I reminded Dunkie, "you put the ranch here
at Casa Grande in my name. Does that mean we lose our home?"
I was able to speak quietly, but I could hear the thud of my own
heart-beats.
"That's for you to decide," he none too happily acknowledged. Then he
added, with sudden decisiveness: "No, they can't touch anything of
_yours_! Not a thing!"
"But won't that hold good with the Harris Ranch, as well?" I further
inquired. "That was actually bought in my name. It was deeded to me
from the first, and always has been in my name."
"Of course it's yours," he said with a hesitation that was slightly
puzzling to me.
"Then how about the cattle and things?"
"What cattle?"
"The cattle we've kept on it to escape the wild land tax? Aren't those
all legally mine?"
It sounded rapacious, I suppose, under the circumstances. It must have
seemed like looting on a battlefield. But I wasn't thinking entirely
about myself, even though poor old Dinky-Dunk evidently assumed so,
from the look of sudden questioning that came into his stricken eyes.
"Yes, they're yours," he almost listlessly responded.
"Then, as I've already said, let's look this thing fairly and squarely
in the face. We've taken a gambler's chance on a big thing, and we've
lost. We've lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what you
say is true, we haven't lost our home, and what is still more
important, we haven't lost our pride."
My husband looked down at his plate.
"That's gone, too," he slowly admitted.
"It doesn't sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like that," I promptly
admonished. But I'd spoken before I caught sight of the tragic look in
his eyes as he once more looked up at me.
"If those politicians had only kept their word, we'd have had our
shipyard deal to save us," he said, more to himself than to me. Yet
that, I knew, was more an excuse than a reason.
"And if the rabbit-dog hadn't stopped to scratch, he might have caught
the hare!" I none too mercifully quoted. My husband's face hardened as
he sat staring across the table at me.
"I'm glad you can take it lightly enough to joke over," he remarked,
as he got up from his chair. There was a ponderous sort of bitterness
in his voice, a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight
back the surge of pity which was threatening to strangle my voice,
pity for a man, once so proud of his power, standing stripped and
naked in his weakness.
"Heaven knows I don't want to joke, Honey-Chile," I told him. "But
we're not the first of these wild-catting westerners who've come a
cropper. And since we haven't robbed a bank, or--"
"It's just a little worse than that," cut in Dinky-Dunk, meeting my
astonished gaze with a sort of Job-like exultation in his own misery.
I promptly asked him what he meant. He sat down again, before
speaking.
"I mean that I've lost Allie's money along with my own," he very
slowly and distinctly said to me. And we sat there, staring at each
other, for all the world like a couple of penguins on a sub-Arctic
shingle.
Allie, I remembered, was Dinky-Dunk's English cousin, Lady Alicia
Elizabeth Newland, who'd made the Channel flight in a navy plane and
the year before had figured in a Devonshire motor-car accident.
Dinky-Dunk had a picture of her, from _The Queen_, up in his study
somewhere, the picture of a very debonair and slender young woman on
an Irish hunter. He had a still younger picture of her in a tweed
skirt and spats and golf-boots, on the brick steps of a Sussex
country-house, with the jaw of a bull-dog resting across her knee. It
was signed and dated and in a silver frame and every time I'd found
myself polishing that oblong of silver I'd done so with a wifely
ruffle of temper.
"How much was it?" I finally asked, still adhering to my rôle of the
imperturbable chorus.
"She sent out over seven thousand pounds. She wanted it invested out
here."
"Why?"
"Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. She said she wanted a
ranch, but she left everything to me."
"Then it was a trust fund!"
Dinky-Dunk bowed his head, in assent.
"It practically amounted to that," he acknowledged.
"And it's gone?"
"Every penny of it."
"But, Dinky-Dunk," I began. I didn't need to continue, for he seemed
able to read my thoughts.
"I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond's Valley
tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any
time. But the bank's swept that into the bag, of course, along with
the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins--when one
tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save
that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was
petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city
block--and that sent the whole card-house down."
I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the next minute or two.
"Then isn't it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky-Dunk, and make good on
that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can--"
But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. "A thousand bushels an acre couldn't
get me out of this mess," he maintained.
"Why not?"
"Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in
Montreal," he quietly announced.
"How do you know that?"
"She wrote to me from New York. She's had influenza, and it left her
with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor
told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt's impossible, just now,
and if she doesn't like our West she says she'll amble on to Arizona,
or try California for the winter." He looked away, and smiled rather
wanly. "She's counting on the big game shooting we can give her!"
"Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?"
"I suppose so!"
"And she's on her way out here?"
"She's on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn't exist!"
I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Dunk's woebegone face. And
still again I had considerable thinking to do.
"Then we'll _make_ it exist," I finally announced. But Dinky-Dunk,
staring gloomily off into space, wasn't even interested. They had
stunned the spirit out of him. He wasn't himself. They'd put him where
even a well-turned Scotch scone couldn't appeal to him.
"Listen," I solemnly admonished. "If this Cousin Allie of yours is
coming out here for a ranch, she's got to be presented with one."
"It sounds easy!" he said, not without mockery.
"And apparently the only way we can see that she's given her money's
worth is to hand Casa Grande over to her. Surely if she takes this,
bag and baggage, she ought to be half-satisfied."
Dinky-Dunk looked up at me as though I were assailing him with the
ravings of a mad-woman. He knew how proud I had always been of that
prairie home of ours.
"Casa Grande is yours--yours and the kiddies," he reminded me. "You've
at least got that, and God knows you'll need it now, more than ever,
God knows I've at least kept my hands off _that_!"
"But don't you see it can't be ours, it can't be a home, when there's
a debt of honor between us and every acre of it."
"You're in no way involved in that debt," cried out my lord and
master, with a trace of the old battling light in his eyes.
"I'm so involved in it that I'm going to give up the glory of a
two-story house with hardwood floors and a windmill and a laundry
chute and a real bathroom, before that English cousin of yours can
find out the difference between a spring-lamb and a jack-rabbit!" I
resolutely informed him. "And I'm going to do it without a whimper. Do
you know what we're going to do, O lord and master? We're going to
take our kiddies and our chattels and our precious selves over to that
Harris Ranch, and there we're going to begin over again just as we did
nearly four years ago!" Dinky-Dunk tried to stop me, but I warned him
aside. "Don't think I'm doing anything romantic. I'm doing something
so practical that the more I think of it the more I see it's the only
thing possible."
He sat looking at me as though he had forgotten what my features were
like and was, just discovering that my nose, after all, hadn't really
been put on straight. Then the old battling light grew stronger than
ever in his eyes.
"It's _not_ going to be the only thing possible," he declared. "And
I'm not going to make _you_ pay for my mistakes. Not on your life! I
could have swung the farm lands, all right, even though they did have
me with my back to the wall, if only the city stuff hadn't gone
dead--so dead that to-day you couldn't even give it away. I'm not an
embezzler. Allie sent me out that money to take a chance with, and by
taking a double chance I honestly thought I could get her double
returns. As you say, it was a gambler's chance. But the cards broke
against me. The thing that hurts is that I've probably just about
cleaned the girl out."
"How do you know that?" I asked, wondering why I was finding it so
hard to sympathize with that denuded and deluded English cousin.
"Because I know what's happened to about all of the older families and
estates over there," retorted Dinky-Dunk. "The government has pretty
well picked them clean."
"Could I see your Cousin Allie's letters?"
"What good would it do?" asked the dour man across the table from me.
"The fat's in the fire, and we've got to face the consequences."
"And that's exactly what I've been trying to tell you, you foolish old
calvanistic autocrat! We've got to face the consequences, and the only
way to do it is to do it the way I've said."
Dinky-Dunk's face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to
smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart
clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it,
that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I'd acted on
impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in
Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was
even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let
Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through
the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing
the right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even though at first
sight it seemed too prodigious a sacrifice, just as I'd done the right
thing when in the face of tribal reasoning and logic I'd gone kiting
off to a prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It was a
tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that
luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded,
like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this
newer change would mean to me and mine.
"You're not going to face another three years of drudgery and
shack-dirt," declared Dinky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line
of thought. "You went through that once, and once was enough. It's not
fair. It's not reasonable. It's not even thinkable. You weren't made
for that sort of thing, and--"
"Listen to me," I broke in, doing my best to speak calmly and quietly.
"Those three years were really the happiest three years of all my life.
I love to remember them, for they mean so much more than all the others.
There were a lot of the frills and fixin's of life that we had to do
without. But those three years brought us closer together, Dinky-Dunk,
than we have ever been since we moved into this big house and got on
bowing terms again with luxury. I don't know whether you've given it
much thought or not, husband o' mine, but during the last year or two
there's been a change taking place in us. You've been worried and busy
and forever on the wing, and there have been days when I've felt you
were almost a stranger to me, as though I'd got to be a sort of accident
in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I'm not blaming you; I'm only
pointing out certain obvious truths, now the time for a little honest
talk seems to have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, in a
tremendously big fight, for success and money; and you were doing it
more for me and Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You
couldn't help remembering that I'd been a city girl and imagining that
prairie-life was a sort of penance I was undergoing before passing on to
the joys of paradise in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the
door and the sound of the Elevated outside the windows. And you were
terribly wrong in all that, for there have been days and days,
Dinky-Dunk, when I've been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack
and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hungry and happy for the
ham and eggs and bread I'd cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring
us so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and happy-go-lucky
and soul-satisfying in its completeness, and we weren't forever fretting
about bank-balances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a rancher's
wife then--and I can't help feeling that all along there was something
in that simple life we didn't value enough. We were just rubes and hicks
and clodhoppers and hay-tossers in those days, and we weren't staying
awake nights worrying about land-speculations and water-fronts and
trying to make ourselves millionaires when we might have been making
ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now that our card-house
of high finance has gone to smash, I realize more than ever that I've
got to be at peace with my own soul and on speaking terms with my own
husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally long-winded sermon,
my beloved, it's merely to make plain to you that I haven't surrendered
to any sudden wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating over to
that Harris Ranch. It's nothing more than good old hard-headed,
practical self-preservation, for I wouldn't care to live without you,
Dinky-Dunk, any more than I imagine you'd care to live without your own
self-respect."
I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in
my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map
to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even
in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces.
And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of
my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the
antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with
the wonder was a slightly perplexed brand of contrition, and
interwoven with that again was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as
though he had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a heart and
mind of her own, who was even worth sticking to when the rest of the
world was threatening to give him the cold shoulder. He felt
abstractedly down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always a
helpful sign.
"It's big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that way," he began,
rather awkwardly, and with just a touch of color coming to his rather
gray-looking cheek-bones. "But can't you see that now it's the
children we've got to think of?"
"I _have_ thought of them," I quietly announced. As though any mother,
on prairie or in metropolis, didn't think of them first and last and
in-between-whiles! "And that's what simplifies the situation. I want
them to have a fair chance. I'd rather they--"
"It's not quite that criminal," cut in Dinky-Dunk, with almost an
angry flush creeping up toward his forehead.
"I'm only taking your own word for that," I reminded him, deliberately
steeling my heart against the tides of compassion that were trying to
dissolve it. "And I'm only taking what is, after all, the easiest
course out of the situation."
Dinky-Dunk's color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the
color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily
tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.
"But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this,"
he reminded me.
"Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good," I
retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the
situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland
with bated breath, just because she had a title. I'd scratched dances
with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see
myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a
hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.
"You're missing the point," began Dinky-Dunk.
"Listen!" I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a
young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from
above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was
promptly augmented into a duet.
"Poppsy's got Pee-Wee awake," I announced as I rose from my chair. It
seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune,
before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies
safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the
swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer
in spirit by the time I'd crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And
I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old
Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the
table to resume my seat opposite him.
"You don't despise me, do you?" he demanded, holding me by the sleeve
and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as
wistful as an old hound's in winter, an eye with a hunger I'd not seen
there this many a day.
"Despise you, Acushla?" I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my
arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of
desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had
gathered and swung between us for so many months. I'd worried, in
secret, about that fog. I'd tried to tell myself that it was the
coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big
strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless
little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no
snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my
mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as
I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the
last acre of land.
"My dear, my dear," I tried to tell him, "I was never hungry for
money. The one thing I've always been hungry for is love. What'd be
the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a
hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time?
And what's the good of life if you can't crowd a little affection into
it? I was just thinking we're all terribly like children in a Maypole
dance. We're so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about
a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a
mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We
don't remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in
our ends. So _carpe diem_, say I. And perhaps you remember that
sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and
pinned to my bedroom door: 'Better it is that great souls should live
in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great
houses!'"
Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a
sad and slightly acidulated smile.
"You'd need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you'd
lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack," he warned me.
"Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad," I very promptly informed
him.
"But you do know that," he contended, man-like. I was glad to find,
though, that a little of the bitterness had gone out of his eyes.
"Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger to hear that sort of
thing, hunger to hear it all the time. On that theme they want their
husbands to be like those little Japanese wind-harps that don't even
know how to be silent."
"Then why did you say, about a month ago, that marriage was like
Hogan's Alley, the deeper one got into it the tougher it was?"
"Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole days without kissing
me good-by?" I countered. I tried to speak lightly, but it took an
effort. For my husband's neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the
first intimation that the glory was over and done with. It had given
me about the same feeling that we used to have as flapperettes when
the circus-manager mounted the tub and began to announce the
after-concert, all for the price of ten cents, one dime!
"I wanted to, Tabbie, but you impressed me as looking rather
unapproachable that day."
"When the honey is scarce, my dear, even bees are said to be cross," I
reminded him. "And that's the thing that disturbs me, Dinky-Dunk. It
must disturb any woman to remember that she's left her happiness in
one man's hand. And it's more than one's mere happiness, for mixed up
with that is one's sense of humor and one's sense of proportion. They
all go, when you make me miserable. And the Lord knows, my dear, that
a woman without a sense of humor is worse than a dipper without a
handle."
Dinky-Dunk sat studying me.
"I guess it was my own sense of proportion that got out of kilter,
Gee-Gee," he finally said. "But there's one thing I want you to
remember. If I got deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn't
for what money meant to me. I've never been able to forget what I took
you away from. I took you away from luxury and carted you out here to
the end of Nowhere and had you leave behind about everything that made
life decent. And the one thing I've always wanted to do is make good
on that over-draft on your bank-account of happiness. I've wanted to
give back to you the things you sacrificed. I knew I owed you that,
all along. And when the children came I saw that I owed it to you more
than ever. I want to give Dinky-Dink and Poppsy and Pee-Wee a fair
chance in life. I want to be able to start them right, just as much as
you do. And you can't be dumped back into a three-roomed wickiup, with
three children to bring up, and feel that you're doing the right thing
by your family."
It wasn't altogether happy talk, but deep down in my heart I was glad
we were having it. It seemed to clear the air, very much as a good
old-fashioned thunder-storm can. It left us stumbling back to the
essentials of existence. It showed us where we stood, and what we
meant to each other, what we must mean to each other. And now that the
chance had come, I intended to have my say out.
"The things that make life decent, Dinky-Dunk, are the things that we
carry packed away in our own immortal soul, the homely old things like
honesty and self-respect and contentment of mind. And if we've got to
cut close to the bone before we can square up our ledger of life,
let's start the carving while we have the chance. Let's get our
conscience clear and know we're playing the game."
I was dreadfully afraid he was going to laugh at me, it sounded so
much like pulpiteering. But I was in earnest, passionately in earnest,
and my lord and master seemed to realize it.
"Have you thought about the kiddies?" he asked me, for the second
time.
"I'm always thinking about the kiddies," I told him, a trifle puzzled by
the wince which so simple a statement could bring to his face. His
wondering eye, staring through the open French doors of the living-room,
rested on my baby grand.
"How about _that_?" he demanded, with a grim head-nod toward the
piano.
"That may help to amuse Lady Alicia," I just as grimly retorted.
He stared about that comfortable home which we had builded up out of
our toil, stared about at it as I've seen emigrants stare back at the
receding shores of the land they loved. Then he sat studying my face.
"How long is it since you've seen the inside of the Harris shack?" he
suddenly asked me.
"Last Friday when I took the bacon and oatmeal over to Soapy and
Francois and Whinstane Sandy," I told him.
"And what did you think of that shack?"
"It impressed me as being sadly in need of soap and water," I calmly
admitted. "It's like any other shack where two or three men have been
batching--no better and no worse than the wickiup I came to here on my
honeymoon."
Dinky-Dunk looked about at me quickly, as though in search of some
touch of malice in that statement. He seemed bewildered, in fact, to
find that I was able to smile at him.
"But that, Chaddie, was nearly four long years ago," he reminded me,
with a morose and meditative clouding of the brow. And I knew exactly
what he was thinking about.
"I'll know better how to go about it this time," I announced with my
stubbornest Doctor Pangless grin.
"But there are two things you haven't taken into consideration,"
Dinky-Dunk reminded me.
"What are they?" I demanded.
"One is the matter of ready money."
"I've that six hundred dollars from my Chilean nitrate shares," I
proudly announced. "And Uncle Carlton said that if the Company ever
gets reorganized it ought to be a paying concern."
Dinky-Dunk, however, didn't seem greatly impressed with either the
parade of my secret nest-egg or the promise of my solitary plunge into
finance. "What's the other?" I asked as he still sat frowning over his
empty pipe.
"The other is Lady Alicia herself," he finally explained.
"What can she do?"
"She may cause complications."
"What kind of complications?"
"I can't tell until I've seen her," was Dinky-Dunk's none too definite
reply.
"Then we needn't cross that bridge until we come to it," I announced
as I sat watching Dinky-Dunk pack the bowl of his pipe and strike a
match. It seemed a trivial enough movement. Yet it was monumental in
its homeliness. It was poignant with a power to transport me back to
earlier and happier days, to the days when one never thought of
feathering the nest of existence with the illusions of old age. A
vague loneliness ate at my heart, the same as a rat eats at a cellar
beam.
I crossed over to my husband's side and stood with one hand on his
shoulder as he sat there smoking. I waited for him to reach out for my
other hand. But the burden of his troubles seemed too heavy to let him
remember. He smoked morosely on. He sat in a sort of self-immuring
torpor, staring out over what he still regarded as the wreck of his
career. So I stooped down and helped myself to a very smoky kiss
before I went off up-stairs to bed. For the children, I knew, would
have me awake early enough--and nursing mothers needs must sleep!
_Thursday the Second_
I have won my point. Dinky-Dunk has succumbed. The migration is under
way. The great trek has begun. In plain English, we're moving.
I rather hate to think about it. We seem so like the Children of Israel
bundled out of a Promised Land, or old Adam and Eve turned out of the
Garden with their little Cains and Abels. "We're up against it,
Gee-Gee," as Dinky-Dunk grimly observed. I could see that we were,
without his telling me. But I refused to acknowledge it, even to
myself. And it wasn't the first occasion. This time, thank heaven, I
can at least face it with fortitude, if not with relish. I don't like
poverty. And I don't intend to like it. And I'm not such a hypocrite as
to make a pretense of liking it. But I do intend to show my Dinky-Dunk
that I'm something more than a household ornament, just as I intend to
show myself that I can be something more than a breeder of children. I
have given my three "hostages to fortune"--and during the last few days
when we've been living, like the infant Moses, in a series of rushes, I
have awakened to the fact that they are indeed hostages. For the little
tikes, no matter how you maneuver, still demand a big share of your
time and energy. But one finally manages, in some way or another.
Dinky-Dunk threatens to expel me from the Mothers' Union when I work
over time, and Poppsy and Pee-Wee unite in letting me know when I've
been foolish enough to pass my fatigue-point. Yet I've been sloughing
off some of my old-time finicky ideas about child-raising and reverting
to the peasant-type of conduct which I once so abhorred in my Finnish
Olga. And I can't say that either I or my family seem to have suffered
much in the process. I feel almost uncannily well and strong now, and
am a wolf for work. If nothing else happened when our apple-cart went
over, it at least broke the monotony of life. I'm able to wring, in
fact, just a touch of relish out of all this migrational movement and
stir, and Casa Grande itself is already beginning to remind me of a
liner's stateroom about the time the pilot comes aboard and the
donkey-engines start to clatter up with the trunk-nets.
For three whole days I simply ached to get at the Harris Ranch shack,
just to show what I could do with it. And I realized when Dinky-Dunk
and I drove over to it in the buckboard, on a rather nippy morning
when it was a joy to go spanking along the prairie trail with the cold
air etching rosettes on your cheek-bones, that it was a foeman well
worthy of my steel. At a first inspection, indeed, it didn't look any
too promising. It didn't exactly stand up on the prairie-floor and
shout "Welcome" into your ears. There was an overturned windmill and a
broken-down stable that needed a new roof, and a well that had a pump
which wouldn't work without priming. There was an untidy-looking
corral, and a reel for stringing up slaughtered beeves, and an
overturned Red River cart bleached as white as a buffalo skeleton. As
for the wickiup itself, it was well-enough built, but lacking in
windows and quite unfinished as to the interior.
I told Dinky-Dunk I wanted two new window-frames, beaverboard for
inside lining, and two gallons of paint. I have also demanded a
lean-to, to serve as an extra bedroom and nursery, and a brand-new
bunk-house for the hired "hands" when they happen to come along. I
have also insisted on a covered veranda and sleeping porch on the
south side of the shack, and fly-screens, and repairs to the chimney
to stop the range from smoking. And since the cellar, which is merely
timbered, will have to be both my coal-hole and my storage-room, it
most assuredly will have to be cemented. I explained to Dinky-Dunk
that I wanted eave-troughs on both the shack and the stable, for the
sake of the soft-water, and proceeded to point out the need of a new
washing-machine, and a kiddie-coop for Poppsy and Pee-Wee as soon as
the weather got warm, and a fence, hog-tight and horse-high, about my
half-acre of kitchen garden.
Dinky-Dunk sat staring at me with a wry though slightly woebegone
face.
"Look here, Lady-Bird, all this sort of thing takes 'rhino,' which
means ready money. And where's it going to come from?"
"I'll use that six hundred, as long as it lasts," I blithely retorted.
"And then we'll get credit."
"But my credit is gone," Dinky-Dunk dolorously acknowledged.
"Then what's the matter with mine?" I demanded. I hadn't meant to hurt
him, when I said that. But I refused to be downed. And I intended to
make my ranch a success.
"It's still quite unimpaired, I suppose," he said in a thirty-below-zero
sort of voice.
"Goose!" I said, with a brotherly pat on his drooping shoulder. But my
lord and master refused to be cheered up.
"It's going to take more than optimism to carry us through this first
season," he explained to me. "And the only way that I can see is for
me to get out and rustle for work."
"What kind of work?" I demanded.
"The kind there's a famine for, at this very moment," was Dinky-Dunk's
reply.
"You don't mean being somebody else's hired man?" I said, aghast.
"A hired man can get four dollars a day and board," retorted my
husband. "And a man and team can get nine dollars a day. We can't keep
things going without ready money. And there's only one way, out here,
of getting it."
Dinky-Dunk was able to laugh at the look of dismay that came into my
face. I hadn't stopped to picture myself as the wife of a hired
"hand." I hadn't quite realized just what we'd descended to. I hadn't
imagined just how much one needed working capital, even out here on
the edge of Nowhere.
"But never that way, Diddums!" I cried out in dismay, as I pictured my
husband bunking with a sweaty-smelling plowing-gang of Swedes and
Finns and hoboing about the prairie with a thrashing outfit of the
Great Unwashed. He'd get cooties, or rheumatism, or a sunstroke, or a
knife between his ribs some fine night--and then where'd I be? I
couldn't think of it. I couldn't think of Duncan Argyll McKail, the
descendant of Scottish kings and second-cousin to a title, hiring out
to some old skinflint of a farmer who'd have him up at four in the
morning and keep him on the go until eight at night.
"Then what other way?" asked Dinky-Dunk.
"You leave it to me," I retorted. I made a bluff of saying it bravely
enough, but I inwardly decided that instead of sixteen yards of fresh
chintz I'd have to be satisfied with five yards. Poverty, after all,
is not a picturesque thing. But I didn't intend to be poor, I
protested to my troubled soul, as I went at that Harris Ranch wickiup,
tooth and nail, while Iroquois Annie kept an eye on Dinkie and the
Twins.
These same Twins, I can more than ever see, are going to be somewhat
of a brake on the wheels of industry. I have even been feeding on
"slops," of late, to the end that Poppsy and Pee-Wee may thrive. And
already I see sex-differences asserting themselves. Pee-Wee is a bit
of a stoic, while his sister shows a tendency to prove a bit of a
squealer. But Poppsy is much the daintier feeder of the two. I'll
probably have to wean them both, however, before many more weeks slip
by. As soon as we get settled in our new shack and I can be sure of a
one-cow supply of milk I'll begin a bottle-feed once in every
twenty-four hours. Dinky-Dunk says I ought to take a tip from the
Indian mother, who sometimes nurses her babe until he's two and three
years old. I asked Ikkie--as Dinkie calls Iroquois Annie--about this
and Ikkie says the teepee squaw has no cow's milk and has to keep on
the move, so she feeds him breast-milk until he's able to eat meat.
Ikkie informs me that she has seen a papoose turn away from its
mother's breast to take a puff or two at a pipe. From which I assume
that the noble Red Man learns to smoke quite early in life.
Ikkie has also been enlightening me on other baby-customs of her
ancestors, explaining that it was once the habit for a mother to name
her baby for the first thing seen after its birth. That, I told
Dinky-Dunk, was probably why there were so many "Running Rabbits," and
"White Pups" and "Black Calfs" over on the Reservation. And that
started me maun enlarging on the names of Indians he'd known, the most
elongated of which, he acknowledged, was probably "The-Man-Who-Gets-Up-
In-The-Middle-Of-The-Night-To-Feed-Oats-To-His-Pony," while the most
descriptive was "Slow-To-Come-Over-The-Hill," though "Shot-At-Many-Times"
was not without value, and "Long-Time-No-See-Him," as the appellative for
a disconsolate young squaw, carried a slight hint of the Indian's genius
for nomenclature. Another thing mentioned by Dunkie, which has stuck in
my memory, was his running across a papoose's grave in an Indian
burying-ground at Pincer Creek, when he was surveying, where the Indian
baby had been buried--above-ground, of course--_in an old Saratoga
trunk_. That served to remind me of Francois' story about "Old Sun," who
preceded "Running Rabbit"--note the name--as chief of the Alberta
Blackfoot tribe, and always carried among his souvenirs of conquest a
beautiful white scalp, with hair of the purest gold, very long and fine,
but would never reveal how or where he got it. Many a night, when I
couldn't sleep, I've worried about that white scalp, and dramatized
the circumstances of its gathering. Who was the girl with the long and
lovely tresses of purest gold? And did she die bravely? And did she
meet death honorably and decently, or after the manner of certain of
the Jesuits' _Relations_?...
I have had a talk with Whinnie, otherwise Whinstane Sandy, who has
been ditching at the far end of our half-section. I explained the
situation to him quite openly, acknowledging that we were on the rocks
but not yet wrecked, and pointing out that there might be a few months
before the ghost could walk again. And Whinstane Sandy has promised to
stick. Poor old Whinnie not only promised to stick, but volunteered
that if he could get over to Seattle or 'Frisco and raise some money
on his Klondike claim our troubles would be a thing of the past. For
Whinnie, who is an old-time miner and stampeder, is, I'm afraid, a wee
bit gone in the upper story. He dreams he has a claim up North where
there's millions and millions in gold to be dug out. On his moose-hide
watch-guard he wears a nugget almost half as big as a praline, a
nugget he found himself in ninety-nine, and he'd part with his life, I
believe, before he'd part with that bangle of shiny yellow metal. In
his chest of black-oak, too, he keeps a package of greasy and
dog-eared documents, and some day, he proclaims, those papers will
bring him into millions of money.
I asked Dinky-Dunk about the nugget, and he says it's genuine gold,
without a doubt. He also says there's one chance in a hundred of
Whinnie actually having a claim up in the gold country, but doubts if
the poor old fellow will ever get up to it again. It's about on the
same footing, apparently, as Uncle Carlton's Chilean nitrate mines. For
Whinnie had a foot frozen, his third winter on the Yukon, and this, of
course, has left him lame. It means that he's not a great deal of good
when it comes to working the land, but he's a clever carpenter, and a
good cement-worker, and can chore about milking the cows and looking
after the stock and repairing the farm implements. Many a night, after
supper, he tells us about the Klondike in the old days, about the
stampedes of ninety-eight and ninety-nine, and the dance-halls and
hardships and gamblers and claim-jumpers. I have always had a weakness
for him because of his blind and unshakable love for my little Dinkie,
for whom he whittles out ships and windmills and decoy-ducks. But when
I explained things to simple-minded old Whinnie, and he offered to hand
over the last of his ready money--the money he was hoarding dollar by
dollar to get back to his hidden _El Dorado_--it brought a lump up into
my throat.
I couldn't accept his offer, of course, but I loved him for making it.
And whatever happens, I'm going to see that Whinnie has patches on his
panties and no holes in his socks as long as he abides beneath our
humble roof-tree. I intend to make the new bunk-house just as homy and
comfortable as I can, so that Whinnie, under that new roof, won't feel
that he's been thrust out in the cold. But I must have my own house
for myself and my babes. Soapy Stennet, by the way, has been paid off
by Dinky-Dunk and is moving on to the Knee-Hill country, where he says
he can get good wages breaking and seeding. Soapy, of course, was a
good man on the land, but I never took a shine to that hard-eyed
Canuck, and we'll get along, in some way or other, without him. For,
in the language of the noble Horatius, "I'll find a way, or make it!"
On the way back to Casa Grande to-night, after a hard day's work, I
asked Dinky-Dunk if we wouldn't need some sort of garage over at the
Harris Ranch, to house our automobile. He said he'd probably put doors
on the end of one of the portable granaries and use that. When I
questioned if a car of that size would ever fit into a granary he
informed me that we couldn't keep our big car.
"I can get seventeen hundred dollars for that boat," he explained.
"We'll have to be satisfied with a tin Lizzie, and squander less on
gasoline."
So once again am I reminded that the unpardonable crime of poverty is
not always picturesque. But I wrestled with my soul then and there,
and put my pride in my pocket and told Dinky-Dunk I didn't give a rip
what kind of a car I rode in so long as I had such a handsome
_chauffeur_. And I reached out and patted him on the knee, but he was
too deep in his worries about business matters, I suppose, to pay any
attention to that unseemly advance.
To-night after supper, when the bairns were safely in bed, I opened up
the baby grand, intent on dying game, whatever happened or was to
happen. But my concert wasn't much of a success. When you do a thing
for the last time, and know it's to be the last time, it gives you a
graveyardy sort of feeling, no matter how you may struggle against it.
And the blither the tune the heavier it seemed to make my heart. So I
swung back to the statelier things that have come down to us out of
the cool and quiet of Time. I eased my soul with the _Sonata
Appassionata_ and lost myself in the _Moonlight_ and pounded out the
_Eroica_. But my fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden--so it was
small wonder my poor lord and master tried to bury himself in his
four-day-old newspaper. Then I tried Schubert's _Rosamonde_, though
that wasn't much of a success. So I wandered on through Liszt to
Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too soft and sugary and far-away
for a homesteader's wife, so I sang
"In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still,"--
to see if it would shake any sign of recognition out of my harried old
Dinky-Dunk.
As I beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown over the tip-top edge
of his paper, I defiantly swung into _The Humming Coon_, which
apparently had no more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice
aforethought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the Beethoven Funeral
March. I lost myself, in fact, in that glorious and melodic wail of
sorrow, merged my own puny troubles in its god-like immensities, and was
brought down to earth by a sudden movement from Dinky-Dunk.
"Why rub it in?" he almost angrily demanded as he got up and left the
room....
But that stammering little soul-flight has done me good. It has given
me back my perspective. I refuse to be downed. I'm still the captain
of my soul. I'm still at the wheel, no matter if we are rolling a bit.
And life, in some way, is still going to be good, still well worth the
living!
_Wednesday the Eighth_
Dinky-Dunk has had word that Lady Alicia is on her way west. He seems
to regard that event as something very solemn, but I refuse to take
seriously either her ladyship or her arrival. To-night, I'm more
worried about Dinkie, who got at the floor-shellac with which I'd been
furbishing up the bathroom at Casa Grande. He succeeded in giving his
face and hair a very generous coat of it--and I'm hoping against hope
he didn't get too much of it in his little stomach. He seems normal
enough, and in fairly good spirits, but I had to scrub his face with
coal-oil, to get it clean, and his poor little baby-skin is burnt
rather pink.
The winter has broken, the frost is coming out of the ground and the
mud is not adding to our joy in life. Our last load over to the Harris
shack was ferried and tooled through a batter. On the top of it (the
_load_, and not the batter!) I placed Olie's old banjo, for whatever
happens, we mustn't be entirely without music.
Yesterday Dinky-Dunk got Paddy saddled and bridled for me. Paddy
bucked and bit and bolted and sulked and tried to brush his rider off
against the corral posts. But Dinky-Dunk fought it out with him, and
winded him, and mastered him, and made him meek enough for me to slip
up into the saddle. My riding muscles, however, have gone flabby, and
two or three miles, for the first venture, was all I cared to stand.
But I'm glad to know that Paddy can be pressed into service again,
whenever the occasion arises. Poor old Bobs, by the way, keeps looking
at me with a troubled and questioning eye. He seems to know that some
unsettling and untoward event is on the way. When a coyote howled last
night, far off on the sky-line, Bobs poured out his soul in an
answering solo of misery. This morning, when I was pretty busy, he
poked his head between my knees. I had a dozen things calling me, but
I took the time to rub his nose and brush back his ears and tell him
he was the grandest old dog on all God's green earth. And he repaid me
with a look of adoration that put springs under my heels for the rest
of the morning, and came and licked Pee-Wee's bare heels, and later
Poppsy's, when I was giving them their bath.
_Friday the Tenth_
Lady Alicia has arrived. So have her trunks, eleven in number--count
'em!--trunks of queer sizes and shapes, of pigskin and patent leather
and canvas, with gigantic buckles and straps, and all gaudily
initialed and plastered with foreign labels. Her ladyship had to come,
of course, at the very worst time of year, when the mud was at its
muckiest and the prairie was at its worst. The trails were simply
awful, with the last of the frost coming out of the ground and mother
earth a foot-deep sponge of engulfing stickiness. All the world seemed
turned to mud. I couldn't go along, of course, when Dinky-Dunk started
off in the Teetzels' borrowed spring "democrat" to meet his English
cousin at the Buckhorn station, with Whinstane Sandy and the wagon
trailing behind for the luggage.
We expected a lady in somewhat delicate health, so I sent along plenty
of rugs and a foot-warmer, and saw that the house was well heated, and
the west room bed turned down. Even a hot-water bottle stood ready and
waiting to be filled.
But Lady Alicia, when she arrived with Dinky-Dunk just before
nightfall, didn't impress me as very much of an invalid. She struck me
more as a very vital and audacious woman, neither young nor old, with
an odd quietness of manner to give a saber-edge to her audacity. I
could hear her laughing, musically and not unpleasantly, at the
mud-coated "democrat," which on its return looked a good deal like a
'dobe hut mounted on four chariot wheels. But _everything_, for that
matter, was covered with mud, horses and harness and robes and even
the blanket in which Lady Alicia had wrapped herself. She had done
this, I could see, to give decent protection to a Redfern coat of
plucked beaver with immense reveres, though there was mud enough on
her stout tan shoes, so unmistakably English in their common-sense
solidity, and some on her fur turban and even a splash or two on her
face. That face, by the way, has an apple-blossom skin of which I can
see she is justly proud. And she has tourmaline eyes, with reddish
hazel specks in an iris of opaque blue, and small white teeth and lips
with a telltale curve of wilfulness about them. She isn't exactly
girlish, but with all her worldly wisdom she has a touch of the
clinging-ivy type which must make her inordinately appealing to men.
Her voice is soft and full-voweled, with that habitual rising
inflection characteristic of the English, and that rather insolent
drawl which in her native land seems the final flower of unchallenged
privilege. Her hands are very white and fastidious looking, and most
carefully manicured. She is, in fact, wonderful in many ways, but I
haven't yet decided whether I'm going to like her or not. Her smile
strikes me as having more glitter than warmth, and although she is
neither tall nor full-bodied, she seems to have the power of making
point take the place of weight. Yet, oddly enough, there is an
occasional air of masculine loose-jointedness about her movements, a
half-defiant sort of slouch and swagger which would probably carry
much farther in her Old World than in our easier-moving New World,
where disdain of decorum can not be regarded as quite such a novelty.
It wasn't until she was within the protecting door of Casa Grande that
I woke up to the fact of how incongruous she stood on a northwest
ranch. She struck me, then, as distinctly an urban product, as one of
those lazy and silk-lined and limousiny sort of women who could face
an upholstery endurance-test without any apparent signs of
heart-failure, but might be apt to fall down on engine-performance.
Yet I was determined to suspend all judgment, even after I could see
that she was making no particular effort to meet me half-way, though
she did acknowledge that Dinkie, in his best bib and tucker, was a
"dawling" and even proclaimed that his complexion--due, of course, to
the floor-shellac and coal-oil--reminded her very much of the
higher-colored English children. She also dutifully asked about Poppsy
and Pee-Wee, after announcing that she found the house uncomfortably
hot, and seemed surprised that Dinky-Dunk should descend to the
stabling and feeding and watering of his own horses.
She appeared rather constrained and ill-at-ease, in fact, until
Dinky-Dunk had washed up and joined us. Yet I saw, when we sat down to
our belated supper, that the fair Allie had the abundant and honest
appetite of a healthy boy. She also asked if she might smoke between
courses--which same worried the unhappy Dinky-Dunk much more than it
did me. My risibilities remained untouched until she languidly
remarked that any woman who had twins on the prairie ought to get a
V.C.
But she automatically became, I retorted, a K.C.B. This seemed to
puzzle the cool-eyed Lady Alicia.
"That means a Knight Commander of the Bath," she said with her English
literalness.
"Exactly," I agreed. And Dinky-Dunk had to come to her rescue and
explain the joke, like a court-interpreter translating Cree to the
circuit judge, so that by the time he got through it didn't seem a
joke at all and his eyes were flashing me a code-signal not to be too
hard on a tenderfoot. When, later on, Lady Alicia looked about Casa
Grande, which we'd toiled and moiled and slaved to make like the
homestead prints in the immigration pamphlets, she languidly
acknowledged that it was rather ducky, whatever that may mean, and
asked Dinky-Dunk if there'd be any deer-shooting this spring. I
notice, by the way, that she calls him "Dooncan" and sometimes "Cousin
Doonk," which strikes me as being over-intimate, seeing he's really
her second cousin. It seems suggestive of some hidden joke between
them. And Duncan addresses her quite openly as "Allie."
This same Allie has brought a lady's maid with her whom she addresses,
_more Anglico_, simply by her surname of "Struthers." Struthers is a
submerged and self-obliterating and patient-eyed woman of nearly
forty, I should say, with a face that would be both intelligent and
attractive, if it weren't so subservient. But I've a floaty sort of
feeling that this same maid knows a little more than she lets on to
know, and I'm wondering what western life will do to her. In one
year's time, I'll wager a plugged nickel against an English sovereign,
she'll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and
murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it
fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which
Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and
warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's
rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two
shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser
tops, and even a nickel alcohol-lamp set up for brewing the apparently
essential cup of tea. It made me wish that I had a Struthers or two of
my own on the string. And that made my thoughts go hurtling back to my
old Hortense and how we had parted at the Hotel de L'Athenee, and to
Theobald Gustav and his aunt the Baroness, and the old lost life that
seemed such years and years away....
But I promptly put the lid down on those over-disturbing reminiscences.
There should be no _post-mortems_ in this family circle, no jeremiads
over what has gone before. This is the New World and the new age where
life is too crowded for regrets. I am a woman twenty-seven years old,
married and the mother of three children. I am the wife of a rancher
who went bust in a land-boom and is compelled to start life over again.
I must stand beside him, and start from the bottom. I must also carry
along with me all the hopes and prospects of three small lives. This,
however, is something which I refuse to accept as a burden and a
handicap. It is a weight attached to me, of course, but it's only the
stabilizing weight which the tail contributes to the kite, allowing it,
in the end, to fly higher and keep steadier. It won't seem hard to do
without things, when I think of those kiddies of mine, and hard work
should be a great and glorious gift, if it is to give them the start in
life which they deserve. We'll no longer quarrel, Diddums and I, about
whether Dinkie shall go to Harvard or McGill. There'll be much closer
problems than that, I imagine, before Dinkie is out of his knickers.
Fate has shaken us down to realities--and my present perplexity is to
get possession of six new milk-pans and that new barrel-churn, not to
mention the flannelette I simply must have for the Twins' new
nighties!...
_Saturday the Eleventh_
These imperturbable English! I didn't know whether I should take off
my hat to 'em or despise 'em. They seem to come out of a different
mold to what we Americans do. Lady Alicia takes everything as a matter
of course. She seems to have accepted one of the finest ranches west
of the Peg as impassively as an old work-horse accepts a new shoe.
Even the immensity of our western prairie-land hasn't quite stumped
her. She acknowledged that Casa Grande was "quaint," and is obviously
much more interested in Iroquois Annie, the latter being partly a
Redskin, than in my humble self. I went up in her estimation a little,
however, when I coolly accepted one of her cigarettes, of which she
has brought enough to asphyxiate an army. I managed it all right,
though it was nearly four long years since I'd flicked the ash off the
end of one--in Chinkie's yacht going up to Monte Carlo. But I was glad
enough to drop the bigger half of it quietly into my nasturtium
window-box, when the lady wasn't looking.
The lady in question, by the way, seems rather disappointed to find
that Casa Grande has what she called "central heating." About the
middle of next February, when the thermometer is flirting with the
forty-below mark, she may change her mind. I suppose the lady expected
to get a lodge and a deer-park along with her new home, to say nothing
of a picture 'all--open to the public on Fridays, admission one
shilling--and a family ghost, and, of course, a terrace for the
aforesaid ghost to ambulate along on moonlight nights.
But the thing that's been troubling me, all day long, is: Now that
Lady Alicia has got her hand-made ranch, what's she going to do with
it? I scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on the
matter, since she seems intent on regarding me as merely a bit of the
landscape. The disturbing part of it all is that her aloofness is so
unstudied, so indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me
feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn't so much mind being actively and
martially snubbed, for that would give me something definite and
tangible to grow combative over. But you can't cross swords with a
Scotch mist.
With Dinky-Dunk her ladyship is quite different. I never see that look
of mild impatience in her opaque blue eyes when he is talking. She
flatters him openly, in fact, and a man takes to flattery, of course,
as a kitten takes to cream. Yet with all her outspokenness I am
conscious of a tremendous sense of reservation. Already, more than
once, she has given me a feeling which I'd find it very hard to
describe, a feeling as though we were being suspended over peril by
something very fragile. It's the feeling you have when you stand on
one of those frail little Alpine bridges that can sway so forebodingly
with your own weight and remind you that nothing but a rustic paling
or two separates you from the thousand-footed abysses below your
heels.
But I mustn't paint the new mistress of Casa Grande all in dark
colors. She has her good points, and a mind of her own, and a thought
or two of her own. Dinky-Dunk was asking her about Egypt. That
country, she retorted, was too dead for her. She couldn't wipe out of
her heart the memory of what man had suffered along the banks of the
Nile, during the last four thousand years, what millions of men had
suffered there because of religion and war and caste.
"I could never be happy in a country of dead races and dead creeds and
dead cities," protested Lady Alicia, with more emotion than I had
expected. "And those are the things that always stare me in the face
out there."
This brought the talk around to the New World.
"I rather fancy that a climate like yours up here," she coolly
observed, "would make luxuries of furniture and dress, and convert
what should be the accidents of life into essentials. You will always
have to fight against nature, you know, and that makes man attach more
importance to the quest of comfort. But when he lives in the tropics,
in a surrounding that leaves him with few desires, he has time to sit
down and think about his soul. That's why you can never have a great
musician or a great poet in your land of blizzards, Cousin Dooncan.
You are all kept too busy laying up nuts for the winter. You can't
afford to turn gipsy and go off star-gazing."
"You can if you join the I. W. W.," I retorted. But the allusion was
lost on her.
"I can't imagine a Shelley or a Theocritus up here on your prairie,"
she went on, "or a Marcus Aurelius in the real-estate business in
Winnipeg."
Dinky-Dunk was able to smile at this, though I wasn't.
"But we have the glory of doing things," I contended, "and somebody, I
believe, has summed up your Marcus Aurelius by saying he left behind
him a couple of beautiful books, an execrable son, and a decaying
nation. And we don't intend to decay! We don't live for the moment,
it's true. But we live for To-morrow. We write epics in railway lines,
and instead of working out sonnets we build new cities, and instead of
sitting down under a palm-tree and twiddling our thumbs we turn a
wilderness into a new nation, and grow grain and give bread to the
hungry world where the gipsies don't seem quite able to make both ends
meet!"
I had my say out, and Lady Alicia sat looking at me with a sort of
mild and impersonal surprise. But she declined to argue about it all.
And it was just as well she didn't, I suppose, for I had my Irish up
and didn't intend to sit back and see my country maligned.
But on the way home to the Harris Ranch last night, with Dinky-Dunk
silent and thoughtful, and a cold star or two in the high-arching
heavens over us, I found that my little fire of enthusiasm had burnt
itself out and those crazy lines of John Davidson kept returning to my
mind:
"After the end of all things,
After the years are spent,
After the loom is broken,
After the robe is rent,
Will there be hearts a-beating,
Will friend converse with friend,
Will men and women be lovers,
After the end?"
I felt very much alone in the world, and about as cheerful as a
moonstruck coyote, after those lines had rattled in my empty brain like
a skeleton in the wind. It wasn't until I saw the light in our wickiup
window and heard Bobs' bay of welcome through the crystal-clear
twilight that the leaden weight of desolation slipped off the ledge of
my heart. But as I heard that deep-noted bark of gladness, that
friendly intimation of guardianship unrelaxed and untiring, I
remembered that I had one faithful and unexacting friend, even though
it was nothing better than a dog.
_Sunday the Twelfth_
Dinky-Dunk rather surprised me to-day by asking why I was so
stand-offish with his Cousin Allie. I told him that I wasn't in the
habit of curling up like a kitten on a slab of Polar ice.
"But she really likes you, Tabbie," my husband protested. "She wants
to know you and understand you. Only you keep intimidating her, and
placing her at a disadvantage."
This was news to me. Lady Alicia, I'd imagined, stood in awe of
nothing on the earth beneath nor the heavens above. She can speak very
sharply, I've already noticed, to Struthers, when the occasion arises.
And she's been very calm and deliberate, as I've already observed, in
her manner of taking over Casa Grande. For she _has_ formally taken it
over, Dinky-Dunk tells me, and in a day or two we all have to trek to
town for the signing of the papers. She is, apparently, going to run
the ranch on her own hook, and in her own way. It will be well worth
watching.
I was rather anxious to hear the particulars of the transfer to Lady
Allie, but Dinky-Dunk seemed a little reluctant to go into details,
and I didn't intend to make a parade of my curiosity. I can bide my
time.... Yesterday I put on my old riding-suit, saddled Paddy, fed the
Twins to their last mouthful, and went galloping off through the mud
to help bring the cattle over to the Harris Ranch. I was a sight, in
that weather-stained old suit and ragged toppers, even before I got
freckled and splashed with prairie-mud. I was standing up in the
stirrups laughing at Francois, who'd had a bad slip and fallen in a
puddle just back of our old corral, when her Ladyship came out. She
must have taken me for a drunken cowboy who'd rolled into a sheep-dip,
for my nose was red and my old Stetson sombrero was crooked on the
back of my head and even my hair was caked with mud. She called to me,
rather imperiously, so I went stampeding up to her, and let Paddy
indulge in that theatrical stop-slide of his, on his haunches, so that
it wasn't until his nose was within two feet of her own that she could
be quite sure she wasn't about to be run down.
Her eyes popped a little when she saw it was a woman on Paddy, though
she'd refused to show a trace of fear when we went avalanching down on
her. Then she studied my get-up.
"I should rather like to ride that way," she coolly announced.
"It's the only way," I told her, making Paddy pirouette by pressing a
heel against his short-ribs. She meant, of course, riding astride,
which must have struck her as the final word in audacity.
"I like your pony," next remarked Lady Alicia, with a somewhat wistful
intonation in her voice.
"He's a brick," I acknowledged. Then I swung about to help Francois
head off a bunch of rampaging steers. "Come and see us," I called back
over my shoulder. If Lady Alicia answered, I didn't have time to catch
what she said.
But that romp on Paddy has done me good. It shook the solemnity out of
me. I've just decided that I'm not going to surrender to this
middle-aged Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire stuff before my time. I'm going to
refuse to grow old and poky. I'm going to keep the spark alive, the
sacred spark of youth, even though folks write me down as the biggest
loon west of the Dirt Hills. So dear Lord--this is my prayer--whatever
You do to me, keep me _alive_. O God, don't let me, in Thy divine mercy,
be a Dead One. Don't let me be a soured woman with a self-murdered soul.
Keep the wine of youth in my body and the hope of happiness in my heart.
Yea, permit me deeply to live and love and laugh, so that youth may
abide in my bones, even as it did in that once-renowned Duchess of
Lienster,
Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
To die of a fall from a cherry-tree then!
My poor old Dinky-Dunk, by the way, meanders about these days so moody
and morose it's beginning to disturb me. He's at the end of his
string, and picked clean to the bone, and I'm beginning to see that
it's my duty to buoy that man up, to nurse him back into a respectable
belief in himself. His nerves are a bit raw, and he's not always
responsible for his manners. The other night he came in tired, and
tried to read, when Poppsy and Pee-Wee were both going it like the
Russian Balalaika. To tell the truth, their little tummies were a bit
upset, because the food purveyor had had too strenuous a day to be
regular in her rounds.
"Can't you keep those squalling brats quiet?" Dinky-Dunk called out to
me. It came like a thunder clap. It left me gasping, to think that he
could call his own flesh and blood "squalling brats." And I was
shocked and hurt, but I decided not to show it.
"Will somebody kindly page Lord Chesterfield?" I quietly remarked as I
went to the Twins and wheeled them out to the kitchen, where I gave
them hot peppermint and rubbed their backs and quieted them down
again.
I suppose there's no such thing as a perfect husband. That's a lesson
we've all got to learn, the same as all children, apparently, have to
find out that acorns and horse-chestnuts aren't edible. For the nap
wears off men the same as it does off clothes. I dread to have to
write it down, but I begin to detect thinnesses in Dinky-Dunk, and a
disturbing little run or two in the even web of his character. But he
knows when he's played Indian and attempts oblique and rather
shamefaced efforts to make amends, later on, when it won't be too
noticeable. Last night, as I sat sewing, our little Dinkie must have
had a bad dream, for he wakened from a sound sleep with a scream of
terror. Dinky-Dunk went to him first, and took him up and sang to him,
and when I glanced in I saw a rumply and tumbly and sleepy-eyed tot
with his kinky head against his father's shoulder. As I took up my
sewing again and heard Dinky-Dunk singing to his son, it seemed a
proud and happy and contented sort of voice. It rose and fell in that
next room, in a sort of droning bass, and for the life of me I can't
tell why, but as I stopped in my sewing and sat listening to that
father singing to his sleepy-eyed first-born, it brought the sudden
tears to my eyes. It has been a considerable length of time, _en
passant_, since I found myself sitting down and pumping the brine. I
must be getting hardened in my old age.
_Tuesday the Fourteenth_
Lady Allie sent over for Dinky-Dunk yesterday morning, to fix the
windmill at Casa Grande. They'd put it out of commission in the first
week, and emptied the pressure-tank, and were without water, and were
as helpless as a couple of canaries. We have a broken windmill of our
own, right here at home, but Diddums went meekly enough, although he
was in the midst of his morning work--and work is about to loom big
over this ranch, for we're at last able to get on the land. And the
sooner you get on the land, in this latitude, the surer you are of
your crop. We daren't shave down any margins of chance. We need that
crop....
I am really beginning to despair of Iroquois Annie. She is the only
thing I can get in the way of hired help out here, and yet she is
hopeless. She is sullen and wasteful, and she has never yet learned to
be patient with the children. I try to soften and placate her with the
gift of trinkets, for there is enough Redskin in her to make her
inordinately proud of anything with a bit of flash and glitter to it.
But she is about as responsive to actual kindness as a diamond-back
rattler would be, and some day, if she drives me too far, I'm going
off at half-cock and blow that breed into mince-meat.
By the way, I can see myself writ small in little Dinkie, my moods and
waywardnesses and wicked impulses, and sudden chinooks of tenderness
alternating with a perverse sort of shrinking away from love itself,
even when I'm hungering for it. I can also catch signs of his pater's
masterfulness cropping out in him. Small as he is, he disturbs me by
that combative stare of his. It's almost a silent challenge I see in
his eyes as he coolly studies me, after a proclamation that he will be
spanked if he repeats a given misdeed.
I'm beginning to understand the meaning of that very old phrase about
one's chickens coming home to roost. I can even detect sudden impulses
of cruelty in little Dinkie, when, young and tender as he appears to
the casual eye, a quick and wilful passion to hurt something takes
possession of him. Yesterday I watched him catch up his one-eyed Teddy
Bear, which he loves, and beat its head against the shack-floor.
Sometimes, too, he'll take possession of a plate and fling it to the
floor with all his force, even though he knows such an act is surely
followed by punishment. It's the same with Poppsy and Pee-Wee, with
whom he is apt to be over-rough, though his offenses in that direction
may still be touched with just a coloring of childish jealousy, long
and arduously as I struggle to implant some trace of fraternal feeling
in his anarchistic little breast. There are even times, after he's
been hugging my knees or perhaps stroking my cheek with his little
velvet hands and murmuring "Maaa-maa!" in his small and bird-like coo,
when he will suddenly turn savage and try to bite my patella or pull
my ear out by the root.
Most of this cruelty, I think, is born of a sheer excess of animal
spirits. But not all of it. Some of it is based on downright
wilfulness. I have seen him do without things he really wanted, rather
than unbend and say the necessary "Ta-ta" which stands for both
"please" and "thanks" in his still limited vocabulary. The little Hun
will also fall on his picture-books, at times, and do his best to tear
the linen pages apart, flailing them about in the air with genuine
Berserker madness. But along with this, as I've already said, he has
his equally sudden impulses of affection, especially when he first
wakens in the morning and his little body seems to be singing with the
pure joy of living. He'll smooth my hair, after I've lifted him from
the crib into my bed, and bury his face in the hollow of my neck and
kiss my cheek and pat my forehead and coo over me until I squeeze him
so hard he has to grunt. Then he'll probably do his best to pick my
eyes out, if I pretend to be asleep, or experiment with the end of my
nose, to see why it doesn't lift up like a door-knocker. Then he'll
snuggle down in the crook of my arm, perfectly still except for the
wriggling of his toes against my hip, and croon there with happiness
and contentment, like a ring-neck dove.
_Friday the Seventeenth_
Lady Allie couldn't have been picked quite clean to the bone by the
McKails, for she's announced her intention of buying a touring-car and
a gasoline-engine and has had a conference with Dinky-Dunk on the
matter. She also sent to Montreal for the niftiest little English
sailor suit, for Dinkie, together with a sailor hat that has
"Agamemnon" printed in gold letters on its band.
I ought to be enthusiastic about it, but I can't. Dinkie himself,
however, who calls it his "new nailor nuit"--not being yet able to
manage the sibilants--struts about in it proud as a peacock, and
refuses to sit down in his supper-chair until Ikkie has carefully
wiped off the seat of the same, to the end that the beloved nailor
nuit might remain immaculate. He'll lose his reverence for it, of
course, when he knows it better. It's a habit men have, big or little.
Lady Allie has confessed that she is succumbing to the charm of
prairie life. It ought to make her more of a woman and less of a
silk-lined idler. Dinky-Dunk still nurses the illusion that she is
delicate, and manages to get a lot of glory out of that clinging-vine
pose of hers, big oak that he is! But it is simply absurd, the way he
falls for her flattery. She's making him believe that he's a
twentieth-century St. Augustine and a Saint Christopher all rolled
into one. Poor old Dinky-Dunk, I'll have to keep an eye on him or
they'll be turning his head, for all its gray hairs. He is wax in the
hand of designing beauty, as are most of the race of man. And the fair
Allie, I must acknowledge, is dangerously appealing to the eye. It's
no wonder poor old Dinky-Dunk nearly broke his neck trying to teach
her to ride astride. But I intend to give her ladyship an inkling,
before long, that I'm not quite so stupid as I seem to be. She mustn't
imagine she can "vamp" my Kaikobad with impunity. It's a case of any
port in a storm, I suppose, for she has to practise on somebody. But I
must say she looks well on horseback and can lay claim to a poise that
always exacts its toll of respect. She rides hard, though I imagine
she would be unwittingly cruel to her mount. Yet she has been more
offhanded and friendly, the last two or three times she has dropped
over to the shack, and she is kind to the kiddies, especially Dinkie.
She seems genuinely and unaffectedly fond of him. As for me, she
thinks I'm hard, I feel sure, and is secretly studying me--trying to
decipher, I suppose, what her sainted cousin could ever see in me to
kick up a dust about!
Lady Allie's London togs, by the way, make me feel rather shoddy and
slattern. I intend to swing in a little stronger for personal
adornment, as soon as we get things going again. When a woman gives
up, in that respect, she's surely a goner. And I may be a hard-handed
and slabsided prairie huzzy, but there was a time when I stood beside
the big palms by the fountain in the conservatory of Prince Ernest de
Ligne's Brussels house in the _Rue Montoyer_ and the Marquis of
What-Ever-His-Name-Was bowed and set all the orders on his chest
shaking when he kissed my hand and proclaimed that I was the most
beautiful woman in Belgium!
Yes, there was such a time. But it was a long, long time ago, and I
never thought then I'd be a rancher's wife with a barrel-churn to
scald out once a week and a wheezy old pump to prime in the morning
and a little hanging garden of Babylon full of babies to keep warm and
to keep fed and to keep from falling on their boneless little cocos! I
might even have married Theobald Gustav von Brockdorff and turned into
an embassy ball lizard and ascended into the old family landau of his
aunt the baroness, to disport along the boulevards therein very much
like an oyster on the half-shell. I might have done all that, and I
might not. But it's all for the best, as the greatest pessimist who
ever drew the breath of life once tried to teach in his _Candide_. And
in my career, as I have already written, there shall be no jeremiads.
_Sunday the Nineteenth_
I've been trying to keep tab on the Twins' weight, for it's important
that they should gain according to schedule. But I've only Dinky-Dunk's
bulky grain-scales, and it's impossible to figure down to anything as
fine as ounces or even quarter-pounds on such a balancer. Yet my
babies, I'm afraid, are not gaining as they ought. Poppsy is especially
fretful of late. Why can't somebody invent children without colic,
anyway? I have a feeling that I ought to run on low gear for a while.
But that's a luxury I can't quite afford.
Last night, when I was dead-tired and trying to give the last licks to
my day's work without doing a Keystone fall over the kitchen table,
Dinky-Dunk said: "Why haven't you ever given a name to this new place?
They tell me you have a genius for naming things--and here we are
still dubbing our home the Harris shack."
"I suppose it ought to be an Indian name, in honor of Ikkie?" I
suggested, doing my best to maintain an unruffled front. And Duncan
Argyll absently agreed that it might just as well.
"Then what's the matter with calling it Alabama?" I mordantly
suggested. "For as I remember it, that means 'Here we rest.' And I can
imagine nothing more appropriate."
I was half-sorry I said it, for the Lord deliver me always from a
sarcastic woman. But I've a feeling that the name is going to stick,
whether we want it or not. At any rate, Alabama Ranch has rather a
musical turn to it....
I wonder if there are any really perfect children in the world? Or do
the good little boys and girls only belong to that sentimentalized
mid-Victorian fiction which tried so hard to make the world like a
cross between an old maid's herb-garden and a Sunday afternoon in a
London suburb? I have tried talking with little Dinkie, and reasoning
with him. I have striven long and patiently to blow his little spark
of conscience into the active flame of self-judgment. And averse as I
am to cruelty and hardness, much as I hate the humiliation of physical
punishment, my poor kiddie and I can't get along without the slipper.
I have to spank him, and spank him soundly, about once a week. I'm
driven to this, or there'd be no sleep nor rest nor roof about our
heads at Alabama Ranch. I don't give a rip what Barrie may have
written about the bringing up of children--for he never had any of his
own! He never had an imperious young autocrat to democratize. He never
had a family to de-barbarize, even though he did write very pretty
books about the subject. It's just another case, I suppose, where
fiction is too cowardly or too finicky to be truthful. I had theories
about this child-business myself, at one time, but my pipe of illusion
has plumb gone out. It wasn't so many years ago that I imagined about
all a mother had to do was to dress in clinging _negligees_, such as
you see in the toilet-soap advertisements, and hold a spotless little
saint on her knee, or have a miraculously docile nurse in cap and
apron carry in a little paragon all done up in dotted Swiss and
rose-pink, and pose for family groups, not unlike popular prints of
the royal family in full evening dress, on _Louis Quinze_ settees. And
later on, of course, one could ride out with a row of sedate little
princelings at one's side, so that one could murmur, when the world
marveled at their manners, "It's blood, my dears, merely blood!"
But fled, and fled forever, are all such dreams. Dinkie prefers
treading on his bread-and-butter before consuming it, and does his
best to consume the workings of my sewing-machine, and pokes the
spoons down through the crack in the kitchen floor, and betrays a
weakness for yard-mud and dust in preference to the well-scrubbed
boards of the sleeping porch, which I've tried to turn into a sort of
nursery by day. Most fiction, I find, glides lightly over this eternal
Waterloo between dirt and water--for no active and healthy child is
easy to keep clean. That is something which you never, never, really
succeed at. All that you can do is to keep up the struggle, consoling
yourself with the memory that cleanness, even surgical cleanness, is
only an approximation. The plain everyday sort of cleanness promptly
resolves itself into a sort of neck and neck race with dirt and
disorder, a neck and neck race with the soap-bar habitually running
second. Sometimes it seems hopeless. For it's incredible what can
happen to an active-bodied boy of two or three years in one brief but
crowded afternoon. It's equally amazing what can happen to a
respectably furnished room after a healthy and high-spirited young
Turk has been turned loose in it for an hour or two.
It's a battle, all right. But it has its compensations. It _has_ to,
or the race would wither up like an unwatered cucumber-vine. Who
doesn't really love to tub a plump and dimpled little body like my
Dinkie's? I'm no petticoated Paul Peel, but I can see enough beauty in
the curves of that velvety body to lift it up and bite it on its
promptly protesting little flank. And there's unclouded glory in
occasionally togging him out in spotless white, and beholding him as
immaculate as a cherub, if only for one brief half-hour. It's the
transiency of that spotlessness, I suppose, which crowns it with
glory. If he was forever in that condition, we'd be as indifferent to
it as we are to immortelles and wax flowers. If he was always cherubic
and perfect, I suppose, we'd never appreciate that perfection or know
the joy of triumphing over the mother earth that has an affinity for
the finest of us.
But I _do_ miss a real nursery, in more ways than one. The absence of
one gives Dinkie the range of the whole shack, and when on the range
he's a timber-wolf for trouble, and can annoy his father even more
than he can me by his depredations. Last night after supper I heard an
icy voice speaking from the end of the dining-room where Dinky-Dunk
has installed his desk.
"Will you kindly come and see what your son has done?" my husband
demanded, with a sort of in-this-way-madness-lies tone.
I stepped in through the kitchen door, ignoring the quite unconscious
humor of "_my_ son" under the circumstances, and found that Dinkie had
provided a novel flavor for his dad by emptying the bottle of ink into
his brand-new tin of pipe-tobacco. There was nothing to be done, of
course, except to wash as much of the ink as I could off Dinkie's
face. Nor did I reveal to his father that three days before I had
carefully compiled a list of his son and heir's misdeeds, for one
round of the clock. They were, I find, as follows:
Overturning a newly opened tin of raspberries, putting bread-dough in
his ears; breaking my nail-buffer, which, however, I haven't used for
a month and more; paring the bark, with the bread-knife, off the
lonely little scrub poplar near the kitchen door, our one and only
shade; breaking a drinking-glass, which was accident; cutting holes
with the scissors in Ikkie's new service-apron; removing the covers
from two of his father's engineering books; severing the wire joint in
my sewing-machine belt (expeditiously and secretly mended by Whinnie,
however, when he came in with the milk-pails); emptying what was left
of my bottle of vanilla into the bread mixer; and last but not least,
trying to swallow and nearly choking on my silver thimble, in which he
seems to find never-ending disappointment because it will not remain
fixed on the point of his nose.
It may sound like a busy day, but it was, on the whole, merely an
average one. Yet I'll wager a bushel of number one Northern winter
wheat to a doughnut ring that if Ibsen had written an epilogue for
_The Doll's House_, Nora would have come crawling back to her home and
her kiddies, in the end.
_Wednesday the Twenty-second_
Lady Allie is either dunderheaded or designing. She has calmly
suggested that her rural phone-line be extended from Casa Grande to
Alabama Ranch so that she can get in touch with Dinky-Dunk when she
needs his help and guidance. Even as it is, he's called on about five
times a week, to run to the help of that she-remittance-man in
corduroy and dog-skin gauntlets and leggings.
She seems thunderstruck to find that she can't get the hired help she
wants, at a moment's notice. Dinky-Dunk says she's sure to be imposed
on, and that although she's as green as grass, she's really anxious to
learn. He feels that it's his duty to stand between her and the
outsiders who'd be only too ready to impose on her ignorance.
She rode over to see the Twins yesterday, who were sleeping out under
the fly-netting I'd draped over them, the pink-tinted kind they put
over fruit-baskets in the city markets and shops. Poppsy and Pee-Wee
looked exactly like two peaches, rosy and warm and round.
Lady Allie stared at them with rather an abstracted eye, and then,
idiot that she is, announced that she'd like to have twelve. But talk
is cheap. The modern woman who's had even half that number has pretty
well given up her life to her family. It's remarkable, by the way, the
silent and fathomless pity I've come to have for childless women. The
thought of a fat spinster fussing over a French poodle or a faded
blond forlornly mothering a Pekinese chow gives me a feeling that is
at least first cousin to sea-sickness.
Lady Allie, I find, has very fixed and definite theories as to the
rearing of children. They should never be rocked or patted, or be
given a "comfort," and they should be in bed for the night at sundown.
There was a time I had a few theories of my own, but I've pretty well
abandoned them. I've been taught, in this respect, to travel light, as
the overland voyageurs of this country would express it, to travel
light and leave the final resort to instinct.
_Friday the Twenty-fourth_
I was lazy last night, so both the ink-pot and its owner had a rest.
Or perhaps it wasn't so much laziness as wilful revolt against the
monotony of work, for, after all, it's not the 'unting as 'urts the
'osses, but the 'ammer, 'ammer, 'ammer on the 'ard old road! I loafed
for a long time in a sort of sit-easy torpor, with Bobs' head between
my knees while Dinky-Dunk pored over descriptive catalogues about
farm-tractors, for by hook or by crook we've got to have a tractor for
Alabama Ranch.
"Bobs," I said after studying my collie's eyes for a good many
minutes, "you are surely one grand old dog!"
Whereupon Bobs wagged his tail-stump with sleepy content. As I bent
lower and stared closer into those humid eyes of his, it seemed as
though I were staring down into a bottomless well, through a peep-hole
into Infinity, so deep and wonderful was that eye, that dusky pool of
love and trust. It was like seeing into the velvet-soft recesses of a
soul. And I could stare into them without fear, just as Bobs could
stare back without shame. That's where dogs are slightly different
from men. If I looked into a man's eye like that he'd either rudely
inquire just what the devil I was gaping at or he'd want to ask me out
to supper in one of those Pompeian places where a bald-headed waiter
serves lobsters in a _chambre particulière_.
But all I could see in the eye of my sedate old Bobs was love, love
infinite and inarticulate, love too big ever to be put into words.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said, interrupting my lord and master at his reading,
"if God is really love, as the Good Book says, I don't see why they
ever started talking about the Lamb of God."
"Why shouldn't they?" asked Diddums, not much interested.
"Because lambs may be artless and innocent little things, but when
you've got their innocence you've got about everything. They're not
the least bit intelligent, and they're self-centered and self-immured.
Now, with dogs it's different. Dogs love you and guard you and ache to
serve you." And I couldn't help stopping to think about the dogs I'd
known and loved, the dogs who once meant so much in my life: Chinkie's
Bingo, with his big baptizing tongue and his momentary rainbow as he
emerged from the water and shook himself with my stick still in his
mouth; Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie with all
his tricks and his singsong of howls when the piano played; Schnider,
with his mania for my slippers and undies, which he carried into most
unexpected quarters; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely of face
and form but so true blue in temper and trust.
"Life, to a dog," I went on, "really means devotion to man, doesn't
it?"
"What are you driving at, anyway?" asked Dinky-Dunk.
"I was just wondering," I said as I sat staring into Bobs' eyes, "how
strange it would be if, after all, God was really a dog, the loving
and faithful Watch-Dog of His universe!"
"Please don't be blasphemous," Dinky-Dunk coldly remarked.
"But I'm not blasphemous," I tried to tell him. "And I was never more
serious in my life. There's even something sacred about it, once you
look at it in the right way. Just think of the Shepherd-Dog of the
Stars, the vigilant and affectionate Watcher who keeps the wandering
worlds in their folds! That's not one bit worse than the lamb idea,
only we've got so used to the lamb it doesn't shock us into attention
any more. Why, just look at these eyes of Bobs right now. There's more
nobility and devotion and trust and love in them than was ever in all
the eyes of all the lambs that ever frisked about the fields and
sheep-folds from Dan to Beersheba!"
"Your theory, I believe, is entertained by the Igorrotes," remarked
Dinky-Dunk as he made a pretense of turning back to his
tractor-pamphlet. "The Igorrotes and other barbarians," he repeated,
so as to be sure the screw was being turned in the proper direction.
"And now I know why she said the more she knew about men the better
she liked dogs," I just as coldly remarked, remembering Madame de
Stael. "And I believe you're jealous of poor old Bobs just because he
loves me more than you do."
Dinky-Dunk put down his pamphlet. Then he called Bobs over to his side
of the table. But Bobs, I noticed, didn't go until I'd nodded
approval. So Dinky-Dunk took his turn at sitting with Bobs' nose in
his hand and staring down into the fathomless orbs that stared up at
him.
"You'll never get a lady, me lud, to look up at you like that," I told
him.
"Perhaps they have," retorted Dinky-Dunk, with his face slightly
averted.
"And having done so in the past, there's the natural chance that
they'll do so in the future," I retorted, making it half a question
and half a statement. But he seemed none too pleased at that thrust,
and he didn't even answer me when I told him I supposed I was his
Airedale, because they say an Airedale is a one-man dog.
"Then don't at least get distemper," observed my Kaikobad, very
quietly, over the top of his tractor-catalogue.
I made no sign that I had heard him. But Dinky-Dunk would never have
spoken to me that way, three short years ago. And I imagine he knows
it. For, after all, a change has been taking place, insubstantial and
unseen and subterranean, a settling of the foundations of life which
comes not only to a building as it grows older but also to the heart
as it grows older. And I'm worried about the future.
_Monday the--Monday the I-forget-what_
It's Monday, blue Monday, that's all I remember, except that there's a
rift in the lute of life at Alabama Ranch. Yesterday of course was
Sunday. And out of that day of rest Dinky-Dunk spent just five hours
over at Casa Grande. When he showed up, rather silent and constrained
and an hour and a half late for dinner, I asked him what had happened.
He explained that he'd been adjusting the carbureter on Lady Alicia's
new car.
"Don't you think, Duncan," I said, trying to speak calmly, though I
was by no means calm inside, "that it's rather a sacrifice of dignity,
holding yourself at that woman's beck and call?"
"We happen to be under a slight debt of obligation to _that woman_,"
my husband retorted, clearly more upset than I imagined he could be.
"But, Dinky-Dunk, you're not her hired man," I protested, wondering
how, without hurting him, I could make him see the thing from my
standpoint.
"No, but that's about what I'm going to become," was his altogether
unexpected answer.
"I can't say that I quite understand you," I told him, with a sick
feeling which I found it hard to keep under. Yet he must have noticed
something amusingly tragic in my attitude, for he laughed, though it
wasn't without a touch of bitterness. And laughter, under the
circumstances, didn't altogether add to my happiness.
"I simply mean that Allie's made me an offer of a hundred and fifty
dollars a month to become her ranch-manager," Dinky-Dunk announced
with a casualness that was patently forced. "And as I can't wring that
much out of this half-section, and as I'd only be four-flushing if I
let outsiders come in and take everything away from a tenderfoot, I
don't see--"
"And such a lovely tenderfoot," I interrupted.
"--I don't see why it isn't the decent and reasonable thing," concluded
my husband, without stooping to acknowledge the interruption, "to
accept that offer."
I understood, in a way, every word he was saying; yet it seemed
several minutes before the real meaning of a somewhat startling
situation seeped through to my brain.
"But surely, if we get a crop," I began. It was, however, a lame
beginning. And like most lame beginnings, it didn't go far.
"How are we going to get a crop when we can't even raise money enough
to get a tractor?" was Dinky-Dunk's challenge. "When we haven't help,
and we're short of seed-grain, and we can't even get a gang-plow on
credit?"
It didn't sound like my Dinky-Dunk of old, for I knew that he was
equivocating and making excuses, that he was engineering our ill luck
into an apology for worse conduct. But I was afraid of myself, even
more than I was afraid of Dinky-Dunk. And the voice of Instinct kept
whispering to me to be patient.
"Why couldn't we sell off some of the steers?" I valiantly suggested.
"It's the wrong season for selling steers," Dinky-Dunk replied with a
ponderous sort of patience. "And besides, those cattle don't belong to
me."
"Then whose are they?" I demanded.
"They're yours," retorted Dinky-Dunk, and I found his hair-splitting,
at such a time, singularly exasperating.
"I rather imagine they belonged to the family, if you intend it to
remain a family."
He winced at that, as I had proposed that he should.
"It seems to be getting a dangerously divided one," he flung back,
with a quick and hostile glance in my direction.
I was ready to fly to pieces, like a barrel that's lost its hoops. But
a thin and quavery and over-disturbing sound from the swing-box out on
the sleeping-porch brought me up short. It was a pizzicato note which
I promptly recognized as the gentle Pee-Wee's advertisement of
wakefulness. So I beat a quick and involuntary retreat, knowing only
too well what I'd have ahead of me if Poppsy joined in to make that
solo a duet.
But Pee-Wee refused to be silenced, and what Dinky-Dunk had just said
felt more and more like a branding-iron against my breast. So I
carried my wailing infant back to the dinner-table where my husband
still stood beside his empty chair. The hostile eye with which he
regarded the belcantoing Pee-Wee reminded me of the time he'd spoken
of his own off-spring as "squalling brats." And the memory wasn't a
tranquillizing one. It was still another spur roweling me back to the
ring of combat.
"Then you've decided to take that position?" I demanded as I surveyed
the cooling roast-beef and the fallen Yorkshire pudding.
"As soon as they can fix up my sleeping-quarters in the bunk-house
over at Casa Grande," was Dinky-Dunk's reply. He tried to say it
casually, but didn't quite succeed, for I could see his color deepen a
little. And this, in turn, led to a second only too obvious gesture of
self-defense.
"My monthly check, of course, will be delivered to you," he announced,
with an averted eye.
"Why to me?" I coldly inquired.
"It wouldn't be of much use to me," he retorted. And I resented his
basking thus openly in the fires of martyrdom.
"In that case," I asked, "what satisfaction are you getting out of
your new position?"
That sent the color ebbing from his face again, and he looked at me as
I'd never seen him look at me before. We'd both been mauled by the paw
of Destiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and oversensitized
spirits, facing each other as irritable as teased rattlers, ready to
thump rocks with our head. More than once I'd heard Dinky-Dunk
proclaim that the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled.
And I remembered Theobald Gustav's pet aphorism to the effect that
_Hassen machts nichts_. But life had its limits. And I wasn't one of
those pink-eared shivery little white mice who could be intimidated
into tears by a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And
married life, after all, is only a sort of _guerre d'usure_.
"And you think you're doing the right thing?" I demanded of my
husband, not without derision, confronting him with a challenge on my
face and a bawling Pee-Wee on my hip.
Dinky-Dunk sniffed.
"That child seems to have its mother's disposition," he murmured,
ignoring my question.
"The prospects of its acquiring anything better from its father seem
rather remote," I retorted, striking blindly. For that over-deft
adding of insult to injury had awakened every last one of my seven
sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold and calculated
cruelty. And by this time little waves of liquid fire were running
through my tingling body.
"Then I can't be of much service to this family," announced Dinky-Dunk,
with his maddening note of mockery.
"I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a flabby-minded idler
and the head of this household at one and the same time," I said out
of the seething crater-fogs of my indignation.
"She's never impressed me as being flabby," he ventured, with a
quietness which only a person who knew him would or could recognize as
dangerous.
"Well, I don't share your admiration for her," I retorted, letting the
tide of vitriol carry me along in its sweep.
Dinky-Dunk's face hardened.
"Then what do you intend doing about it?" he demanded.
That was a poser, all right. That was a poser which, I suppose, many a
woman at some time in her life has been called on to face. What did I
intend doing about it? I didn't care much. But I at least intended to
save the bruised and broken hulk of my pride from utter annihilation.
"I intend," I cried out with a quaver in my voice, "since you're not
able to fill the bill, to be head of this household myself."
"That sounds like an ultimatum," said Dinky-Dunk very slowly, his face
the sickly color of a meerschaum-pipe bowl.
"You can take it any way you want to," I passionately proclaimed,
compelled to raise my voice to the end that it might surmount
Pee-Wee's swelling cries. "And while you're being lackey for Lady
Alicia Newland I'll run this ranch. I'll run it in my own way, and
I'll run it without hanging on to a woman's skirt!"
Dinky-Dunk stared at me as though he were looking at me through a
leper-squint. But he had been brutal, was being brutal. And it was a
case of fighting fire with fire.
"Then you're welcome to the job," I heard him proclaiming out of his
blind white heat of rage. "After _that_, I'm through!"
"It won't be much of a loss," I shot back at him, feeling that he'd
soured a bright and sunny life into eternal blight.
"I'll remember that," he said with his jaw squared and his head down.
I saw him push his chair aside and wheel about and stride away from
the Yorkshire pudding with the caved-in roof, and the roast-beef that
was as cold as my own heart, and the indignantly protesting Pee-Wee
who in some vague way kept reminding me that I wasn't quite as
free-handed as I had been so airily imagining myself. For I mistily
remembered that the Twins, before the day was over, were going to find
it a very flatulent world. But I wasn't crushed. For there are times
when even wives and worms will turn. And this was one of them.
_Thursday the Thirtieth_
It's a busy three days I've been having, and if I'm a bit tuckered out
in body I'm still invincible in spirit. For I've already triumphed
over a tangle or two and now I'm going to see this thing through. I'm
going to see Alabama Ranch make good.
I teamed in to Buckhorn, with Dinkie and the Twins and Ikkie bedded
down in the wagon-box on fresh wheat-straw, and had a talk with Syd
Woodward, the dealer there. It took me just about ten minutes to get
down to hard-pan with him, once he was convinced that I meant
business. He's going to take over my one heavy team, Tumble-Weed and
Cloud-Maker, though it still gives my heart a wrench to think of
parting with those faithful animals. I'm also going to sell off
fifteen or eighteen of the heaviest steers and turn back the tin
Lizzie, which can be done without for a few months at least.
But, on the other hand, I'm going to have an 8-16 tractor that'll turn
over an acre of land in little more than an hour's time, and turn it
over a trifle better than the hired hand's usual "cut and cover"
method, and at a cost of less than fifty cents an acre. Later on, I
can use my tractor for hauling, or turn it to practically any other
form of farm-power there may be a call for. I'm also getting a special
grade of seed-wheat. There was a time when I thought that wheat was
just merely wheat. It rather opened my eyes to be told that in one
season the Shippers' Clearance Association definitely specified and
duly handled exactly four hundred and twenty-eight grades of this
particular grain. Even straight Northern wheat, without the taint of
weed-seed, may be classified in any of the different numbers up to
six, and also assorted into "tough," "wet," "damp," "musty,"
"binburnt" and half a dozen other grades and conditions, according to
the season. But since I'm to be a wheat-grower, it's my duty to find
out all I can about the subject.
I am also the possessor of three barrels of gasoline, and a new
disk-drill, together with the needed repairs for the old drill which
worked so badly last season. I've got Whinstane Sandy patching up the
heavy sets of harness, and at daybreak to-morrow I'm going to have him
out on the land, and also Francois, who has promised to stay with us
another two weeks. It may be that I'll put Ikkie in overalls and get
her out there too, for there's not a day, not an hour, to be lost. I
want my crop in. I want my seed planted, and the sooner the better.
Whinstane Sandy, on account of his lame foot, can't follow a plow. But
there's no reason he shouldn't run a tractor. If it wasn't for my
bairns, of course, I'd take that tractor in hand myself. But my two
little hostages to fortune cut off that chance. I've decided, however,
to have Whinnie build a canopy-top over the old buckboard, and fit two
strong frames, just behind the dashboard, that will hold a couple of
willow-baskets, end to end. Then I can nest Poppsy and Pee-Wee in
these two baskets, right under my nose, with little Dinkie beside me
in the seat, and drive from one end of the ranch to the other and see
that the work is being done, and done right. The Lord knows how I'll
get back to the shack in time to rustle the grub--but we'll manage, in
some way.
The Twins have been doing better, the last week or two. And I rather
dread the idea of weaning them. If I had somebody to look after them I
could, I suppose, get a breast-pump and leave their mid-morning and
mid-afternoon luncheons in cold-storage for them, and so ride my
tractor without interruption. I remember a New York woman who did
that, left the drawn milk of her breast on ice, so that she might gad
and shop for a half-day at a time. But the more I think it over the
more unnatural and inhuman it seems. Yet to hunt for help, in this
busy land, is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack. Already, in
the clear morning air, one can hear the stutter and skip and cough of
the tractors along the opalescent sky-line, accosting the morning sun
with their rattle and tattle of harvests to be. And I intend to be in
on the game.
_Sunday the Second_
I'm too busy to puddle in spilt milk or worry over things that are
past. I can't even take time to rhapsodize over the kitchen-cabinet to
which Whinnie put the finishing touches to-day at noon, though I know
it will save me many a step. Poor old Whinnie, I'm afraid, is more a
putterer than a plowman. He's had a good deal of trouble with the
tractor, and his lame foot seems to bother him, on account of the long
hours, but he proclaims he'll see me through.
Tractor-plowing, I'm beginning to discover, isn't the simple operation
it sounds, for your land, in the first place, has to be staked off and
marked with guidons, since you must know your measurements and have
your headlands uniform and your furrows straight or there'll be a
woeful mix-up before you come to the end of your job. The great
trouble is that a tractor can't turn in its own length, as a team of
horses can. Hence this deploying space must be wasted, or plowed later
with horses, and your headlands themselves must be wide enough for the
turning radius of your tractor. Some of the ranchers out here, I
understand, even do their tractor-plowing in the form of a series of
elongated figure-eights, beginning at one corner of their tract,
claiming this reduces the time spent with plows out of the ground. But
that looked too complex for me to tackle.
Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with man: they occasionally
get out of kilter at the very time you expect most from them. So this
morning I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath by
working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie's overalls--for I _have_
succeeded in coercing Ikkie into a jumper and the riding-seat of the old
gang-plow--and went out and studied that tractor. I was determined to
understand just what was giving the trouble.
It was two hours before I located the same, which was caused by the
timer. But I've conquered the doggoned thing, and got her to spark
right, and I went a couple of rounds, Sunday and all, just to make
sure she was in working order. And neither my actions nor my language,
I know, are those of a perfect lady. But any one who'd lamped me in
that get-up, covered with oil and dust and dirt, would know that never
again could I be a perfect lady. I'm a wiper, a greaser, a clodhopper,
and, according to the sullen and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a
slave-driver. And the odd part of it all is that I'm wringing a
perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excitement and the novelty of
the thing. I'm being something more than a mere mollusk. I'm making my
power felt, and producing results. And self-expression, I find, is the
breath of life to my soul. But I've scarcely time to do my hair, and
my complexion is gone, and I've got cracks in my cheek-skin. I'm
getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever again love me. Even
my own babies gape at me kind of round-eyed when I take them in my
arms.
But I'm wrong there, and I know I'm wrong. My little Dinkie will
always love me. I know that by the way his little brown arms cling
about my wind-roughened neck, by the way he burrows in against my
breast and hangs on to me and hollers for his Mummsy when she's out of
sight. He's not a model youngster, I know. I'm afraid I love him too
much to demand perfection from him. It's the hard and selfish women,
after all, who make the ideal mothers--at least from the standpoint of
the disciplinarian. For the selfish woman refuses to be blinded by
love, just as she refuses to be imposed upon and declines to be
troubled by the thought of inflicting pain on those perverse little
toddlers who grow so slowly into the knowledge of what is right and
wrong. It hurts me like Sam-Hill, sometimes, to have to hurt my little
man-child. When the inevitable and slow-accumulating spanking _does_
come, I try to be cool-headed and strictly just about it--for one look
out of a child's eyes has the trick of bringing you suddenly to the
judgment-bar. Dinkie, young as he is, can already appraise and arraign
me and flash back his recognition of injustice. More than once he's
made me think of those lines of Frances Lyman's:
"Just a look of swift surprise
From the depths of childish eyes,
Yet my soul to judgment came,
Cowering, as before a flame.
Not a word, a lisp of blame:
Just a look of swift surprise
In the quietly lifted eyes!"
_Saturday the Twenty-second_
I've got my seed in, glory be! The deed is done; the mad scramble is
over. And Mother Earth, as tired as a child of being mauled, lies
sleeping in the sun.
If, as some one has said, to plow is to pray, we've been doing a heap
of mouth-worship on Alabama Ranch this last few weeks. But the final
acre has been turned over, the final long sea of furrows disked and
plank-dragged and seeded down, and after the heavy rains of Thursday
night there's just the faintest tinge of green, here and there, along
my billiard-table of a granary-to-be.
But the mud is back, and to save my kitchen floor, last night, I
trimmed down a worn-out broom, cut off most of the handle, and
fastened it upside down in a hole I'd bored at one end of the lower
door-step.
All this talk of mine about wheat sounds as though I were what they
call out here a Soil Robber, or a Land Miner, a get-rich-quick
squatter who doesn't bother about mixed farming or the rotation of
crops, with no true love for the land which he impoverishes and leaves
behind him when he's made his pile. I want to make my pile, it's true,
but we'll soon have other things to think about. There's my home
garden to be made ready, and the cattle and pigs to be looked after,
and a run to be built for my chickens. The latter, for all their
neglect, have been laying like mad and I've three full crates of eggs
in the cellar, all dipped in water-glass and ready for barter at
Buckhorn. If the output keeps up I'll store away five or six crates of
the treated eggs for Christmas-season sale, for in midwinter they
easily bring eighty cents a dozen.
And speaking of barter reminds me that both Dinkie and the Twins are
growing out of their duds, and heaven knows when I'll find time to make
more for them. They'll probably have to promenade around like Ikkie's
ancestors. I've even run out of safety-pins. And since the enduring
necessity for the safety-pin is evidenced by the fact that it's even
found on the baby-mummies of ancient Egypt, and must be a good four
thousand years old, I've had Whinnie supply me with some home-made ones,
manufactured out of hair-pins.... My little Dinkie, I notice, is going
to love animals. He seems especially fond of horses, and is fearless
when beside them, or on them, or even under them--for he walked calmly
in under the belly of Jail-Bird, who could have brained him with one
pound of his wicked big hoof. But the beast seemed to know that it was a
friend in that forbidden quarter, and never so much as moved until
Dinkie had been rescued. It won't be long now before Dinkie has a pinto
of his own and will go bobbing off across the prairie-floor, I suppose,
like a monkey on a circus-horse. Even now he likes nothing better than
coming with his mother while she gathers her "clutch" of eggs. He can
scramble into a manger--where my unruly hens persist in making an
occasional nest--like a marmoset. The delight on his face at the
discovery of even two or three "cackle-berries," as Whinnie calls them,
is worth the occasional breakage and yolk-stained rompers. For I share
in that delight myself, since egg-gathering always gives me the feeling
that I'm partaking of the bounty of Nature, that I'm getting something
for next-to-nothing. It's the same impulse, really, which drives city
women to the bargain-counter and the auction-room, the sublimated
passion to adorn the home teepee-pole with the fruits of their cunning!
_Tuesday the Twenty-fifth_
Yesterday I teamed in to Buckhorn, for supplies. And as I drove down
the main street of that squalid little western town I must have looked
like something the crows had been roosting on. But just as I was
swinging out of Syd Woodward's store-yard I caught sight of Lady Allie
in her big new car, drawn up in front of the modestly denominated "New
York Emporium." What made me stare, however, was the unexpected vision
of Duncan Argyll McKail, emerging from the aforesaid "Emporium" laden
down with parcels. These he carried out to the car and was dutifully
stowing away somewhere down in the back seat, when he happened to look
up and catch sight of me as I swung by in my wagon-box. He turned a
sort of dull brick-red, and pretended to be having a lot of trouble
with getting those parcels where they ought to be. But he looked
exactly like a groom. And he knew it. And he knew that I knew he knew
it. And if he was miserable, which I hope he was, I'm pretty sure he
wasn't one-half so miserable as I was--and as I am. "_Damn that
woman!_" I caught myself saying, out loud, after staring at my mottled
old map in my dressing-table mirror.
I've been watching the sunset to-night, for a long time, and thinking
about things. It was one of those quiet and beautiful prairie sunsets
which now and then flood you with wonder, in spite of yourself, and
give you an achey little feeling in the heart. It was a riot of orange
and Roman gold fading out into pale green, with misty opal and
pearl-dust along the nearer sky-line, then a big star or two, and then
silence, the silence of utter peace and beauty. But it didn't bring
peace to my soul. I could remember watching just such a sunset with my
lord and master beside me, and turning to say: "Don't you sometimes
feel, Lover, that you were simply made for joy and rapture in moments
like this? Don't you feel as though your body were a harp that could
throb and sing with the happiness of life?"
And I remembered the way my Dunkie had lifted up my chin and kissed
me.
But that seemed a long, long time ago. And I wasn't in tune with the
Infinite. And I felt lonely and old and neglected, with callouses on
my hands and the cords showing in my neck, and my nerves not exactly
what they ought to be. For Sunday, which is reckoned as a day of rest,
had been a long and busy day for me. Dinkie had been obstreperous and
had eaten most of the paint off his Noah's Ark, and had later burnt
his fingers pulling my unbaked loaf-cake out of the oven, after
eventually tiring of breaking the teeth out of my comb, one by one.
Poppsy and Pee-Wee had been peevish and disdainful of each other's
society, and Iroquois Annie had gruntingly intimated that she was
about fed up on trekking the floor with wailing infants. But I'd had
my week's mending to do, and what was left of the ironing to get
through and Whinnie's work-pants to veneer with a generous new patch,
and thirteen missing buttons to restore to the kiddies' different
garments. My back ached, my finger-bones were tired, and there was a
jumpy little nerve in my left temple going for all the world like a
telegraph-key. And then I gave up.
I sat down and stared at that neatly folded pile of baby-clothes two
feet high, a layer-cake of whites and faded blues and pinks. I stared
at it, and began to gulp tragically, wallowing in a wave of self-pity.
I felt so sorry for myself that I let my flat-iron burn a hole clean
through the ironing-sheet, without even smelling it. That, I told
myself, was all that life could be to me, just a round of washing and
ironing and meal-getting and mending, fetch and carry, work and worry,
from sun-up until sun-down, and many a time until midnight.
And what, I demanded of the frying-pan on its nail above the
stove-shelf, was I getting out of it? What was it leading to? And what
would it eventually bring me? It would eventually bring me crabbed and
crow-footed old age, and fallen arches and a slabsided figure that a
range-pinto would shy at. It would bring me empty year after year out
here on the edge of Nowhere. It would bring me drab and spiritless
drudgery, and faded eyes, and the heart under my ribs slowly but
surely growing as dead as a door-nail, and the joy of living just as
slowly but surely going out of my life, the same as the royal blue had
faded out of Dinkie's little denim jumpers.
At that very moment, I remembered, there were women listening to
symphony music in Carnegie Hall, and women sitting in willow-rockers
at Long Beach contentedly listening to the sea-waves. There were women
driving through Central Park, soft and lovely with early spring, or
motoring up to the Clairemont for supper and watching the searchlights
from the war-ships along the Hudson, and listening to the music on the
roof-gardens and dancing their feet off at that green-topped heaven of
youth which overlooks the Plaza where Sherman's bronze horse forever
treads its spray of pine. There were happy-go-lucky girls crowding the
soda-fountains and regaling themselves on fizzy water and fruit
sirups, and dropping in at first nights or motoring out for sea-food
dinners along lamp-pearled and moonlit boulevards of smooth asphalt.
And here I was planted half-way up to the North Pole, with coyotes for
company, with a husband who didn't love me, and not a jar of decent
face-cream within fifteen miles of the shack! I was lost there in a
sea of flat desolation, without companionable neighbors, without an
idea, without a chance for any exchange of thought. I had no time for
reading, and what was even worse, I had no desire for reading, but
plodded on, like the stunned ox, kindred to the range animals and
sister to the cow.
Then, as I sat luxuriating before my crowded banquet-table of misery,
as I sat mopping my nose--which was getting most unmistakably rough
with prairie-winds and alkali-water--and thinking what a fine mess I'd
made of a promising young life, I fancied I heard an altogether too
familiar C-sharp cry. So I got wearily up and went tiptoeing in to see
if either Poppsy or Pee-Wee were awake.
But they were there, safe and sound and fast asleep, curled up like two
plump little kittens, with their long lashes on their cheeks of
peach-blow pink and their dewy little lips slightly parted and four
little dimples in the back of each of the four little hands. And as I
stood looking down at them, with a shake still under my breastbone, I
couldn't keep from saying: "God bless your sleepy old bones!" Something
melted and fell from the dripping eaves of my heart, and I felt that it
was a sacred and God-given and joyous life, this life of being a
mother, and any old maid who wants to pirouette around the Plaza roof
with a lounge-lizard breathing winy breaths into her false hair was
welcome to her choice. I was at least in the battle of life--and life
is a battle which scars you more when you try to keep out of it than
when you wade into it. I was a mother and a home-maker and the hope and
buttress of the future. And all I wanted was a good night's sleep and
some candid friend to tell me not to be a feather-headed idiot, but a
sensible woman with a sensible perspective on things!
_Friday the Twenty-seventh--Or Should It Be the Twenty-eighth_
It has turned quite cold again, with frosts sharp enough at night to
freeze a half-inch of ice on the tub of soft-water I've been so
carefully saving for future shampoos. It's just as well I didn't try to
rush the season by getting too much of my truck-garden planted. We're
glad of a good fire in the shack-stove after sun-down. I've rented
thirty acres from the Land Association that owns the half-section next
to mine and am going to get them into oats. If they don't ripen up
before the autumn frosts come and blight them, I can still use the
stuff for green feed. And I've bargained for the hay-rights from the
upper end of the section, but heaven only knows how I'll ever get it
cut and stacked.
Whinnie had to kill a calf yesterday, for we'd run out of meat. As
we're in a district that's too sparsely settled for a Beef Ring, we
have to depend on ourselves for our roasts. But whatever happens, I
believe in feeding my workers. I wonder, by the way, how the fair Lady
Allie is getting along with her _cuisine_. Is she giving Dinky-Dunk a
Beautiful Thought for breakfast, instead of a generous plate of ham
and eggs? If she is, I imagine she's going to blight Romance in the
bud.
I've just had a circular letter from the Women Grain Growers'
Association explaining their fight for community medical service and a
system of itinerant rural nurses. They're organized, and they're in
earnest, and I'm with them to the last ditch. They're fighting for the
things that this raw new country is most in need of. It will take us
some time to catch up with the East. But the westerner's a scrambler,
once he's started.
I can't get away from the fact, since I know them both, that there's a
big gulf between the East and the West. It shouldn't be there, of
course, but that doesn't seem to affect the issue. It's the opposition
of the New to the Old, of the Want-To-Bes to the Always-Has-Beens, of
the young and unruly to the settled and sedate. We seem to want
freedom, and they seem to prefer order. We want movement, and they
want repose. We look more feverishly to the future, and they dwell
more fondly on the past. They call us rough, and we try to get even by
terming them _effete_. They accentuate form, and we remain satisfied
with performance. We're jealous of what they have and they're jealous
of what we intend to be. We're even secretly envious of certain things
peculiarly theirs which we openly deride. We're jealous, at heart, of
their leisure and their air of permanence, of their accomplishments
and arts and books and music, of their buildings and parks and towns
with the mellowing tone of time over them. And as soon as we make
money enough, I notice, we slip into their neighborhood for a gulp or
two at their fountains of culture. Some day, naturally, we'll be more
alike, and have more in common. The stronger colors will fade out of
the newer fabric and we'll merge into a more inoffensive monotone of
respectability. Our Navajo-blanket audacities will tone down to
wall-tapestry sedateness--but not too, too soon, I pray the gods!
Speaking of Navajo reminds me of Redskins, and Redskins take my
thoughts straight back to Iroquois Annie, who day by day becomes
sullener and stupider and more impossible. I can see positive dislike
for my Dinkie in her eyes, and I'm at present applying zinc ointment
to Pee-Wee's chafed and scalded little body because of her neglect.
I'll ring-welt and quarter that breed yet, mark my words! As it is,
there's a constant cloud of worry over my heart when I'm away from the
shack and my bairns are left behind. This same Ikkie, apparently,
tried to scald poor old Bobs the other day, but Bobs dodged most of
that steaming potato-water and decided to even up the ledger of
ill-usage by giving her a well-placed nip on the hip. Ikkie now sits
down with difficulty, and Bobs shows the white of his eye when she
comes near him, which isn't more often than Ikkie can help--And of
such, in these troublous Ides of March, and April and May, is the
kingdom of Chaddie McKail!
_Tuesday the Second_
I may as well begin at the beginning, I suppose, so as to get the
whole thing straight. And it started with Whinstane Sandy, who broke
the wheel off the spring-wagon and the third commandment at one and
the same time. So I harnessed Slip-Along up to the buckboard, and put
the Twins in their two little crow's-nests and started out to help get
my load out of that bogged trail, leaving Dinkie behind with Iroquois
Annie.
There was a chill in the air and I was glad of my old coonskin coat.
It was almost two hours before Whinnie and I got the spring-wagon out
of its mud-bath, and the load on again, and a willow fence-post lashed
under the drooping axle-end to sustain it on its journey back to
Alabama Ranch. The sun was low, by this time, so I couldn't wait for
Whinnie and the team, but drove on ahead with the Twins.
I was glad to see the smoke going up from my lonely little
shack-chimney, for I was mud-splashed and tired and hungry, and the
thought of fire and home and supper gave me a comfy feeling just under
the tip of the left ventricle. I suppose it was the long evening
shadows and the chill of the air that made the shack look so
unutterably lonely as I drove up to it. Or perhaps it was because I
stared in vain for some sign of life. At any rate, I didn't stop to
unhitch Slip-Along, but gathered up my Twins and made for the door,
and nearly stumbled on my nose over the broom-end boot-wiper which
hadn't proved such a boon as I'd expected.
I found Iroquois Annie in front of my home-made dressing-table mirror,
with my last year's summer hat on her head and a look of placid
admiration on her face. The shack seemed very quiet. It seemed so
disturbingly quiet that I even forgot about the hat.
"Where's Dinkie?" I demanded, as I deposited the Twins in their
swing-box.
"He play somew'ere roun'," announced Ikkie, secreting the purloined
head-gear and circling away from the forbidden dressing-table.
"But where?" I asked, with exceptional sharpness, for my eye had
already traversed the most of that shack and had encountered no sign
of him.
That sloe-eyed breed didn't know just where, and apparently didn't
care. He was playing somewhere outside, with three or four old wooden
decoy-ducks. That was all she seemed to know. But I didn't stop to
question her. I ran to the door and looked out. Then my heart began
going down like an elevator, for I could see nothing of the child. So
I made the rounds of the shack again, calling "Dinkie!" as I went.
Then I looked through the bunk-house, and even tried the cellar. Then
I went to the rainwater tub, with my heart up in my throat. He wasn't
there, of course. So I made a flying circle of the out-buildings. But
still I got no trace of him.
I was panting when I got back to the shack, where Iroquois Annie was
fussing stolidly over the stove-fire. I caught her by the snake-like
braid of her hair, though I didn't know I was doing it, at the moment,
and swung her about so that my face confronted hers.
"Where's my boy?" I demanded in a sort of shout of mingled terror and
rage and dread. "Where is he, you empty-eyed idiot? _Where is he?_"
But that half-breed, of course, couldn't tell me. And a wave of sick
fear swept over me. My Dinkie was not there. He was nowhere to be
found. He was lost--lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all this
at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what I was doing.
"And remember," I hissed out at her, in a voice that didn't sound like
my own as I swung her about by her suddenly parting waist, "if
anything has happened to that child, _I'll kill you!_ Do you
understand, I'll kill you as surely as you're standing in those
shoes!"
I went over the shack, room by room, for still the third time. Then I
went over the bunk-house and the other buildings, and every corner of
the truck-garden, calling as I went.
But still there was no answer to my calls. And I had to face the
steel-cold knowledge that my child was lost. That little toddler,
scarcely more than a baby, had wandered away on the open prairie.
For one moment of warming relief I thought of Bobs. I remembered what
a dog is sometimes able to do in such predicaments. But I also
remembered that Bobs was still out on the trail with Whinnie. So I
circled off on the undulating floor of the prairie, calling "Dinkie"
every minute or two and staring into the distance until my eyes ached,
hoping to see some moving dot in the midst of all that silence and
stillness.
"My boy is lost," I kept saying to myself, in sobbing little whimpers,
with my heart getting more and more like a ball of lead. And there
could only be an hour or two of daylight left. If he wasn't found
before night came on--I shut the thought out of my heart, and started
back for the shack, in a white heat of desperation.
"If you want to live," I said to the now craven and shrinking Ikkie,
"you get in that buckboard and make for Casa Grande. Drive there as
fast as you can. Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost on
the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come quick. And stop at
the Teetzel ranch on your way. Tell them to send men on horses, and
lanterns! But move, woman, move!"
Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard skid on the uneven
trail as though he were playing a game of crack-the-whip with that
frightened Indian. And I just as promptly took up my search again,
forgetting about the Twins, forgetting about being tired, forgetting
everything.
Half-way between the fenced-in hay-stacks and the corral-gate I found
a battered decoy-duck with a string tied to its neck. It was one of a
set that Francois and Whinstane Sandy had whittled out over a year
ago. It was at least a clue. Dinkie must have dropped it there.
It sent me scuttling back among the hay-stacks, going over the ground
there, foot by foot and calling as I went, until my voice had an eerie
sound in the cold air that took on more and more of a razor-edge as
the sun and the last of its warmth went over the rim of the world. It
seemed an empty world, a plain of ugly desolation, unfriendly and
pitiless in its vastness. Even the soft green of the wheatlands took
on a look like verdigris, as though it were something malignant and
poisonous. And farther out there were muskegs, and beyond the
three-wire fence, which would stand no bar to a wandering child, there
were range-cattle, half-wild cattle that resented the approach of
anything but a man on horseback. And somewhere in those darkening
regions of peril my Dinky-Dink was lost.
I took up the search again, with the barometer of hope falling lower
and lower. But I told myself that I must be systematic, that I must
not keep covering the same ground, that I must make the most of what
was left of the daylight. So I blocked out imaginary squares and kept
running and calling until I was out of breath, then resting with my
hand against my heart, and running on again. But I could find no trace
of him.
He was such a little tot, I kept telling myself. He was not warmly
dressed, and night was coming on. It would be a cold night, with
several degrees of frost. He would be alone, on that wide and empty
prairie, with terror in his heart, chilled to the bone, wailing for
his mother, wailing until he was able to wail no more. Already the
light was going, I realized with mounting waves of desperation, and no
child, dressed as Dinkie was dressed, could live through the night.
Even the coyotes would realize his helplessness and come and pick his
bones clean.
I kept thinking of Bobs, more than of anything else, and wondering why
Whinnie was so slow in getting back with his broken wagon, and
worrying over when the men would come. I told myself to be calm, to be
brave, and the next moment was busy picturing a little dead body with
a tear-washed face. But I went on, calling as I went. Then suddenly I
thought of praying.
"O God, it wouldn't be fair, to take that little mite away from me," I
kept saying aloud. "O God, be good to me in this, be merciful, and
lead me to him! Bring him back before it is too late! Bring him back,
and do with me what You wish, but have pity on that poor little
toddler! What You want of me, I will do, but don't, O God, don't take
my boy away from me!"
I made promises to God, foolish, desperate, infantile promises; trying
to placate Him in His might with my resolutions for better things,
trying to strike bargains, at the last moment, with the Master of Life
and Death--even protesting that I'd forgive Dinky-Dunk for anything
and everything he might have done, and that it was the Evil One
speaking through my lips when I said I'd surely kill Iroquois Annie.
Then I heard the signal-shots of a gun, and turned back toward the
shack, which looked small and squat on the floor of the paling
prairie. I couldn't run, for running was beyond me now. I heard Bobs
barking, and the Twins crying, and I saw Whinnie. I thought for one
fond and foolish moment, as I hurried toward the house, that they'd
found my Dinkie. But it was a false hope. Whinnie had been frightened
at the empty shack and the wailing babies, and had thought something
might have happened to me. So he had taken my duck-gun and fired those
signal-shots.
He leaned against the muddy wagon-wheel and said "Guid God! Guid God!"
over and over again, when I told him Dinkie was lost. Then he flung
down the gun and drew his twisted old body up, peering through the
twilight at my face.
I suppose it frightened him a little.
"Dinna fear, lassie, dinna fear," he said. He said it in such a deep
and placid voice that it carried consolation to my spirit, and brought
a shadow of conviction trailing along behind it. "We'll find him. I
say it before the livin' God, _we'll find him_!"
But that little candle of hope went out in the cold air, for I could
see that night was coming closer, cold and dark and silent. I forgot
about Whinnie, and didn't even notice which direction he took when he
strode off on his lame foot. But I called Bobs to me, and tried to
quiet his whimpering, and talked to him, and told him Dinkie was lost,
the little Dinkie we all loved, and implored him to go and find my boy
for me.
But the poor dumb creature didn't seem to understand me, for he
cringed and trembled and showed a tendency to creep off to the stable
and hide there, as though the weight of this great evil which had
befallen his house lay on him and him alone. And I was trying to coax
the whimpering Bobs back to the shack-steps when Dinky-Dunk himself
came galloping up through the uncertain light, with Lady Alicia a few
hundred yards behind him.
"Have you found him?" my husband asked, quick and curt. But there was
a pale greenish-yellow tint to his face that made me think of
Rocquefort cheese.
"No," I told him. I tried to speak calmly, determined not to break
down and make a scene there before Lady Alicia, who'd reined up,
stock-still, and sat staring in front of her, without a spoken word.
I could see Dinky-Dunk's mouth harden.
"Have you any clue--any hint?" he asked, and I could catch the quaver
in his voice as he spoke.
"Not a thing," I told him, remembering that we were losing time. "He
simply wandered off, when that Indian girl wasn't looking. He didn't
even have a cap or a coat on."
I heard Lady Alicia, who had slipped down out of the saddle, make a
little sound as I said this. It was half a gasp and half a groan of
protest. For one brief moment Dinky-Dunk stared at her, almost
accusingly, I thought. Then he swung his horse savagely about, and
called out over our heads. Other horsemen, I found, had come loping up
in the ghostly twilight where we stood. I could see the breath from
their mounts' nostrils, white in the frosty air.
"You, Teetzel, and you, O'Malley," called my husband, in an oddly
authoritative and barking voice, "and you on the roan there, swing
twenty paces out from one another and circle the shack. Then widen the
circle, each turn. There's no use calling, for the boy'll be down.
He'll be done out. But don't speak until you see something. And for
the love of God, watch close. He's not three yet, remember. He
couldn't have got far away!"
I should have found something reassuring in those quick and purposeful
words of command, but they only served to bring the horror of the
situation closer home to me. They brought before me more graphically
than ever the thought that I'd been trying to get out of my head, the
picture of a huddled small body, with a tear-washed face, growing
colder and colder, until the solitary little flame of life went
completely out in the midst of that star-strewn darkness. Only too
willingly, I knew, I would have covered that chilling body with the
warmth of my own, though wild horses rode over me until the end of
time. I tried to picture life without Dinkie. I tried to imagine my
home without that bright and friendly little face, without the patter
of those restless little feet, without the sound of those beleaguering
little coos of child-love with which he used to burrow his head into
the hollow of my shoulder.
It was too much for me. I had to lean against the wagon-wheel and
gulp. It was Lady Alicia, emerging from the shack, who brought me back
to the world about me. I could just see her as she stood beside me,
for night had fallen by this time, night nearly as black as the
blackness of my own heart.
"Look here," she said almost gruffly. "Whatever happens, you've got to
have something to drink. I've got a kettle on, and I'm going back to
make tea, or a pot of coffee, or whatever I can find."
"Tea?" I echoed, as the engines of indignation raced in my shaken
body. "Tea? It sounds pretty, doesn't it, sitting down to a pink tea,
when there's a human being dying somewhere out in that darkness!"
My bitterness, however, had no visible effect on Lady Alicia.
"Perhaps coffee would be better," she coolly amended. "And those
babies of yours are crying their heads off in there, and I don't seem
to be able to do anything to stop them. I rather fancy they're in need
of feeding, aren't they?"
It was then and then only that I remembered about my poor neglected
Twins. I groped my way in through the darkness, quite calm again, and
sat down and unbuttoned my waist and nursed Poppsy, and then took up
the indignant and wailing Pee-Wee, vaguely wondering if the milk in my
breast wouldn't prove poison to them and if all my blood hadn't turned
to acid.
I was still nursing Pee-Wee when Bud Teetzel came into the shack and
asked how many lanterns we had about the place. There was a sullen
look on his face, and his eyes refused to meet mine. So I knew his
search had not succeeded.
Then young O'Malley came in and asked for matches, and I knew even
before he spoke, that he too had failed. They had all failed.
I could hear Dinky-Dunk's voice outside, a little hoarse and throaty.
I felt very tired, as I put Pee-Wee back in his cradle. It seemed as
though an invisible hand were squeezing the life out of my body and
making it hard for me to breathe. I could hear the cows bawling,
reminding the world that they had not yet been milked. I could smell
the strong coffee that Lady Alicia was pouring out into a cup. She
stepped on something as she carried it to me. She stopped to pick it
up--and it was one of Dinkie's little stub-toed button shoes.
"Let me see it," I commanded, as she made a foolish effort to get it
out of sight. I took it from her and turned it over in my hand. That
was the way, I remembered, mothers turned over the shoes of the
children they had lost, the children who could never, never, so long
as they worked and waited and listened in this wide world, come back
to them again.
Then I put down the shoe, for I could hear one of the men outside say
that the upper muskeg ought to be dragged.
"Try that cup of coffee now," suggested Lady Alicia. I liked her
quietness. I admired her calmness, under the circumstances. And I
remembered that I ought to give some evidence of this by accepting the
hot drink she had made for me. So I took the coffee and drank it. The
bawling of my milk-cows, across the cold night air, began to annoy me.
"My cows haven't been milked," I complained. It was foolish, but I
couldn't help it. Then I reached out for Dinkie's broken-toed shoe,
and studied it for a long time. Lady Alicia crossed to the shack door,
and stood staring out through it....
She was still standing there when Whinnie came in, with the stable
lantern in his hand, and brushed her aside. He came to where I was
sitting and knelt down in front of me, on the shack-floor, with his
heavy rough hand on my knee. I could smell the stable-manure that
clung to his shoes.
"God has been guid to ye, ma'am!" he said in a rapt voice, which was
little more than an awed whisper. But it was more his eyes, with the
uncanny light in them making them shine like a dog's, that brought me
to my feet. For I had a sudden feeling that there was Something just
outside the door which he hadn't dared to bring in to me, a little
dead body with pinched face and trailing arms.
I tried to speak, but I couldn't. I merely gulped. And Whinnie's rough
hand pushed me back into my chair.
"Dinna greet," he said, with two tears creeping crookedly down his own
seamed and wind-roughened face.
But I continued to gulp.
"Dinna greet, for _your laddie's safe and sound_!" I heard the rapt
voice saying.
I could hear what he'd said, quite distinctly, yet his words seemed
without color, without meaning, without sense.
"Have you found him?" called out Lady Alicia sharply.
"Aye, he's found," said Whinnie, with an exultant gulp of his own, but
without so much as turning to look at that other woman, who,
apparently, was of small concern to him. His eyes were on me, and he
was very intimately patting my leg, without quite knowing it.
"He says that the child's been found," interpreted Lady Alicia,
obviously disturbed by the expression on my face.
"He's just yon, as warm and safe as a bird in a nest," further
expounded Whinstane Sandy.
"Where?" demanded Lady Alicia. But Whinnie ignored her.
"It was Bobs, ma'am," were the blessed words I heard the old lips
saying to me, "who kept whimper-in' and grievin' about the upper
stable door, which had been swung shut. It was Bobs who led me back
yon, fair against my will. And there I found our laddie, asleep in the
manger of Slip-Along, nested deep in the hay, as safe and warm as if
in his own bed."
I didn't speak or move for what must have been a full minute. I
couldn't. I felt as though my soul had been inverted and emptied of
all feeling, like a wine-glass that's turned over. For a full minute I
sat looking straight ahead of me. Then I got up, and went to where I
remembered Dinky-Dunk kept his revolver. I took it up and started to
cross to the open door. But Lady Alicia caught me sharply by the arm.
"What are you doing?" she gasped, imagining, I suppose, that I'd gone
mad and was about to blow my brains out. She even took the firearm
from my hand.
"It's the men," I tried to explain. "They should be told. Give them
three signal-shots to bring them in." Then I turned to Whinnie. He
nodded and took me by the hand.
"Now take me to my boy," I said very quietly.
I was still quite calm, I think. But deep down inside of me I could
feel a faint glow. It wasn't altogether joy, and it wasn't altogether
relief. It was something which left me just a little bewildered, a
good deal like a school-girl after her first glass of champagne at
Christmas dinner. It left me oddly self-immured, miles and miles from
the figures so close to me, remote even from the kindly old man who
hobbled a little and went with a decided list to starboard as he led
me out toward what he always spoke of as the upper stable.
[Illustration: He was warm and breathing, and safe and sound]
Yet at the back of my brain, all the while, was some shadow of doubt,
of skepticism, of reiterated self-warning that it was all too good to
be true. It wasn't until I looked over the well-gnawed top rail of
Slip-Along's broken manger and saw that blessed boy there, by the
light of Whinnie's lantern, saw that blessed boy of mine half buried
in that soft and cushioning prairie-grass, saw that he was warm and
breathing, and safe and sound, that I fully realized how he had been
saved for me.
"The laddie'd been after a clutch of eggs, I'm thinkin'," whispered
Whinnie to me, pointing to a yellow stain on his waist, which was
clearly caused by the yolk of a broken egg. And Whinnie stooped over
to take Dinkie up in his arms, but I pushed him aside.
"No, I'll take him," I announced.
He'd be the hungry boy when he awakened, I remembered as I gathered him
up in my arms. My knees were a bit shaky, as I carried him back to the
shack, but I did my best to disguise that fact. I could have carried
him, I believe, right on to Buckhorn, he seemed such a precious burden.
And I was glad of that demand for physical expenditure. It seemed to
bring me down to earth again, to get things back into perspective. But
for the life of me I couldn't find a word to say to Lady Allie as I
walked into my home with Dinky-Dink in my arms. She stood watching me
for a moment or two as I started to undress him, still heavy with
slumber. Then she seemed to realize that she was, after all, an
outsider, and slipped out through the door. I was glad she did, for a
minute later Dinkie began to whimper and cry, as any child would with
an empty stomach and an over-draft of sleep. It developed into a good
lusty bawl, which would surely have spoilt the picture to an outsider.
But it did a good turn in keeping me too busy to pump any more brine on
my own part.
When Dinky-Dunk came in I was feeding little Dinkie a bowl of hot
tapioca well drowned in cream and sugar. My lord and master took off
his hat--which struck me as funny--and stood regarding us from just
inside the door. He stood there by the door for quite a long while.
"Hadn't I better stay here with you to-night?" he finally asked, in a
voice that didn't sound a bit like his own.
I looked up at him. But he stood well back from the range of the
lamplight and I found it hard to decipher his expression. The one
feeling I was certain of was a vague feeling of disappointment. What
caused it, I could not say. But it was there.
"After what's happened," I told him as quietly as I could, "I think
I'd rather be alone!"
He stood for another moment or two, apparently letting this sink in.
It wasn't until he'd turned and walked out of the door that I realized
the ambiguity of that retort of mine. I was almost prompted to go
after him. But I checked myself by saying: "Well, if the shoe fits,
put it on!" But in my heart of hearts I didn't mean it. I wanted him
to come back, I wanted him to share my happiness with me, to sit and
talk the thing over, to exploit it to the full in a sweet retrospect
of relief, as people seem to want to do after they've safely passed
through great peril.
It wasn't until half an hour later, when Dinkie was sound asleep again
and tucked away in his crib, that I remembered my frantic promises to
God to forgive Dinky-Dunk everything, if He'd only bring my boy back
to me. And there'd been other promises, equally foolish and frantic.
I've been thinking them over, in fact, and I _am_ going to make an
effort to keep them. I'm so happy that it hurts. And when you're
happy, you want other people to be that way, too.
_Wednesday the Third_
Humor is the salt of life. The older I grow the more I realize that
truth. And I'm going to keep more of it, if I can, in the work-room of
my soul. Last night, when Dinky-Dunk and I were so uppish with each
other, one single clap of humor might have shaken the solemnity out of
the situation and shown us up for the poseurs we really were. But
Pride is the mother of all contention. If Dinky-Dunk, when I was so
imperially dismissing him from his own home, had only up and said:
"Look here, Lady-bird, this is as much my house as it is yours, you
feather-headed little idiot, and I'll put a June-bug down your neck if
you don't let me stay here!" If he'd only said that, and sat down and
been the safety-valve to my emotions which all husbands ought to be to
all wives, the igloo would have melted about my heart and left me
nothing to do but crawl over to him and tell him that I missed him
more than tongue could tell, and that getting Dinkie's daddy back was
almost as good as getting Dinkie himself back to me.
But we missed our chance. And I suppose Lady Allie sat up until all
hours of the night, over at Casa Grande, consoling my Diddums and
talking things over. It gives me a sort of bruised feeling, for I've
nobody but Whinstane Sandy to unbosom my soul to....
Iroquois Annie has flown the coop. She has gone for good. I must have
struck terror deeper into the heart of that Redskin than I imagined,
for rather than face death and torture at my hands she left Slip-Along
and the buckboard at the Teetzel Ranch and vamoosed off into the great
unknown. I have done up her valuables in an old sugar-sack, and if
they're not sent for in a week's time I'll make a bonfire of the
truck. Whinnie, by the way, is to help me with the house-work. He is
much better at washing dishes than I ever thought he could be. And he
announces he can make a fair brand of bannock, if we run out of bread.
_Tuesday the Ninth_
I've got a hired man. He dropped like manna, out of the skies, or,
rather, he emerged like a tadpole out of the mud. But there's
something odd about him and I've a floaty idea he's a refugee from
justice and that some day one of the Mounties will come riding up to
my shack-door and lead my farm-help away in handcuffs.
Whatever he is, I can't quite make him out. But I have my suspicions,
and I'm leaving everything in abeyance until they're confirmed.
I was on Paddy the other morning, in my old shooting-jacket and
Stetson, going like the wind for the Dixon Ranch, after hearing they
had a Barnado boy they wanted to unload on anybody who'd undertake to
keep him under control. The trail was heavy from the night rain that
had swept the prairie like a new broom, but the sun was shining again
and the air was like champagne. The ozone and the exercise and Paddy's
_legato_ stride all tended to key up my spirits, and I went along
humming:
"Bake me a bannock,
And cut me a callop,
For I've stole me a grey mare
And I'm off at a gallop!"
It wasn't until I saw Paddy's ear prick up like a rabbit's that I
noticed the gun-boat on the trail ahead. At least I thought it was a
gun-boat, for a minute or two, until I cantered closer and saw that it
was a huge gray touring-car half foundered in the prairie-mud. Beside
it sat a long lean man in very muddy clothes and a rather
disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a ridiculously contented look on
his face, smoking a small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I
circled his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with its nose
poked deep down in the mire, for all the world like a rooting shote.
"Good morning, Diana," he said, quite coolly, as he removed his
battered-looking cap.
His salutation struck me as impertinent, so I returned it in the
curtest of nods.
"Are you in trouble?" I asked.
"None whatever," he airily replied, still eying me. "But my car seems
to be, doesn't it?"
"What's wrong?" I demanded, determined that he shouldn't elbow me out
of my matter-of-factness.
He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an indifferent eye.
"I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing her until the water
boiled, and she got even with me by blowing up an intake hose. But I'm
perfectly satisfied."
"With what?" I coldly inquired.
"With being stuck here," he replied; He had rather a bright gray eye
with greenish lights in it, and he looked rational enough. But there
was something fundamentally wrong with him.
"What makes you feel that way?" I asked, though for a moment I'd been
prompted to inquire if they hadn't let him out a little too soon.
"Because I wouldn't have seen you, who should be wearing a crescent
moon on your brow, if my good friend Hyacinthe hadn't mired herself in
this mud-hole," he had the effrontery to tell me.
"Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in that vision?" I asked,
deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn't confronting an
untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more
pointedly and more impersonally than ever.
"It's more than consolatory," he said with an accentuating flourish of
the little briar pipe. "It's quite compensatory."
It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both
verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.
"Do you want to get out of that hole?" I demanded. For it's a law of
the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in
distress.
"Not if it means an ending to this interview," he told me.
It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn't much warmth in the
inspection.
"What are you trying to do?" I calmly inquired, for prairie life
hadn't exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of
that stalker known as Man.
"I'm trying to figure out," he just as calmly retorted, apparently
quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, "how anything as radiant and
lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and
coyotes."
The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I
then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.
"And I'm still trying to figure out," I told him, "how what impresses
me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what
looks like a first-class car! Unless," and the thought came to me out
of a clear sky, and when they come that way they're inspirations and
are usually true, "unless you stole it!"
He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it
from end to end.
"If I'm that far behind Hyacinthe," he indifferently acknowledged, "I
begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn't
been altogether wasted."
"But you did steal the car?" I persisted.
"That must be a secret between us," he said, with a distinctly guilty
look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs
and bloodhounds on his track.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded, determined to thrash the thing
out, now that it had been thrust upon me.
"Talking to the most charming woman I've encountered west of the Great
Lakes," he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile.
But I didn't intend him to draw a herring across the trail.
"I'd be obliged if you'd be sincere," I told him, sitting up a little
straighter on Paddy.
"I am sincere," he protested, putting away his pipe.
"But the things you're saying are the things the right sort of person
refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the victim of
their operation."
"Yes, that's quite true, in drawing-rooms," he airily amended. "But
this is God's open and untrammeled prairie."
"Where crudeness is king," I added.
"Where candor is worth more than convention," he corrected, with
rather a wistful look in his eye. "And where we mortals ought to be at
least as urbane as that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with
the chinook arch across it."
He wasn't flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing
his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we
were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I
merely inquired where his home happened to be.
"I've just come from up North!" he said. And that, I promptly
realized, was an evasive way of answering an honest question,
especially as there was a California license-number on the front of
his car.
"And what's your business?" I inquired, deciding to try him out with
still one more honest question.
"I'm a windmill man," he told me, as he waded in toward his
dejected-looking automobile and lifted up its hood. I took him
literally, for there wasn't anything, at the time, to make me think of
Cervantes. But I'd already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they
weren't the hands of a laboring man. They were long and lean and
finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could span an octave much better
than they could hold a hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by
his own petard.
"Then you're just the man I'm looking for," I told him. He stopped for
a moment to look up from the bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding
with a stretch of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from an
inner tube.
"Words such as those are honey to my ears," he said as he went on with
his work. And I saw it was necessary to yank him down to earth again.
"I've a broken-down windmill over on my ranch," I told him. "And if
you're what you say you are, you ought to be able to put it in running
order for me."
"Then you've a ranch?" he observed, stopping in his work.
"A ranch and a husband and three children," I told him with the
well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who's dragged her last mouse into the
drawing-room. But my announcement didn't produce the effect I'd
counted on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man was a sort
of mild perplexity.
"That only deepens the mystery," he observed, apparently as much to
himself as to me.
"What mystery?" I asked.
"You!" he retorted.
"What's wrong with me?" I demanded.
"You're so absurdly alive and audacious and sensitive and
youthful-hearted, dear madam! For the life of me I can't quite fit you
into the narrow little frame you mention."
"Is it so narrow?" I inquired, wondering why I wasn't much more
indignant at him. But instead of answering that question, he asked me
another.
"Why hasn't this husband of yours fixed the windmill?" he casually
asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.
"My husband's work keeps him away from home," I explained, promptly on
the defensive.
"I thought so," he announced, with the expression of a man who's had a
pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.
"Then what made you think so?" I demanded, with a feeling that he was
in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.
"Instinct--if you care to call it that," he said as he stooped low
over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable
length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I'd
have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of
candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of
his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia's, with its untoward suggestion
of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was
no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all
his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps
something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching
him pitch shut-out ball.
"What are you going to do about it?" I asked, after he'd finished his
job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little
collapsible canvas bucket.
He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered
me.
"I'm going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole," was what he said. "And
then I'm going to fix that windmill!"
"On what terms?" I inquired.
"What's the matter with a month's board and keep?" he suggested.
It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to betray the fact. He
_was_ a refugee, after all, and only too anxious to go into hiding for
a few weeks.
"Can you milk?" I demanded, deciding to keep him in his place, from
the start. And he sadly acknowledged that he wasn't able to milk.
Windmill men seldom were, he casually asserted.
"Then you'll have to make yourself handy, in other ways," I proclaimed
as he sat appraising me from his deep-padded car-seat.
"All right," he said, as though the whole thing were settled, on the
spot. But it wasn't so simple as it seemed.
"How about this car?" I demanded. His eye met mine; and I made note of
the fact that he was compelled to look away.
"I suppose we'll have to hide it somewhere," he finally acknowledged.
"And how'll you hide a car of that size on the open prairie?" I
inquired.
"Couldn't we bury it?" he asked with child-like simplicity.
"It's pretty well that way now, isn't it? But I saw it three miles
off," I reminded him.
"Couldn't we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?" he suggested next,
with the natural cunning of the criminal. "Then they'd never suspect."
"Suspect what?" I asked.
"Suspect where we got it," he explained.
"Kindly do not include me in any of your activities of this nature," I
said with all the dignity that Paddy would permit of, for he was
getting restless by this time.
"But you've included yourself in the secret," he tried to argue, with
a show of injured feelings. "And surely, after you've wormed that out
of me, you're not going to deliver a poor devil over to--"
"You can have perfect confidence in me," I interrupted, trying to be
stately but only succeeding, I'm afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded
and laughed in a companionable and _laisser-faire_ sort of way as he
started his engine and took command of the wheel.
Then began a battle which I had to watch from a distance because Paddy
evinced no love for that purring and whining thing of steel as it
rumbled and roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying
heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which
it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a
canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed,
and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a
grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the
struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able
to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big
motor roared and churned up the mud and again Paddy took to prancing
and pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the spinning rear
wheels appeared to get a trace of traction, flimsy as it was, for the
throbbing gray mass moved forward a little, subsided again, and once
more nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined in a still
higher key, and slowly but surely that mud-covered mass emerged from
the swale that had sought to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and
awkwardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval ooze.
The man in the car stepped down from his driving-seat, once he was
sure of firm ground under his wheels again, and walked slowly and
wistfully about his resurrected devil-wagon.
"The wages of sin is mud," he said as I trotted up to him. "And how
much better it would have been, O Singing Pine-Tree, if I'd never
taken that car!"
The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in the head, but likable
withal, and not ill-favored in appearance, and a man that one should
try to make allowances for.
"It would have been much better," I agreed, wondering how long it
would be before the Mounted Police would be tracking him down and
turning him to making brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina.
"Now, if you'll kindly trot ahead," he announced as he relighted his
little briar pipe, "and show me the trail to the ranch of the blighted
windmill, I'll idle along behind you."
I resented the placidity with which he was accepting a situation that
should have called for considerable meekness on his part. And I sat
there for a silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resentment
quite obvious to him.
"What's your name?" I asked, the same as I'd ask the name of any new
help that arrived at Alabama Ranch.
"Peter Ketley," he said, for once both direct and sober-eyed.
"All right, Peter," I said, as condescendingly as I was able. "Just
follow along, and I'll show you where the bunk-house is."
It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So I started off on
Paddy and went like the wind. I don't know whether he called it idling
or not, but once or twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car
was bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher places in the
trail, and I rather fancy it got some of the mud shaken off its
running-gear before it pulled up behind the upper stable at Alabama
Ranch.
"You ride like a _ritt-meister_," he said, with an approvingly
good-natured wag of the head, as he came up as close as Paddy would
permit.
"_Danke-schön!_" I rather listlessly retorted, "And if you leave the
car here, close beside this hay-stack, it'll probably not be seen
until after dinner. Then some time this afternoon, if the coast is
clear, you can get it covered up."
I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I'd harped still again on
an act which must have become painful for him to remember, since I
could see his face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine.
But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely in my hands.
Such being the case, I was more excited than I'd have been willing to
admit when I led him into the shack. Frontier life had long since
taught me not to depend too much on appearances, but the right sort of
people, the people who out here are called "good leather," would
remain the right sort of people in even the roughest wickiup. We may
have been merely ranchers, but I didn't want Peter, whatever his
morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the bone and made fire
by rubbing sticks together.
Yet he must have come pretty close to believing that, unimpeachable as
his manners remained, for Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a
charry mass, the Twins were crying like mad, and Dinkie had painted
himself and most of the dining-room table with Worcestershire sauce. I
showed Peter where he could wash up and where he could find a whisk to
remove the dried mud from his person. Then I hurriedly appeased my
complaining bairns, opened a can of beans to take the place of
Whinnie's boiled potatoes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow
soap, and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a Dixon dinner
with my last carefully treasured jar of raspberry preserve.
Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and silent as a glacier
through all that meal. But my new man, Peter, talked easily and
uninterruptedly. And he talked amazingly well. He talked about
mountain goats, and the Morgan rose-jars in the Metropolitan, and why
he disliked George Moore, and the difference between English and
American slang, and why English women always wear the wrong sort of
hats, and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the brains to
understand 'em, and how the wheat I'd manufactured my home-made bread
out of was made up of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the
alcohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast affected the
gluten, and how the woman who could make bread like that ought to have
a specially designed decoration pinned on her apron-front. Then he
played "Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker's man," with Dinkie, who took to
him at once, and when I came back from getting the extra cot ready in
the bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired man's back,
circling the dinner-table and shouting "Gid-dap, 'ossie, gid-dap!" as
he went, a proceeding which left the seamed old face of Whinstane
Sandy about as blithe as a coffin-lid. So I coldly informed the
newcomer that I'd show him where he could put his things, if he had
any, before we went out to look over the windmill. And Peter rather
astonished me by lugging back from the motor-car so discreetly left in
the rear a huge suit-case of pliable pigskin that looked like a
steamer-trunk with carrying-handles attached to it, a laprobe lined
with beaver, a llama-wool sweater made like a Norfolk-jacket, a
chamois-lined ulster, a couple of plaid woolen rugs, and a lunch-kit
in a neatly embossed leather case.
"Quite a bit of loot, isn't it?" he said, a little red in the face
from the effort of portaging so pretentious a load.
That word "loot" stuck in my craw. It was a painful reminder of
something that I'd been trying very hard to forget.
"Did it come with the car?" I demanded.
"Yes, it came with the car," he was compelled to acknowledge. "But it
would be exhausting, don't you see, to have to tunnel through a
hay-stack every time I wanted a hair-brush!"
I icily agreed that it would, scenting tacit reproof in that
mildly-put observation of his. But I didn't propose to be trifled
with. I calmly led Mr. Peter Ketley out to where the overturned
windmill tower lay like a museum skeleton along its bed of weeds and
asked him just what tools he'd need. It was a simple question,
predicating a simple answer. Yet he didn't seem able to reply to it.
He scratched his close-clipped pate and said he'd have to look things
over and study it out. Windmills were tricky things, one kind
demanding this sort of treatment and another kind demanding that.
"You'll have no trouble, of course, in raising the tower?" I asked,
looking him square in the eye. More than once I'd seen these windmill
towers of galvanized steel girders put up on the prairie, and I had a
very good idea of how the thing was done. They were assembled lying on
the ground, and then a heavy plank was bolted to the bottom side of
the tower base. This plank was held in place by two big stakes. Then a
block and tackle was attached to the upper part of the tower, with the
running-rope looped over a tripod of poles, to act as a fulcrum, so
that when a team of horses was attached to the tackle the tower
pivoted on its base and slowly rose in the air, steadied by a couple
of guy-ropes held out at right angles to it.
"Oh, no trouble at all," replied the expert quite airily. But I
noticed that his eye held an especially abstracted and preoccupied
expression.
"Just how is it done?" I innocently inquired.
"Well, that all depends," he sapiently observed. Then, apparently
nettled by my obviously superior smile, he straightened up and said:
"I want you to leave this entirely to me. It's my problem, and you've
no right to be worried over it. It'll take study, of course, and it'll
take time. Rome wasn't built in a day. But before I leave you, madam,
your tower will be up."
"I hope you're not giving yourself a life sentence," I remarked as I
turned and left him.
I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but I gave no outer sign
of that inner knowledge. I was equally conscious of his movements,
through the shack window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and
with more than one backward look over his shoulder circled out to where
his car still stood. He tooled it still closer up beside the hay-stack,
which he mounted, and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a
huge mound of sun-cured prairie-grass that relic of a past crime which
he seemed only too willing to obliterate.
But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of
sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his
hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspect
his fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round off the top of
his very badly made stack, and test the joints by opening and closing
them, as though not quite sure they were still in working order. And
when the stack-making was finished and he returned to the windmill,
circling about the fallen tower and examining its mechanism and
stepping off its dimensions, I noticed that he kept feeling the small
of his back and glancing toward the stack in what seemed an attitude
of resentment.
When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after his day a-field, I
noticed that Peter approached him blithely and attempted to draw him
into secret consultation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no
palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. He walked
several times, in fact, about that mysterious new hay-stack, and moved
shackward more dour and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy
Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, though I
strongly suspected, and still suspect, that he'd locked himself in the
bunk-house to remove unobserved all the labels from his underwear.
In the morning his appearance was not that of a man at peace with his
own soul. He even asked me if he might have a horse and rig to go in
to the nearest town for some new parts which he'd need for the
windmill. And he further inquired if I'd mind him bringing back a tent
to sleep in.
"Did you find the bunk-house uncomfortable?" I asked, noticing again
the heavy look about his eyes.
"It's not the bunk-house," he admitted. "It's that old Caledonian
saw-mill with the rock-ribbed face."
"What's the matter with Whinnie?" I demanded, with a quick touch of
resentment. And Peter looked up in astonishment.
"Do you mean you've never heard him--and your shack not sixty paces
away?"
"Heard him what?" I asked.
"_Heard him snore_," explained Peter, with a sigh.
"Are you sure?" I inquired, remembering the mornings when I'd had
occasion to waken Whinnie, always to find him sleeping as silent and
placid as one of my own babies.
"I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any doubts," he
pointedly explained.
This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of course, would have
been picayune. I had just the faintest of suspicions, however, that
the fair Peter might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to
solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and the beaver-lined
lap-robe would at least remain with me. But my fears were groundless.
Before supper-time Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new
parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim apparel for
himself, and a little red sweater for Dinkie, and an armful of
magazines for myself.
Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter's return, clearly betrayed the
disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when
he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival
and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of
course, that Peter was a little locoed.
But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed and quick-thoughted, and
if there's any madness about him it's a madness with a deep-laid method.
The one thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continuously and yet
so obliquely under observation. He pretends to be studying out my
windmill, but he is really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I
know, won't help him much. And I refuse to rise to his gaudiest flies.
So he's still puzzling over what he regards as an anomaly, a farmerette
who knows the difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery
horse-rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto and play a
banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can talk about Ragusa and Toarmina
and the summer races at Piping Rock. But it's a relief to converse about
something besides summer-fallowing and breaking and seed-wheat and
tractor-oil and cows' teats. And it's a stroke of luck to capture a
farm-hand who can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time that
he campaigns against the domestic weed!
_Thursday the Eleventh_
We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very different from the
westerners of the romantic movies. If we were the cinema kind of
ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little
Dinkie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up
the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps,
toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking
brother was _not_ hidden in the cellar!
Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who till the soil and
try to make a home for themselves and their children, only we are
without a great many of their conveniences, even though we do beat them
out in the matter of soil. But breaking sod isn't so picturesque as
breaking laws, and a plow-handle isn't so thrilling to the eye as a
shooting-iron, so it's mostly the blood-and-thunder type of westerners,
from the ranch with the cow-brand name, who goes ki-yi-ing through
picture and story, advertising us as an aggregation of train-robbers
and road-agents and sheriff-rabbits. And it's a type that makes me
tired.
The open range, let it be remembered, is gone, and the cowboy is going
after it. Even the broncho, they tell me, is destined to disappear. It
seems hard to think that the mustang will be no more, the mustang which
Dinky-Dunk once told me was the descendant of the three hundred Arab
and Spanish horses which Cortez first carried across the Atlantic to
Mexico. For we, the newcomers, mesh the open range with our barb-wire,
and bring in what Mrs. Eagle-Moccasin called our "stink-wagon" to turn
the grass upside down and grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once
wallowed. But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day world, I
find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glamorous, if one has only the
eye to see it, as the romance of the past. In one generation, almost,
we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up
cities and threading the continent with steel, we are feeding the world
on the best and cleanest wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear
and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its
harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking
sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of
umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture,
something mysteriously moving and epic....
The weather has turned quite warm again, with glorious spring days of
winy and heart-tugging sunlight and cool and starry nights. In my
spare time I've been helping Whinnie get in my "truck" garden, and
Peter, who has reluctantly forsaken the windmill and learned to run
the tractor, is breaking sod and summer-fallowing for me. For there is
always another season to think of, and I don't want the tin-can of
failure tied to my spirit's tail. As I say, the days slip by. Morning
comes, fresh as a new-minted nickel, we mount the treadmill, and
somebody rolls the big red ball off the table and it's night again.
But open-air work leaves me healthy, my children grow a-pace, and I
should be most happy.
But I'm not.
I'm so homesick for something which I can't quite define that it gives
me a misty sort of ache just under the fifth rib. It's just three
weeks now since Dinky-Dunk has ventured over from Casa Grande. If this
aloofness continues, he'll soon need to be formally introduced to his
own offspring when he sees them.
Now that I have Peter out working on the land, I can safely give a
little more time to my household. But meals are still more or less a
scramble. Peter has ventured the opinion that he might get a Chinaman
for me, if he could have a week off to root out the right sort of
Chink. But I prefer that Peter sticks to his tractor, much as I need
help in the house.
My new hired man is still a good deal of a mystery to me, just as I
seem to remain a good deal of a mystery to him. I've been asking myself
just why it is that Peter is so easy to get along with, and why, in
some indescribable way, he has added to the color of life since coming
to Alabama Ranch. It's mostly, I think, because he's supplied me with
the one thing I had sorely missed, without being quite conscious of it.
He has been able to give me mental companionship, at a time when my
mind was starving for an idea or two beyond the daily drudgery of
farm-work. He has given a fillip to existence, loath as I am to
acknowledge it. He's served to knock the moss off my soul by more or
less indirectly reminding me that all work and no play could make
Chaddie McKail a very dull girl indeed.
I was rather afraid, at one time, that he was going to spoil it all by
making love to me, after the manner of young Bud Dyruff, from the Cowen
Ranch, who, because I waded bare-kneed into a warm little slough-end
when the horses were having their noonday meal, assumed that I could be
persuaded to wade with equal celerity into indiscriminate affection.
That rudimentary and ingenuous youth, in fact, became more and more
offensive in his approaches, until finally I turned on him. "Are you
trying to make love to me?" I demanded. "The surest thing you know," he
said with a rather moonish smile. "Then let me tell you something," I
hissed out at him, with my nose within six inches of his, "I'm a
high-strung hell-cat, I am. I'm a bob-cat, and I'm not aching to be
pawed by you or any other hare-brained he-mutt. So now, right from this
minute, keep your distance! Is that clear? Keep your distance, or I'll
break your head in with this neck-yoke!"
Poor Bud! That rather blighted the flower of Bud's tender young
romance, and to this day he effects a wide detour when he happens to
meet me on the trail or in the byways of Buckhorn.
But Peter Ketley is not of the Bud Dyruff type. He is more complex,
and, accordingly, more disturbing. For I can see admiration in his
eye, even though he no longer expresses it by word of mouth. And there
is something tonic to any woman in knowing that a man admires her. In
my case, in fact, it's so tonic that I've ordered some benzoin and
cucumber-cream, and think a little more about how I'm doing my hair,
and argue with myself that it's a woman's own fault if she runs to
seed before she's seen thirty. I may be the mother of three children,
but I still have a hankering after personal power--and that comes to
women through personal attractiveness, disquieting as it may be to
have to admit it. We can't be big strong men and conquer through
force, but our frivolous little bodies can house the triumphant
weaknesses which make men forget their strength.
_Sunday the Fourteenth_
I've had a talk with Peter. It simply _had_ to come, for we couldn't
continue to play-act and evade realities. The time arrived for getting
down to brass tacks. And even now the brass tacks aren't as clear-cut
as I'd like them to be.
But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That beetle-headed
suspicion has passed slowly but surely away, like a snow-man
confronted by a too affectionate sun. It slipped away from me little
by little, and began losing its lines, not so much when I found that
Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy of _Marius The
Epicurean_ and walked about in undergarments that were expensive
enough for a _prima donna_, but more because I found myself face to
face with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was not to be
dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put him through his paces.
I began by telling him that I didn't seem to know a great deal about
him.
"The closed makimono," he cryptically retorted, "is the symbol of
wisdom."
I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I tried another tack.
"Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in this frontier life,
like worms in a bait-tin. So they naturally need to know what they're
tangled up with."
Peter, at that, began to look unhappy.
"Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the
country?" I asked.
"Would you mind telling me what brought _you_ to this part of the
country?" countered Peter.
"My husband," I curtly retorted. And that chilled him perceptibly. But
he saw that I was not to be shuttled aside.
"I was interested," he explained with a shrug of finality, "in the
nesting-ground of the Canada goose!"
"Then you came to the right point," I promptly retorted. "For _I_ am
it!"
But he didn't smile, as I'd expected him to do. He seemed to feel that
something approaching seriousness was expected of that talk.
"I really came because I was more interested in one of your earliest
settlers," he went on. "This settler, I might add, came to your
province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from
one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic
order of archisaurian gentlemen known as _Dinosauria_, and there's
about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous
dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I'm wedded to science.
And I _am_, though to nothing else. I'm as free as the wind, dear
lady, or I wouldn't be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes
my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other,
has the power of making my heart ache."
"_Verboten!_" I promptly interjected.
Peter saluted and then sighed.
"There are things up here even more interesting than your Edmonton
formation," he remarked. "But I was born a Quaker, you see, and I
can't get rid of my self-control!"
"I like you for that," I rather depressed him by saying. "For I find
that one accepts you, Peter, as one accepts a climate. You're intimate
in your very remoteness."
Peter looked at me out of a rueful yet ruminative eye. But Whinnie
came forth and grimly announced that the Twins were going it. So I had
to turn shackward.
"You really ought to get that car out," I called over my shoulder to
him, with a head-nod toward the hay-stack. And he nodded absently back
at me.
_Thursday the--I Can't Remember_
Dinky-Dunk rode over to-day when Peter was bolting some new wire stuts
on the windmill tower and I was busy dry-picking two polygamous old
roosters which Whinnie had beheaded for me. My husband attempted an
offhand and happy-go-lucky air which, I very soon saw, was merely a
mask to hide his embarrassment. He even flushed up to the ears when
little Dinkie drew back for a moment or two, as any child might who
didn't recognize his own father, though he later solicitously tiptoed
to the sleeping-porch where the Twins were having their nap, and
remarked that they were growing prodigiously.
It was all rather absurd. But when one member of this life-partnership
business is stiff with constraint, you can't expect the other member
to fall on his neck and weep. And Dinky-Dunk, for all his nonchalance,
looked worried and hollow-eyed. He was in the saddle again, and headed
back for Casa Grande, when he caught sight of Peter at work on the
windmill. So he loped over to my hired man and had a talk with him.
What they talked about I couldn't tell, of course, but it seemed a
casual and friendly enough conversation. Peter, in his blue-jeans,
dirt-marked and oil-stained, and with a wrench in his hand, looked
like an I. W. W. agitator who'd fallen on evil days.
I felt tempted to sally forth and reprove Dinky-Dunk for wasting the
time of my hired help. But that, I remembered in time, might be
treading on rather thin ice, or, what would be even worse, might seem
like snooping. And speaking of snooping, reminds me that a few nights
ago I listened carefully at the open window of the bunk-house where
Whinstane Sandy was deep in repose. Not a sound, not a trace of a
snore, arose from Whinnie's cot.
So my suspicions were confirmed. That old sourdough had deliberately
lain awake and tried to trumpet my second man from the precincts which
Whinnie felt he'd already preempted. He had attempted to snore poor
Peter off the map and away from Alabama Ranch!
_Saturday the Thirtieth_
The sedatest lives, I suppose, have their occasional Big Surprises.
Life, at any rate, has just treated me to one. Lady Alicia Newland's
English maid, known as Struthers, arrived at Alabama Ranch yesterday
afternoon and asked if I'd take her in. She'd had some words, she
said, with her mistress, and didn't propose to be treated like the
scum of the earth by anybody.
So the inevitable has come about. America, the liberalizer, has touched
the worthy Struthers with her wand of democracy and transformed her
from a silent machine of service into a Vesuvian female with a mind and
a voice of her own.
I told Struthers, who was still a bit quavery and excited, to sit down
and we'd talk the matter over, for rustling maids, in a land where
they're as scarce as hen's teeth, is a much graver crime than rustling
cattle. Yet if Lady Allie had taken my husband away from me, I didn't
see why, in the name of poetic justice, I shouldn't appropriate her
hand-maid.
And Struthers, I found, was quite definite as to her intentions. She
is an expert needle-woman, can do plain cooking, and having been a
nurse-maid in her younger days, is quite capable of looking after
children, even American children. I winced at that, naturally, and
winced still harder when she stipulated that she must have four
o'clock tea every afternoon, and every alternate Sunday morning off
for the purpose of "saging" her hair, which was a new one on me. But I
weighed the pros and cons, very deliberately, and discussed her
predicament very candidly, and the result is that Struthers is now
duly installed at Alabama Ranch. Already, in fact, that efficient hand
of hers has left its mark on the shack. Her muffins this morning were
above reproach and to-morrow we're to have Spotted Dog pudding. But
already, I notice, she is casting sidelong glances in the direction of
poor Peter, to whom, this evening at supper, she deliberately and
unquestionably donated the fairest and fluffiest quarter of the lemon
pie. I have no intention of pumping the lady, but I can see that there
are certain matters pertaining to Casa Grande which she is not averse
to easing her mind of. I am not quite sure, in fact, that I could find
it possible to lend an ear to the gossipings of a servant. And
yet--and yet, there are a few things I'd like to find out. And dignity
may still be slaughtered on the altar of curiosity.
_Sunday the Sixth_
Now that I've had a breathing-spell, I've been sitting back and
mentally taking stock. The showers of last week have brought the
needed moisture for our wheat, which is looking splendid. Our oats are
not quite so promising, but everything will depend upon the season.
The season, in fact, holds our fate and our fortune in its lap. Those
ninety days that include June and July and August are the days when
the northwest farmer is forever on tiptoe watching the weather. It's
his time of trial, his period of crisis, when our triple foes of
Drought and Hail and Fire may at any moment creep upon him. It keeps
one on the _qui vive_, making life a gamble, giving the zest of the
uncertain to existence, and leaving no room for boredom. It's the big
drama which even dwarfs the once momentous emotions of love and hate
and jealousy. For when the Big Rush is on, I've noticed, husbands are
apt to neglect their wives, and lovers forget their sweethearts, and
neighbors their enmities. Let the world go hang, but before and above
everything else, _save your crop!_
Yet, as I was saying, I've been taking stock. It's clear that I should
have more cattle. And if all goes well, I want a bank-barn, the same
as they have in the East, with cement flooring and modern stalling.
And I've got to comb over my herd, and get rid of the boarders and
hatracks, and acquire a blooded bull for Alabama Ranch, to improve the
strain. Two of my milkers must go for beef, as well as several scrub
springers which it would be false economy to hold. I've also got to do
something about my hogs. They are neither "easy feeders" nor good
bacon types. With them, too, I want a good sire, a pure-bred Yorkshire
or Berkshire. And I must have cement troughs and some movable fencing,
so that my young shoats may have pasture-crop. For there is money in
pigs, and no undue labor, provided you have them properly fenced.
My chickens, which have been pretty well caring for themselves, have
done as well as could be expected. I've tried to get early hatchings
from my brooders, for pullets help out with winter eggs when prices
are high, laying double what a yearling does during the cold months.
My yellow-beaks and two-year-olds I shall kill off as we're able to
eat them, for an old hen is a useless and profitless possession and I
begin to understand why lordly man has appropriated that phrase as a
term of contempt for certain of my sex. I'm trading in my eggs--and
likewise my butter--at Buckhorn, selling the Number One grade and
holding back the Number Twos for home consumption. There is an amazing
quantity of Number Twos, because of "stolen nests" and the lack of
proper coops and runs. But we seem to get away with them all. Dinkie
now loves them and would eat more than one at a time if I'd let him.
The gluttony of the normal healthy three-year-old child, by the way,
is something incredible. Dinkie reminds me more and more of a robin in
cherry-time. He stuffs sometimes, until his little tummy is as tight
as a drum, and I verily believe he could eat his own weight in
chocolate blanc-mange, if I'd let him. Eating, with him, is now a
serious business, demanding no interruptions or distractions. Once
he's decently filled, however, his greediness takes the form of
exterior application. He then rejoices to plaster as much as he can in
his hair and ears and on his face, until he looks like a cross between
a hod-carrier and a Fiji-Islander. And grown men, I've concluded, are
very much the same with their appetite of love. They come to you with
a brave showing of hunger, but when you've given until no more remains
to be given, they become finicky and capricious, and lose their
interest in the homely old porridge-bowl which looked all loveliness
to them before they had made it theirs....
This afternoon, tired of scheming and conceiting for the future, I had
a longing to be frivolous and care-free. So I got out the old
rusty-rimmed banjo, tuned her up, and sat on an overturned milk-bucket,
with Dinkie and Bobs and Poppsy and Pee-Wee for an audience.
I was leaning back with my knees crossed, strumming out _Turkey in the
Straw_ when Peter walked up and sat down between Bobs and Dinkie. So I
gave him _The Whistling Coon_, while the Twins lay there positively
pop-eyed with delight, and he joined in with me on _Dixie_, singing in
a light and somewhat throaty baritone. Then we swung on to _There's a
Hole in the Bottom of the Sea_, which must always be sung to a
church-tune, and still later to that dolorous ballad, _Oh, Bury Me Not
on the Lone Prair-hee!_ Then we tried a whistling duet with banjo
accompaniment, pretty well murdering the Tinker's Song from _Robin
Hood_ until Whinstane Sandy, who was taking his Sabbath bath in the
bunk-house, loudly opened the window and stared out with a dourly
reproving countenance, which said as plain as words: "This is nae the
day for whustlin', folks!"
But little Dinkie, obviously excited by the music, shouted "A-more!
A-more!" so we went on, disregarding Whinnie and the bunk-house window
and Struthers' acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the middle of
Fay Templeton's lovely old _Rosie, You Are My Posey_, when Lady Alicia
rode up, as spick and span as though she'd just pranced off Rotten
Row. And as I'd no intention of showing the white feather to her
ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I looked up and waved the
banjo at her where she sat stock-still on her mount. There was an
enigmatic look on her face, but she laughed and waved back, whereupon
Peter got up, and helped her dismount as she threw her reins over the
pony's head.
I noticed that her eye rested very intently on Peter's face as I
introduced him, and he in turn seemed to size the stately newcomer up
in one of those lightning-flash appraisals of his. Then Lady Allie
joined our circle, and confessed that she'd been homesick for a sight
of the kiddies, especially Dinkie, whom she took on her knee and
regarded with an oddly wistful and abstracted manner.
My hired man, I noticed, was in no way intimidated by a title in our
midst, but wagered that Lady Allie's voice would be a contralto and
suggested that we all try _On the Road to Mandalay_ together. But Lady
Allie acknowledged that she had neither a voice nor an ear, and would
prefer listening. We couldn't remember the words, however, and the
song wasn't much of a success. I think the damper came when Struthers
stepped out into full view, encased in my big bungalow-apron of
butcher's linen. Lady Alicia, after the manner of the English, saw her
without seeing her. There wasn't the flicker of an eyelash, or a
moment's loss of poise. But it seemed too much like a Banquo at the
feast to go on with our banjo-strumming, and I attempted to bridge the
hiatus by none too gracefully inquiring how things were getting along
over at Casa Grande. Lady Allie's contemplative eye, I noticed,
searched my face to see if there were any secondary significances to
that bland inquiry.
"Everything seems to be going nicely," she acknowledged. Then she
rather took the wind out of my sails by adding: "But I really came
over to see if you wouldn't dine with me to-morrow at seven. Bring the
children, of course. And if Mr.--er--Ketley can come along, it will be
even more delightful."
Still again I didn't intend to be stumped by her ladyship, so I said
that I'd be charmed, without one second of hesitation, and Peter, with
an assumption of vast gravity, agreed to come along if he didn't have
to wear a stiff collar and a boiled shirt. And he continued to rag
Lady Allie in a manner which seemed to leave her a little bewildered.
But she didn't altogether dislike it, I could see, for Peter has the
power of getting away with that sort of thing.
_Tuesday the Eighth_
Lady Alicia's dinner is over and done with. I can't say that it was a
howling success. And I'm still very much in doubt as to its _raison
d'être_, as the youthful society reporters express it. At first I
thought it might possibly be to flaunt my lost grandeur in my face.
And then I argued with myself that it might possibly be to exhibit
Sing Lo, the new Chink man-servant disinterred from one of the
Buckhorn laundries. And still later I suspected that it might be a
sort of demonstration of preparedness, like those carefully timed
naval parades on the part of one of the great powers disquieted by the
activities of a restive neighbor. And then came still another
suspicion that it might possibly be a move to precipitate the
impalpable, as it were, to put certain family relationships to the
touch, and make finally certain as to how things stood.
But that, audacious as I felt Lady Alicia to be, didn't quite hold
water. It didn't seem any more reasonable than my earlier theories. And
all I'm really certain of is that the dinner was badly cooked and badly
served, rather reminding me of a chow-house meal on the occasion of a
Celestial New Year. We all wore our every-day clothes (with Peter's
most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the
Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and Dinkie was
given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his
armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his
neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie
and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the
bareback rider who's just been carried out on a stretcher. But
Constraint was there, all the while, first in the form of Dinky-Dunk's
unoccupied chair, which remained that way until dinner was two-thirds
through, and then in the form of Dinky-Dunk himself, whose explanation
about some tractor-work keeping him late didn't quite ring true. His
harried look, I must acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me
at least it was only too plain that he was there under protest.
I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met rôle, but it
struck me as uncommonly like dancing on a coffin. And for all his
garrulity, I know, Peter was really watching us with the eye of a
hawk.
"I'm too old a dog," I overheard him telling Lady Alicia, "ever to be
surprised at the crumbling of an ideal or the disclosure of a
skeleton."
I don't know what prompted that statement, but it had the effect of
making Lady Allie go off into one of her purl-two knit-two trances.
"I think you English people," I heard him telling her a little later,
"have a tendency to carry moderation to excess."
"I don't quite understand that," she said, lighting what must have
been about her seventeenth cigarette.
"I mean you're all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter--which
impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie,
worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian
milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a
fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him,
"Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye:
"Yes, I happen to have read a bit of Henry James."
But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in what Lady Alicia had
rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and
airy over a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars
of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from
Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to
remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn't sorry when those
devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me
an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another theatricality
presented itself when Dinky-Dunk announced that he'd take us back in
the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble-Weed and our sea-going
spring-wagon, with plenty of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of
putting a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux and planted
Peter meekly in the back seat with little Dinkie to hold and took the
reins myself.
I started home with a lump in my throat and a weight in my heart,
feeling it really wasn't a home that I was driving toward. But it was
one of those crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like
electric-lights shining through cut-glass and the air was like a
razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It
reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the
immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was
merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of
sister-motes in the infinitudes of time and space.
"_Nitchevo!_" I said out loud, as I stopped on the trail to readjust
and wrap the Twins in their rug-lined laundry-basket.
"In that case," Peter unexpectedly remarked, "I'd like to climb into
that front seat with you."
"Why?" I asked, not greatly interested.
"Because I want to talk to you," was Peter's answer.
"But I think I'd rather not talk," I told him.
"Why?" it was his turn to inquire.
"Isn't it a rum enough situation as it is?" I demanded. For Peter,
naturally, had not used his eyes for nothing that night.
But Peter didn't wait for my permission to climb into the front seat.
He plumped himself down beside me and sat there with my first-born in
his arms and one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over his
knees.
"I think I'm beginning to see light," he said, after a rather long
silence, as we went spanking along the prairie-trail with the cold air
fanning our faces.
"I wish _I_ did," I acknowledged.
"You're not very happy, are you?" he ventured, in a voice with just
the slightest trace of _vibrato_ in it.
But I didn't see that anything was to be gained by parading my
troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to
consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.
"Do you like me, Peter?" I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe
with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and
the very sense of his remoteness, as I'd already told him, gives birth
to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the
brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the
delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper "weenies."
"What do you suppose I've been hanging around for?" demanded Peter,
with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.
"To fix the windmill, of course," I told him. "Unless you have
improper designs on Struthers!"
He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.
"If it's true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the dark, I suppose
that's why she weaves so badly," he observed, after a short silence.
"She undoubtedly drops a stitch now and then," I agreed, wondering if
he was thinking of me or Struthers when he spoke. "But you do like me,
don't you?"
"I adore you," admitted Peter quite simply.
"In the face of all these?" I said with a contented little laugh,
nodding toward my three children.
"In the face of everything," asserted Peter.
"Then I wish you'd do something for me," I told him.
"What?"
"Break that woman's heart," I announced, with a backward nod of my
head toward Casa Grande.
"I'd much rather break _yours_," he coolly contended. "Or I'd prefer
knowing I had the power of doing it."
I shook my head. "It can't be done, Peter. And it can't even be
pretended. Imagine the mother of twins trying to flirt with a man even
as nice as you are! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be
kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dinosauria getting up and
trying to do a two-step. And I'm getting old and prosy, Peter, and if
I pretend to be skittish now and then it's only to mask the fact that
I'm on the shelf, that I've eaten my pie and that before long I'll be
dyeing my hair every other Sunday, the same as Struthers, and----"
"Rot!" interrupted Peter. "All rot!"
"Why rot?" I demanded.
"Because to me you're the embodiment of undying youth," asserted the
troubadour beside me. It was untrue, and it was improper, but for a
moment or two at least my hungry heart closed about that speech the
same as a child's hand closes about a chocolate-drop. Women are made
that way. But I had to keep to the trail.
"Supposing we get back to earth," I suggested.
"What's the matter with the way we were heading?" countered the
quiet-eyed Peter.
"It doesn't seem quite right," I argued. And he laughed a little
wistfully.
"What difference does it make, so long as we're happy?" he inquired.
And I tried to reprove him with a look, but I don't think it quite
carried in the misty starlight.
"I can't say," I told him, "that I approve of your reasoning."
"That's just the point," he said with a slightly more reckless note in
his laughter. "It doesn't pretend to be reasoning. It's more like that
abandoning of all reasoning which brings us our few earthly glories."
"_Cogito, ergo sum_," I announced, remembering my Descartes.
"Well, I'm going to keep on just the same," protested Peter.
"Keep on at what?" I asked.
"At thinking you're adorable," was his reply.
"Well, the caterpillars have been known to stop the train, but you
must remember that it's rather hard on the caterpillars," I proclaimed
as we swung off the trail and headed in for Alabama Ranch.
_Sunday the Thirteenth_
On Friday night there were heavy showers again, and now Whinnie
reports that our Marquis wheat couldn't look better and ought to run
well over forty bushels to the acre. We are assured of sufficient
moisture, but our two enemies yclept Fire and Hail remain. I should
like to have taken out hail insurance, but I haven't the money on
hand.
I can at least make sure of my fire-guards. Turning those essential
furrows will be good training for Peter. That individual, by the way,
has been quieter and more ruminative of late, and, if I'm not
mistaken, a little gentler in his attitude toward me. Yet there's not
a trace of pose about him, and I feel sure he wouldn't harm the morals
of a lady-bug. He's kind and considerate, and doing his best to be a
good pal. Whinnie, by the way, regards me with a mildly reproving eye,
and having apparently concluded that I am a renegade, is concentrating
his affection on Dinkie, for whom he is whittling out a new Noah's Ark
in his spare time. He is also teaching Dinkie to ride horseback,
lifting him up to the back of either Nip or Tuck when they come for
water and letting him ride as far as the stable. He looks very small
up on that big animal.
At night, now that the evenings are so long, Whinnie takes my laddie
on his knee and tells him stories, stories which he can't possibly
understand, I'm sure, but Dinkie likes the drone of Whinnie's voice
and the feel of those rough old arms about his little body. We all
hunger for affection. The idiot who said that love was the bitters in
the cocktail of life wasn't either a good liver or a good philosopher.
For love is really the whole cocktail. Take that away, and nothing is
left....
I seem to be getting moodier, as summer advances. Alternating waves of
sourness and tenderness sweep through me, and if I wasn't a busy woman
I'd possibly make a fine patient for one of those fashionable
nerve-specialists who don't flourish on the prairie.
But I can't quite succeed in making myself as miserable as I feel I
ought to be. There seems to be a great deal happening all about us,
and yet nothing ever happens. My children are hale and hearty, my
ranch is fat with its promise of harvest, and I am surrounded by
people who love and respect me. But it doesn't seem enough. Coiled in
my heart is one small disturbing viper which I can neither scotch nor
kill. Yet I decline to be the victim of anything as ugly as jealousy.
For jealousy is both poisonous and pathetic. But I'd like to choke
that woman!
Yesterday Lady Alicia, who is now driving her own car, picked up Peter
from his fire-guard work and carried him off on an experimental ride
to see what was wrong with her carbureter--the same old carbureter!
She let him out at the shack, on her way home, and Struthers witnessed
the tail end of that _enlèvement_. It spoilt her day for her. She
fumed and fretted and made things fly--for Struthers always works
hardest, I've noticed, when in a temper--and surrendering to the
corroding tides which were turning her gentle nature into gall and
wormwood, obliquely and tremulously warned the somewhat startled Peter
against ungodly and frivolous females who 'ave no right to be
corrupting simple-minded colonials and who 'ave no scruples against
playing with men the same as a cat would play with a mouse.
"So be warned in time," I sternly exclaimed to Peter, when I
accidentally overheard the latter end of Struthers' exhortation.
"And there are others as ought to be warned in time!" was Struthers'
Parthian arrow as she flounced off to turn the omelette which she'd
left to scorch on the cook-stove.
Peter's eye met mine, but neither of us said anything. It reminded me
of cowboy honor, which prompts a rider never to "touch leather," no
matter how his bronco may be bucking. And _omelette_, I was later
reminded, comes from the French _alumelle_, which means ship's
plating, a bit of etymology well authenticated by Struthers' skillet.
_Wednesday the Twenty-third_
Summer is here, here in earnest, and already we've had a few scorching
days. Haying will soon be upon us, and there is no slackening in the
wheels of industry about Alabama Ranch. My Little Alarm-Clocks have me
up bright and early, and the morning prairie is a joy that never grows
old to the eye. Life is good, and I intend to be happy, for
I'm going alone,
Though Hell forefend,
By a way of my own
To the bitter end!
And our miseries, after all, are mostly in our own minds. Yesterday I
came across little Dinkie lamenting audibly over a scratch on his hand
at least seven days old. He insisted that I should kiss it, and, after
witnessing that healing touch, was perfectly satisfied. And there's no
reason why grown-ups should be more childish than children themselves.
One thing that I've been missing this year, more than ever before, is
fresh fruit. During the last few days I've nursed a craving for a tart
Northern-Spy apple, or a Golden Pippin with a water-core, or a juicy
and buttery Bartlett pear fresh from the tree. Those longings come
over me occasionally, like my periodic hunger for the Great Lakes and
the Atlantic, a vague ache for just one vision of tumbling beryl
water, for the plunge of cool green waves and the race of foam. And
Peter overheard me lamenting our lack of fruit and proclaiming I could
eat my way right across the Niagara Peninsula in peach time. So when
he came back from Buckhorn this afternoon with the farm supplies, he
brought on his own hook two small boxes of California plums and a
whole crate of oranges.
It was very kind of him, and also very foolish, for the oranges will
never keep in this hot weather, and the only way that I can see to
save them is to make them up into marmalade. It was pathetic to see
little Dinkie with his first orange. It was hard to persuade him that
it wasn't a new kind of ball. But once the flavor of its interior
juices was made known to him, he took to it like a cat to cream.
It brought home to me how many things there are my kiddies have had to
do without, how much that is a commonplace to the city child must
remain beyond the reach of the prairie tot. But I'm not complaining. I
am resolved to be happy, and in my prophetic bones is a feeling that
things are about to take a turn for the better, something better than
the humble stewed prune for Dinkie's little tummy and something better
than the companionship of the hired help for his mother. Not that both
Peter and Whinnie haven't a warm place in my heart! They couldn't be
better to me. But I'm one of those neck-or-nothing women, I suppose,
who are silly enough to bank all on a single throw, who have to put
all their eggs of affection in one basket. I can't be indiscriminate,
like Dinkie, for instance, whom I found the other day kissing every
picture of a man in the Mail-Order Catalogue and murmuring "Da-da!"
and doing the same to every woman-picture and saying "Mummy." To be
lavish with love is, I suppose, the prerogative of youth. Age teaches
us to treasure it and sustain it, to guard it as we'd guard a lonely
flame against the winds of the world. But the flame goes out, and we
grope on through the darkness wondering why there can never be
another....
I wonder if Lady Alicia is as cold as she seems? For she has the
appearance of keeping her emotions in an ice-box of indifferency, the
same as city florists keep their flowers chilled for commercial
purposes. Lady Allie, I'm sure, is fond of my little Dinkie. Yet
there's a note of condescension in her affection, for even in what
seems like an impulse of adoration her exclamation nearly always is
"Oh, you lovable little rabbit!" or, if not that, it's likely to be
"You adorable little donkey you!" She says it very prettily, of
course, setting it to music almost with that melodious English drawl
of hers. She is, she must be, a very fascinating woman. But at the
first tee, friendship ends, as the golf-nuts say.
...I asked Peter the other day what he regarded as my besetting sin
and the brute replied: "Topping the box." I told him I didn't quite
get the idea. "A passion to produce a good impression," he explained,
"by putting all your biggest mental strawberries on the top!"
"That sounds suspiciously like trying to be a Smart Aleck," I
retorted.
"It may sound that way, but it isn't. You're so mentally alive, I
mean, that you've simply got to be slightly acrobatic. And it's as
natural, of course, as a child's dancing."
But Peter is wrong. I've been out of the world so long that I've a
dread of impressing people as stupid, as being a clodhopper. And if
trying hard not to be thought that is "topping the box," I suppose I'm
guilty.
"You are also not without vanity," Peter judicially continued. "But
every naturally beautiful woman has a right to that." And I proved
Peter's contention by turning shell-pink even under my sunburn and
feeling a warm little runway of pleasure creep up through my carcass,
for the homeliest old prairie-hen that ever made a pinto shy, I
suppose, loves to be told that she's beautiful.
Peter, of course, is a conscienceless liar, but I can't help liking
him, and he'll always nest warm in the ashes of my heart....
There's one thing I must do, as soon as I have the chance, and that is
get in to a dentist and have my teeth attended to. And now that I'm so
much thinner I want a new and respectable pair of corsets. I've been
studying my face in the glass, and I can see, now, what an awful
Ananias Peter really is. Struthers, by the way, observed me in the
midst of that inspection, and, if I'm not greatly mistaken, indulged
in a sniff. To her, I suppose, I'm one of those vain creatures who
fall in love with themselves as a child and perpetuate, thereby, a
life romance!
_Saturday the Twenty-sixth_
Coming events do _not_ cast their shadows before them. I was busy in
the kitchen this morning, making marmalade out of what was left of
Peter's oranges and contentedly humming _Oh, Dry Those Tears_ when the
earthquake that shook the world from under my feet occurred.
The Twins had been bathed and powdered and fed and put out in their
sleeping-box, and Dinkie was having his morning nap, and Struthers was
busy at the sewing-machine, finishing up the little summer shirts for
Poppsy and Pee-Wee which I'd begun to make out of their daddy's
discarded B. V. D.'s. It was a glorious morning with a high-arching
pale blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky-line and
the milk of life running warm and rich in the bosom of the sleeping
earth. And I was bustling about in my apron of butcher's linen, after
slicing oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until the house
was aromatic with them, when the sound of a racing car-engine smote on
my ear. I went to the door with fire in my eye and the long-handled
preserving spoon in my hand, ready to call down destruction on the
pinhead who'd dare to wake my kiddies.
My visitor, I saw, was Lady Alicia; and I beheld my broken wash-tub
under the front axle of her motor-car.
I went out to her, with indignation still in my eye, but she paid no
attention to either that or the tub itself. She was quite pale, in
fact, as she stepped down from her driving-seat, glanced at her
buckskin gauntlets, and then looked up at me.
"There's something we may as well face, and face at once," she said,
with less of a drawl than usual.
I waited, without speaking, wondering if she was referring to the tub.
But I could feel my heart contract, like a leg-muscle with a cramp in
it. And we stood there, face to face, under the flat prairie sunlight,
ridiculously like two cockerels silently estimating each other's
intentions.
"I'm in love with your husband," Lady Alicia suddenly announced, with
a bell-like note of challenge in her voice. "And I'd rather like to
know what you're going to do about it."
I was able to laugh a little, though the sound of it seemed foolish in
my own startled ears.
"That's rather a coincidence, isn't it?" I blithely admitted. "For so
am I."
I could see the Scotch-granite look that came into the thick-lashed
tourmaline eyes. And they'd be lovely eyes, I had to admit, if they
were only a little softer.
"That's unfortunate," was her ladyship's curt retort.
"It's more than unfortunate," I agreed, "it's extremely awkward."
"Why?" she snapped, plainly annoyed at my lightness of tone.
"Because he can't possibly have both of us, you know--unless he's
willing to migrate over to that Mormon colony at Red-Deer. And even
there, I understand, they're not doing it now."
"I'm afraid this is something much too serious to joke about," Lady
Alicia informed me.
"But it strikes me as essentially humorous," I told her.
"I'm afraid," she countered, "that it's apt to prove essentially
tragic."
"But he happens to be _my_ husband," I observed.
"Only in form, I fancy, if he cares for some one else," was her
ladyship's deliberate reply.
"Then he has acknowledged that--that you've captured him?" I inquired,
slowly but surely awakening to the sheer audacity of the lady in the
buckskin gauntlets.
"Isn't that rather--er--primitive?" inquired Lady Allie, paler than
ever.
"If you mean coming and squabbling over another woman's husband, I'd
call it distinctly prehistoric," I said with a dangerous little red
light dancing before my eyes. "It's so original that it's aboriginal.
But I'm still at a loss to know just what your motive is, or what you
want."
"I want an end to this intolerable situation," my visitor averred.
"Intolerable to whom?" I inquired.
"To me, to Duncan, and to _you_, if you are the right sort of woman,"
was Lady Alicia's retort. And still again I was impressed by the
colossal egoism of the woman confronting me, the woman ready to ride
rough-shod over the world, for all her sparkling veneer of civilization,
as long, as she might reach her own selfish ends.
"Since you mention Duncan, I'd like to ask if you're speaking now as
his cousin, or as his mistress?"
Lady Alicia's stare locked with mine. She was making a sacrificial
effort, I could see, to remain calm.
"I'm speaking as some one who is slightly interested in his happiness,
and his future," was her coldly intoned reply.
"And has my husband acknowledged that his happiness and his future
remain in your hands?" I asked.
"I should hate to see him waste his life in a hole like this," said
Lady Alicia, not quite answering my question.
"Have you brought any great improvement to it?" I parried. Yet even as
I spoke I stood impressed by the thought that it was, after all, more
than primitive. It was paleolithic, two prehistoric she-things in
combat for their cave-man.
"That is not what I came here to discuss," she replied, with a tug at
one of her gauntlets.
"I suppose it would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by
being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my
husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred
the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that
Struthers' attentive ear was just below the nearest window-sill.
Lady Alicia smiled forbearingly, almost pityingly.
"Any such donation, I'm afraid, is no longer your prerogative," she
languidly remarked, once more mistress of herself. "What I'm more
interested in is your giving your husband his liberty."
I felt like saying that this was precisely what I had been giving him.
But it left too wide an opening. So I ventured, instead: "I've never
heard my husband express a desire for his liberty."
"He's too honorable for that," remarked my enemy.
"Then it's an odd kind of honor," I icily remarked, "that allows you
to come here and bicker over a situation that is so distinctly
personal."
"Pardon me, but I'm not bickering. And I'm not rising to any heights
of courage which would be impossible to your husband. It's consoling,
however, to know how matters stand. And Duncan will probably act
according to his own inclinations."
That declaration would have been more inflammatory, I think, if one
small truth hadn't gradually come home to me. In some way, and for
some reason, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland was not so sure of herself
as she was pretending to be. She was not so sure of her position, I
began to see, or she would never have thrown restraint to the winds
and come to me on any such mission.
"Then that counts me out!" I remarked, with a forlorn attempt at being
facetious. "If he's going to do as he likes, I don't see that you or I
have much to say in the matter. But before he does finally place his
happiness in your hands, I rather think I'd like to have a talk with
him."
"That remains with Duncan, of course," she admitted, in a strictly
qualified tone of triumph, as though she were secretly worrying over a
conquest too incredibly facile.
"He knows, of course, that you came to talk this over with me?" I
suggested, as though it were an after-thought.
"He had nothing to do with my coming," asserted Lady Alicia.
"Then it was your own idea?" I asked.
"Entirely," she admitted.
"Then what did you hope to gain?" I demanded.
"I wasn't considering my own feelings," imperially acknowledged her
ladyship.
"That was very noble of you," I admitted, "especially when you bear in
mind that you weren't considering mine, either! And what's more, Lady
Newland, I may as well tell you right here, and right now, that you
can't get anything out of it. I gave up my home to you, the home I'd
helped make by the work of my own hands. And I gave up the hope of
bringing up my children as they ought to be brought up. I even gave up
my dignity and my happiness, in the hope that things could be made to
come out straight. But I'm not going to give up my husband. Remember
that, I'm not going to give him up. I don't care what he says or
feels, at this particular moment; I'm not going to give him up to make
a mess of what's left of the rest of his life. He may not know what's
ahead of him, _but I do_! And now that you're shown me just what you
are, and just what you're ready to do, I intend to take a hand in
this. I intend to fight you to the last ditch, and to the last drop of
the hat! And if that sounds primitive, as you've already suggested,
it'll pay you to remember that you're out here in a primitive country
where we're apt to do our fighting in a mighty primitive way!"
It was a very grand speech, but it would have been more impressive, I
think, if I hadn't been suddenly startled by a glimpse of Whinstane
Sandy's rock-ribbed face peering from the bunk-house window at almost
the same moment that I distinctly saw the tip of Struthers' sage-green
coiffure above the nearest sill of the shack. And it would have been a
grander speech if I'd stood quite sure as to precisely what it meant
and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed sufficiently climactic for my
visitor, who, after a queenly and combative stare into what must have
looked like an ecstatically excited Fourth-of-July face, turned
imperially about and swung open the door of her motor-car. Then she
stepped up to the car-seat, as slowly and deliberately as a sovereign
stepping up to her throne.
"It may not be so simple as it seems," she announced with great
dignity, as she proceeded to start her car. And the same dignity might
have attended her entire departure, but in the excitement she
apparently flooded her carbureter, and the starter refused to work,
and she pushed and spun and re-throttled and pushed until she was
quite red in the face. And when the car finally did get under way, the
running-gear became slightly involved with my broken wash-tub and it
was not until the latter was completely and ruthlessly demolished that
the automobile found its right-of-way undisputed and anything like
dignity returned to the situation.
I stood there, with the long-handled preserving spoon still in my
hand, staring after Lady Alicia and the dust that arose from her
car-wheels. I stood there in a sort of trance, with all the valor gone
out of my bones and that foolish declamation of mine still ringing in
my ears.
I began to think of all the clever things I might have said to Lady
Alicia Elizabeth Newland. But the more I thought it over the more
desolated I became in spirit, so that by the time I meandered back to
the shack I had a face as long as a fiddle. And there I was confronted
by a bristling and voluble Struthers, who acknowledged that she'd
heard what she'd heard, and could no longer keep her lips sealed,
whether it was her place to speak or not, and that her ladyship was
not all that she ought to be, not by any manner of means, or she would
never have left England and hidden herself away in this wilderness of
a colony.
I had been rather preoccupied with my own thoughts, and paying scant
attention to the clattering-tongued Struthers, up to this point. But
the intimation that Lady Allie was not in the West for the sake of her
health brought me up short. And Struthers, when I challenged that
statement, promptly announced that the lady in question was no more in
search of health than a tom-cat's in search of water and no more
interested in ranching than an ox is interested in astronomy, seeing
as she'd 'a' been co-respondent in the Allerby and Crewe-Buller
divorce case if she'd stayed where the law could have laid a hand on
her, and standing more shamed than ever when Baron Crewe-Buller shut
himself up in his shooting-lodge and blew his brains out three weeks
before her ladyship had sailed for America, and the papers that full
of the scandal it made it unpleasant for a self-respecting lady's maid
to meet her friends of a morning in Finsbury Park. And as for these
newer goings-on, Struthers had seen what was happening right under her
nose, she had, long before she had the chance to say so openly by word
of mouth, but now that the fat was in the fire she wasn't the kind to
sit by and see those she should be loyal to led about by the nose. And
so forth. And so forth! For just what else the irate Struthers had to
unload from her turbulent breast I never did know, since at that
opportune moment Dinkie awakened and proceeded to page his parent with
all the strength of his impatient young lungs.
By the time I'd attended to Dinkie and finished my sadly neglected
marmalade--for humans must eat, whatever happens--I'd made an effort to
get some sort of order back into my shattered world. Yet it was about
Duncan more than any one else that my thoughts kept clustering and
centering. He seemed, at the moment, oddly beyond either pity or blame.
I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, as the prey of a
predaceous and unscrupulous woman who had intrigued and would continue
to intrigue against his happiness, a woman away from her own world, a
self-complacent and sensual privateer who for a passing whim, for a
momentary appeasement of her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last
of his self-respect. She was self-complacent, but she was also a woman
with an unmistakable physical appeal. She was undeniably attractive, as
far as appearances went, and added to that attractiveness was a
dangerous immediacy of attack, a touch of outlawry, which only too
often wins before resistance can be organized. And Dinky-Dunk, I kept
reminding myself, was at that dangerous mid-channel period of a man's
life where youth and age commingle, where the monotonous middle-years
slip their shackles over his shoulders and remind him that his days of
dalliance are ebbing away. He awakens to the fact that romance is being
left behind, that the amorous adventure which once meant so much to him
must soon belong to the past, that he must settle down to his jog-trot
of family life. It's the age, I suppose, when any spirited man is
tempted to kick up with a good-by convulsion or two of romantic
adventure, as blind as it is brief and passionate, sadly like the
contortions of a rooster with its head cut off.
I tried, as I sat down and struggled to think things out, to withhold
all blame and bitterness. Then I tried to think of life without
Dinky-Dunk. I attempted to picture my daily existence with somebody
else in the place that my Diddums had once filled. But I couldn't do
it. I couldn't forget the old days. I couldn't forget the wide path of
life that we'd traveled together, and that he was the father of my
children--my children who will always need him!--and that he and he
alone had been my torch-bearer into the tangled wilderness of passion.
Then I tried to think of life alone, of going solitary through the
rest of my days--and I knew that my Maker had left me too warm-blooded
and too dependent on the companionship of a mate ever to turn back to
single harness. I couldn't live without a man. He might be a sorry
mix-up of good and bad, but I, the Eternal Female, would crave him as
a mate. Most women, I knew, were averse to acknowledging such things;
but life has compelled me to be candid with myself. The tragic part of
it all seems that there should and could be only one man. I had been
right when I had only too carelessly called myself a neck-or-nothing
woman.
It wasn't until later that any definite thought of injustice to me at
Dinky-Dunk's hands entered my head, since my attitude toward
Dinky-Dunk seemed to remain oddly maternal, the attitude of the mother
intent on extenuating her own. I even wrung a ghostly sort of
consolation out of remembering that it was not a young and dewy girl
who had imposed herself on his romantic imagination, for youth and
innocence and chivalric obligation would have brought a much more
dangerous fire to fight. But Lady Alicia, with all her carefully
achieved charm, could scarcely lay claim to either youth or the other
thing. Early in the morning, I knew, those level dissecting eyes of
hers would look hard, and before her hair was up she'd look a little
faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively
insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled
child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to
precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into
untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would
probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of _ennui_ that there
are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though it's a sustaining
wall.
And somewhere in her make-up was a strain of cruelty or she would
never have come to me the way she did, and struck at me with an open
claw. That cruelty, quite naturally, could never have been paraded
before my poor old Dinky-Dunk's eyes. It would be, later on, after
disillusionment and boredom. Then, and then only, it would dare to
show its ugly head. So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to
feel sorry for my Diddums, even though he was trying to switch me off
like an electric-light. And all of a sudden I came to a decision.
I decided to write to Dinky-Dunk. That, I felt, would be safer than
trying to see him. For in a letter I could say what I wanted to
without being stopped or side-tracked. There would be no danger of
accusations and recriminations, of anger leading to extremes, of
injured pride standing in the path of honesty. It would be better than
talking. And what was more, it could be done at once, for the
mysterious impression that time was precious, that something ominous
was in the air, had taken hold of me.
So I wrote to Dinky-Dunk. I did it on two crazy-looking pages torn out
of the back of his old ranch ledger. I did it without giving much
thought to precisely what I said or exactly how I phrased it,
depending on my heart more than my brain to guide me in the way I
should go. For I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that it was my last
shot, my forlornest ultimatum, since in it went packed the last shred
of my pride.
"Dear Dinky-Dunk," I wrote, "I hardly know how to begin, but I surely
don't need to begin by saying we haven't been hitting it off very well
of late. We seem to have made rather a mess of things, and I suppose
it's partly my fault, and the fault of that stupid pride which keeps us
tongue-tied when we should be honest and open with each other. But I've
been feeling lately that we're both skirting a cut-bank with our eyes
blindfolded, and I've faced an incident, trivial in itself but
momentous in its possibilities, which persuades me that things can't go
on as they are. There's too much at stake to let either ruffled nerves
or false modesty--or whatever you want to call it--come between you and
the very unhappy woman who still is your wife. It's time, I think, when
we both ought to look everything squarely in the face, for, after all,
we've only one life to live, and if you're happy, at this moment, if
you're completely and tranquilly happy as I write this, then I've
banked wrong, tragically wrong, on what I thought you were. For I
_have_ banked on you, Dinky-Dunk, banked about all my life and
happiness--and it's too late to change, even if I wanted to. I'm alone
in the world, and in a lonely part of the world, with three small
children to look after, and that as much as anything, I suppose, drives
me to plain speaking and compels me to clear thinking. But even as I
write these words to you, I realize that it isn't really a matter of
thought or speech. It's a matter of feeling. And the one thing I feel
is that I need you and want you; that no one, that nothing, can ever
take your place.... I thought I could write a great deal more. But I
find I can't. I seem to have said everything. It _is_ everything,
really. For I love you, Dinky-Dunk, more than everything in life.
Perhaps I haven't shown it very much, of late, but it's there, trying
to hide its silly old ostrich-head behind a pebble of hurt pride. So
let's turn the page and start over. Let's start with a clean slate,
before we lose the chance. Come back to me. I'm very unhappy. I find it
hard to write. It's only that big ache in my heart that allows me to
write at all. And I've left a lot of things unsaid, that I ought to
have said, and intended to say, but this will have to be enough. If
there's nothing that speaks up to you, from between these lines, then
there's nothing that can hold together, I'm afraid, what's left of your
life and mine. Think this over, Dinky-Dunk, and answer the way your
heart dictates. But please don't keep me waiting too long, for until I
get that answer I'll be like a hen on a hot griddle or Mary Queen of
Scots on the morning before she lost her head, if that's more
dignified."
The hardest part of all that letter, I found, was the ending of it. It
took me a long time to decide just what to sign myself, just how to
pilot my pen between the rocks of candor and dignity. So I ended up by
signing it "Chaddie" and nothing more, for already the fires of
emotion had cooled and a perplexed little reaction of indifferency had
set in. It was only a surface-stir, but it was those surface-stirs, I
remembered, which played such a lamentably important part in life.
When Whinstane Sandy came in at noon for his dinner, a full quarter of
an hour ahead of Peter, I had his meal all ready for him by the time
he had watered and fed his team. I cut that meal short, in fact, by
handing him my carefully sealed letter and telling him I wanted him to
take it straight over to Casa Grande.
I knew by his face as I helped him hitch Water-Light to the
buckboard--for Whinnie's foot makes it hard for him to ride
horseback--that he nursed a pretty respectable inkling of the
situation. He offered no comments, and he even seemed averse to having
his eye meet mine, but he obviously knew what he knew.
He was off with a rattle of wheels and a drift of trail-dust even
before Peter and his cool amending eyes arrived at the shack to "stoke
up" as he expresses it. I tried to make Peter believe that nothing was
wrong, and cavorted about with Bobs, and was able to laugh when Dinkie
got some of the new marmalade in his hair, and explained how we'd have
to take our mower-knives over to Teetzel's to have them ground, and did
my best to direct silent reproofs at the tight-lipped and tragic-eyed
Struthers, who moved about like a head-mourner not unconscious of her
family obligations. But Peter, I suspect, sniffed something untoward in
the air, for after a long study of my face--which made me color a
little, in spite of myself--he became about as abstracted and
solemn-eyed as Struthers herself.
To my dying day I shall never forget that wait for Whinnie to come back.
It threatened to become an endless one. I felt like Bluebeard's wife up
in the watch tower--no, it was her Sister Anne, wasn't it, who anxiously
mounted the tower to search for the first sign of deliverance? At any
rate I felt like Luck--now before the Relief, or a prisoner waiting for
the jury to file in, or a gambler standing over an invisible
roulette-table and his last throw, wondering into what groove the little
ivory ball was to run. And when Whinnie finally appeared his seamed old
face wore such a look of dour satisfaction that for a weak flutter or
two of the heart I thought he'd brought Dinky-Dunk straight back with
him.
But that hope didn't live long.
"Your maun's awa'," said Whinnie, with quite unnecessary curtness, as
he held my own letter out to me.
"He's away?" I echoed in a voice that was just a wee bit trembly, as I
took the note from Whinnie, "what do you mean by away?"
"He left three hours ago for Chicago," Whinstane Sandy retorted, still
with that grim look of triumph in his gloomy old eyes.
"But what could be taking him to Chicago?" I rather weakly inquired.
"'Twas to see about buyin' some blooded stock for the ranch. At least,
so her ladyship informed me. But that's nae more than one of her lies,
I'm thinkin'."
"What did she say, Whinnie?" I demanded, doing my best to keep cool.
"Naethin'," was Whinnie's grim retort. "'Twas me did the sayin'!"
"What did you say?" I asked, disturbed by the none too gentle look on
his face.
"What was needed to be said," that old sour-dough with the lack-luster
eyes quietly informed me.
"What did you say?" I repeated, with a quavery feeling just under my
floating ribs, alarmed at the after-light of audacity that still
rested on his face, like wine-glow on a rocky mountain-tip.
"I said," Whinstane Sandy informed me with his old shoulders thrust
back and his stubby forefinger pointed to within a few inches of my
nose, "I said that I kenned her and her kind well, havin' watched the
likes o' her ridden out o' Dawson City on a rail more times than once.
I said that she was naethin' but a wanton"--only this was _not_ the
word Whinnie used--"a wanton o' Babylon and a temptress o' men and a
corrupter o' homes out o' her time and place, bein' naught but a soft
shinin' thing that was a mockery to the guid God who made her and a
blight to the face o' the open prairie that she was foulin' with her
presence. I said that she'd brought shame and sorrow to a home that
had been filled with happiness until she crept into it like the
serpent o' hell she was, and seein' she'd come into a lonely land
where the people have the trick o' tryin' their own cases after their
own way and takin' when need be justice into their own hands, she'd
have one week, one week o' seven days and no more, to gather up what
belonged to her and take herself back to the cities o' shame where
she'd find more o' her kind. And if she was not disposed to hearken a
friendly and timely word such as I was givin' her, I said, she'd see
herself taken out o' her home, and her hoorish body stripped to the
skin, and then tarred and feathered, and ridden on the cap-rail of a
corral-gate out of a settlement that had small taste for her company!"
"Whinnie!" I gasped, sitting down out of sheer weakness, "you didn't
say that?"
"I said it," was Whinnie's laconic retort.
"But what right had you to--"
He cut me short with a grunt that was almost disrespectful.
"I not only said it," he triumphantly affirmed, "but what's more to my
likin', I made her believe it, leavin' her with the mockin' laugh dead
in her eyes and her face as white as yon table-cover, white to the
lips!"
_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_
I've been just a little mystified, to-day, by Whinstane Sandy's
movements. As soon as breakfast was over and his chores were done he
was off on the trail. I kept my eye on him as he went, to satisfy
myself that he was not heading for Casa Grande, where no good could
possibly come of his visitations.
For I've been most emphatic to Whinstane Sandy in the matter of his
delightful little lynch-law program. There shall be no tarring and
feathering of women by any man in my employ. That may have been
possible in the Klondike in the days of the gold-rush, but it's not
possible in this country and this day of grace--except in the movies.
And life is not so simple that you can ride its problems away on the
cap-rail from a corral. It's unfortunate that that absurd old
sour-dough, for all his good intentions, ever got in touch with Lady
Alicia. I have, in fact, strictly forbidden him to repeat his visit to
Casa Grande, under any circumstances.
But a number of things combine to persuade me that he's not being as
passive as he pretends. He's even sufficiently forgotten his earlier
hostility toward Peter to engage in long and guarded conversation with
that gentleman, as the two of them made a pretense of bolting the new
anchor-timbers to the heel of the windmill tower. So at supper
to-night I summoned up sufficient courage to ask Peter what he knew
about the situation.
He replied that he knew more than he wanted to, and more than he
relished. That reply proving eminently unsatisfactory, I further
inquired what he thought of Lady Alicia. He somewhat startled and
shocked me by retorting that according to his own personal way of
thinking she ought to be spanked until she glowed.
I was disappointed in Peter about this. I had always thought of him as
on a higher plane than poor old Whinnie. But he was equally atavistic,
once prejudice had taken possession of him, for what he suggested must
be regarded as not one whit more refined than tar and feathers. As for
myself, I'd like to choke her, only I haven't the moral courage to
admit it to anybody.
_Thursday the First_
Lady Alicia has announced, I learn through a Struthers quite pop-eyed
with indignation, that it's Peter and I who possibly ought to be
tarred and feathered, if our puritanical community is deciding to go
in for that sort of thing! It is to laugh.
Her ladyship, I also learn, has purchased about all the small-arms
ammunition in Buckhorn and toted the same back to Casa Grande in her
car. There, in unobstructed view of the passers-by, she has set up a
target, on which, by the hour together, she coolly and patiently
practises sharpshooting with both rifle and revolver.
I admire that woman's spunk. And whatever you may do, you can't
succeed in bullying the English. They have too much of the bull-dog
breed in their bones. They're always at their best, Peter declares,
when they're fighting. "But from an Englishwoman trying to be
kittenish," he fervently added, "good Lord, deliver us all!"
And that started us talking about the English. Peter, of course, is too
tolerant to despise his cousins across the Pond, but he pregnantly
reminded me that Lady Allie had asked him what sort of town Saskatchewan
was and he had retorted by inquiring if she was fond of Yonkers,
whereupon she'd looked puzzled and acknowledged that she'd never eaten
one. For Peter and Lady Allie, it seems, had had a set-to about American
map-names, which her ladyship had described as both silly and unsayable,
especially the Indian ones, while Peter had grimly proclaimed that any
people who called Seven-Oaks _Snooks_ and Belvoir _Beever_ and Ruthven
_Rivven_ and Wrottesley _Roxly_ and Marylebone _Marrabun_ and
Wrensfordsley _Wrensley_ had no right to kick about American
pronunciations.
But Peter is stimulating, even though he does stimulate you into
opposition. So I found myself defending the English, and especially
the Englishman, for too many of them had made me happy in their lovely
old homes and too many of their sons, æons and æons ago, had tried
to hold my hand.
"Your Englishman," I proclaimed to Peter, "always acts as though he
quite disapproves of you and yet he'll go to any amount of trouble to
do things to make you happy or comfortable. Then he conceals his
graciousness by being curt about it. Then, when he's at his crankiest,
he's apt to startle you by saying the divinest things point-blank in
your face, and as likely as not, after treating you as he would a
rather backward child of whom he rigidly disapproves, he'll make love
to you and do it with a fine old Anglo-Saxon directness. He hates
swank, of course, for he's a truffle-hound who prefers digging out his
own delicacies. And it's ten to one, if a woman simply sits tight and
listens close and says nothing, that he'll say something about her
unrivaled powers of conversation!"
_Sunday the Fourth_
Peter, as we sat out beside the corral on an empty packing-case
to-night after supper, said that civilization was a curse. "Look what
it's doing to your noble Red Man right here in your midst! There was a
time, when a brave died, they handsomely killed that dead brave's
favorite horse, feeling he would course the plains of Heaven in peace.
Now, I find, they have their doubts, and they pick out a dying old
bone-yard whose day is over, or an outlaw that nobody can break and
ride. And form without faith is a mockery. It's the same with us
whites. Here we are, us two, with--"
But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on rubber-ice just for the
sake of seeing it bend.
"Can you imagine anything lovelier," I remarked as a derailer, "than
the prairie at this time of the year, and this time of day?"
Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and uncounted acres of
sage-green grain with an eternity of opal light behind them.
"Think of LaVérendrye, who was their Columbus," he meditated aloud.
"Going on and on, day by day, week by week, wondering what was beyond
that world of plain and slough and coulée and everlasting green! And
they tell me there's four hundred million arable acres of it. I wonder
if old Vérendrye ever had an inkling of what Whittier felt later on:
'I hear the tread of pioneers,
Of cities yet to be--
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.'"
Then Peter went on to say that Bryant had given him an entirely false
idea of the prairie, since from the Bryant poem he'd expected to see
grass up to his armpits. And he'd been disappointed, too, by the
scarcity of birds and flowers.
But I couldn't let that complaint go by unchallenged. I told him of
our range-lilies and foxglove and buffalo-beans and yellow crowfoot
and wild sunflowers and prairie-roses and crocuses and even violets in
some sections. "And the prairie-grasses, Peter--don't forget the
prairie-grasses," I concluded, perplexed for a moment by the rather
grim smile that crept up into his rather solemn old Peter-Panish face.
"I'm not likely to," he remarked.
For to-morrow, I remembered, Peter is going off to cut hay. He has
been speaking of it as going into the wilderness for meditation. But
what he's really doing is taking a team and his tent and supplies and
staying with that hay until it's cut, cut and "_collected_," to use
the word which the naive Lady Allie introduced into these parts.
I have a suspicion that it is the wagging of tongues that's sending
Peter out into his wilderness. But I've been busy getting his grub-box
ready and I can at least see that he fares well. For whatever happens,
we must have hay. And before long, since we're to go in more and more
for live stock, we must have a silo at Alabama Ranch. Now that the
open range is a thing of the past, in this part of the country at
least, the silo is the natural solution of the cattle-feed problem. It
means we can double our stock, which is rather like getting another
farm for nothing, especially as the peas and oats we can grow for
ensilage purposes give such enormous yields on this soil of ours.
_Tuesday the Sixth_
For the second time the unexpected has happened. Lady Alicia has gone.
She's off, bag and baggage, and has left the redoubtable Sing Lo in
charge of Casa Grande.
Her ladyship waited until one full day after the time-limit imposed
upon her by Whinstane Sandy in that barbarous armistice of his, and
then, having saved her face, joined the Broadhursts of Montreal on a
trip to Banff, where she'll be more in touch with her kind and her
countrymen. From there, I understand, she intends visiting the Marquis
of Anglesey ranch at Wallachie.
I don't know what she intends doing about her property, but it seems
to me it doesn't show any great interest in either her crop or her
cousin, to decamp at this particular time. Struthers protests that
she's a born gambler, and can't live without bridge and American
poker. Banff, accordingly, ought to give her what she's pining for....
But I'm too busy to worry about Lady Allie. The Big Drama of the year
is opening on this sun-steeped plain of plenty, for harvest-time will
soon be here and we've got to be ready for it. We're on the go from
six in the morning until sun-down. We're bringing in Peter's crop of
hay with the tractor, hauling three wagon-loads at a time. I make the
double trip, getting back just in time to feed my babies and then
hiking out again. That means we're all hitting on every cylinder. I've
no time for either worries or wishes, though Peter once remarked that
life is only as deep as its desires, and that the measure of our
existence lies in the extent of its wants. That may be true, in a way,
but I haven't time to philosophize over it. Hard work can be more than
a narcotic. It's almost an anesthetic. And soil, I've been thinking,
should be the symbol of life here, as it is with the peasants of
Poland. I feel that I'm getting thinner, but I've an appetite that I'm
ashamed of, in secret.
Dinky-Dunk, by the way, is not back yet, and there's been no word from
him. Struthers is resolute in her belief that he's in hiding somewhere
about the mountain-slopes of Banff. But I am just as resolute in my
scorn for all such suspicions. And yet, and yet,--if I wasn't so busy
I'd be tempted to hold solemn days of feasting and supplication that
Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland might wade out beyond her depth in the
pellucid waters of Lake Louise.
_Friday the Sixteenth_
Peter surprised me yesterday by going in to Buckhorn and bringing out
a machinist to work on the windmill tower. By mid-afternoon they had
it ready for hoisting and rebolting to its new anchor-posts. So just
before supper the team and the block-and-tackle were hitched on to
that attenuated steel skeleton, Whinnie took one guide rope and I took
the other, and our little Eiffel Tower slowly lifted itself up into
the sky.
Peter, when it was all over, and the last nut tightened up, walked
about with the triumphant smile of a Master-Builder who beholds his
work completed. So I said "Hello, _Halvard Solness_!" as I stepped
over to where he stood.
And he was bright enough to catch it on the wing, for he quoted back
to me, still staring up at the tower-head: "From this day forward I
will be a free builder."
Whereupon I carelessly retorted, "Oh, there's some parts of Ibsen that
I despise."
But something in Peter's tone and his preoccupation during supper both
worried and perplexed me. So as soon as I could get away from the
shack I went out to the windmill tower again. And the small platform
at the end of the sloping little iron ladder looked so tempting and
high above the world that I started up the galvanized rungs.
When I was half-way up I stopped and looked down. It made me dizzy,
for prairie life gives you few chances of getting above the flat floor
of your flat old world. But I was determined to conquer that feeling,
and by keeping my eyes turned up toward the windmill head I was able
to reach the little platform at the top and sit there with my feet
hanging over and my right arm linked through one of the steel
standards.
I suppose, as windmills go, it wasn't so miraculously high, but it was
amazing how even that moderate altitude where I found myself could
alter one's view-point. I felt like a sailor in a crow's-nest, like a
sentinel on a watch-tower, like an eagle poised giddily above the
world. And such a wonderful and wide-flung world it was, spreading out
beneath me in mottled patches of grape-leaf green and yellow and gold,
with a burgundian riot of color along the western sky-line where the
last orange rind of the sun had just slipped down out of sight.
As I stared down at the roof of our shack it looked small and pitiful,
tragically meager to house the tangled human destinies it was housing.
And the fields where we'd labored and sweated took on a foreign and
ghostly coloring, as though they were oblongs on the face of an alien
world, a world with mystery and beauty and unfathomable pathos about
it.
I was sitting there, with my heels swinging out in space and an oddly
consoling sense of calmness in my heart, when Peter came out of the
shack and started to cross toward the corral. I couldn't resist the
temptation to toss my old straw hat down at him.
He stopped short as it fell within twenty paces of him, like a meteor
out of the sky. Then he turned and stared up at me. The next minute I
saw him knock out his little briar pipe, put it away in his pocket,
and cross over to the tower.
I could feel the small vibrations of the steel structure on which I
sat poised, as he mounted the ladder toward me. And it felt for all
the world like sitting on the brink of Heaven, like a blessed damozel
the second, watching a sister-soul coming up to join you in your
beatitude.
"I say, isn't this taking a chance?" asked Peter, a little worried and
a little out of breath, as he clambered up beside me.
"It's glorious!" I retorted, with a nod toward the slowly paling
sky-line.
That far and lonely horizon looked as though a fire of molten gold
burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a
fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly
and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an
odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to
remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out
over empty space.
"I find," he observed, "that this tower was sold to a tenderfoot, by
the foot. That's why it went over. It was too highfalutin! It was
thirty feet taller than it had any need to be."
Then he dropped back into silence.
I finally became conscious of the fact that Peter, instead of staring
at the sunset, was staring at me. And I remembered that my hair was
half down, trailing across my nose, and that three distinctly new
freckles had shown themselves that week on the bridge of that same
nose.
"O God, but you're lovely!" he said in a half-smothered and shamefaced
sort of whisper.
"_Verboten!_" I reminded him. "And not so much the cussing, Peter, as
the useless compliments."
He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring out over the
twilight prairie for quite a long time. When he spoke again it was in
a quieter and much more serious tone.
"I suppose I may as well tell you," he said without looking at me,
"that I've come into a pretty clear understanding of the situation
here at Alabama Ranch."
"It's kind of a mix-up, isn't it?" I suggested, with an attempt at
lightness.
Peter nodded his head.
"I've been wondering how long you're going to wait," he observed,
apparently as much to himself as to me.
"Wait for what?" I inquired.
"For what you call your mix-up to untangle," was his answer.
"There's nothing for me to do but to wait," I reminded him.
He shook his head in dissent.
"You can't waste your life, you know, doing that," he quietly
protested.
"What else can I do?" I asked, disturbed a little by the absence of
color from his face, apparent even in that uncertain light.
"Nothing's suggested itself, I suppose?" he ventured, after a silence.
"Nothing that prompts me into any immediate action," I told him. "You
see, Peter, I'm rather anchored by three little hostages down in that
little shack there!"
That left him silent for another long and brooding minute or two.
"I suppose you've wondered," he finally said, "why I've stuck around
here as long as I have?"
I nodded, not caring to trust myself to words, and then, realizing I
was doing the wrong thing, I shook my head.
"It's because, from the morning you found me in that mud-hole, I've
just wanted to be near you, to hear your voice when you spoke, to see
the curve of your lips and the light come and go in your eyes when you
laugh," were the words that came ever so slowly from Peter. "I've
wanted that so much that I've let about everything else in life go
hang. Yet in a way, and in my own world, I'm a man of some little
importance. I've been cursed with enough money, of course, to move
about as I wish, and loaf as I like. But that sort of life isn't
really living. I'm not in the habit, though, of wanting the things I
can't have. So what strikes me as the tragic part of it all is that I
couldn't have met and known you when you were as free as I am now. In
a way, you _are_ free, or you ought to be. You're a woman, I think,
with arrears of life to make up. You've struck me, from the very
first, as too alive, too sensitive, too responsive to things, to get
the fullest measure out of life by remaining here on the prairie, in
what are, after all, really pioneer conditions. You've known the other
kind of life, as well as I have, and it will always be calling to you.
And if that call means anything to you, and the--the change we've
spoken of is on its way, or for some unexpected reason has to come,
I'm--well, I'm going to take the bit in my teeth right here and tell
you that I love you more than you imagine and a good deal more, I
suppose, than the law allows!"
He pushed my hand aside when I held it up to stop him.
"I may as well say it, for this is as good a time and place as we'll
ever have, and I can't go around with my teeth shut on the truth any
longer. I know you've got your three little tots down there, and I
love 'em about as much as you do. And it would seem like giving a
little meaning and purpose to life to know that I had the chance of
doing what I could to make you and to make them happy. I've--"
But I couldn't let him go on.
"It's no use, Peter," I cried with a little choke in my voice which I
couldn't control. "It's no earthly use. I've known you liked me, and
it's given me a warm little feeling down in one corner of my heart.
But I could never allow it to be more than a corner. I like you,
Peter, and I like you a lot. You're wonderful. In some ways you're the
most adorable man I've ever known in all my life. That's a dangerous
thing to say, but it's the truth and I may as well say it. It even
hurts a little to remember that I've traded on your chivalry, though
that's the one thing in life you _can_ trade on without reproof or
demand for repayment. But as I told you before, I'm one of those
neck-or-nothing women, one of those single-track women, who can't have
their tides of traffic going two ways at once. And if I'm in a mix-up,
or a maelstrom, or whatever you want to call it, I'm in it. That's
where I belong. It would never, never do to drag an innocent outsider
into that mixed-up mess of life, simply because I imagined it could
make me a little more comfortable to have him there."
Peter sat thinking over what I'd said. There were no heroics, no
chest-pounding, no suggestion of romantically blighted lives and
broken hearts.
"That means, of course, that I'll have to climb out," Peter finally
and very prosaically remarked.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it's so apt to leave one of us sailing under false colors,"
was his somewhat oblique way of explaining the situation. "I might
have hung on until something happened, I suppose, if I hadn't shown my
hand. And I hadn't quite the right to show my hand, when you take
everything into consideration. But you can't always do what you intend
to. And life's a little bigger than deportment, anyway, so what's the
use of fussing over it? There's just one thing, though, I want to say,
before we pull down the shutters again. I want you to feel that if
anything does happen, if by any mischance things should take a turn
for the worse, or you're worried in any way about the outcome of all
this"--he indulged in a quiet but comprehensive hand-wave which
embraced the entire ranch that lay in the gray light at our feet--"I
want you to feel that I'd be mighty happy to think you'd turn to me
for--for help."
It was getting just a little too serious again, I felt, and I decided
in a bit of a panic to pilot things back to shallower water.
"But you _have_ helped, Peter," I protested. "Look at all that hay you
cut, and the windmill here, and the orange marmalade that'll make me
think of you every morning!"
He leaned a little closer and regarded me with a quiet and wistful
eye. But I refused to look at him.
"That's nothing to what I'd like to do, if you gave me the chance," he
observed, settling back against the tower-standard again.
"I know, Peter," I told him, "And it's nice of you to say it. But the
nicest thing of all is your prodigious unselfishness, the unselfishness
that's leaving this talk of ours kind of--well, kind of hallowed, and
something we'll not be unhappy in remembering, when it could have so
easily turned into something selfishly mean and ugly and sordid. That's
where you're _big_. And that's what I'll always love you for!"
"Let's go down," said Peter, all of a sudden. "It's getting cold."
I sat staring down at the world to which we had to return. It seemed a
long way off. And the ladder that led down to it seemed a cobwebby and
uncertain path for a lady whose heart was still slipping a beat now
and then. Peter apparently read the perplexity on my face.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'll go down one rung ahead of you. Even if
you did slip, then, I'll be there to hold you up. Come on."
We started down, with honest old Peter's long arms clinging to the
ladder on either side of me and my feet following his, step by step,
as we went like a newfangled sort of quadruped down the narrow steel
rungs.
We were within thirty feet of the ground when I made ever so slight a
misstep and brought Peter up short. The next moment he'd caught me up
bodily in his right arm, and to steady myself I let my arms slip about
his neck. I held on there, tight, even after I knew what I was doing,
and let my cheek rest against the bristly side of his head as we went
slowly down to the bottom of the tower.
It wasn't necessary, my holding my arms about Peter's neck. It wasn't
any more necessary than it was for him to pick me up and carry me the
rest of the way down. It wasn't true-to-the-line fair play, even, when
you come to think of it in cold blood, and it wasn't by any manner of
means just what sedately married ladies should do.
But, if the terrible truth must be told, _it was nice_. I think both
our hearts were a little hungry for the love which didn't happen to be
coming our way, which the law of man and his Maker alike prohibited.
So we saved our dignity and our self-respect, oddly enough, by
resorting to the shallowest of subterfuges. And I don't care much if
it wasn't true-to-the-line ethics. I liked the feel of Peter's arm
around me, holding me that way, and I hope he liked that long and
semi-respectable hug I gave him, and that now and then, later on, in
the emptier days of his life, he'll remember it pleasantly, and
without a bit of bitterness in his heart.
For Alabama Ranch, of course, is going to lose Peter as soon as he can
get away.
_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_
Peter is no longer with us. He went yesterday, much to the open grief
of an adoring and heart-broken Struthers. I stood in the doorway as he
drove off, pretending to mop my eyes with my hankie and then making a
show of wringing the brine out of it. He laughed at this bit of
play-acting, but it was rather a melancholy laugh. Struthers, however,
was quite snappy for the rest of the morning, having apparently
construed my innocent pantomime as a burlesque of her tendency to
sniffle a little.
I never quite knew how much we'd miss Peter until he was gone, and
gone for good. Even Dinkie was strangely moody and downcast, and
showed his depression by a waywardness of spirit which reached its
crowning misdemeanor by poking a bean into his ear.
This seemed a trivial enough incident, at first. But the heat and
moisture of that little pocket of flesh caused the bean to swell, and
soon had Dinkie crying with pain. So I renewed my efforts to get that
bean out of the child's ear, for by this time he was really suffering.
But I didn't succeed. There was no way of getting behind it, or
getting a hold on it. And poor Dinkie bawled bitterly, ignorant of why
this pain should be inflicted on him and outraged that his own mother
should add to it by probing about the already swollen side of his
head.
I was, in fact, getting a bit panicky, and speculating on how long it
would take to get Dinkie in to Buckhorn and a doctor, when Struthers
remembered about a pair of toilet tweezers she'd once possessed
herself of, for pulling out an over-punctual gray-hair or two. Even
then I had to resort to heroic measures, tying the screaming child's
hands tight to his side with a bath-towel and having the tremulous
Struthers hold his poor little head flat against the kitchen table.
It was about as painful, I suppose, as extracting a tooth, but I
finally got a grip on that swollen legume and pulled it from its
inflamed pocket of flesh. I felt as relieved and triumphant as an
obstetrician after a hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie
anything his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie and the
entire contents of my sewing-basket, which under ordinary circumstances
is strictly taboo. But once the ear-passage was clear the pain went
away, and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, was himself again.
But Peter has left a hole in our lives. I keep feeling that he's
merely out on the land and will be coming in with that quiet and
remote smile of his and talking like mad through a meal that I always
had an incentive for making a little more tempting than the ordinary
grub-rustling of a clodhopper.
The only person about Alabama Ranch who seems undisturbed by Peter's
departure is Whinstane Sandy. He reminds me of a decrepit but
robustious old rooster repossessing himself of a chicken-run after the
decapitation of an arrogant and envied rival. He has with a dour sort
of blitheness connected up the windmill pump, in his spare time, and
run a pipe in through the kitchen wall and rigged up a sink, out of a
galvanized pig-trough. It may not be lovely to the eye, but it will
save many a step about this shack of ours. And the steps count, now
that the season's work is breaking over us like a Jersey surf!
_Thursday the Twenty-sixth_
I've got Struthers in jumpers, and she's learning how to handle a
team. Whinnie laughed at her legs, and said they made him think
a-muckle o' a heron. But men are scarce in this section, and it looks
as though Alabama Ranch was going to have a real wheat crop. Whinnie
boasts that we're three weeks ahead of Casa Grande, which, they tell
me, is taking on a neglected look.
I've had no message from my Dinky-Dunk, and no news of him. All day
long, at the back of my brain, a nervous little mouse of anxiety keeps
nibbling and nibbling away. Last night, when she was helping me get
the Twins ready for bed, Struthers confided to me that she felt sure
Lady Alicia and my husband had been playmates together in England at
one time, for she's heard them talking, and laughing about things that
had happened long ago. But it's not the things that happened long ago
that are worrying me. It's the things that may be happening now.
I wonder what the fair Lady Alicia intends doing about getting her
crop off. Sing Lo will scarcely be the man to master that problem....
The Lord knows I'm busy enough, but I seem to be eternally waiting for
something. I wonder if every woman's life has a larval period like
this? I've my children and Bobs. Over my heart, all day long, should
flow a deep and steady current of love. But it's not the kind I've a
craving for. There's something missing. I've been wondering if
Dinky-Dunk, even though he were here at my side, would still find any
"kick" in my kisses. I can't understand why he never revealed to me
the fact that he and Lady Allie were playmates as children. In that
case, she must be considerably older than she looks. But old or young,
I wish she'd stayed in England with her croquet and pat-tennis and
broom-stick-cricket, instead of coming out here and majestically
announcing that nothing was to be expected of a country which had no
railway porters!
_Wednesday the First_
The departed Peter has sent back to us a Victrola and a neatly packed
box of records. Surely that was kind of him. I suppose he felt that I
needed something more than a banjo to keep my melodious soul alive. He
may be right, for sometimes during these long and hot and tiring days
I feel as though my spirit had been vitrified and macadamized. But I
haven't yet had time to unpack the music-box and get it in
working-order, though I've had a look through the records. There are
quite a number of my old favorites. I notice among them a song from
_The Bohemian Girl_. It bears the title of _Then You'll Remember Me_.
Poor old Peter! For when I play it, I know I'll always be thinking of
another man.
_Sunday the Fifth_
Life is a club from which Cupid can never be blackballed. I notice
that Struthers, who seems intent on the capture of a soul-mate, has
taken to darning Whinstane Sandy's socks for him. And Whinnie, who is
a bit of a cobbler as well as being a bit of renegade to the ranks of
the misogynists, has put new heels and soles on the number sevens
which Struthers wears at the extremities of her heron-like limbs. Thus
romance, beginning at the metatarsus, slowly but surely ascends to the
diastolic region!
_Wednesday the Eighth_
I've just had a nice little note from Peter, written from the Aldine
Club in Philadelphia, saying he'd neglected to mention something which
had been on his mind for some time. He has a slightly rundown place in
the suburbs of Pasadena, he went on to explain, and as his lazy summer
would mean he'd have to remain in the East and be an ink-coolie all
winter, the place was at my disposal if it so turned out that a winter
in California seemed desirable for me and my kiddies. It would, in
fact, be a God-send--so he protested--to have somebody dependable
lodged in that empty house, to keep the cobwebs out of the corners and
the mildew off his books and save the whole disintegrating shebang
from the general rack and ruin which usually overtakes empty mansions
of that type. He gave me the name and address of the caretaker, on
Euclid Avenue, and concluded by saying it wasn't very much of a place,
but might be endured for a winter for the sake of the climate, if I
happened to be looking for a sunnier corner of the world than Alabama
Ranch. He further announced that he'd give an arm to see little
Dinkie's face when that young outlaw stole his first ripe orange from
the big Valencia tree in the _patio_. And Peter, in a post-script,
averred that he could vouch for the flavor of the aforementioned
Valencias.
_Tuesday the Fourteenth_
Whinstane Sandy about the middle of last week brought home the
startling information that Sing Lo had sold Lady Allie's heavy
work-team to Bud O'Malley for the paltry sum of sixty dollars. He
further reported that Sing Lo had decamped, taking with him as rich a
haul as he could carry.
I was in doubt on what to do, for a while. But I eventually decided to
go in to Buckhorn and send a telegram to the owner of Casa Grande. I
felt sure, if Lady Allie was in Banff, that she'd be at the C. P. R.
hotel there, and that even if she had gone on to the Anglesey Ranch my
telegram would be forwarded to Wallachie. So I wired her: "Chinaman
left in charge has been selling ranch property. Advise me what action
you wish taken."
A two-day wait brought no reply to this, so I then telegraphed to the
hotel-manager asking for information as to her ladyship. I was anxious
for that information, I'll confess, for more personal reasons than
those arising out of the activities of Sing Lo.
When I went in for my house supplies on Friday there was a message
there from the Banff hotel-manager stating that Lady Newland had left,
ten days before, for the Empress Hotel in Victoria. So I promptly
wired that hotel, only to learn that my titled wanderer might be found
in San Francisco, at the Hotel St. Francis. So I repeated my message;
and yesterday morning Hy Teetzel, homeward bound from Buckhorn in his
tin Lizzie, brought the long-expected reply out to me. It read:
"Would advise consulting my ranch manager on the matter mentioned in
your wire," and was signed "Alicia Newland."
There was a sense of satisfaction in having located the lady, but
there was a distinctly nettling note in the tenor of that little
message. I decided, accordingly, to give her the retort courteous by
wiring back to her: "Kindly advise me of ranch manager's present
whereabouts," and at the bottom of that message inscribed, "Mrs.
Duncan Argyll McKail."
And I've been smiling a little at the telegram which has just been
sent on to me, for now that I come to review our electric intercourse
in a cooler frame of mind it looks suspiciously like back-biting over
a thousand miles of telegraph-wire. This second message from San
Francisco said: "Have no knowledge whatever of the gentleman's
movements or whereabouts."
It was, I found, both a pleasant and a puzzling bit of information,
and my earlier regrets at wasting time that I could ill spare betrayed
a tendency to evaporate. It was satisfying, and yet it was not
satisfying, for morose little doubts as to the veracity of the lady in
question kept creeping back into my mind. It also left everything
pretty much up in the air, so I've decided to take things in my own
hand and go to Casa Grande and look things over.
_Thursday the Sixteenth_
I didn't go over to Casa Grande, after all. For this morning the news
came to me that Duncan had been back since day before yesterday. And
he is undoubtedly doing anything that needs to be done.
But the lady lied, after all. That fact now is only too apparent. And
her equerry has been hurried back to look after her harried estate.
The live stock, I hear, went without water for three whole days, and
the poultry would all have been in kingdom-come if Sing Lo, in
choosing a few choice birds for his private consumption, hadn't
happened to leave the run-door unlatched....
I was foolish enough to expect, of course, that Duncan might nurse
some slight curiosity as to his family and its welfare. This will be
his third day back, and he has neither put in an appearance nor sent a
word. He's busy, of course, with that tangle to unravel--but where
there's a will there's usually a way. And hope dies hard. Yet day by
day I find less bitterness in my heart. Those earlier hot tides of
resentment have been succeeded, not by tranquillity or even
indifference, but by a colder and more judicial attitude toward things
in general. I've got a home and a family to fight for--not to mention
a baby with prickly-heat--and they must not be forgotten. I have the
consolation, too, of knowing that the fight doesn't promise to be a
losing one. I've banked on wheat, and old Mother Earth is not going to
betray me. My grain has ripened miraculously during these last few
weeks of hot dry weather. It's _too_ hot, in fact, for my harvest
threatens to come on with a rush. But we'll scramble through it, in
some way.
_Sunday the Nineteenth_
It's only three days since I wrote those last lines. But it seems a
long time back to last Thursday. So many, many things have happened
since then.
Friday morning broke very hot, and without a breath of wind. By noon
it was stifling. By mid-afternoon I felt strangely tired, and even
more strangely depressed. I even attempted to shake myself together,
arguing that my condition was purely mental, for I had remembered that
it was unmistakably Friday, a day of ill-omen to the superstitious.
I was surprised, between four and five, to see Whinstane Sandy come in
from his work and busy himself about the stables. When I asked him the
reason for this premature withdrawal he pointed toward a low and
meek-looking bank of clouds just above the southwest sky-line and
announced that we were going to have a "blow," as he called it.
I was inclined to doubt this, for the sun was still shining, there was
no trace of a breeze, and the sky straight over my head was a pellucid
pale azure. But, when I came to notice it, there was an unusual, small
stir among my chickens, the cattle were restless, and one would
occasionally hold its nose high in the air and then indulge in a
lowing sound. Even Bobs moved peevishly from place to place, plainly
disturbed by more than the flies and the heat. I had a feeling,
myself, of not being able to get enough air into my lungs, a depressed
and disturbed feeling which was nothing more than the barometer of my
body trying to tell me that the glass was falling, and falling
forebodingly.
By this time I could see Whinnie's cloud-bank rising higher above the
horizon and becoming more ragged as it mushroomed into anvil-shaped
turrets. Then a sigh or two of hot air, hotter even than the air about
us, disturbed the quietness and made the level floor of my yellowing
wheat undulate a little, like a breast that has taken a quiet breath
or two. Then faint and far-off came a sound like the leisurely firing
of big guns, becoming quicker and louder as the ragged arch of the
storm crept over the sun and marched down on us with strange twistings
and writhings and up-boilings of its tawny mane.
"Ye'd best be makin' things ready!" Whinnie called out to me. But even
before I had my windows down little eddies of dust were circling about
the shack. Then came a long and sucking sigh of wind, followed by a
hot calm too horrible to be endured, a hot calm from the stifling
center of which your spirit cried out for whatever was destined to
happen to happen at once. The next moment brought its answer to that
foolish prayer, a whining and whistling of wind that shook our little
shell of a house on its foundations, a lurid flash or two, and then
the tumult of the storm itself.
The room where I stood with my children grew suddenly and uncannily
dark. I could hear Struthers calling thinly from the kitchen door to
Whinnie, who apparently was making a belated effort to get my
chicken-run gate open and my fowls under cover. I could hear a
scattering drive of big rain-drops on the roof, solemn and soft, like
the fall of plump frogs. But by the time Whinnie was in through the
kitchen door this had changed. It had changed into a passionate and
pulsing beat of rain, whipped and lashed by the wind that shook the
timbers about us. The air, however, was cooler by this time, and it
was easier to breathe. So I found it hard to understand why Whinnie,
as he stood in the half-light by one of the windows, should wear such
a look of protest on his morose old face which was the color of a
pigskin saddle just under the stirrup-flap.
Even when I heard one solitary thump on the roof over my head, as
distinct as the thump of a hammer, I failed to understand what was
worrying my hired man. Then, after a momentary pause in the rain, the
thumps were repeated. They were repeated in a rattle which became a
clatter and soon grew into one continuous stream of sound, like a
thousand machine-guns all going off at once.
I realized then what it meant, what it was. It was hail. And it meant
that we were being "hailed out."
We were being cannonaded with shrapnel from the skies. We were being
deluged with blocks of ice almost the size of duck-eggs. So thunderous
was the noise that I had no remembrance when the window-panes on the
west side of the house were broken. It wasn't, in fact, until I beheld
the wind and water blowing in through the broken sashes that I
awakened to what had happened. But I did nothing to stop the flood. I
merely sat there with my two babes in my arms and my Dinkie pressed in
close between my knees, in a foolishly crouching and uncomfortable
position, as though I wanted to shield their tender little bodies with
my own. I remember seeing Struthers run gabbing and screaming about
the room and then try to bury herself under her mattress, like the
silly old she-ostrich she was, with her number sevens sticking out
from under the bedding. I remember seeing Whinnie picking up one of
the white things that had rolled in through the broken window. It was
oblong, and about as big as a pullet's egg, but more irregular in
shape. It was clear on the outside but milky at the center, making me
think of a half-cooked globe of tapioca. But it was a stone of solid
ice. And thousands and thousands of stones like that, millions of
them, were descending on my wheat, were thrashing down my half-ripened
oats, were flailing the world and beating the life and beauty out of
my crops.
The storm ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. The hammers of
Thor that were trying to pound my lonely little prairie-house to
pieces were withdrawn, the tumult stopped, and the light grew
stronger. Whinstane Sandy even roused himself and moved toward the
door, which he opened with the hand of a sleep-walker, and stood
staring out. I could see reflected in that seamed old face the
desolation which for a minute or two I didn't have the heart to look
upon. I knew, even before I got slowly up and followed him toward the
door, that our crop was gone, that we had lost everything.
I stood in the doorway, staring out at what, only that morning, had
been a world golden with promise, rich and bountiful and beautiful to
the eye and blessed in the sight of God. And now, at one stroke, it
was all wiped out. As far as the eye could see I beheld only flattened
and shredded ruin. Every acre of my crop was gone. My year's work had
been for nothing, my blind planning, my petty scheming and contriving,
my foolish little hopes and dreams, all, all were there, beaten down
into the mud.
Yet, oddly enough, it did not stir in me any quick and angry passion
of protest. It merely left me mute and stunned, staring at it with the
eyes of the ox, with a dull wonder in my heart and a duller sense of
deprivation away off at the back of my brain. I scarcely noticed when
little Dinkie toddled out and possessed himself of a number of the
larger hailstones, which he promptly proceeded to suck. When a smaller
one melted in the warmth of his hand, he stared down at the emptiness
between his little brown fingers, wondering where his pretty pebble
had vanished to, just as I wondered where my crop had gone.
But it's gone. There's no doubt of that. The hail went from southwest
to northeast, in a streak about three miles wide, like a conquering
army, licking up everything as it went. Whinnie says that it's the
will of God. Struthers, resurrected from her mattress, proclaims that
it's Fate punishing us for our sins. My head tells me that it's
barometric laws, operating along their own ineluctable lines. But that
doesn't salve the sore.
For the rest of the afternoon we stood about like Italian peasants
after an earthquake, possessed of a sort of collective mutism, doing
nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Even my seven dead pullets,
which had been battered to death by the hail, were left to lie where
they had fallen. I noticed a canvas carrier for a binder which Whinnie
had been mending. It was riddled like a sieve. If this worried me, it
worried me only vaguely. It wasn't until I remembered that there would
be no wheat for that binder to cut and no sheaves for that carrier to
bear, that the extent of what had befallen Alabama Ranch once more
came fully home to me. It takes time to digest such things, just as it
takes time to reorganize your world. The McKails, for the second time,
have been cleaned to the bones. We ought to be getting used to it, for
it's the second time we've gone bust in a year!
It wasn't until yesterday morning that any kind of perspective came
back to us. I went to bed the night before wondering about Dinky-Dunk
and hoping against hope that he'd come galloping over to make sure his
family were still in the land of the living. But he didn't come. And
before noon I learned that Casa Grande had not been touched by the
hail. That at least was a relief, for it meant that Duncan was safe
and sound.
In a way, yesterday, there was nothing to do, and yet there was a
great deal to do. It reminded me of the righting up after a funeral.
But I refused to think of anything beyond the immediate tasks in hand.
I just did what had to be done, and went to bed again dog-tired. But I
had nightmare, and woke up in the middle of the night crying for all I
was worth. I seemed alone in an empty world, a world without meaning
or mercy, and there in the blackness of the night when the tides of
life run lowest, I lay with my hand pressed against my heart, with the
feeling that there was nothing whatever left in existence to make it
worth while. Then Pee-Wee stirred and whimpered, and when I lifted him
into my bed and held him against my breast, the nearness of his body
brought warmth and consolation to mine, and I remembered that I was
still a mother....
It was this morning (Sunday) that Dinky-Dunk appeared at Alabama
Ranch. I had looked for him and longed for him, in secret, and my
heart should have leapt up with gladness at the sight of him. But it
didn't. It couldn't. It was like asking a millstone to pirouette.
In the first place, everything seemed wrong. I had a cold in the head
from the sudden drop in the temperature, and I was arrayed in that
drab old gingham wrapper which Dinkie had cut holes in with Struthers'
scissors, for I hadn't cared much that morning when I dressed whether
I looked like a totem-pole or a Stoney squaw. And the dregs of what
I'd been through during the last two days were still sour in the
bottom of my heart. I was a Job in petticoats, a mutineer against man
and God, a nihilist and an I. W. W. all in one. And Dinky-Dunk
appeared in Lady Alicia's car, in _her_ car, carefully togged out in
his Sunday best, with that strangely alien aspect which citified
clothes can give to the rural toiler when he emerges from the costume
of his kind.
But it wasn't merely that he came arrayed in this outer shell of
affluence and prosperity. It was more that there was a sense of
triumph in his heart which he couldn't possibly conceal. And I wasn't
slow to realize what it meant. I was a down-and-outer now, and at his
mercy. He could have his way with me, without any promise of protest.
And whatever he might have done, or might yet do, it was ordained that
I in my meekness should bow to the yoke. All that I must remember was
that he stood my lord and master. I had made my foolish little
struggle to be mistress of my own destiny, and now that I had failed,
and failed utterly, I must bend to whatever might be given to me.
"It's hard luck, Chaddie," he said, with a pretense at being
sympathetic. But there was no real sorrow in his eye as he stood there
surveying my devastated ranch.
"Nix on that King Cophetua stuff!" I curtly and vulgarly proclaimed.
"Just what do you mean?" he asked, studying my face.
"Kindly can the condescension stuff!" I repeated, taking a wayward
satisfaction out of shocking him with the paraded vulgarity of my
phrasing.
"That doesn't sound like you," he said, naturally surprised, I
suppose, that I didn't melt into his arms.
"Why not?" I inquired, noticing that he no longer cared to meet my
eye.
"It sounds hard," he said.
"Well, some man has said that a hard soil makes a hard race," I
retorted, with a glance about at my ruined wheatlands. "Did you have a
pleasant time in Chicago?"
He looked up quickly.
"I wasn't in Chicago," he promptly protested.
"Then that woman lied, after all," I remarked, with a lump of Scotch
granite where my heart ought to have been. For I could see by his face
that he knew, without hesitation, the woman I meant.
"Isn't that an unnecessarily harsh word?" he asked, trying, of course,
to shield her to the last. And if he had not exactly winced, he had
done the next thing to it.
"What would _you_ call it?" I countered. It wouldn't have taken a
microphone, I suppose, to discover the hostility in my tone. "And
would it be going too far to inquire just where you were?" I continued
as I saw he had no intention of answering my first question.
"I was at the Coast," he said, compelling himself to meet my glance.
"I'm sorry that I cut your holiday short," I told him.
"It was scarcely a holiday," he remonstrated.
"What would you call it then?" I asked.
"It was purely a business trip," he retorted.
There had, I remembered, been a great deal of that business during the
past few months. And an ice-cold hand squeezed the last hope of hope
out of my heart. _She_ had been at the Coast.
"And this belated visit to your wife and children, I presume, is also
for business purposes?" I inquired. But he was able to smile at that,
for all my iciness.
"_Is_ it belated?" he asked.
"Wouldn't you call it that?" I quietly inquired.
"But I had to clear up that case of the stolen horses," he protested,
"that Sing Lo thievery."
"Which naturally comes before one's family," I ironically reminded
him.
"But courts are courts, Chaddie," he maintained, with a pretense of
patience.
"And consideration is consideration," I rather wearily amended.
"We can't always do what we want to," he next remarked, apparently
intent on being genially axiomatic.
"Then to what must the humble family attribute this visit?" I
inquired, despising that tone of mockery into which I had fallen yet
seeming unable to drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths.
"To announce that I intend to return to them," he asserted, though it
didn't seem an easy statement to make.
It rather took my breath away, for a moment. But Reason remained on
her throne. It was too much like sticking spurs into a dead horse.
There was too much that could not be forgotten. And I calmly reminded
Dinky-Dunk that the lightest of heads can sometimes have the longest
of memories.
"Then you don't want me back?" he demanded, apparently embarrassed by
my lack of hospitality.
"It all depends on what you mean by that word," I answered, speaking
as judicially as I was able. "If by coming back you mean coming back
to this house, I suppose you have a legal right to do so. But if it
means anything more, I'm afraid it can't be done. You see, Dinky-Dunk,
I've got rather used to single harness again, and I've learned to
think and act for myself, and there's a time when continued unfairness
can kill the last little spark of friendliness in any woman's heart.
It's not merely that I'm tired of it all. But I'm _tired of being
tired_, if you know what that means. I don't even know what I'm going
to do. Just at present, in fact, I don't want to think about it. But
I'd much prefer being alone until I am able to straighten things out
to my own satisfaction."
"I'm sorry," said Dinky-Dunk, looking so crestfallen that for a moment
I in turn felt almost sorry for him.
"Isn't it rather late for that?" I reminded him.
"Yes, I suppose it is," he admitted, with a disturbing new note of
humility. Then he looked up at me, almost defiantly. "But you need my
help."
It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. It was a trivial
misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire
misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended
to be.
"I'm afraid I've rather outlived that period of Bashi-Bazookism," I
coolly and quietly explained to my lord and master. "You may have the
good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been
hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they
seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than
the loss of a crop."
"Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked Dinky-Dunk,
with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.
"If the shoe fits, put it on," I observed.
"But there are certain things I want to explain," he tried to argue,
with the look of a man confronted by an overdraft on his patience.
"Somebody has said that a friend," I reminded him, "is a person to
whom one need never explain. And any necessity for explanation, you
see, removes us even from the realm of friendship."
"But, hang it all, I'm your husband," protested my obtuse and somewhat
indignant interlocutor.
"We all have our misfortunes," I found the heart, or rather the
absence of heart, to remark.
"I'm afraid this isn't a very good beginning," said Dinky-Dunk, his
dignity more ruffled than ever.
"It's not a beginning at all," I reminded him. "It's more like an
ending."
That kept him silent for quite a long while.
"I suppose you despise me," he finally remarked.
"It's scarcely so active an emotion," I tried to punish him by
retorting.
"But I at least insist on explaining what took me to the Coast," he
contended.
"That is scarcely necessary," I told him.
"Then you know?" he asked.
"I imagine the whole country-side does," I observed.
He made a movement of mixed anger and protest.
"I went to Vancouver because the government had agreed to take over my
Vancouver Island water-front for their new shipbuilding yards. If
you've forgotten just what that means, I'd like to remind you that
there's----"
"I don't happen to have forgotten," I interrupted, wondering why news
which at one time would have set me on fire could now leave me quite
cold. "But what caused the government to change its mind?"
"Allie!" he said, after a moment's hesitation, fixing a slightly
combative eye on mine.
"She seems to have almost unlimited powers," I observed as coolly as I
could, making an effort to get my scattered thoughts into line again.
"On the contrary," Dinky-Dunk explained with quite painful politeness,
"it was merely the accident that she happened to know the naval
officer on the Imperial Board. She was at Banff the week the board was
there, and she was able to put in a good word for the Vancouver Island
site. And the Imperial verdict swung our own government officials
over."
"You were lucky to have such an attractive wirepuller," I frigidly
announced.
"The luck wasn't altogether on my side," Dinky-Dunk almost as frigidly
retorted, "when you remember that it was giving her a chance to get
rid of a ranch she was tired of!"
I did my best to hide my surprise, but it wasn't altogether a success.
The dimensions of the movement, apparently, were much greater than my
poor little brain had been able to grasp.
"Do you mean it's going to let you take Casa Grande off her ladyship's
hands?" I diffidently inquired.
"That's already arranged for," Dinky-Dunk quite casually informed me.
We were a couple of play-actors, I felt, each deep in a rôle of his
own, each stirred much deeper than he was ready to admit, and each a
little afraid of the other.
"You are to be congratulated," I told Dinky-Dunk, chilled in spite of
myself, never for a moment quite able to forget the sinister shadow of
Lady Alicia which lay across our trodden little path of everyday life.
"It was you and the kiddies I was thinking of," said my husband, in a
slightly remote voice. And the mockery of that statement, knowing what
I knew, was too much for me.
"I'm sorry you didn't think of us a little sooner," I observed. And I
had the bitter-sweet reward of seeing a stricken light creep up into
Dinky-Dunk's eyes.
"Why do you say that?" he asked.
But I didn't answer that question of his. Instead, I asked him
another.
"Did you know that Lady Alicia came here and announced that she was in
love with you?" I demanded, resolved to let the light in to that
tangled mess which was fermenting in the silo of my soul.
"Yes, I know," he quietly affirmed, as he hung his head. "She told me
about it. And it was _awful_. It should never have happened. It made
me ashamed even--even to face you!"
"That was natural," I agreed, with my heart still steeled against him.
"It makes a fool of a man," he protested, "a situation like that."
"Then the right sort of man wouldn't encourage it," I reminded him,
"wouldn't even permit it." And still again I caught that quick
movement of impatience from him.
"What's that sort of thing to a man of my age?" he demanded. "When you
get to where I am you don't find love looming so large on the horizon.
What--"
"No, it clearly doesn't loom so large," I interrupted.
"What you want then," went on Dinky-Dunk, ignoring me, "is power,
success, the consolation of knowing you're not a failure in life.
_That's_ the big issue, and that's the stake men play big for, and
play hard for."
It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what I myself had been
playing hard for--but I had lost. And it had left my heart dry. It had
left my heart so dry that my own Dinky-Dunk, standing there before me
in the open sunlight, seemed millions of miles removed from me,
mysteriously depersonalized, as remote in spirit as a stranger from
Mars come to converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system.
"Then you've really achieved your ambition," I reminded my husband, as
he stood studying a face which I tried to keep tranquil under his
inspection.
"Oh, no," he corrected, "only a small part of it."
"What's the rest?" I indifferently inquired, wondering why most of
life's victories, after all, were mere Pyrrhic victories.
"You," declared Dinky-Dunk, with a reckless light in his eyes, "You,
and the children, now that I'm in a position to give them what they
want."
"But _are_ you?" I queried.
"Well, that's what I'm coming back to demonstrate," he found the
courage to assert.
"To them?" I asked.
"To all of you!" he said with a valiant air of finality.
I told him it was useless, but he retorted that he didn't propose to
have that stop him. I explained to him that it would be embarrassing,
but he parried that claim by protesting that sacrifice was good for
the soul. I asserted that it would be a good deal of a theatricality,
under the circumstances, but he attempted to brush this aside by
stating that what he had endured for years might be repeated by
patience.
So Dinky-Dunk is coming back to Alabama Ranch! It sounds momentous,
and yet, I know in my heart, that it doesn't mean so very much. He
will sleep under the same roof with me as remote as though he were
reposing a thousand miles away. He will breakfast and go forth to his
work, and my thoughts will not be able to go with him. He will return
with the day's weariness in his bones, but a weariness which I can
neither fathom nor explain in my own will keep my blood from warming
at the sound of his voice through the door. Being still his wife, I
shall have to sew and mend and cook for him. _That_ is the penalty of
prairie life; there is no escape from propinquity.
But that life can go on in this way, indefinitely, is unthinkable.
What will happen, I don't know. But there will have to be a change,
somewhere. There will have to be a change, but I am too tired to worry
over what it will be. I'm too tired even to think of it. That's
something which lies in the lap of Time.
_Saturday the Twenty-fifth_
Dinky-Dunk is back. At least he sleeps and breakfasts at home, but the
rest of the time he is over at Casa Grande getting his crop cut. He's
too busy, I fancy, to pay much attention to our mutual lack of
attention. But the compact was made, and he seems willing to comply
with it. The only ones who fail to regard it are the children. I
hadn't counted on them. There are times, accordingly, when they
somewhat complicate the situation. It didn't take them long to get
re-acquainted with their daddy. I could see, from the first, that he
intended to be very considerate and kind with them, for I'm beginning
to realize that he gets a lot of fun out of the kiddies. Pee-Wee will
go to him, now, from anybody. He goes with an unmistakable expression
of "Us-men-have-got-to-stick-together" satisfaction on his little
face.
But Dinky-Dunk's intimacies, I'm glad to say, do not extend beyond the
children. Three days ago, though, he asked me about turning his hogs
in on my land. It doesn't sound disturbingly emotional. But if what's
left of my crop, of course, is any use to Duncan, he's welcome to
it....
I looked for that letter which I wrote to Dinky-Dunk several weeks
ago, looked for it for an hour and more this morning, but haven't
succeeded in finding it. I was sure that I'd put it between the pages
of the old ranch journal. But it's not there.
Last night before I turned in I read all of Meredith's _Modern Love_.
It was nice to remember that once, at Box Hill, I'd felt the living
clasp of the hand which had written that wonderful series of poems.
But never before did I quite understand that elaborated essay in
love-moods. It came like a friendly voice, like an understanding
comrade who knows the world better than I do, and brought me comfort,
even though the sweetness of it was slightly acidulated, like a
lemon-drop. And as for myself, I suppose I'll continue to
"............sit contentedly
And eat my pot of honey on the grave."
_Sunday the Second_
I have written to Uncle Carlton again, asking him about my Chilean
Nitrate shares. If the company's reorganized and the mines opened
again, surely my stock ought to be worth something.
The days are getting shorter, and the hot weather is over for good, I
hope. I usually like autumn on the prairie, but the thought of fall,
this year, doesn't fill me with any inordinate joy. I'm unsettled and
atonic, and it's just as well, I fancy, that I'm weaning the Twins.
It's not the simple operation I'd expected, but the worst is already
over. Pee-Wee is betraying unmistakable serpentine powers, and it's no
longer safe to leave him on a bed. Poppsy is a fastidious little lady,
and apparently a bit of a philosopher. She is her father's favorite.
Whinstane Sandy is loyal to little Dinkie, and, now that the evenings
are longer, regales him on stories, stories which the little tot can
only half understand. But they must always be about animals, and
Whinnie seems to run to wolves. He's told the story of the skater and
the wolves, with personal embellishments, and Little Red Riding-Hood
in a version all his own, and last night, I noticed, he recounted the
tale of the woman in the sleigh with her children when the pack of
wolves pursued her. And first, to save herself and her family, she
threw her little baby out to the brutes. And when they had gained on
her once more, she threw out her little girl, and then her little boy,
and then her biggest boy of ten. And when she reached a settlement and
told of her deliverance, the Oldest Settler took a wood-ax and clove
her head clear down to the shoulder-blades--the same, of course, being
a punishment for saving herself at the expense of her little ones.
My Dinkie sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that
gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on
countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical
interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive
Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his _Ivan
Ivanovitch_.
Dinky-Dunk, wandering in on the tail end of it, remarked: "That's a
fine story, that is, with all those coyotes singing out there!"
"The chief objection to it," I added, "is that the lady didn't drop
her husband over first."
Dinky-Dunk looked down at me as he filled his pipe.
"But the husband, as I remember the story, had been left behind to do
what a mere husband could to save their home," my spouse quietly
reminded me.
_Monday the Tenth_
There was a heavy frost last night. It makes me feel that summer is
over. Dinky-Dunk asked me yesterday why I disliked Casa Grande and
never ventured over into that neighborhood. I evaded any answer by
announcing that there were very few things I liked nowadays....
Only once, lately, have we spoken of Lady Allie. It was Dinky-Dunk, in
fact, who first brought up her name in speaking of the signing of the
transfer-papers.
"Is it true," I found the courage to ask, "that you knew your cousin
quite intimately as a girl?"
Dinky-Dunk laughed as he tamped down his pipe.
"Yes, it _must_ have been quite intimately," he acknowledged. "For
when she was seven and I was nine we went all the way down Teignmouth
Hill together in an empty apple-barrel--than which nothing that I know
of could possibly be more intimate!"
I couldn't join him in his mirth over that incident, for I happened to
remember the look on Lady Alicia's face when she once watched
Dinky-Dunk mount his mustang and ride away. "Aren't men lawds of
creation?" she had dreamily inquired. "Not after you've lived with
them for a couple of years," I had been heartless enough to retort,
just to let her know that I didn't happen to have a skin like a
Douglas pine.
_Sunday the Sixteenth_
I've just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It's a very long and
businesslike letter, in which he goes into details as to how our
company has been incorporated in _La Association de Productores de
Salitre de Chile_, with headquarters at Valparaiso. It's a new and
rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies that with nitrate at
ten shillings per Spanish quintal the returns on the investment, under
the newer conditions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to
explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the
price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only,
involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent.
Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method
from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire
amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my
own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I
winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from
this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least
two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, once
the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of
course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America--and much
more along the same lines.
That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have
made me happy. But it didn't. I couldn't quite react to it. As usual,
I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did
bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that,
whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and
shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn't come with
sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence.
I've even been wondering if there's any news that could. For the one
thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from
life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it's youth, golden
youth, that is slipping away from me?
It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my
fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow
myself to become antiquated. I'm on the wrong track, in some way, but
before I dry up into a winter apple I'm going to find out where the
trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want
life, Life--and oodles of it....
Among other things, by the way, which I've been missing are books.
They at least are to be had for the buying, and I've decided there's
no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I've had
a "serious but not fatal wound," as the newspapers say, to my personal
vanity, but there's no use in letting go of things, at my time of
life. Pee-Wee, I'm sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed
old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that
are slightly disturbing. Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over
his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked
at me with widening eyes. "Mummy," he called out, "I've got a m'sheen
inside me!" And Whinnie's explorations are surely worth emulating. I
too have a machine inside me which some day I'll be compelled to
rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump,
though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the
emotions.
_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_
Dinky-Dunk is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, as a modern army of
assault ignores a fortress by simply circling about its forbidding
walls and leaving it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliberately
and patiently making love to my children. He is entrenching himself in
their affection.
He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me to interfere.
Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old
Dinky-Dunk's face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on
Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry
along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded
me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me,
in turn, of what a difference there is between your first child and
the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed
by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales
and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year,
but by the month.
It's not that I love the Twins less. It's only that the novelty has
passed. And in one way it's a good thing, for over your second and
third baby you worry less. You know what is needed, and how to do it.
You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build
your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. You know the
way you have to go, henceforth, and you follow it. It is less a Great
Adventure, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double-pointed tooth
of Anxiety does not rowel quite so often at the core of your heart....
I've been wondering if, with the coming of the children, there is not
something which slips away from the relationship between husband and
wife. That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time
when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn't big
enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And it _was_ Nature,
you have to admit when you come to look it honestly in the face,
Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I
hadn't loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would
have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. They would have
been left to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that
lonely and twilit No-Man's Land of barren love and unwanted babes. And
the only thing that keeps me human, nowadays, that keeps me from being
a woman with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and bones and
dehydrated ham-strings, is my kiddies. The thought of them, at any
time of the day, can put a cedilla under my heart to soften it....
Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the children when they
have their picture taken, is already deep in elaborating preparations
for that expedition. She is improvising an English nurse's uniform and
has asked if there might be one picture of her and the children.
_Tuesday the Fifteenth_
The children have been away for a whole day, the first time in family
history. And oh, what a difference it makes in this lonely little
prairie home of ours! The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of
it all was something quite beyond my imagination. I know now that I
could never live apart from them. Whatever happens, I shall not be
separated from my kiddies....
I spent my idle time in getting Peter's music-box in working order.
Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, thoughtlessly sat on the package of
records and broke three of them. I've been trying over the others.
They sound tinny and flat, and I'm beginning to suspect I haven't my
sound-box adjusted right. I've a hunger to hear good music. And
without quite knowing it, I've been craving for city life again, for
at least a taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler
counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a cloudy creature, and
accused me of having a mutinous mouth. Men seem to think that love
should be like an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of industrious
winding-up rewarded by a long week of undeviating devotion.
_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_
The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and my being a mere
spectator of the big and busy final act of the season's drama reminds
me of three years ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however,
is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only woman in a circle
of nine active-bodied men.
I begin to see that it's true what Dinky-Dunk said about business
looming bigger in men's lives than women are apt to remember. He's
working hard, and his neck's so thin that his Adam's apple sticks out
like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running
much higher than he had figured. He's as keen as ever he was for power
and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he's scheming for
it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't deliberately _use_ his cousin
Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. Yet
Dinky-Dunk, with all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous.
I feel sure of that.
He became philosophical, the other day when I complained about the
howling of the coyotes, and protested it was these horizon-singers
that kept the prairie clean. He even argued that the flies which seem
such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing in disguise,
since the unmolested animals over-eat when feed is plentiful and get
black-rot. So out of suffering comes wisdom and out of endurance comes
fortitude!
_Thursday the Sixth_
On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the season, or, rather,
before the season. It wasn't much of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was
greatly worked up at the sight of it and I finally put on his little
reefer and his waders and let him go out in it. But the weather had
moderated, the snow turned to slush, and when I rescued Dinkie from
rolling in what looked to him like a world of ice-cream he was a very
wet boy.
On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and strong, woke up with a
tight little chest-cough that rather frightened me. I went over to his
crib and covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a couple of
hours later, the cough had grown tighter. It turned into a sort of
sharp bark. And this time I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got
busy, rubbing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the skin
was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry pectoral which I still
had on the upper shelf of the cupboard.
When morning came he was no better. He seemed in a stupor, rousing only
to bark into his pillow. I called Dinky-Dunk in, before he left in the
pouring rain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indifferently, "Yes,
the boy's got a cold all right." But that was all.
When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot gruel, but he declined
it. He refused to eat, in fact, and remembering what Peter had once
said about my first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect that I
had a very sick boy on my hands.
At noon, when he seemed no better, I made a mild mustard-plaster and
put it on the upper part of his little chest. I let it burn there
until he began to cry with the discomfort of it. Then I tucked a
double fold of soft flannel above his thorax.
As night came on he was more flushed and feverish than ever, and I
wished to heaven that I'd a clinic thermometer in the house. For by
this time I was more than worried: I was panicky. Yet Duncan, when he
came in, and got out of his oil-skins, didn't seem very sympathetic.
He flatly refused to share my fears. The child, he acknowledged, had a
croupy little chest-cold, but all he wanted was keeping warm and as
much water as he could drink. Nature, he largely protested, would
attend to a case like that.
I was ready to turn on him like a she-tiger, but I held myself in,
though it took an effort. I saw Duncan go off to bed, dog-tired, of
course, but I felt that to go to sleep, under the circumstances, would
be criminal. Dinkie, in the meantime, was waking every now and then
and barking like a baby-coyote. I could have stood it, I suppose, if
that old Bobs of ours hadn't started howling outside, in long-drawn
and dreary howls of unutterable woe. I remembered about a dog always
howling that way when somebody was going to die in the house. And I
concluded, with an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to
count Dinkie's pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so nervous that I
lost track of the beats. So I decided to call Dinky-Dunk.
He came in to us kind of sleepy-eyed and with his hair rumpled up, and
asked, without thinking, what I wanted.
And I told him, with a somewhat shaky voice, what I wanted. I said I
wanted antiphlogistine, and a pneumonia-jacket, and a doctor, and a
trained nurse, and just a few of the comforts of civilization.
Dinky-Dunk, staring at me as though I were a madwoman, went over to
Dinkie's crib, and felt his forehead and the back of his neck, and held
an ear against the boy's chest, and then against his shoulder-blades.
He said it was all right, and that I myself ought to be in bed. As
though in answer to that Dinkie barked out his croupy protest, tight
and hard, barked as I'd never heard a child bark before. And I began to
fuss, for it tore my heart to think of that little body burning up with
fever and being denied its breath.
"You might just as well get back to bed," repeated Dinky-Dunk, rather
impatiently. And that was the spark which set off the mine, which
pushed me clear over the edge of reason. I'd held myself in for so
long, during weeks and weeks of placid-eyed self-repression, that when
the explosion did come I went off like a Big Bertha. I turned on my
husband with a red light dancing before my face and told him he was a
beast and a heartless brute. He tried to stop me, but it was no use. I
even said that this was a hell of a country, where a white woman had
to live like a Cree squaw and a child had to die like a sick hound in
a coulée. And I said a number of other things, which must have cut to
the raw, for even in the uncertain lamplight I could see that
Dinky-Dunk's face had become a kind of lemon-color, which is the
nearest to white a sunburned man seems able to turn.
"I'll get a doctor, if you want one," he said, with an
over-tried-patience look in his eyes.
"_I_ don't want a doctor," I told him, a little shrill-voiced with
indignation. "It's the child who wants one."
"I'll get your doctor," he repeated as he began dressing, none too
quickly. And it took him an interminable time to get off, for it was
raining cats and dogs, a cold, sleety rain from the northeast, and the
shafts had to be taken off the buckboard and a pole put in, for it
would require a team to haul anything on wheels to Buckhorn, on such a
night.
It occurred to me, as I stood at the window and saw Dinky-Dunk's
lantern wavering about in the rain while he was getting the team and
hooking them on to the buckboard, that it would be only the decent
thing to send him off with a cup of hot coffee, now that I had the
kettle boiling. But he'd martyrize himself, I knew, by refusing it,
even though I made it. And he was already sufficiently warmed by the
fires of martyrdom.
Yet it was an awful night, I realized when I stood in the open door
and stared after him as he swung out into the muddy trail with the
stable lantern lashed to one end of his dashboard. And I felt sorry,
and a little guilty, about the neglected cup of coffee.
I went back to little Dinkie, and found him asleep. So I sat down
beside him. I sat there wrapped up in one of Dinky-Dunk's four-point
Hudson-Bays, deciding that if the child's cough grew tighter I'd rig
up a croup-tent, as I'd once seen Chinkie's doctor do with little
Gimlets. But Dinkie failed to waken. And I fell asleep myself, and
didn't open an eye until I half-tumbled out of the chair, well on
toward morning.
By the time Dinky-Dunk got back with the doctor, who most unmistakably
smelt of Scotch whisky, I had breakfast over and the house in order
and the Twins fed and bathed and off for their morning nap. I had a
fresh nightie on little Dinkie, who rather upset me by announcing that
he wanted to get up and play with his Noah's Ark, for his fever seemed
to have slipped away from him and the tightness had gone from his
cough. But I said nothing as that red-faced and sweet-scented doctor
looked the child over. His stethoscope, apparently, tickled Dinkie's
ribs, for after trying to wriggle away a couple of times he laughed
out loud. The doctor also laughed. But Dinky-Dunk's eye happened to
meet mine.
It would be hard to describe his expression. All I know is that it
brought a disagreeable little sense of shame to my hypocritical old
heart, though I wouldn't have acknowledged it, for worlds.
"Why, those lungs are clear," I heard the man of medicine saying to my
husband. "It's been a nasty little cold, of course, but nothing to
worry over."
His optimism struck me as being rather unprofessional, for if you
travel half a night to a case, it seems to me, it ought not to be
brushed aside with a laugh. And I was rather sorry that I had such a
good breakfast waiting for them. Duncan, it's true, did not eat a
great deal, but the way that red-faced doctor lapped up my coffee with
clotted cream and devoured bacon and eggs and hot muffins should have
disturbed any man with an elementary knowledge of dietetics. And by
noon Dinkie was pretty much his old self again. I half expected that
Duncan would rub it in a little. But he has remained discreetly
silent.
Next time, of course, I'll have a better idea of what to do. But I've
been thinking that this exquisite and beautiful animalism known as the
maternal instinct can sometimes emerge from its exquisiteness.
Children are a joy and a glory, but you pay for that joy and glory
when you see them stretched out on a bed of pain, with the shadow of
Death hovering over them.
When I tried to express something like this to Dunkie last night,
somewhat apologetically, he looked at me with an odd light in his
somber old Scotch Canadian eye.
"Wait until you see him really ill," he remarked, man-like, stubbornly
intent on justifying himself. But I was too busy saying a little
prayer, demanding of Heaven that such a day might never come, to
bother about delivering myself of the many laboriously concocted
truths which I'd assembled for my bone-headed lord and master. I was
grateful enough for things as they were, and I could afford to be
generous.
_Sunday the Ninth_
For the first time since I came out on the prairie, I dread the thought
of winter. Yet it's really something more than the winter I dread,
since snow and cold have no terrors for me. I need only to look back
about ten short months and think of those crystal-clear winter days of
ours, with the sleigh piled up with its warm bear-robes, the low sun on
the endless sea of white, the air like champagne, the spanking team
frosted with their own breath, the caroling sleigh-bells, and the man
who still meant so much to me at my side. Then the homeward drive at
night, under violet clear skies, over drifts of diamond-dust, to the
warmth and peace and coziness of one's own hearth! It was often
razor-edge weather, away below zero, but we had furs enough to defy any
threat of frost-nip.
We still have the furs, it's true, but there's the promise of a
different kind of frost in the air now, a black frost that creeps into
the heart which no furs can keep warm....
We still have the furs, as I've already said, and I've been looking
them over. They're so plentiful in this country that I've rather lost
my respect for them. Back in the old days I used to invade those
mirrored and carpeted _salons_ where a trained and deferential
saleswoman would slip sleazy and satin-lined moleskin coats over my
arms and adjust baby-bear and otter and ermine and Hudson-seal next to
my skin. It always gave me a very luxurious and Empressy sort of
feeling to see myself arrayed, if only experimentally, in silver-fox
and plucked beaver and fisher, to feel the soft pelts and observe how
well one's skin looked above seal-brown or shaggy bear.
But I never knew what it cost. I never even considered where they came
from, or what they grew on, and it was to me merely a vague and
unconfirmed legend that they were all torn from the carcasses of
far-away animals. Prairie life has brought me a little closer to that
legend, and now that I know what I do, it makes a difference.
For with the coming of the cold weather, last winter, Francois and
Whinstane Sandy took to trapping, to fill in the farm-work hiatus.
They made it a campaign, and prepared for it carefully, concocting
stretching-rings and cutting-boards and fashioning rabbit-snares and
overhauling wicked-looking iron traps, which were quite ugly enough
even before they became stained and clotted and rusted with blood.
They had a very successful season, but even at the first it struck me as
odd to see two men, not outwardly debased, so soberly intent on their
game of killing. And in the end I got sick of the big blood-rusted traps
and the stretching-rings and the blood-smeared cutting-boards and the
smell of pelts being cured. For every pelt, I began to see, meant pain
and death. In one trap Francois found only the foot of a young red fox:
it had gnawed its leg off to gain freedom from those vicious iron jaws
that had bitten so suddenly into its flesh and bone and sinew. He also
told me of finding a young bear which had broken the anchor-chain of a
twelve-pound trap and dragged it over one hundred miles. All the fight,
naturally, was gone out of the little creature. It was whimpering like a
woman when Francois came up with it--poor little tortured broken-hearted
thing! And some empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metropolitan,
on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky over her new ermine coat,
without ever dreaming it's a patchwork of animal sufferings that is
keeping her fat body warm, and that she's trying to make herself
beautiful in a hundred tragedies of the wild.
If women only thought of these things! But we women have a very
convenient hand-made imagination all our own, and what upsets us as
perfect ladies we graciously avoid. Yet if the petticoated Vandal in
that ermine coat were compelled to behold from her box-chair in the
Metropolitan, not a musty old love-affair set to music, but the
spectacle of how each little animal whose skin she has appropriated
had been made to suffer, the hours and sometimes days of torture it
had endured, and how, if still alive when the trapper made the rounds
of his sets, it had been carefully strangled to death by that frugal
harvester, to the end that the pelt might not be bloodied and reckoned
only as a "second"--if the weasel-decked lady, I repeat, had to
witness all this with her own beaded eyes, our wilderness would not be
growing into quite such a lonely wilderness.
Or some day, let's put it, as one of these beaver-clad ladies tripped
through the Ramble in Central Park, supposing a steel-toothed trap
suddenly and quite unexpectedly snapped shut on her silk-stockinged
ankle and she writhed and moaned there in public, over the week-end.
Then possibly her cries of suffering might make her sisters see a
little more light. But the beaver, they tell me, is trapped under the
ice, always in running water. A mud-ball is placed a little above the
waiting trap, to leave the water opaque, and when the angry iron jaws
have snapped shut on their victim, that victim drowns, a prisoner.
Francois used to contend shruggingly that it was an easy death. It may
be easy compared with some of the other deaths imposed on his furry
captives. But it's not my idea of bliss, drowning under a foot or two
of ice with a steel trap mangling your ankle for full measure!
"We live forward, but we understand backward." I don't know who first
said it. But the older I grow the more I realize how true it is.
_Sunday the Umptieth_
I've written to Peter, reminding him of his promise, and asking about
the Pasadena bungalow.
It seems the one way out. I'm tired of living like an Alpine ibex, all
day long above the snow-line. I'm tired of this blind alley of
inaction. I'm tired of decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to
get away to think things over, to step back and regain a perspective on
the over-smudged canvas of life.
To remain at Alabama Ranch during the winter can mean only a winter of
discontent and drifting--and drifting closer and closer to uncharted
rocky ledges. There's no ease for the mouth where one tooth aches, as
the Chinese say.
Dinky-Dunk, I think, has an inkling of how I feel. He is very
thoughtful and kind in small things, and sometimes looks at me with
the eyes of a boy's dog which has been forbidden to follow the village
gang a-field. And it's not that I dislike him, or that he grates on
me, or that I'm not thankful enough for the thousand and one little
kind things he does. But it's rubbing on the wrong side of the glass.
It can't bring back the past. My husband of to-day is not the
Dinky-Dunk I once knew and loved and laughed with. To go back to dogs,
it reminds me of Chinkie's St. Bernard, "Father Tom," whom Chinkie
petted and trained and loved almost to adoration. And when poor old
Father Tom was killed Chinkie in his madness insisted that a
taxidermist should stuff and mount that dead dog, which stood,
thereafter, not a quick and living companion but a rather gruesome
monument of a vanished friendship. It was, of course, the shape and
color of the thing he had once loved; but you can't feed a hungry
heart by staring at a pair of glass eyes and a wired tail without any
wag in it.
_Saturday the Ninth_
Struthers and I have been busy making clothes, during the absence of
Dinky-Dunk, who has been off duck-shooting for the last three days. He
complained of being a bit tuckered out and having stood the gaff too
long and needing a change. The outing will do him good. The children
miss him, of course, but he's promised to bring Dinkie home an Indian
bow-and-arrow. I can see death and destruction hanging over the
glassware of this household.... The weather has been stormy, and
yesterday Whinnie and Struthers put up the stove in the bunk-house.
They were a long time about it, but I was reluctant to stop the
flutterings of Cupid's wings.
_Tuesday the Twelfth_
I had a brief message from Peter stating the Pasadena house is
entirely at my disposal.... Dinky-Dunk came back with a real
pot-hunter's harvest of wild ducks, which we'll pick and dress and
freeze for winter use. I'm taking the breast-feathers for my pillows
and Whinstane Sandy is taking what's left for a sleeping-bag--from
which I am led to infer that he's still reconciled to a winter of
solitude. Struthers, I know, could tell him of a warmer bag than that,
lined with downier feathers from the pinions of Eros. But, as I've
said before, Fate, being blind, weaves badly.
_Friday the Fifteenth_
I've just told Dinky-Dunk of my decision to take the kiddies to
California for the winter months. He rather surprised me by agreeing
with everything I suggested. He feels, I think, as I do, that there's
danger in going aimlessly on and on as we have been doing. And it's
really a commonplace for the prairie rancher--when he can afford
it--to slip down to California for the winter. They go by the
thousand, by the train-load.
_Friday the Sixth_
It's three long weeks since I've had time for either ink or retrospect.
But at last I'm settled, though I feel as though I'd died and ascended
into Heaven, or at least changed my world, as the Chinks say, so
different is Pasadena to the prairie and Alabama Ranch. For as I sit
here on the _loggia_ of Peter's house I'm bathed in a soft breeze that
is heavy with a fragrance of flowers, the air is the air of our
balmiest midsummer, and in a pepper-tree not thirty feet away a
mocking-bird is singing for all it's worth. It seems a poignantly
beautiful world. And everything suggests peace. But it was not an easy
peace to attain.
In the first place, the trip down was rather a nightmare. It brought
home to me the fact that I had three young barbarians to break and
subjugate, three untrained young outlaws who went wild with their
first plunge into train-travel and united in defiance of Struthers and
her foolishly impressive English uniform which always makes me think
of Regent Park. I have a suspicion that Dinky-Dunk all the while knew
of the time I'd have, but sagely held his peace.
I had intended, when I left home, to take the boat at Victoria and go
down to San Pedro, for I was hungry for salt water and the feel of a
rolling deck under my feet again. But the antics of my three little
outlaws persuaded me, before we pulled into Calgary, that it would be
as well to make the trip south as short a one as possible. Dinkie
disgraced me in the dining-car by insisting on "drinking" his mashed
potatoes, and made daily and not always ineffectual efforts to
appropriate all the fruit on the table, and on the last day, when I'd
sagaciously handed him over to the tender mercies of Struthers, I
overheard this dialogue:
"I want shooder in my soup!"
"But little boys don't eat sugar in their soup."
"I want shooder in my soup!"
"But, darling, mommie doesn't eat sugar in her soup!"
"Shooder! Dinkie wants shooder, shooder in his soup!"
"Daddy never eats shooder in his soup, Sweetness."
"I want shooder!"
"But really nice little boys don't ask for sugar in their soup,"
argued the patient-eyed Struthers.
"_Shooder!_" insisted the implacable tyrant. And he got it.
There was an exceptional number of babies and small children on board
and my unfraternal little prairie-waifs did not see why every rattle
and doll and automatic toy of their little fellow travelers and sister
tourists shouldn't promptly become their own private property. And
traveling with twins not yet a year old is scarcely conducive to rest.
And yet, for all the worry and tumult, I found a new peace creeping
into my soul. It was the first sight of the Rockies, I think, which
brought the change. I'd grown tired of living on a billiard-table,
without quite knowing it, tired of the trimly circumscribed monotony
of material life, of the isolating flat contention against hunger and
want. But the mountains took me out of myself. They were Peter's
windmill, raised to the Nth power. They loomed above me, seeming to
say: "We are timeless. You, puny one, can live but a day." They stood
there as they had stood from the moment God first whispered: "Let
there be light"--and there was light. But no, I'm wrong there, as
Peter would very promptly have told me, for it was only in the
Cambrian Period that the cornerstone of the Rockies was laid. The
geologic clock ticked out its centuries until the swamps of the Coal
Period were full of Peter's Oldest Inhabitants in the form of
Dinosaurs and then came the Cretaceous Period and the Great Architect
looked down and bade the Rockies arise, and tooled them into beauty
with His blue-green glaciers and His singing rivers, and touched the
lordliest peaks with wine-glow and filled the azure valleys with music
and peace. And we threaded along those valley-sides on our little
ribbons of steel, skirted the shouting rivers and plunged into tiny
twisted tubes of darkness, emerging again into the light and once more
hearing the timeless giants, with their snow-white heads against the
sunset, repeat their whisper: "We live and are eternal. Ye, who fret
about our feet, dream for a day, and are forgotten!"
But we seemed to be stepping out into a new world, by the time we got
to Pasadena. It was a summery and flowery and holiday world, and it
impressed me as being solely and scrupulously organized for pleasure.
Yet all minor surprises were submerged in the biggest surprise of
Peter's bungalow, which is really more like a _château_, and strikes
me as being singularly like Peter himself, not amazingly impressive to
look at, perhaps, but hiding from the world a startingly rich and
luxurious interior. The house itself, half hidden in shrubbery, is of
weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with
the _patina_ of time upon it. But it is a restful change from the
spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of
the paint-brush and the lawn-valet's shears, so smug and new and
strident in its paraded opulence. Peter's gardens, in fact, are a
rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel
roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of
refinement driven too high had broken and tumbled over on itself.
The house, which is the shape of an "E" without the middle stroke, has
a green-sodded _patio_ between the two wings, with a small fountain
and a stained marble basin at the center. There are shade-trees and
date-palms and shrubs and Romanesque-looking stone seats about narrow
walks, for this is the only really formalized portion of the entire
property. This leads off into a grove and garden, a confusion of
flowers and trees where I've already been able to spot out a number of
orange trees, some of them well fruited, several lemon and fig trees,
a row of banana trees, or plants, whichever they should be called,
besides pepper and palm and acacia and a long-legged double-file of
eucalyptus at the rear. And in between is a pergola and a mixture of
mimosa and wistaria and tamarisk and poppies and trellised roses and
one woody old geranium with a stalk like a crab-apple trunk and growth
enough to cover half a dozen prairie hay-stacks.
But, as I've already implied, it was the inside of the house that
astonished me. It is much bigger than it looks and is crowded with the
most gorgeous old things in copper and brass and leather and mahogany
that I ever saw under one roof. It has three open fireplaces, a huge
one of stone in the huge living-room, and rough-beamed ceilings of
redwood, and Spanish tiled floors, and chairs upholstered with cowhide
with the ranch-brand still showing in the tanned leather, and tables
of Mexican mahogany set in redwood frames, and several convenient
little electric heaters which can be carried from room to room as they
are needed.
Pinshaw, Peter's gardener and care-taker, had before our arrival
picked several clumps of violets, with perfume like the English
violets, and the house was aired and everything waiting and ready when
we came, even to two bottles of certified milk in the icebox for the
babies and half a dozen Casaba melons for their elders. My one
disturbing thought is that it will be a hard house to live up to. But
Struthers, who is not untouched with her _folie de grandeur_, has the
slightly flurried satisfaction of an exile who has at last come into
her own. One of the first things I must do, however, is to teach my
kiddies to respect Peter's belongings. In one cabinet of books, which
is locked, I have noticed several which are by "Peter Ketley" himself.
Yet that name meant nothing to me, when I met it out on the prairie
and humiliated its owner by converting him into one of my hired hands.
_Ce monde est plein de fous._
_Monday the Sixteenth_
This is a great climate for meditation. And I have been meditating.
Back at Alabama Ranch, I suppose, there's twenty degrees of frost and
a northwest wind like a search-warrant. Here there's a pellucid blue
sky, just enough breeze to rustle the bamboo-fronds behind me, and a
tall girl in white lawn, holding a pale green parasol over her head
and meandering slowly along the sun-steeped boulevard, which smells of
hot tar.
I've been sitting here staring down that boulevard, with the strong
light making me squint a little. I've been watching the two rows of
date-palms along the curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring
lazily in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth and shining
asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a
row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and
stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped
and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished and opulent. The
street is very quiet, but half-way down the block I can see a Jap
gardener in brown denim sedately watering a well-barbered terrace.
Still farther away, somebody, in one of the deep-shadowed porches, is
tinkling a ukelele, and somebody that I can't see is somewhere beating
a rug. I can see a little rivulet of water that flows sparkling down
the asphalted runnel of the curb. Then the clump of bamboos back by
Peter's bedroom window rustles crisply again and is quiet and the
silence is broken by a nurse-maid calling to a child sitting in a toy
motor-wagon. Then a touring-car purrs past, with the sun flashing on
its polished metal equipment, and the toy motor child being led
reluctantly homeward by the maid cries shrilly, and in the silence
that ensues I can hear the faint hiss of a spray-nozzle that builds a
transient small rainbow just beyond the trellis of Cherokee roses from
which a languid white petal falls, from time to time.
It's a _dolce-far-niente_ day, as all the days seem to be here, and
the best that I can do is sit and brood like a Plymouth Rock with a
full crop. But I've been thinking things over. And I've come to
several conclusions.
One is that I'm not so contented as I thought I was going to be. I am
oppressed by a shadowy feeling of in some way sailing under false
colors. I am also hounded by an equally shadowy impression that I'm a
convalescent. Yet I find myself vulgarly healthy, my kiddies have all
acquired a fine coat of tan, and only Struthers is slightly off her
feed, having acquired a not unmerited attack of cholera morbus from
over-indulgence in Casaba melon. But I keep wondering if Dinky-Dunk is
getting the right sort of things to eat, if he's lonely, and what he
does in his spare time.
And another conclusion I've come to is that men, much as I hate to
admit it, are built of a stronger fiber than women. They seem able to
stand shock better than the weaker sex. They are not so apt to go down
under defeat, to take the full count, as I have done. For I still have
to face the fact that I was a failure. Then I turned tail and fled
from the scene of my collapse. That flight, it is true, has brought me
a certain brand of peace, but it is not an enduring peace, for you
can't run away from what's in your own heart. And already I'm restless
and ill-at-ease. It's not so much that I'm dissatisfied; it's more
that I'm unsatisfied. There still seems to be something momentous left
out of the plan of things. I have the teasing feeling of confronting
something which is still impending, which is being withheld, which I
can not reach out for, no matter how I try, until the time is ripe....
Those rustling bamboos so close to the room where I sleep have begun
to bother me so much that I'm migrating to a new bedroom to-night.
"There's never anything without something!"
_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_
Little Dinky-Dunk has adventured into illicit knowledge of his first
orange from the bough. It was one of Peter's low-hanging Valencias,
and seems to have left no ill-effects, though I prefer that all inside
matter be carefully edited before consumption by that small Red. So
Struthers hereafter must stand the angel with the flaming sword and
guard the gates that open upon that tree of forbidden fruit. Her own
colic, by the way, is a thing of the past, and at present she's
extremely interested in Pinshaw, who, she tells me, was once a
cabinet-maker in England, and came out to California for his health.
Struthers, as usual, is attempting to reach the heart of her new
victim by way of the stomach, and Pinshaw, apparently, is not
unappreciative, since he appears a little more punctually at his
watering and raking and gardening and has his ears up like a rabbit
for the first inkling of his lady-love's matutinal hand-out. And poor
old Whinstane Sandy, back at Alabama Ranch, is still making sheep's
eyes at the patches which Struthers once sewed on his breeks, like as
not, and staring with a moonish smile at the atrabilious photograph
which the one camera-artist of Buckhorn made of Struthers and my three
pop-eyed kiddies....
These are, without exception, the friendliest people I have ever known.
The old millionaire lumberman from Bay City, who lives next door to me,
pushes through the hedge with platefuls of green figs and tid-bits from
his gardens, and delightful girls whose names I don't even know come in
big cars and ask to take little Dinkie off for one of their lawn
_fêtes_. It even happened that a movie-actor--who, I later discovered,
was a drug-addict--insisted on accompanying me home and informed me on
the way that I had a dream of a face for camera-work. It quite set me
up, for all its impertinence, until I learned to my sorrow that it had
flowered out of nothing more than an extra shot in the arm.
They are a friendly and companionable folk, and they'd keep me on the
go all the time if I'd let 'em. But I've only had energy enough to run
over to Los Angeles twice, though there are a dozen or two people I
must look up in that more frolicsome suburb. But I can't get away from
the feeling, the truly rural feeling, that I'm among strangers. I
can't rid myself of the extremely parochial impression that these
people are not my people. And there's a valetudinarian aspect to the
place which I find slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one
particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and
the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of
the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old _beaux_ sit about in
Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their
arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet--not if I know
it--not by a long shot!
But one has to be educated for idleness, I find, almost as much as for
industry. I knew the trick once, but I've lost the hang of it. The one
thing that impresses me, on coming straight from prairie life to a
city like this, is how much women-folk can have done for them without
quite knowing it. The machinery of life here is so intricate and yet
so adequate that it denudes them of all the normal and primitive
activities of their grandmothers, so they have to invent troubles and
contrive quite unnecessary activities to keep from being bored to
extinction. Everything seems to come to them ready-made and duly
prepared, their bread, their light and fuel and water, their meat and
milk. All that, and the daily drudgery it implies, is made ready and
performed beyond their vision, and they have no balky pumps to prime
and no fires to build, and they'd probably be quite disturbed to think
that their roasts came from a slaughter-house with bloody floors and
that their breakfast rolls, instead of coming ready-made into the
world, are mixed and molded in bake-rooms where men work sweating by
night, stripped to the waist, like stokers.
_Wednesday the Second_
Dinky-Dunk's letter, which reached me Monday, was very short and
almost curt. It depressed me for a day. I tried to fight against that
feeling, when it threatened to return yesterday, and was at Peter's
piano shouting to the kiddies:
"Coon, Coon, Coon, I wish my color'd fade!
Coon, Coon, Coon, I'd like a different shade!"
when Struthers carried in to me, with a sort of triumphant and
tight-lipped I-told-you-so air, a copy of the morning's _Los Angeles
Examiner_. She had it folded so that I found myself confronting a
picture of Lady Alicia Newland, Lady Alicia in the "Teddy-Bear" suit
of an aviator, with a fur-lined leather jacket and helmet and heavy
gauntlets and leggings and the same old audacious look out of the
quietly smiling eyes, which were squinting a little because of the
sunlight.
Lady Allie, I found on perusing the letter-press, had been flying with
some of the North Island officers down in San Diego Bay. And now she
and the Right Honorable Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton Ainsley-Brook, of
the British Imperial Commission to Canada, were to attempt a flight to
Kelly Field Number Two, at San Antonio, in Texas, in a De Haviland
machine. She had told the _Examiner_ reporter who had caught her as
she stood beside a naval sea-plane, that she "loved" flying and loved
taking a chance and that her worst trouble was with nose-bleed, which
she'd get over in time, she felt sure. And if the Texas flight was a
success she would try to arrange for a flight down to the Canal at the
same time that the Pacific fleet comes through from Colon.
"Isn't that 'er, all over?" demanded Struthers, forgetting her place
and her position and even her aspirate in the excitement of the
moment. But I handed back the paper without comment. For a day,
however, Lady Allie has loomed large in my thoughts.
_Sunday the Thirteenth_
It will be two weeks to-morrow since I've had a line from Dinky-Dunk.
The world about me is a world of beauty, but I'm worried and restless
and Edna Millay's lines keep running through my head:
"...East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat--the sky
Will cave in on him by and by!"
_Wednesday the Sixteenth_
Peter has written to me saying that unless he hears from me to the
contrary he thinks he can arrange to "run through" to the Coast in
time for the Rose Tournament here on New Year's Day. He takes the
trouble to explain that he'll stay at the Alexandria in Los Angeles,
so there'll be no possible disturbance to me and my family routine.
That's so like Peter!
But there's been no word from Dinky-Dunk. The conviction is growing in
my mind that he's not at Alabama Ranch.
_Monday the Twenty-first_
A letter has just come to me this morning from Whinstane Sandy,
written in lead-pencil. It said, with an orthography all its own, that
Duncan had been in bed for two weeks with what they thought was
pneumonia, but was up again and able to eat something, and not to
worry. It seemed a confident and cheerful message at first, but the
oftener I read it the more worried I became. So one load was taken off
my heart only to make room for another. My first decision was to start
north at once, to get back to Alabama Ranch and my Dinky-Dunk as fast
as steam could take me. I was still the sharer of his joys and
sorrows, and ought to be with him when things were at their worst. But
on second thought it didn't seem quite fair to the kiddies, to dump
them from midsummer into shack-life and a sub-zero climate. And
always, always, always, there were the children to be considered. So I
wired Ed Sherman, the station-agent at Buckhorn, asking him to send
out a message to Duncan, saying I was waiting for him in Pasadena and
to come at once....
I wonder what his answer will be? It's surrender, on my part. It's
capitulation, and Dinky-Dunk, of course, will recognize that fact. Or
he ought to. But it's not this I'm worrying over. It's Duncan himself,
and his health. It gives me a guilty feeling.... I once thought that I
was made to heal hearts. But about all I can do, I find, is to bruise
them.
_Thursday the Twenty-fourth_
A telegram of just one word has come from Duncan, dated at Calgary. It
said: "Coming." I could feel a little tremble in my knees as I read
it. He must be better, or he'd never be able to travel. To-morrow will
be Christmas Day, but we've decided to postpone all celebration until
the kiddies' daddy is on the scene. It will never seem much like
Christmas to us Eskimos, at eighty-five in the shade. And we're
temporarily subduing that red-ink day to the eyes of the children by
carefully secreting in one of Peter's clothes-closets each and every
present that has come for them.
_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_
Dinky-Dunk is here. He arrived this morning, and we were all at the
station in our best bib-and-tucker and making a fine show of being
offhanded and light-hearted. But when I saw the porter helping down my
Diddums, so white-faced and weak and tired-looking, something swelled
up and burst just under my floating ribs and for a moment I thought my
heart had had a blow-out like a tire and stopped working for ever and
ever. Heaven knows I held my hands tight, and tried to be cheerful,
but in spite of everything I could do, on the way home, I couldn't
stop the tears from running slowly down my cheeks. They kept running
and running, as though I had nothing to do with it, exactly as a wound
bleeds. The poor man, of course, was done out by the long trip. He was
just _blooey_, and saved himself from being pitiful by shrinking back
into a shell of chalky-faced self-sufficiency. He has said very
little, and has eaten nothing, but had a sleep this afternoon for a
couple of hours, out in the _patio_ on a _chaise-longue_. It hurt him,
I think, to find his own children look at him with such cold and
speculative eyes. But he has changed shockingly since they last saw
him. And they have so much to fill up their little lives. They haven't
yet reached the age when life teaches them they'd better stick to
what's given them, even though there's a bitter tang to its sweetness!
_Wednesday the Thirtieth_
It is incredible, what three days of rest and forced feeding at my
implacable hands, have done for Dinky-Dunk. He is still a little shaky
on his pins, if he walks far, and the noonday sun makes him dizzy, but
his eyes don't look so much like saucers and I haven't heard the trace
of a cough from him all to-day. Illness, of course, is not romantic, but
it plays its altogether too important part in life, and has to be faced.
And there is something so disturbingly immuring and depersonalizing
about it! Dinky-Dunk appears rather in a world by himself. Only once, so
far, has he seemed to step back to our every-day old world. That was
when he wandered into the Blue Room in the East Wing where little Dinkie
has been sleeping. I was seated beside his little lordship's bed
singing:
"The little pigs sleep with their tails curled up,"
and when that had been exhausted, rambling on to
"The sailor being both tall and slim,
The lady fell in love with him,"
when _pater familias_ wandered in and inquired, "Whyfore the cabaret?"
I explained that Dinkie, since coming south, had seemed to demand an
even-song or two before slipping off.
"I see that I'll have to take our son in hand," announced
Dinky-Dunk--but there was just the shadow of a smile about his lips as
he went slowly out and closed the door after him.
To-night, when I told Dinky-Dunk that Peter would in all likelihood be
here to-morrow, he listened without batting an eyelash. But he asked
if I'd mind handing him a cigarette, and he studied my face long and
intently. I don't know what he saw there, or what he concluded, for I
did my best to keep it as noncommittal as possible. If there is any
move, it must be from him. That sour-inked Irishman called Shaw has
said that women are the wooers in this world. A lot he knows about
it!... Yet something has happened, in the last half-hour, which both
disturbs and puzzles me. When I was unpacking Dinky-Dunk's second
trunk, which had stood neglected for almost four long days, I came
across the letter which I thought I'd put away in the back of the
ranch ledger and had failed to find.... And he had it, all the time!
The redoubtable Struthers, it must be recorded, to-day handed me
another paper, and almost as triumphantly as the first one. She'd
picked it up on her way home from the druggist's, where she went for
aspirin for Dinky-Dunk. On what was labeled its "Woman's Page" was yet
another photographic reproduction of the fair Lady Allie in aviation
togs and a head-line which read: "Insists On Tea Above The Clouds."
But I plainly disappointed the expectant Struthers by promptly handing
the paper back to her and by declining to make any comment.
_Thursday the Thirty-first_
Peter walked in on us to-day, a little less spick and span, I'm
compelled to admit, than I had expected of one in his position, but as
easy and unconcerned as though he had dropped in from across the way
for a cigarette and a cup of tea. And I played up to that pose by
having Struthers wheel the tea-wagon out into the _patio_, where we
gathered about it in a semicircle, as decorously as though we were
sitting in a curate's garden to talk over the program for the next
meeting of the Ladies' Auxiliary.
There we sat, Dinky-Dunk, my husband who was in love with another woman;
Peter, my friend, who was in love with me, and myself, who was too busy
bringing up a family to be in love with anybody. There we sat in that
beautiful garden, in that balmy and beautiful afternoon sunlight, with
the bamboos whispering and a mocking-bird singing from its place on the
pepper-tree, stirring our small cups and saying "Lemon, please," or
"Just one lump, thank you." It may not be often, but life _does_
occasionally surprise us by being theatrical. For I could not banish
from my bones an impression of tremendous reservations, of guarded
waiting and watching from every point of that sedate and quiet-mannered
little triangle. Yet for only one moment had I seen it come to the
front. That was during the moment when Dinky-Dunk and Peter first shook
hands. On both faces, for that moment, I caught the look with which two
knights measure each other. Peter, as he lounged back in his wicker
chair and produced his familiar little briar pipe, began to remind me
rather acutely of that pensive old _picador_ in Zuloaga's _The Victim of
The Fête_, the placid and plaintive and only vaguely hopeful knight on
his bony old Rosinante, not quite ignorant of the fact that he must
forage on to other fields and look for better luck in newer ventures,
yet not quite forgetful that life, after all, is rather a blithe
adventure and that the man who refuses to surrender his courage, no
matter what whimsical turns the adventure may take, is still to be
reckoned the conqueror. But later on he was jolly enough and direct
enough, when he got to showing Dinky-Dunk his books and curios. I
suppose, at heart, he was about as interested in those things as an
aquarium angel-fish is in a Sunday afternoon visitor. But if it was
pretense, and nothing more, there was very actual kindliness in it. And
there was nothing left for me but to sit tight, and refill the little
lacquered gold cups when necessary, and smile non-committally when
Dinky-Dunk explained that my idea of Heaven was a place where husbands
were served _en brochette_, and emulate the Priest and the Levite by
passing by on the other side when Peter asked me if I'd ever heard that
the West was good for mules and men but hard on horses and women. And it
suddenly struck me as odd, the timidities and reticences which nature
imposes on our souls. It seemed so ridiculous that the three of us
couldn't sit there and unbosom our hearts of what was hidden away in
them, that we couldn't be open and honest and aboveboard and say just
what we felt and thought, that we couldn't quietly talk things out to an
end and find where each and all of us stood. But men and women are not
made that way. Otherwise, I suppose, life would be too Edenic, and we'd
part company with a very old and venerable interest in Paradise!
[Illustration: "She's not dead?" I asked in a breath]
_Saturday the Second_
Peter had arranged to come for us with a motor-car and carry us all
off to the Rose Tournament yesterday morning, "for I do want to be
sitting right next to that little tike of yours," he explained,
meaning Dinkie, "when he bumps into his first brass band!"
But little Dinkie didn't hear his brass band, and we didn't go to the
Rose Tournament, although it was almost at our doors and some eighty
thousand crowded automobiles foregathered here from the rest of the
state to get a glimpse of it. For Peter, who is staying at the Greene
here instead of at the Alexandria over in Los Angeles, presented
himself before I'd even sat down to breakfast and before lazy old
Dinky-Dunk was even out of bed.
Peter, I noticed, had a somewhat hollow look about the eye, but I
accepted it as nothing more than the after-effects of his long trip,
and blithely commanded him to sit down and partake of my coffee.
Peter, however, wasn't thinking about coffee.
"I'm afraid," he began, "that I'm bringing you rather--rather bad
news."
We stood for a moment with our gazes locked. He seemed appraising me,
speculating on just what effect this message of his might have on me.
"What is it?" I asked, with that forlorn tug at inner reserves which
life teaches us to send over the wire as we grow older.
"I've come," explained Peter, "simply because this thing would have
reached you a little later in your morning paper--and I hated the
thought of having it spring out at you that way. So you won't mind,
will you? You'll understand the motive behind the message?"
"But what is it?" I repeated, a little astonished by this obliquity in
a man customarily so direct.
"It's about Lady Newland," he finally said. And the solemnity of his
face rather frightened me.
"She's not dead?" I asked in a breath.
Peter shook his head from side to side.
"She's been rather badly hurt," he said, after several moments of
silence. "Her plane was winged yesterday afternoon by a navy flier
over San Diego Bay. She didn't fall, but it was a forced landing and
her machine had taken fire before they could get her out of her seat."
"You mean she was burnt?" I cried, chilled by the horror of it.
And, inapposite as it seemed, my thoughts flashed back to that lithe
and buoyant figure, and then to the picture of it charred and scorched
and suffering.
"Only her face," was Peter's quiet and very deliberate reply.
"Only her face," I repeated, not quite understanding him.
"The men from the North Bay field had her out a minute or two after
she landed. But practically the whole plane was afire. Her heavy
flying coat and gauntlets saved her body and hands. But her face was
unprotected. She--"
"Do you mean she'll be _disfigured_?" I asked, remembering the
loveliness of that face with its red and wilful lips and its
ever-changing tourmaline eyes.
"I'm afraid so," was Peter's answer. "But I've been wiring, and you'll
be quite safe in telling your husband that she's in no actual danger.
The Marine Hospital officials have acknowledged that no flame was
inhaled, that it's merely temporary shock, and, of course, the
face-burn."
"But what can they do?" I asked, in little more than a whisper.
"They're trying the new ambersine treatment, and later on, I suppose,
they can rely on skin-grafting and facial surgery," Peter explained to
me.
"Is it that bad?" I asked, sitting down in one of the empty chairs,
for the mere effort to vision any such disfigurement had brought a
Channel-crossing and Calais-packet feeling to me.
"It's very sad," said Peter, more ill-at-ease than I'd ever seen him
before, "But there's positively no danger, remember. It won't be so bad
as your morning paper will try to make it out. They've sensationalized
it, of course. That's why I wanted to be here first, and give you the
facts. They are distressing enough, God knows, without those yellow
reporters working them over for wire consumption."
I was glad that Peter didn't offer to stay, didn't even seem to wish
to stay. I wanted quietness and time to think the thing over.
Dinky-Dunk, I realized, would have to be told, and told at once. It
would, of course, be a shock to him. And it would be something more.
It would be a sudden crowding to some final issue of all those
possibilities which lay like spring-traps beneath the under-brush of
our indifference. I had no way of knowing what it was that had
attracted him to Lady Alicia. Beauty of face, of course, must have
been a factor in it. And that beauty was now gone. But love, according
to the Prophets and the Poets, overcometh all things. And in her very
helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin Allie might
appeal to him in a more personal and more perilous way. My Diddums
himself, of late, had appealed more to me in his weakness and his
unhappiness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There was a
time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate his successes. And yet
he was my husband. He was _mine_. And it was a human enough instinct
to fight for what was one's own. But that wild-bird part of man known
as his will could never be caged and chained. If somewhere far off it
beheld beauty and nobility it must be free to wing its way where it
wished. The only bond that held it was the bond of free-giving and
goodness. And if it abjured such things as that, the sooner the flight
took place and the colors were shown, the better. If on the home-bough
beside him nested neither beauty nor nobility, it was only natural
that he should wander a-field for what I had failed to give him. And
now, in this final test, I must not altogether fail him. For once in
my life, I concluded, I had to be generous.
So I waited until Dinky-Dunk emerged. I waited, deep in thought, while
he splashed like a sea-lion in his bath, and called out to Struthers
almost gaily for his glass of orange-juice, and shaved, and opened and
closed drawers, and finished dressing and came out in his cool-looking
suit of cricketer's flannel, so immaculate and freshly-pressed that
one would never dream it had been bought in England and packed in
mothballs for four long years.
I heard him asking for the kiddies while I was still out in the
_patio_ putting the finishing touches to his breakfast-table, and his
grunt that was half a sigh when he learned that they'd been sent off
before he'd had a glimpse of them. And I could see him inhale a
lungful of the balmy morning air as he stood in the open doorway and
stared, not without approval, at me and the new-minted day.
"Why the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?" he demanded as he joined me at the
little wicker table.
"I've had some rather disturbing news," I told him, wondering just how
to begin.
"The kiddies?" he asked, stopping short.
I stared at him closely as I shook my head in answer to that question.
He looked leaner and frailer and less robustious than of old. But in
my heart of hearts I liked him that way. It left him the helpless and
unprotesting victim of that run-over maternal instinct of mine which
took wayward joy in mothering what it couldn't master. It had brought
him a little closer to me. But that contact, I remembered, was perhaps
to be only something of the moment.
"Dinky-Dunk," I told him as quietly as I could, "I want you to go down
to San Diego and see Lady Allie."
It was a less surprised look than a barricaded one that came into his
eyes.
"Why?" he asked as he slowly seated himself across the table from me.
"Because I think she needs you," I found the courage to tell him.
"Why?" he asked still again.
"There has been an accident," I told him.
"What sort of accident?" he quickly inquired, with one hand arrested
as he went to shake out his table-napkin.
"It was an air-ship accident. And Lady Allie's been hurt."
"Badly?" he asked, as our glances met.
"Not badly, in one way," I explained to him. "She's not in any danger,
I mean. But her plane caught fire, and she's been burned about the
face."
His lips parted slightly, as he sat staring at me. And slowly up into
his colorless face crept a blighted look, a look which brought a vague
yet vast unhappiness to me as I sat contemplating it.
"Do you mean she's disfigured," he asked, "that it's something she'll
always--"
"I'm afraid so," I said, when he did not finish his sentence.
He sat looking down at his empty plate for a long time.
"And you want me to go?" he finally said.
"Yes," I told him.
He was silent for still another ponderable space of time.
"But do you understand--" he began. And for the second time he didn't
finish his sentence.
"I understand," I told him, doing my best to sit steady under his
inquisitorial eye. Then he looked down at the empty plate again.
"All right," he said at last. He spoke in a quite flat and colorless
tone. But it masked a decision which we both must have recognized as
being momentous. And I knew, without saying anything further, that he
would go.
_Sunday the Third_
Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early this morning before I
was up. This naturally surprised me. But what surprised me more was
the way he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about the eyes.
He seemed so wretched that I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.
"_She wouldn't see me!_" was all he said as I stopped him on the way
to his room.
But he rather startled me, fifteen minutes later, by calling up the
Greene and asking for Peter. And before half an hour had dragged past
Peter appeared in person. He ignored the children, and apparently
avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, where he and
Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up and down, with the shadows
dappling their white-clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up
and down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two ministers of state
in a national crisis. And something, I scarcely knew what, kept me
from going out and joining them.
It was Peter himself who finally came in to me. He surprised me, in
the first place, by shaking hands. He did it with that wistful
wandering-picador smile of his on his rather Zuloagaish face.
"I've got to say good-by," I found him saying to me.
"Peter!" I called out in startled protest, trying to draw back so I
could see him better. But he kept my hand.
"I'm going east to-night," he quite casually announced. "But above all
things I want you and your Dinky-Dunk to hang on here as long as you
can. _He_ needs it. I'm stepping out. No, I don't mean that, exactly,
for I'd never stepped in. But it's a fine thing, in this world, for
men and women to be real friends. And I know, until we shuffle off,
that we're going to be that!"
"Peter!" I cried again, trying not to choke up with the sudden sense
of deprivation that was battering my heart to pieces. And the light in
faithful old Peter's eyes didn't make it any easier.
But he dropped my hand, of a sudden, and went stumbling rather
awkwardly over the Spanish tiling as he passed out to the waiting car.
I watched him as he climbed into it, stiffly yet with a show of
careless bravado, for all the world like the lean-jowled knight of the
vanished fête mounting his bony old Rosinante.
It was nearly half an hour later that Dinky-Dunk came into the
cool-shadowed living-room where I was making a pretense of being busy
at cutting down some of Dinkie's rompers for Pee-Wee, who most
assuredly must soon bid farewell to skirts.
"Will you sit down, please?" he said with an abstracted sort of
formality. For he'd caught me on the wing, half-way back from the open
window, where I'd been glancing out to make sure Struthers was on
guard with the children.
My face was a question, I suppose, even when I didn't speak.
"There's something I want you to be very quiet and courageous about,"
was my husband's none too tranquillizing beginning. And I could feel
my pulse quicken.
"What is it?" I asked, wondering just what women should do to make
themselves quiet and courageous.
"It's about Allie," answered my husband, speaking so slowly and
deliberately that it sounded unnatural. "She shot herself last night.
She--she killed herself, with an army revolver she'd borrowed from a
young officer down there."
I couldn't quite understand, at first. The words seemed like
half-drowned things my mind had to work over and resuscitate and coax,
back into life.
"This is terrible!" I said at last, feebly, foolishly, as the meaning
of it all filtered through my none too active brain.
"It's terrible for me," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk, with a self-pity
which I wasn't slow to resent.
"But why aren't you there?" I demanded. "Why aren't you there to keep
a little decency about the thing? Why aren't you looking after what's
left of her?"
Dinky-Dunk's eye evaded mine, but only for a moment.
"Colonel Ainsley-Brook is coming back from Washington to take
possession of the remains," he explained with a sort of dry-lipped
patience, "and take them home."
"But why should an outsider like--"
Dinky-Dunk stopped me with a gesture.
"He and Allie were married, a little over three weeks ago," my husband
quietly informed me. And for the second time I had to work life into
what seemed limp and sodden words.
"Did you know about that?" I asked.
"Yes, Allie wrote to me about it, at the time," he replied with a sort
of coerced candor. "She said it seemed about the only thing left to
do."
"Why should she say that?"
Dinky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely like a pleading look
in his haggard eye.
"Wouldn't it be better to keep away from all that, at a time like
this?" he finally asked.
"No," I told him, "this is the time we _can't_ keep away from it. She
wrote you that because she was in love with you. Isn't that the
truth?"
Dinky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were attempting a movement of
protest, and then dropped it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous
with a sort of inward-burning misery. But I had no intention of being
merciful. I had no chance of being merciful. It was like an operation
without ether, but it had to be gone through with. It had to be cut
out, in some way, that whole cancerous growth of hate and distrust.
"Isn't that the truth?" I repeated.
"Oh, Tabby, don't turn the knife in the wound!" cried Dinky-Dunk, with
his face more than ever pinched with misery.
"Then it _is_ a wound!" I proclaimed in dolorous enough triumph. "But
there's still another question, Dinky-Dunk, you must answer," I went
on, speaking as slowly and precisely as I could, as though deliberation
in speech might in some way make clearer a matter recognized as only
too dark in spirit. "And it must be answered honestly, without any
quibble as to the meaning of words. Were you in love with Lady Allie?"
His gesture of repugnance, of seeming self-hate, was both a prompt and
a puzzling one.
"That's the hideous, the simply hideous part of it all," he cried out
in a sort of listless desperation.
"Why hideous?" I demanded, quite clear-headed, and quite determined
that now or never the overscored slate of suspicion should be wiped
clean. I still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he might
yet usher before me some miraculously simple explanation that would
wipe his scutcheon clean, that would put everything back to the older
and happier order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of "Oh, what's
the good of all this?" I knew that life wasn't so romantic as we're
always trying to make it.
"I've got to know," I said, as steel-cold as a surgeon.
"But can't you see that it's--that it's worse than revolting to me?"
he contended, with the look of a man harried beyond endurance.
"Why should it be?" I exacted.
He sank down in the low chair with the ranch-brand on its leather
back. It was an oddly child-like movement of collapse. But I daren't
let myself feel sorry for him.
"Because it's all so rottenly ignoble," he said, without looking at
me.
"For whom?" I asked, trying to speak calmly.
"For me--for you," he cried out, with his head in his hands. "For you
to have been faced with, I mean. It's awful, to think that you've had
to stand it!" He reached out for me, but I was too far away for him to
touch. "Oh, Tabby, I've been such an awful rotter. And this thing
that's happened has just brought it home to me."
"Then you cared, that much?" I demanded, feeling the bottom of my
heart fall out, for all the world like the floor of a dump-cart.
"No, no; that's the unforgivable part of it," he cried in quick
protest. "It's not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did
_her_ a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at
least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been
more generous with. There wasn't even bigness in it, from my side of
the game. I traded on that dead woman's weakness. And my hands would
be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I'd really cared
for her, that I'd been swept off my feet, that passion had blinded me
to the things I should have remembered." He let his hands fall between
his knees. Knowing him as the man of reticence that he was, it seemed
an indescribably tragic gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next
moment, that he should be actually sobbing. "Oh, my dear, my dear, the
one thing I was blind to was your bigness, was your goodness. The one
thing I forgot was how true blue you could be."
I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, turning over what
he had said, turning it over and over, like a park-squirrel with a
nut. I found a great deal to think about, but little to say.
"I don't blame you for despising me," Dinky-Dunk said, out of the
silence, once more in control of himself.
"I was thinking of _her_," I explained. And then I found the courage
to look into my husband's face. "No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't despise you,"
I told him, remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. "But
I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it's selfishness, it seems to
me, which costs us so much, in the end."
He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement of the head.
"That's the only glimmer of hope I have," he surprised me by saying.
"But why hope from _that_?" I asked.
"Because you're so utterly without selfishness," that deluded man
cried out to me. "You were always that way, but I didn't have the
brains to see it. I never quite saw it until you sent me down to--to
_her_." He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta Spanish
floor-tiles. "_I_ knew it was useless, tragically useless. You didn't.
But you were brave enough to let my weakness do its worst, if it had
to. And that makes me feel that I'm not fit to touch you, that I'm not
even fit to walk on the same ground with you!"
I tried my best to remain judicial.
"But this, Dinky-Dunk, isn't being quite fair to either of us," I
protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see
the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and
illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old
Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave
me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession
Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words
that I'd waited for, this many a month. I was at last facing the scene
I'd again and again dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman's
imagination. But instead of bringing me release, it brought me
heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came involved with the
thin humiliations of compromise. For things could never be the same
again. The blot was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued
away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the bearings of his
soul, had let that grit grind away life's delicate surfaces without
even knowing the wine of abandoned speed. He had been nothing better
than the passive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the cheated
one without even the glory of conquest or the tang of triumph. But he
had been saved for me. He was there within arm's reach of me,
battered, but with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face.
"Take me back, _Babushka_," I could hear his shaken voice imploring.
"I don't deserve it--but I can't go on without you. I can't! I've had
enough of hell. And I need you more than anything else in this world!"
That, I had intended telling him, wasn't playing quite fair. But when
he reached out his hands toward me, exactly as I've seen his own Dinky
do at nightfall when a darkening room left his little spirit hungry
for companionship, something melted like an overlooked chocolate
_mousse_ in my crazy old maternal heart, and before I was altogether
aware of it I'd let my hands slip over his shoulders as he knelt with
his bowed head in my lap. The sight of his colorless and unhappy face
with that indescribable homeless-dog look in his eyes was too much for
me. I gave up. I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were
my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped
when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn't keep a
collection of several big tears from tickling.
"I'm a fool, Dinky-Dunk, a most awful fool," I tried to tell him, when
he gave me a chance to breathe again. "And I've got a temper like a
bob-cat!"
"No, no, Beloved," he protested, "it's not foolishness--it's
nobility!"
I couldn't answer him, for his arms had closed about me again. "And I
love you, Tabbie, I love you with every inch of my body!"
Women are weak. And there is no such thing, so far as I know, as an
altogether and utterly perfect man. So we must winnow strength out of
our weakness, make the best of a bad bargain, and over-scroll the
walls of our life-cell with the illusions which may come to mean as
much as the stone and iron that imprison us. All we can do, we who are
older and wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the meshed
perfection of youth has been bruised and abused and loosened, tighten
up the bearings, and keep as blithely as we can to the worn old road.
For life, after all, is a turn-pike of concession deep-bedded with
compromise. And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So
Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he
can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the
old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm
blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose,
comfortable but not showy. Yet it's the children we really have to
think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may be our own, but the
Future belongs to them. There's a heap of good, though, in my
humble-eyed old Dinky-Dunk, too much good ever to lose him, whatever
may have happened in the days that are over.
_Sunday the Twenty-fourth_
Dinky-Dunk, whom I actually heard singing as he took his bath this
morning, is exercising his paternal prerogative of training little
Dinkie to go to bed without a light. He has peremptorily taken the
matter out of my hands, and is, of course, prodigiously solemn about
it all.
"I'll show that young Turk who's boss around this house!" he
magisterially proclaims almost every night when the youthful wails of
protest start to come from the Blue Room in the East Wing.
And off he goes, with his Holbein's Astronomer mouth set firm and the
fiercest of frowns on his face.
It had a tendency to terrify me, at first. But now I know what a
colossal old fraud and humbug this same soft-hearted and granite-crusted
specimen of humanity can be. For last night, after the usual
demonstration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found big Dunkie
kneeling down beside little Dinkie's bed, with Dinkie's small hand
softly enclosed in his dad's big paw, and Dinkie's yellow head nestled
close against his dad's salt-and-peppery pate.
It made me gulp a little, for some reason or other. So I tiptoed away,
without letting my lord and master know I'd discovered the secret of
that stern mastery of his. And later on Dinky-Dunk himself tiptoed
into Peter's study, farther down the same wing, so that he could, with
a shadow of truth, explain that he'd been looking over some of the
Spanish manuscripts there, when I happened to ask him, on his return,
just what had kept him away so long!
THE END
Transcribers Note:
page 49: changed typo calmy into calmly
page 89: changed Kaikabad to Kaikobad
page 153: changed typo is into it
page 348: changed typo awkardly into awkwardly
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