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The Prairie Child

by Arthur Stringer · English · Gutenberg #28514 · 425,393 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Prairie Child

Author: Arthur Stringer

Illustrator: E. F. Ward


        
Release date: April 6, 2009 [eBook #28514]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28514

Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRAIRIE CHILD ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









[Illustration: We gathered wood and made a fire]




THE PRAIRIE CHILD

By ARTHUR STRINGER

Author of

"Are All Men Alike and the Lost Titian," "The Prairie Mother,"
"The Prairie Wife," "The Wine of Life," "The Door of Dread,"
"The Man Who Couldn't Sleep," etc.

[Illustration]

With Frontispiece by

E. F. WARD

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers        New York

Published by arrangement with The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Printed in U. S. A.




Copyright 1922

The Pictorial Review Company

Copyright 1922

The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Printed in the United States of America




THE PRAIRIE CHILD




_Friday the Eighth of March_


"But the thing I can't understand, Dinky-Dunk, is how you ever
_could_."

"Could what?" my husband asked in an aerated tone of voice.

I had to gulp before I got it out.

"Could kiss a woman like that," I managed to explain.

Duncan Argyll McKail looked at me with a much cooler eye than I had
expected. If he saw my shudder, he paid no attention to it.

"On much the same principle," he quietly announced, "that the Chinese
eat birds' nests."

"Just what do you mean by that?" I demanded, resenting the fact that
he could stand as silent as a December beehive before my morosely
questioning eyes.

"I mean that, being married, you've run away with the idea that all
birds' nests are made out of mud and straw, with possibly a garnish
of horse hairs. But if you'd really examine these edible nests you'd
find they were made of surprisingly appealing and succulent tendrils.
They're quite appetizing, you may be sure, or they'd never be eaten!"

I stood turning this over, exactly as I've seen my Dinkie turn over an
unexpectedly rancid nut.

"Aren't you, under the circumstances, being rather stupidly clever?" I
finally asked.

"When I suppose you'd rather see me cleverly stupid?" he found the
heart to suggest.

"But that woman, to me, always looked like a frog," I protested, doing
my best to duplicate his pose of impersonality.

"Well, she doesn't make love like a frog," he retorted with his first
betraying touch of anger. I turned to the window, to the end that my
Eliza-Crossing-the-Ice look wouldn't be entirely at his mercy. A
belated March blizzard was slapping at the panes and cuffing the
house-corners. At the end of a long winter, I knew, tempers were apt
to be short. But this was much more than a matter of barometers. The
man I'd wanted to live with like a second "Suzanne de Sirmont" in
Daudet's _Happiness_ had not only cut me to the quick but was rubbing
salt in the wound. He had said what he did with deliberate intent to
hurt me, for it was only too obvious that he was tired of being on the
defensive. And it did hurt. It couldn't help hurting. For the man,
after all, was my husband. He was the husband to whom I'd given up the
best part of my life, the two-legged basket into which I'd packed all
my eggs of allegiance. And now he was scrambling that precious
collection for a cheap omelette of amorous adventure. He was my
husband, I kept reminding myself. But that didn't cover the entire
case. No husband whose heart is right stands holding another woman's
shoulder and tries to read her shoe-numbers through her ardently
upturned eyes. It shows the wind is not blowing right in the home
circle. It shows a rent in the dyke, a flaw in the blade, a breach in
the fortress-wall of faith. For marriage, to the wife who is a mother
as well, impresses me as rather like the spliced arrow of the
Esquimos: it is cemented together with blood. It is a solemn matter.
And for the sake of _mutter-schutz_, if for nothing else, it must be
kept that way.

There was a time, I suppose, when the thought of such a thing would
have taken my breath away, would have chilled me to the bone. But I'd
been through my refining fires, in that respect, and you can't burn
the prairie over twice in the same season. I tried to tell myself it
was the setting, and not the essential fact, that seemed so odious. I
did my best to believe it wasn't so much that Duncan Argyll McKail had
stooped to make advances to this bandy-legged she-teacher whom I'd so
charitably housed at Casa Grande since the beginning of the year--for
I'd long since learned not to swallow the antique claim that of all
terrestrial _carnivora_ only man and the lion are truly
monogamous--but more the fact it had been made such a back-stairs
affair with no solitary redeeming touch of dignity.

Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, would have laughed it away, if I hadn't walked
in on them with their arms about each other, and the bandy-legged one
breathing her capitulating sighs into his ear. But there was
desperation in the eyes of Miss Alsina Teeswater, and it was plain to
see that if my husband had been merely playing with fire it had become
a much more serious matter with the lady in the case. There was, in
fact, something almost dignifying in that strickenly defiant face of
hers. I was almost sorry for her when she turned and walked
white-lipped out of the room. What I resented most, as I stood facing
my husband, was his paraded casualness, his refusal to take a tragic
situation tragically. His attitude seemed to imply that we were about
to have a difference over a small thing--over a small thing with brown
eyes. He could even stand inspecting me with a mildly amused glance,
and I might have forgiven his mildness, I suppose, if it had been
without amusement, and that amusement in some way at my expense. He
even managed to laugh as I stood there staring at him. It was neither
an honest nor a natural laugh. It merely gave me the feeling that he
was trying to entrench himself behind a raw mound of mirth, that any
shelter was welcome until the barrage was lifted.

"And what do you intend doing about it?" I asked, more quietly than I
had imagined possible.

"What would you suggest?" he parried, as he began to feel in his
pockets for his pipe.

And I still had a sense, as I saw the barricaded look come into his
face, of entrenchments being frantically thrown up. I continued to
stare at him as he found his pipe and proceeded to fill it. I even
wrung a ghostly satisfaction out of the discovery that his fingers
weren't so steady as he might have wished them to be.

"I suppose you're trying to make me feel like the Wicked Uncle edging
away from the abandoned Babes in the Woods?" he finally demanded, as
though exasperated by my silence. He was delving for matches by this
time, and seemed disappointed that none was to be found in his
pockets. I don't know why he should seem to recede from me, for he
didn't move an inch from where he stood with that defensively mocking
smile on his face. But abysmal gulfs of space seemed to blow in like
sea-mists between him and me, desolating and lonely stretches of
emptiness which could never again be spanned by the tiny bridges of
hope. I felt alone, terribly alone, in a world over which the last
fire had swept and the last rains had fallen. My throat tightened and
my eyes smarted from the wave of self-pity which washed through my
body. It angered me, ridiculously, to think that I was going to break
down at such a time.

But the more I thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was
something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my
instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn't, like the outraged wife
of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it
epochally shut after me. But modern life never quite lives up to its
fiction. And we are never quite free, we women who have given our
hostages to fortune, to do as we wish. We have lives other than our
own to think about.

"But it's all been so--so _dishonest_!" I cried out, stopping myself
in the middle of a gesture which might have seemed like wringing my
hands.

That, apparently, gave Dinky-Dunk something to get his teeth into. The
neutral look went out of his eye, to be replaced by a fortifying stare
of enmity.

"I don't know as it's any more dishonest than the long-distance brand
of the same thing!"

I knew, at once, what he meant. He meant Peter. He meant poor old
Peter Ketley, whose weekly letter, year in and year out, came as
regular as clockwork to Casa Grande. Those letters came to my son
Dinkie, though it couldn't be denied they carried many a cheering word
and many a companionable message to Dinkie's mother. But it brought me
up short, to think that my own husband would try to play cuttle-fish
with a clean-hearted and a clean-handed man like Peter. The wave that
went through my body, on this occasion, was one of rage. I tried to
say something, but I couldn't. The lion of my anger had me down, by
this time, with his paw on my breast. The power of speech was
squeezed out of my carcass. I could only stare at my husband with a
denuding and devastating stare of incredulity touched with disgust, of
abhorrence skirting dangerously close along the margins of hate. And
he stared back, with morose and watchful defiance on his face.

Heaven only knows how it would have ended, if that tableau hadn't gone
smash, with a sudden offstage clatter and thump and cry which reminded
me there were more people in the world than Chaddie McKail and her
philandering old husband. For during that interregnum of parental
preoccupation Dinkie and Poppsy had essayed to toboggan down the lower
half of the front-stairs in an empty drawer commandeered from my
bedroom dresser. Their descent, apparently, had been about as
precipitate as that of their equally adventurous sire down the treads
of my respect, for they had landed in a heap on the hardwood floor of
the hall and I found Dinkie with an abraded shin-bone and Poppsy with
a cut lip. My Poppsy was more frightened at the sight of blood than
actually hurt by her fall, and Dinkie betrayed a not unnatural
tendency to enlarge on his injuries in extenuation of his offense. But
that suddenly imposed demand for first-aid took my mind out of the
darker waters in which it had been wallowing, and by the time I had
comforted my kiddies and completed my ministrations Dinky-Dunk had
quietly escaped from the house and my accusatory stares by clapping on
his hat and going out to the stables....

And that's the scene which keeps pacing back and forth between the
bars of my brain like a jaguar in a circus-cage. That's the scene I've
been living over, for the last few days, thinking of all the more
brilliant things I might have said and the more expedient things I
might have done. And that's the scene which has been working like
yeast at the bottom of my sodden batter of contentment, making me feel
that I'd swell up and burst, if all that crazy ferment couldn't find
some relief in expression. So after three long years and more of
silence I'm turning back to this, the journal of one irresponsible old
Chaddie McKail, who wanted so much to be happy and who has in some way
missed the pot of gold that they told her was to be found at the
rainbow's end.

It seems incredible, as I look back, that more than three, long years
should slip away without the penning of one line in this, the
safety-valve of my soul. But the impulse to write rather slipped away
from me. It wasn't that there was so little to record, for life is
always life. But when it burns clearest it seems to have the trick of
consuming its own smoke and leaving so very little ash. The crowded
even tenor of existence goes on, with its tidal ups and downs, too
listlessly busy to demand expression. Then the shock of tempest comes,
and it's only after we're driven out of them that we realize we've
been drifting so long in the doldrums of life. Then it comes home to
us that there are the Dark Ages in the history of a woman exactly as
there were the Dark Ages in the history of Europe. Life goes on in
those Dark Ages, but it doesn't feel the call to articulate itself, to
leave a record of its experiences. And that strikes me, as I sit here
and think of it, as about the deepest tragedy that can overtake
anything on this earth. Nothing, after all, is sadder than silence,
the silence of dead civilizations and dead cities and dead souls. And
nothing is more costly. For beauty itself, in actual life, passes
away, but beauty lovingly recorded by mortal hands endures and goes
down to our children. And I stop writing, at that word of "children,"
for miraculously, as I repeat it, I see it cut a window in the
unlighted house of my heart. And that window is the bright little
Gothic oriel which will always be golden and luminous with love and
will always send the last shadow scurrying away from the mustiest
corner of my tower of life. I have my Dinkie and my Poppsy, and
nothing can take them away from me. It's on them that I pin my hope.




_Sunday the Seventeenth_


I've been thinking a great deal over what's happened this last week or
so. And I've been trying to reorganize my life, the same as you put a
house to rights after a funeral. But it wasn't a well-ordered funeral,
in this case, and I was denied even the tempered satisfaction of the
bereaved after the finality of a smoothly conducted burial. For
nothing has been settled. It's merely that Time has been trying to
encyst what it can not absorb. I felt, for a day or two, that I had
nothing much to live for. I felt like a feather-weight who'd faced a
knock-out. I saw Pride go to the mat, and take the count, and if I was
dazed, for a while, I suppose it was mostly convalescence from shock.
Then I tightened my belt, and reminded myself that it wasn't the first
wallop Fate had given me, and remembered that in this life you have to
adjust yourself to your environment or be eliminated from the game.
And life, I suppose, has tamed me, as a man who once loved me said it
would do. The older I get the more tolerant I try to be, and the more
I know of this world the more I realize that Right is seldom all on
one side and Wrong on the other. It's a matter of give and take, this
problem of traveling in double-harness. I can even smile a little, as
I remember that college day in my teens when Matilda-Anne and Katrina
and Fanny-Rain-in-the-Face and myself solemnly discussed man and his
make-up, over a three-pound box of Maillard's, and resolutely agreed
that we would surrender our hearts to no suitor over twenty-six and
marry no male who'd ever loved another woman--not, at least, unless
the situation had become compensatingly romanticized by the death of
any such lady preceding us in our loved one's favor. Little we knew of
men and ourselves and the humiliations with which life breaks the
spirit of arrogant youth! For even now, knowing what I know, I've been
doing my best to cooper together a case for my unstable old
Dinky-Dunk. I've been trying to keep the thought of poor dead Lady
Alicia out of my head. I've been wondering if there's any truth in
what Dinky-Dunk said, a few weeks ago, about a mere father being like
the male of the warrior-spider whom the female of the species stands
ready to dine upon, once she's assured of her progeny.

I suppose I _have_ given most of my time and attention to my children.
And it's as perilous, I suppose, to give your heart to a man and then
take it even partly away again as it is to give a trellis to a
rose-bush and then expect it to stand alone. My husband, too, has been
restless and dissatisfied with prairie life during the last year or
so, has been rocking in his own doldrums of inertia where the sight of
even the humblest ship--and the Wandering Sail in this case always
seemed to me as soft and shapeless as a boned squab-pigeon!--could
promptly elicit an answering signal.

But I strike a snag there, for Alsina has not been so boneless as I
anticipated. There was an unlooked-for intensity in her eyes and a
mild sort of tragedy in her voice when she came and told me that she
was going to another school in the Knee-Hill country and asked if I
could have her taken in to Buckhorn the next morning. Some one, of
course, had to go. There was one too many in this prairie home that
must always remain so like an island dotting the lonely wastes of a
lonely sea. And triangles, oddly enough, seem to flourish best in city
squares. But much as I wanted to talk to Alsina, I was compelled to
respect her reserve. I even told her that Dinkie would miss her a
great deal. She replied, with a choke in her voice, that he was a
wonderful child. That, of course, was music to the ears of his mother,
and my respect for the tremulous Miss Teeswater went up at least ten
degrees. But when she added, without meeting my eye, that she was
really fond of the boy, I couldn't escape the impression that she was
edging out on very thin ice. It was, I think, only the silent misery
in her half-averted face which kept me from inquiring if she hadn't
rather made it a family affair. But that, second thought promptly told
me, would seem too much like striking the fallen. And we both seemed
to feel, thereafter, that silence was best.

Practically nothing passed between us, in fact, until we reached the
station. I could see that she was dreading the ordeal of saying
good-by. That unnamed sixth sense peculiar to cab-drivers and waiters
and married women told me that every moment on the bald little
platform was being a torture to her. As the big engine came lumbering
up to a standstill she gave me one quick and searching look. It was a
look I shall never forget. For, in it was a question and something
more than a question. An unworded appeal was there, and also an
unworded protest. It got past my outposts of reason, in some way. It
came to me in my bitterness like the smell of lilacs into a sick-room.
I couldn't be cruel to that poor crushed outcast who had suffered
quite as much from the whole ignoble affair as I had suffered. I
suddenly held out my hand to her, and she took it, with that hungry
questioning look still on her face.

"It's all right," I started to say. But her head suddenly went down
between her hunched-up shoulders. Her body began to shake and tears
gushed from her eyes. I had to help her to the car steps.

"It was all my fault," she said in a strangled voice, between her
helpless little sobs.

It was brave of her, of course, and she meant it for the best. But I
wish she hadn't said it. Instead of making everything easier for me,
as she intended, she only made it harder. She left me disturbingly
conscious of ghostly heroisms which transposed what I had tried to
regard as essentially ignoble into some higher and purer key. And she
made it harder for me to look at my husband, when I got home, with a
calm and collected eye. I felt suspiciously like Lady Macbeth after
the second murder. I felt that we were fellow-sharers of a guilty
secret it would never do to drag too often into the light of
every-day life.

But it will no more stay under cover, I find, than a dab-chick will
stay under water. It bobs up in the most unexpected places, as it did
last night, when Dinkie publicly proclaimed that he was going to marry
his Mummy when he got big.

"It would be well, my son, not to repeat the mistakes of your father!"
observed Dinky-Dunk. And having said it, he relighted his quarantining
pipe and refused to meet my eye. But it didn't take a surgical
operation to get what he meant into my head. It hurt, in more ways
than one, for it struck me as suspiciously like a stone embodied in a
snowball--and even our offspring recognized this as no fair manner of
fighting.

"Then it impresses you as a mistake?" I demanded, seeing red, for the
coyote in me, I'm afraid, will never entirely become house-dog.

"Isn't that the way you regard it?" he asked, inspecting me with a
non-committal eye.

I had to bite my lip, to keep from flinging out at him the things that
were huddled back in my heart. But it was no time for making big war
medicine. So I got the lid on, and held it there.

"My dear Dinky-Dunk," I said with an effort at a gesture of weariness,
"I've long since learned that life can't be made clean, like a cat's
body, by the use of the tongue alone!"

Dinky-Dunk did not look at me. Instead, he turned to the boy who was
watching that scene with a small frown of perplexity on his none too
approving face.

"You go up to the nursery," commanded my husband, with more curtness
than usual.

But before Dinkie went he slowly crossed the room and kissed me. He
did so with a quiet resoluteness which was not without its tacit touch
of challenge.

"You may feel that way about the use of the tongue," said my husband
as soon as we were alone, "but I'm going to unload a few things I've
been keeping under cover."

He waited for me to say something. But I preferred remaining silent.

"Of course," he floundered on, "I don't want to stop you martyrizing
yourself in making a mountain out of a mole-hill. But I'm getting a
trifle tired of this holier-than-thou attitude. And----"

"And?" I prompted, when he came to a stop and sat pushing up his
brindled front-hair until it made me think of the Corean lion on the
library mantel, the lion in pottery which we invariably spoke of as
the Dog of Fo. My wintry smile at that resemblance seemed to
exasperate him.

"What were you going to say?" I quietly inquired.

"Oh, hell!" he exclaimed, with quite unexpected vigor.

"I hope the children are out of hearing," I reminded him,
solemn-eyed.

"Yes, the children!" he cried, catching at the word exactly as a
drowning man catches at a lifebelt. "The children! That's just the
root of the whole intolerable situation. This hasn't been a home for
the last three or four years; it's been nothing but a nursery. And
about all I've been is a retriever for a _crèche_, a clod-hopper to
tiptoe about the sacred circle and see to it there's enough flannel to
cover their backs and enough food to put into their stomachs. I'm an
accident, of course, an intruder to be faced with fortitude and borne
with patience."

"This sounds quite disturbing," I interrupted. "It almost leaves me
suspicious that you are about to emulate the rabbit and devour your
young."

Dinky-Dunk fixed me with an accusatory finger.

"And the fact that you can get humor out of it shows me just how far
it has gone," he cried with a bitterness which quickly enough made me
sober again. "And I could stand being deliberately shut out of your
life, and shut out of their lives as far as you can manage it, but I
can't see that it's doing either them or you any particular good."

"But I am responsible for the way in which those children grow up," I
said, quite innocent of the _double entendre_ which brought a dark
flush to my husband's none too happy face.

"And I suppose I'm not to contaminate them?" he demanded.

"Haven't you done enough along that line?" I asked.

He swung about, at that, with something dangerously like hate on his
face.

"Whose children are they?" he challenged.

"You are their father," I quietly acknowledged. It rather startled me
to find Dinky-Dunk regarding himself as a fur coat and my offspring as
moth-eggs which I had laid deep in the pelt of his life, where we were
slowly but surely eating the glory out of that garment and leaving it
as bald as a prairie dog's belly.

"Well, you give very little evidence of it!"

"You can't expect me to turn a cart-wheel, surely, every time I
remember it?" was my none too gracious inquiry. Then I sat down. "But
what is it you want me to do?" I asked, as I sat studying his face,
and I felt sorriest for him because he felt sorry for himself.

"That's exactly the point," he averred. "There doesn't seem anything
to do. But this can't go on forever."

"No," I acknowledged. "It seems too much like history repeating
itself."

His head went down, at that, and it was quite a long time before he
looked up at me again.

"I don't suppose you can see it from my side of the fence?" he asked
with a disturbing new note of humility in his voice.

"Not when you force me to stay on the fence," I told him. He seemed to
realize, as he sat there slowly moving his head up and down, that no
further advance was to be made along that line. So he took a deep
breath and sat up.

"Something will have to be done about getting a new teacher for that
school," he said with an appositeness which was only too painfully
apparent.

"I've already spoken to two of the trustees," I told him. "They're
getting a teacher from the Peg. It's to be a man this time."

Instead of meeting my eye, he merely remarked: "That'll be better for
the boy!"

"In what way?" I inquired.

"Because I don't think too much petticoat is good for any boy,"
responded my lord and master.

"Big or little!" I couldn't help amending, in spite of all my good
intentions.

Dinky-Dunk ignored the thrust, though it plainly took an effort.

"There are times when even kindness can be a sort of cruelty," he
patiently and somewhat platitudinously pursued.

"Then I wish somebody would ill-treat me along that line," I
interjected. And this time he smiled, though it was only for a
moment.

"Supposing we stick to the children," he suggested.

"Of course," I agreed. "And since you've brought the matter up I can't
help telling you that I always felt that my love for my children is
the one redeeming thing in my life."

"Thanks," said my husband, with a wince.

"Please don't misunderstand me. I'm merely trying to say that a
mother's love for her children has to be one of the strongest and
holiest things in this hard old world of ours. And it seems only
natural to me that a woman should consider her children first, and
plan for them, and make sacrifices for them, and fight for them if she
has to."

"It's so natural, in fact," remarked Dinky-Dunk, "that it has been
observed in even the Bengal tigress."

"It is my turn to thank you," I acknowledged, after giving his
statement a moment or two of thought.

"But we're getting away from the point again," proclaimed my husband.
"I've been trying to tell you that children are like rabbits: It's
only fit and proper they should be cared for, but they can't thrive,
and they can't even live, if they're handled too much."

"I haven't observed any alarming absence of health in my children," I
found the courage to say. But a tightness gathered about my heart, for
I could sniff what was coming.

"They may be all right, as far as that goes," persisted their lordly
parent. "But what I say is, too much cuddling and mollycoddling isn't
good for that boy of yours, or anybody else's boy." And he proceeded
to explain that my Dinkie was an ordinary, every-day, normal child
and should be accepted and treated as such or we'd have a
temperamental little bounder on our hands.

I knew that my boy wasn't abnormal. But I knew, on the other hand,
that he was an exceptionally impressionable and sensitive child. And I
couldn't be sorry for that, for if there's anything I abhor in this
world it's torpor. And whatever he may have been, nothing could shake
me in my firm conviction that a child's own mother is the best person
to watch over his growth and shape his character.

"But what is all this leading up to?" I asked, steeling myself for the
unwelcome.

"Simply to what I've already told you on several occasions," was my
husband's answer. "That it's about time this boy of ours was bundled
off to a boarding-school."

I sat back, trying to picture my home and my life without Dinkie. But
it was unbearable. It was unthinkable.

"I shall never agree to that," I quietly retorted.

"Why?" asked my husband, with a note of triumph which I resented.

"For one thing, because he is still a child, because he is too young,"
I contended, knowing that I could never agree with Dinky-Dunk in his
thoroughly English ideas of education even while I remembered how he
had once said that the greatness of England depended on her
public-schools, such as Harrow and Eton and Rugby and Winchester, and
that she had been the best colonizer in the world because her boys had
been taken young and taught not to overvalue home ties, had been made
manlier by getting off with their own kind instead of remaining
hitched to an apron-string.

"And you prefer keeping him stuck out here on the prairie?" demanded
Dinky-Dunk.

"The prairie has been good enough for his parents, this last seven or
eight years," I contended.

"It hasn't been good enough for me," my husband cried out with quite
unlooked-for passion. "And I've about had my fill of it!"

"Where would you prefer going?" I asked, trying to speak as quietly as
I could.

"That's something I'm going to find out as soon as the chance comes,"
he retorted with a slow and embittered emphasis which didn't add any
to my peace of mind.

"Then why cross our bridges," I suggested, "until we come to them?"

"But you're not looking for bridges," he challenged. "You don't want
to see anything beyond living like Doukhobours out here on the edge of
Nowhere and remembering that you've got your precious offspring here
under your wing and wondering how many bushels of Number-One-Hard it
will take to buy your Dinkie a riding pinto!"

"Aren't you rather tired to-night?" I asked with all the patience I
could command.

"Yes, and I'm talking about the thing that makes me tired. For you
know as well as I do that you've made that boy of yours a sort of
anesthetic. You put him on like a nose-cap, and forget the world. He's
about all you remember to think about. Why, when you look at the
clock, nowadays, it isn't ten minutes to twelve. It's always Dinkie
minutes to Dink. When you read a book you're only reading about what
your Dinkie might have done or what your Dinkie is some day to write.
When you picture the Prime Minister it's merely your Dinkie grown big,
laying down the law to a House of Parliament made up of other Dinkies,
rows and rows of 'em. When the sun shines you're wondering whether
it's warm enough for your Dinkie to walk in, and when the snow begins
to melt you're wondering whether it's soft enough for the beloved
Dinkie to mold into snowballs. When you see a girl you at once get
busy speculating over whether or not she'll ever be beautiful enough
for your Dinkie, and when one of the Crowned Heads of Europe announces
the alliance of its youngest princess you fall to pondering if Dinkie
wouldn't have made her a better husband. And when the flowers come out
in your window-box you wonder if they're fair enough to bloom beside
your Dinkie. I don't suppose I ever made a haystack that you didn't
wonder whether it wasn't going to be a grand place for Dinkie to slide
down. And when Dinkie draws a goggle-eyed man on his scribbler you see
Michael Angelo totter and Titian turn in his grave. And when Dinkie
writes a composition of thirty crooked lines on the landing of Hengist
you feel that fate did Hume a mean trick in letting him pass away
before inspecting that final word in historical record. And heaven's
just a row of Dinkies with little gold harps tucked under their wings.
And you think you're breathing air, but all you're breathing is
Dinkies, millions and millions of etherealized Dinkies. And when you
read about the famine in China you inevitably and adroitly hitch the
death of seven thousand Chinks in Yangchow on to the interests of
your immortal offspring. And I suppose Rome really came into being for
the one ultimate end that an immortal young Dinkie might possess his
full degree of Dinkiness and the glory that was Greece must have been
merely the tom-toms tuning up for the finished dance of our Dinkie's
grandeur. Day and night, it's Dinkie, just Dinkie!"

I waited until he was through. I waited, heavy of heart, until his
foolish fires of revolt had burned themselves out. And it didn't seem
to add to his satisfaction to find that I could inspect him with a
quiet and slightly commiserative eye.

"You are accusing me," I finally told him, "of something I'm proud of.
And I'm afraid I'll always be guilty of caring for my own son."

He turned on me with a sort of heavy triumph.

"Well, it's something that you'll jolly well pay the piper for, some
day," he announced.

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded.

"I mean that nothing much is ever gained by letting the maternal
instinct run over. And that's exactly what you're doing. You're trying
to tie Dinkie to your side, when you can no more tie him up than you
can tie up a sunbeam. You could keep him close enough to you, of
course, when he was small. But he's bound to grow away from you as he
gets bigger, just as I grew away from my mother and you once grew away
from yours. It's a natural law, and there's no use crocking your knees
on it. The boy's got his own life to live, and you can't live it for
him. It won't be long, now, before you begin to notice those quiet
withdrawals, those slippings-back into his own shell of self-interest.
And unless you realize what it means, it's going to hurt. And unless
you reckon on that in the way you order your life you're not only
going to be a very lonely old lady but you're going to bump into a big
hole where you thought the going was smoothest!"

I sat thinking this over, with a ton of lead where my heart should
have been.

"I've already bumped into a big hole where I thought the going was
smoothest," I finally observed.

My husband looked at me and then looked away again.

"I was hoping we could fill that up and forget it," he ventured in a
valorously timid tone which made it hard, for reasons I couldn't quite
fathom, to keep my throat from tightening. But I sat there, shaking my
head from side to side.

"I've got to love something," I found myself protesting. "And the
children seem all that is left."

"How about me?" asked my husband, with his acidulated and slightly
one-sided smile.

"You've changed, Dinky-Dunk," was all I could say.

"But some day," he contended, "you may wake up to the fact that I'm
still a human being."

"I've wakened up to the fact that you're a different sort of human
being than I had thought."

"Oh, we're all very much alike, once you get our number," asserted my
husband.

"You mean men are," I amended.

"I mean that if men can't get a little warmth and color and sympathy
in the home-circle they're going to edge about until they find a
substitute for it, no matter how shoddy it may be," contended
Dinky-Dunk.

"But isn't that a hard and bitter way of writing life down to one's
own level?" I asked, trying to swallow the choke that wouldn't stay
down in my throat.

"Well, I can't see that we get much ahead by trying to sentimentalize
the situation," he said, with a gesture that seemed one of
frustration.

We sat staring at each other, and again I had the feeling of abysmal
gulfs of space intervening between us.

"Is that all you can say about it?" I asked, with a foolish little
gulp I couldn't control.

"Isn't it enough?" demanded Dinky-Dunk. And I knew that nothing was to
be gained, that night, by the foolish and futile clash of words.




_Tuesday the Twenty-Third_


I've been doing a good deal of thinking over what Dinky-Dunk said. I
have been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of
mental ju-jutsu I've even been trying to justify what I can't quite
understand in him. But it's no use. There's one bald, hard fact I
can't escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct
under the sands of self-deception. There's one cold-blooded truth that
will have to be faced. _My husband is no longer in love with me._
Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan
Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes of the law, and the
mother of his children. We still live together, and, from force of
habit, if from nothing else, go through the familiar old rites of
daily communion. He sits across the table from me when I eat, and
talks casually enough of the trivially momentous problems of the
minute, or he reads in his slippers before the fire while I do my
sewing within a spool-toss of him. But a row of invisible assegais
stand leveled between his heart and mine. A slow glacier of
green-iced indifferency shoulders in between us; and gone forever is
the wild-flower aroma of youth, the singing spirit of April, the
mysterious light that touched our world with wonder. He is merely a
man, drawing on to middle age, and I am a woman, no longer young. Gone
now are the spring floods that once swept us together. Gone now is the
flame of adoration that burned clean our altar of daily intercourse
and left us blind to the weaknesses we were too happy to remember. For
there was a time when we loved each other. I know that as well as
Duncan does. But it died away, that ghostly flame. It went out like a
neglected fire. And blowing on dead ashes can never revive the
old-time glow.

"So they were married and lived happy ever afterward!" That is the
familiar ending to the fairy-tales I read over and over again to my
Dinkie and Poppsy. But they are fairy-tales. For who lives happy ever
afterward? First love chloroforms us, for a time, and we try to hug to
our bosoms the illusion that Heaven itself is only a sort of endless
honeymoon presided over by Lohengrin marches. But the anesthetic wears
away and we find that life isn't a bed of roses but a rough field that
rewards us as we till it, with here and there the cornflower of
happiness laughing unexpectedly up at us out of our sober acres of
sober wheat. And often enough we don't know happiness when we see it.
We assuredly find it least where we look for it most. I can't even
understand why we're equipped with such a hunger for it. But I find
myself trending more and more to that cynic philosophy which defines
happiness as the absence of pain. The absence of pain--that is a lot
to ask for, in this life!

I wonder if Dinky-Dunk is right in his implication that I am getting
hard? There are times, I know, when I grate on him, when he would
probably give anything to get away from me. Yet here we are, linked
together like two convicts. And I don't believe I'm as hard as my
husband accuses me of being. However macadamized they may have made
life for me, there's at least one soft spot in my heart, one garden
under the walls of granite. And that's the spot which my two children
fill, which my children keep green, which my children keep holy. It's
them I think of, when I think of the future--when I should at least be
thinking a little of my grammar and remembering that the verb "to be"
takes the nominative, just as discontented husbands seem to take the
initiative! That's why I can't quite find the courage to ask for
freedom. I have seen enough of life to know what the smash-up of a
family means to its toddlers. And I want my children to have a chance.
They can't have that chance without at least two things. One is the
guardianship of home life, and the other is that curse of modern times
known as money. We haven't prospered as we had hoped to, but heaven
knows I've kept an eagle eye on that savings-account of mine, in that
absurdly new and resplendent red-brick bank in Buckhorn. Patiently
I've fed it with my butter and egg money, joyfully I've seen it grow
with my meager Nitrate dividends, and grimly I've made it bigger with
every loose dollar I could lay my hands on. There's no heroism in my
going without things I may have thought I needed, just as there can be
little nobility in my sticking to a husband who no longer loves me.
For it's not Chaddie McKail who counts now, but her chicks. And I'll
have to look for my reward through them, for I'm like Romanes' rat
now, too big to get into the bottle of cream, but wary enough to know
I can dine from a tail still small enough for insertion. I'm merely a
submerged prairie-hen with the best part of her life behind her.

But it bothers me, what Duncan says about my always thinking of little
Dinkie first. And I'm afraid I do, though it seems neither right nor
fair. I suppose it's because he was my first-born--and having come
first in my life he must come first in my thoughts. I was made to love
somebody--and my husband doesn't seem to want me to love him. So he
has driven me to centering my thoughts on the child. I've got to have
something to warm up to. And any love I may lavish on this
prairie-chick of mine, who has to face life with the lack of so many
things, will not only be a help to the boy, but will be a help to me,
the part of Me that I'm sometimes so terribly afraid of.

Yet I can't help wondering if Duncan has any excuses for claiming that
it's personal selfishness which prompts me to keep my boy close to my
side. And am I harming him, without knowing it, in keeping him here
under my wing? Schools are all right, in a way, but surely a good
mother can do as much in the molding of a boy's mind as a
boarding-school with a file of Ph.D.'s on its staff. But am I a good
mother? And should I trust myself, in a matter like this, to my own
feelings? Men, in so many things, are better judges than women. Yet it
has just occurred to me that all men do not think alike. I've been
sitting back and wondering what kindly old Peter would say about it.
And I've decided to write Peter and ask what he advises. He'll tell
the truth, I know, for Peter is as honest as the day is long....

I've just been up to make sure the children were properly covered in
bed. And it disturbed me a little to find that without even thinking
about it I went to Dinkie first. It seemed like accidental
corroboration of all that Duncan has been saying. But I stood studying
him as he lay there asleep. It frightened me a little, to find him so
big. If it's true, as Duncan threatens, that time will tend to turn
him away from me, it's something that I'm going to fight tooth and
nail. And I've seen no sign of it, as yet. With every month and every
year that's added to his age he grows more companionable, more able to
bridge the chasm between two human souls. We have more interests in
common, more things to talk about. And day by day Dinkie is reaching
up to my clumsily mature way of looking at life. He can come to me
with his problems, knowing I'll always give him a hearing, just as he
used to come to me with his baby cuts and bruises, knowing they would
be duly kissed and cared for. Yet some day, I have just remembered,
he may have problems that can't be brought to me. But that day, please
God, I shall defer as long as possible. Already we have our own little
secrets and private compacts and understandings. I don't want my boy
to be a mollycoddle. But I want him to have his chance in the world. I
want him to be somebody. I can't reconcile myself to the thought of
him growing up to wear moose-mittens and shoe-packs and stretching
barb-wire in blue-jeans and riding a tractor across a prairie
back-township. I refuse to picture him getting bent and gray wringing
a livelihood out of an over-cropped ranch fourteen miles away from a
post-office and a world away from the things that make life most worth
living. If he were an ordinary boy, I might be led to think
differently. But my Dinkie is not an ordinary boy. There's a spark of
the unusual, of the exceptional, in that laddie. And I intend to fan
that spark, whatever the cost may be, until it breaks out into
genius.




_Sunday the Twenty-Eighth_


I've had scant time for introspection during the last five days, for
Struthers has been in bed with lumbago, and the weight of the
housework reverted to me. But Whinstane Sandy brought his precious
bottle of Universal Ointment in from the bunk-house, and while that
fiery mixture warmed her lame back, the thought of its origin probably
warmed her lonely heart. I have suddenly wakened up to the fact that
Struthers is getting on a bit. She is still the same efficient and
self-obliterating mainstay of the kitchen that she ever was, but she
grows more "sot" in her ways, more averse to any change in her daily
routine, and more despairing of ever finally and completely capturing
that canny old Scotsman whom we still so affectionately designate as
Whinnie, in short for Whinstane Sandy. Whinnie, I'm afraid, still
nurses the fixed idea that everything in petticoats and as yet
unwedded is after him. And it is only by walking with the utmost
circumspection that he escapes their wiles and by maintaining an
unbroken front withstands their unseemly advances.

The new school-teacher has arrived, and is to live with us here at
Casa Grande. I have my reasons for this. In the first place, it will
be a help to Dinkie in his studies. In the second place, it means that
the teacher can pack my boy back and forth to school, in bad weather,
and next month when Poppsy joins the ranks of the learners, can keep a
more personal eye on that little tot's movements. And in the third
place the mere presence of another male at Casa Grande seems to dilute
the acids of home life.

Gershom Binks is the name of this new teacher, and I have just learned
that in the original Hebrew "Gershom" not inappropriately means "a
stranger there." He is a sophomore (a most excellent word, that, when
you come to inquire into its etymology!) from the University of
Minnesota and is compelled to teach the young idea, for a time, to
accumulate sufficient funds to complete his course, which he wants to
do at Ann Arbor. And Gershom is a very tall and very thin and very
short-sighted young man, with an Adam's apple that works up and down
with a two-inch plunge over the edge of his collar when he
talks--which he does somewhat extensively. He wears glasses with big
bulging lenses, glasses which tend to hide a pair of timid and
brown-October-aleish eyes with real kindliness in them. He looks
ill-nourished, but I can detect nothing radically wrong with his
appetite. It's merely that, like Cassius, he thinks too much. And I'm
going to fatten that boy up a bit, before the year is out, or know the
reason why. He may be a trifle self-conscious and awkward, but he's
also amazingly clean of both body and mind, and it will be no
hardship, I know, to have him under our roof. And for all his devotion
to Science, he reads his Bible every night--which is more than Chaddie
McKail does! He rather took the wind out of my sails by demanding, the
first morning at breakfast, if I knew that one half-ounce of the web
of the spider--the arachnid of the order _Araneida_, he explained--if
stretched out in a straight line would reach from the city of Chicago
to the city of Paris. I told him that this was a most wonderful and a
most interesting piece of information and hoped that some day we could
verify it by actual test. Yet when I inquired whether he meant merely
the environs of the city of Paris, or the very heart of the city such
as the Place de l'Opéra, he studied me with the meditative eye with
which Huxley must have once studied beetles.

Dinky-Dunk, I notice, is as restive as a bull-moose in black-fly
season. He's doing his work on the land, as about every ranch-owner
has to, whether he's happily married or not, but he's doing it without
any undue impression of its epical importance. I heard him observe,
yesterday, that if he could only get his hands on enough ready money
he'd like to swing into land business in a live center like Calgary.
He has a friend there, apparently, who has just made a clean-up in
city real estate and bought his wife a Detroit Electric and built a
home for himself that cost forty thousand dollars. I reminded
Dinky-Dunk, when he had finished, that we really must have a new
straining-mesh in the milk-separator. He merely looked at me with a
sour and morose eye as he got up and went out to his team.

Surely these men-folks are a dissatisfied lot! Gershom to-night
complained that his own name of "Gershom Binks" impressed him as about
the ugliest name that was ever hitched on to a scholar and a
gentlemen. And later on, after I'd opened my piano and tried to
console myself with a tu'penny draught of Grieg, he inspected the
instrument and informed me that it was really evolved from the
six-stringed harps of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, which in the fifth
dynasty was made with a greatly enlarged base, thus giving the
rudimentary beginning of a soundboard.

I am learning a lot from Gershom! And so are my kiddies, for that
matter. I begin, in fact, to feel like royalty with a private tutor,
for every night now Dinkie and Poppsy and Gershom sit about the
living-room table and drink of the founts of wisdom. But we have a
teacher here who loves to teach. And he is infinitely patient and kind
with my little toddlers. Dinkie already asks him questions without
number, while Poppsy gratefully but decorously vamps him with her
infantine gazes. Then Gershom--Heaven bless his scholastic old
high-browed solemnity--has just assured me that Dinkie betrays many
evidences of an exceptionally bright mind.




_Friday the Second_


My husband yesterday accused me of getting moss-backed. He had been
harping on the city string again and asked me if I intended to live
and die a withered beauty on a back-trail ranch.

That "withered beauty" hurt, though I did my best to ignore it, for
the time at least. And Dinky-Dunk went on to say that it struck him as
one of life's little ironies that _I_ should want to stick to the sort
of life we were leading, remembering what I'd come from.

"Dinky-Dunk," I told him, "it's terribly hard to explain exactly how I
feel about it all. I suppose I could never make you see it as I see
it. But it's a feeling like loyalty, loyalty to the land that's given
us what we have. And it's also a feeling of disliking to see one old
rule repeating itself: what has once been a crusade becoming merely a
business. To turn and leave our land now, it seems to me, would make
us too much like those soulless soil-robbers you used to rail at, like
those squatters who've merely squeezed out what they could and have
gone on, like those land-miners who take all they can get and stand
ready to put nothing back. Why, if we were all like that, we'd have no
country here. We'd be a wilderness, a Barren Grounds that went from
the Border up to the Circle. But there's something bigger than that
about it all. I love the prairie. Just why it is, I don't know. It's
too fundamental to be fashioned into words, and I never realized how
deep it was until I went back to the city that time. One can just say
it, and let it go at that: _I love the prairie._ It isn't merely its
bigness, just as it isn't altogether its freedom and its openness.
Perhaps it's because it keeps its spirit of the adventurous. I love it
the same as my children love _The Arabian Nights_ and _The Swiss
Family Robinson_. I thought it was mostly cant, once, that cry about
being next to nature, but the more I know about nature the more I feel
with Pope that naught but man is vile, to speak as impersonally, my
dear Diddums, as the occasion will permit. I'm afraid I'm like that
chickadee that flew into the bunk-house and Whinnie caught and put in
a box-cage for Dinkie. I nearly die at the thought of being cooped up.
I want clean air and open space about me."

"I never dreamed you'd been Indianized to that extent," murmured my
husband.

"Being Indianized," I proceeded, "seems to carry the inference of also
being barbarized. But it isn't quite that, Dinky-Dunk, for there's
something almost spiritually satisfying about this prairie life if
you've only got the eyes to see it. I think that's because the prairie
always seems so majestically beautiful to me. I can see your lip curl
again, but I know I'm right. When I throw open my windows of a morning
and see that placid old never-ending plain under its great wash of
light something lifts up in my breast, like a bird, and no matter how
a mere man has been doing his best to make me miserable that something
stands up on the tip of my heart and does its darnedest to sing. It
impresses me as life on such a sane and gigantic scale that I want to
be an actual part of it, that I positively ache to have a share in its
immensities. It seems so fruitful and prodigal and generous and
patient. It's so open-handed in the way it produces and gives and
returns our love. And there's a completeness about it that makes me
feel it can't possibly be wrong."

"The Eskimo, I suppose, feels very much the same in his little igloo
of ice with a pot of whale-blubber at his elbow," observed my
husband.

"You're a brute, my dear Diddums, and more casually cruel than a
Baffin-land cannibal," I retorted. "But we'll let it pass. For I'm
talking about something that's too fundamental to be upset by a bitter
tongue. There was a time, I know, when I used to fret about the finer
things I thought I was losing out of life, about the little hand-made
fripperies people have been forced to conjure up and carpenter
together to console them for having to live in human beehives made of
steel and concrete. But I'm beginning to find out that joy isn't a
matter of geography and companionship isn't a matter of over-crowded
subways. And the strap-hangers and the train-catchers and the
first-nighters can have what they've got. I don't seem to envy them
the way I used to. I don't need a Louvre when I've got the Northern
Lights to look at. And I can get along without an Æolian Hall when
I've got a little music in my own heart--for it's only what you've got
there, after all, that really counts in this world!"

"All of which means," concluded my husband, "that you are most
unmistakably growing old!"

"You have already," I retorted, "referred to me as a withered
beauty."

Dinky-Dunk studied me long and intently. I even felt myself turning
pink under that prolonged stare of appraisal.

"You are still easy to look at," he over-slangily and over-generously
admitted. "But I do regret that you aren't a little easier to live
with!"

I could force a little laugh, at that, but I couldn't quite keep a
tremor out of my voice when I spoke again.

"I'm sorry you see only my bad side, Dinky-Dunk. But it's kindness
that seems to bring everything that is best out of us women. We're
terribly like sliced pineapple in that respect: give us just a
sprinkling of sugar, and out come all the juices!"

It was Dinky-Dunk's color that deepened a little as he turned and
knocked out his pipe.

"That's a Chaddie McKail argument," he merely observed as he stood up.
"And a Chaddie McKail argument impresses me as suspiciously like Swiss
cheese: it doesn't seem to be genuine unless you can find plenty of
holes in it."

I did my best to smile at his humor.

"But this isn't an argument," I quietly corrected. "I'd look at it
more in the nature of an ultimatum."

That brought him up short, as I had intended it to do. He stood
worrying over it as Bobs and Scotty worry over a bone.

"I'm afraid," he finally intoned, "I've been repeatedly doing you the
great injustice of underestimating your intelligence!"

"That," I told him, "is a point where I find silence imposed upon
me."

He didn't speak until he got to the door.

"Well, I'm glad we've cleared the air a bit anyway," he said with a
grim look about his Holbein Astronomer old mouth as he went out.

But we haven't cleared the air. And it disturbs me more than I can say
to find that I have reservations from my husband. It bewilders me to
see that I can't be perfectly candid with him. But there are certain
deeper feelings that I can no longer uncover in his presence.
Something holds me back from explaining to him that this fixed dread
of mine for all cities is largely based on my loss of little Pee-Wee.
For if I hadn't gone to New York that time, to Josie Langdon's
wedding, I might never have lost my boy. They did the best they
could, I suppose, before their telegrams brought me back, but they
didn't seem to understand the danger. And little did I dream, before
the Donnelly butler handed me that first startling message just as we
were climbing into the motor to go down to the Rochambeau to meet
Chinkie and Tavvy, that within a week I was to sit and watch the
cruelest thing that can happen in this world. I was to see a small
child die. I was to watch my own Pee-Wee pass quietly away.

I have often wondered, since, why I never shed a tear during all those
terrible three days. I couldn't, in some way, though the nurse herself
was crying, and poor old Whinnie and Struthers were sobbing together
next to the window, and dour old Dinky-Dunk, on the other side of the
bed, was racking his shoulders with smothered sobs as he held the
little white hand in his and the warmth went forever out of the little
fingers where his foolish big hand was trying to hold back the life
that couldn't be kept there. The old are ready to die, or can make
themselves ready. They have run their race and had their turn at
living. But it seems cruel hard to see a little tot, with eagerness
still in his heart, taken away, taken away with the wonder of things
still in his eyes. It stuns you. It makes you rebel. It leaves a scar
that Time itself can never completely heal.

Yet through it all I can still hear the voice of valorous old Whinnie
as he patted my shoulder and smiled with the brine still in the seams
of his furrowed old face. "We'll thole through, lassie; we'll thole
through!" he said over and over again. Yes; we'll thole through. And
this is only the uncovering of old wounds. And one must keep one's
heart and one's house in order, for with us we still have the living.

But Dinky-Dunk can't completely understand, I'm afraid, this morbid
hankering of mine to keep my family about me, to have the two chicks
that are left to me close under my wing. And never once, since Pee-Wee
went, have I actually punished either of my children. It may be wrong,
but I can't help it. I don't want memories of violence to be left
corroding and rankling in my mind. And I'd hate to see any child of
mine cringe, like an ill-treated dog, at every lift of the hand. There
are better ways of controlling them, I begin to feel, than through
fear. Their father, I know, will never agree with me on this matter.
He will always insist on mastery, open and undisputed mastery, in his
own house. He is the head of this Clan McKail, the sovereign of this
little circle. For we can say what we will about democracy, but when
a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple.
He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even
seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old
fabrication about the divine right of kings. But I can see that he is
often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in
his decrees. More and more often, of late, I've observed the boy
studying his father, studying him with an impersonal and critical eye.
And this habit of silent appraisal is plainly something which Duncan
resents, and resents keenly. He's beginning to have a feeling, I'm
afraid, that he can't quite get _at_ the boy. And there's a youthful
shyness growing up in Dinkie which seems to leave him ashamed of any
display of emotion before his father. I can see that it even begins to
exasperate Duncan a little, to be shut out behind those incontestable
walls of reserve. It's merely, I'm sure, that the child is so terribly
afraid of ridicule. He already nurses a hankering to be regarded as
one of the grown-ups and imagines there's something rather babyish in
any undue show of feeling. Yet he is hungry for affection. And he
aches, I know, for the approbation of his male parent, for the
approval of a full-grown man whom he can regard as one of his own
kind. He even imitates his father in the way in which he stands in
front of the fire, with his heels well apart. And he gives me chills
up the spine by pulling short on one bridle-rein and making Buntie,
his mustang-pony, pirouette just as the wicked-tempered Briquette
sometimes pirouettes when his father is in the saddle. Yet
Dinky-Dunk's nerves are a bit ragged and there are times when he's not
always just with the boy, though it's not for me to confute what the
instinctive genius of childhood has already made reasonably clear to
Dinkie's discerning young eye. But I can not, of course, encourage
insubordination. All I can do is to ignore the unwelcome and try to
crowd it aside with happier things. I want my boy to love me, as I
love him. And I think he does. I _know_ he does. That knowledge is an
azure and bottomless lake into which I can toss my blackest pebbles of
fear, my flintiest doubts of the future.




_Sunday the Fourth_


I wish I could get by the scruff of the neck that sophomoric old
philosopher who once said nothing survives being thought of. For I've
been learning, this last two or three days, just how wide of the mark
he shot. And it's all arisen out of Dinky-Dunk's bland intimation that
I am "a withered beauty." Those words have held like a fish-hook in
the gills of my memory. If they'd come from somebody else they
mightn't have meant so much. But from one's own husband--Wow!--they go
in like a harpoon. And they have given me a great deal to think about.
There are times, I find, when I can accept that intimation of slipping
into the sere and yellow leaf without revolt. Then the next moment it
fills me with a sort of desperation. I refuse to go up on the shelf. I
see red and storm against age. I refuse to bow to the inevitable. My
spirit recoils at the thought of decay. For when you're fading you're
surely decaying, and when you're decaying you're approaching the end.
So stop, Father Time, stop, or I'll get out of the car!

But we can't get out of the car. That's the tragic part of it. We have
to go on, whether we like it or not. We have to buck up, and grin and
bear it, and make the best of a bad bargain. And Heaven knows I've
never wanted to be one of the Glooms! I've no hankering to sit with
the Sob Sisters and pump brine over the past. I'm light-hearted enough
if they'll only give me a chance. I've always believed in getting what
we could out of life and looking on the sunny side of things. And the
disturbing part of it is, I don't _feel_ withered--not by a jugful!
There are mornings when I can go about my homely old duties singing
like a prairie Tetrazzini. There are days when I could do a
hand-spring, if for nothing more than to shock my solemn old
Dinky-Dunk out of his dourness. There are times when we go skimming
along the trail with the crystal-cool evening air in our faces and the
sun dipping down toward the rim of the world when I want to thank
Somebody I can't see for Something-or-other I can't define. _Dum
vivimus vivamus._

But it seems hard to realize that I'm a sedate and elderly lady
already on the shady side of thirty. A woman over thirty years
old--and I can remember the days of my intolerant youth when I
regarded the woman of thirty as an antiquated creature who should be
piously preparing herself for the next world. And it doesn't take
thirty long to slip into forty. And then forty merges into fifty--and
there you are, a nice old lady with nervous indigestion and
knitting-needles and a tendency to breathe audibly after ascending the
front-stairs. No wonder, last night, it drove me to taking a volume of
George Moore down from the shelf and reading his chapter on "The Woman
of Thirty." But I found small consolation in that over-uxorious essay,
feeling as I did that I knew life quite as well as any amorous
studio-rat who ever made copy out of his mottled past. So I was
driven, in the end, to studying myself long and intently in the
broken-hinged mirrors of my dressing-table. And I didn't find much
there to fortify my quailing spirit. I was getting on a bit. I was
curling up a little around the edges. There was no denying that fact.
For I could see a little fan-light of lines at the outer corner of
each eye. And down what Dinky-Dunk once called the honeyed corners of
my mouth went another pair of lines which clearly came from too much
laughing. But most unmistakably of all there was a line coming under
my chin, a small but tell-tale line, announcing the fact that I wasn't
losing any in weight, and standing, I suppose, one of the foot-hills
which precede the Rocky-Mountain dewlaps of old age. It wouldn't be
long, I could see, before I'd have to start watching my diet, and
looking for a white hair or two, and probably give up horseback
riding. And then settle down into an ingle-nook old dowager with a
hassock under _my_ feet and a creak in my knees and a fixed conviction
that young folks never acted up in _my_ youth as they act up
nowadays.

I tried to laugh it away, but my heart went down like a dredge-dipper.
Whereupon I set my jaw, which didn't make me look any younger. But I
didn't much care, for the mirror had already done its worst.

"Not muchee!" I said as I sat there making faces at myself. "You're
still one of the living. The bloom may be off in a place or two, but
you're sound to the core, and serviceable for many a year. So _sursum
corda! 'Rung ho! Hira Singh!_' as Chinkie taught us to shout in the
old polo days. And that means, Go in and win, Chaddie McKail, and die
with your boots on if you have to."

I was still intent on that study of my robust-looking but slightly
weather-beaten map when Dinky-Dunk walked in and caught me in the
middle of my Narcissus act.

"'All is vanity saith the Preacher,'" he began. But he stopped short
when I swung about at him. For I hadn't, after all, been able to
carpenter together even a whale-boat of consolation out of my wrecked
schooner of hope.

"Oh, Kakaibod," I wailed, "I'm a pie-faced old has-been, and nobody
will ever love me again!"

He only laughed, on his way out, and announced that I seemed to be
getting my share of loving, as things went. But he didn't take back
what he said about me being withered. And the first thing I shall do
to-morrow, when Gershom comes down to breakfast, will be to ask him
how old Cleopatra was when she brought Antony to his knees and how
antiquated Ninon D'Enclos was when she lost her power over that
semi-civilized creature known as Man. Gershom will know, for Gershom
knows everything.




_Wednesday the Seventh_


Gershom has been studying some of my carbon-prints. He can't for the
life of him understand why I consider Dewing's _Old-fashioned Gown_ so
beautiful, or why I should love Childe Hassam's _Church at Old Lyme_
or see anything remarkable about Metcalf's _May Night_. But I cherish
them as one cherishes photographs of lost friends.

A couple of the Horatio Walker's, he acknowledged, seemed to mean
something to him. But Gershom's still in the era when he demands a
story in the picture and could approach Monet and Degas only by way of
Meissonier and Bouguereau. And a print, after all, is only a print.
He's slightly ashamed to admire beauty as mere beauty, contending that
at the core of all such things there should be a moral. So we
pow-wowed for an hour and more over the threadbare old theme and the
most I could get out of Gershom was that the lady in _The
Old-fashioned Gown_ reminded him of me, only I was more vital. But all
that talk about landscape and composition and line and tone made me
momentarily homesick for a glimpse of Old Lyme again, before I go to
my reward.

But the mood didn't last. And I no longer regret what's lost. I don't
know what mysterious Divide it is I have crossed over, but it seems to
be peace I want now instead of experience. I'm no longer envious of
the East and all it holds. I'm no longer fretting for wider circles of
life. The lights may be shining bright on many a board-walk, at this
moment, but it means little to this ranch-lady. What I want now is a
better working-plan for that which has already been placed before me.
Often and often, in the old days, when I realized how far away from
the world this lonely little island of Casa Grande and its inhabitants
stood, I used to nurse a ghostly envy for the busier tideways of life
from which we were banished. I used to feel that grandeur was in some
way escaping me. I could picture what was taking place in some of
those golden-gray old cities I had known: The Gardens of the
Luxembourg when the horse-chestnuts were coming out in bloom, and the
Château de Madrid in the Bois at the luncheon hour, or the Pre Catalan
on a Sunday with heavenly sole in lemon and melted butter and a still
more heavenly waltz as you sat eating _fraises des bois_ smothered in
thick _crême d'Isigny_. Or the Piazzi di Spagna on Easter Sunday with
the murmur of Rome in your ears and the cars and carriages flashing
through the green-gold shadows of the Pincio. Or Hyde Park in May,
with the sun sifting through the brave old trees and flashing on the
helmets of the Life Guards as the King goes by in a scarlet uniform
with the blue Order of the Garter on his breast, or Park Lane on a
glorious light-and-shadow afternoon in June and a dip into the
familiar old Americanized clangor at the Cecil; or Chinkie's place in
Devonshire about a month earlier, sitting out on the terrace wrapped
in steamer-rugs and waiting for the moon to come up and the first
nightingale to sing. Of Fifth Avenue shining almost bone-white in the
clear December sunlight and the salted nuts and orange-blossom
cocktails at Sherry's, or the Plaza tea-room at about five o'clock in
the afternoon with the smell of Turkish tobacco and golden pekoe and
hot-house violets and Houbigant's _Quelque-fleurs_ all tangled up
together. Or the City of Wild Parsley in March with a wave of wild
flowers breaking over the ruins of Selinunte and the tumbling pillars
of the Temple of Olympian Zeus lying time-mellowed in the clear
Sicilian sunlight!

They were all lovely enough, and still are, I suppose, but it's a
loveliness in some way involved with youth. So the memory of those
far-off gaieties, which, after all, were so largely physical, no
longer touch me with unrest. They're wine that's drunk and water
that's run under the bridge. Younger lips can drink of that cup, which
was sweet enough in its time. Let the newer girls dance their legs off
under the French crystals of the Ritz, and powder their noses over the
Fountain of the Sunken Boat, and eat the numbered duck so
reverentially doled out at La Tour d'Argent and puff their cigarettes
behind the beds of begonias and marguerites at the Château Madrid.
They too will get tired of it, and step aside for others. For the
petal falls from the blossom and the blossom plumps out into fruit.
And all those golden girls, when their day is over, must slip away
from those gardens of laughter. When they don't, they only make
themselves ridiculous. For there's nothing sadder than an antique lady
of other days decking herself out in the furbelows of a lost youth.
And I've got Dinky-Dunk's overalls to patch and my bread to set, so I
can't think much more about it to-night. But after I've done my
chores, and before I go up to bed, I'm going to read _Rabbi Ben Ezra_
right through to the end. I'll do it in front of the fire, with my
feet up and with three Ontario Northern Spy apples on a plate beside
me, to be munched as Audrey herself might have munched them, oblivious
of any Touchstone and his reproving eyes.

I have stopped to ponder, however, how much of this morbid dread of
mine for big cities is due to that short and altogether unsatisfactory
visit to New York, to that sense of coming back a stranger and finding
old friends gone and those who were left with such entirely new
interests.

I was out of it, completely and dishearteningly out of it. And my
clothes were all wrong. My hats were wrong; my shoes were wrong; and
every rag I had on me was in some way wrong. I was a tourist from the
provinces. And I wasn't up-to-date with either what was on me or was
_in_ me. I didn't even know the new subway routes or the telephone
rules or the proper places to go for tea. The Metropolitan looked
cramped and shoddy and _Tristan_ seemed shoddily sung to me. There was
no thrill to it. And even _The Jewels of the Madonna_ impressed me as
a bit garish and off color, with the Apache Dance of the last act
almost an affront to God and man. I even asked myself, when I found
that I had lost the trick of laughing at bridal-suite farces, if it
was the possession of children that had changed me. For when you're
with children you must in some way match their snowy innocence with a
kindred coloring of innocence, very much as the hare and the weasel
and the ptarmigan turn white to match the whiteness of our northern
winter. Yet I was able to wring pure joy out of Rachmaninoff's playing
at Carnegie Hall, with a great man making music for music's sake. I
loved the beauty and balance and splendid sanity of that playing,
without keyboard fire-works and dazzle and glare. But Rachmaninoff was
the exception. Even Central Park seemed smaller than of old, and I
couldn't remember which drives Dinky-Dunk and I had taken in the
historic old hansom-cab after our equally historic marriage by
ricochet. Fifth Avenue itself was different, the caterpillar of trade
having crawled a little farther up the stalk of fashion, for the
shops, I found, went right up to the Park, and the old W. K. house
where we once danced our long-forgotten Dresden China Quadrille, in
imitation of the equally forgotten Eighty-Three event, confronted me
as a beehive of business offices. I couldn't quite get used to the new
names and the new faces and the new shops and the side-street theaters
and the thought of really nice girls going to a prize-fight in
Madison Square Garden, and the eternal and never-ending talk about
drinks, about where and how to get them, and how to mix them, and how
much Angostura to put into 'em, and the musty ale that used to be had
at Losekam's in Washington, and the _Beaux Arts_ cocktails that used
to come with a dash of absinthe, and the shipment of pinch-neck Scotch
which somebody smuggled in on his cruiser-yacht from the east end of
Cuba, and so-forth and so-forth until I began to feel that the only
important thing in the world was the possession and dispensation of
alcohol. And out of it I got the headache without getting the fun. I
had the same dull sense of being cheated which came to me in my
flapper days when I fell asleep with a mouthful of contraband gum and
woke up in the morning with my jaw-muscles tired--I'd been facing all
the exertion without getting any of the satisfaction.

The one bright spot to me, in that lost city of my childhood, was the
part of Madison Avenue which used to be known as Murray Hill, the
right-of-way along the west sidewalk of which I once commandeered for
an afternoon's coasting. I could see again, as I glanced down the
familiar slope, the puffy figure of old Major Elmes, who in those
days was always pawing somebody, since he seemed to believe with
Novalis that he touched heaven when he placed his hand on a human
body. I could see myself sky-hooting down that icy slope on my
coaster, approaching the old Major from the rear and peremptorily
piping out: "One side, please!" For I was young then, and I expected
all life to make way for me. But the old Major betrayed no intention
of altering his solemnly determined course at any such juvenile
suggestion, with the result that he sat down on me bodily, and for the
next two blocks approached his club in Madison Square in a manner and
at a speed which he had in no wise anticipated. But, _Eheu_, how long
ago it all seemed!




_Saturday the Tenth_


Peter has written back in answer to my question as to the expediency
of sending my boy off to a boarding-school. He put all he had to say
in two lines. They were:

"_I had a mother like Dinkie's, I'd stick to her until the stars were
dust._"

That was very nice of Peter, of course, but I don't imagine he had any
idea of the peck of trouble he was going to stir up at Casa Grande.
For Dinky-Dunk picked up the sheet of paper on which that
light-hearted message had been written and perused the two lines,
perused them with a savagery which rather disturbed me. He read them
for the second time, and then he put them down. His eye, as he
confronted me, was a glacial one.

"It's too bad we can't run this show without the interference of
outsiders," he announced as he stalked out of the room.

I've been thinking the thing over, and trying to get my husband's
view-point. But I can't quite succeed. There has always been a touch
of the satyric in Dinky-Dunk's attitude toward Peter's weekly letter
to my boy. He has even intimated that they were written in a new kind
of Morse, the inference being that they were intended to carry
messages in cipher to eyes other than Dinkie's. But Peter is much too
honest a man for any such resort to subterfuge. And Dinky-Dunk has
always viewed with a hostile eye the magazines and books and toys
which big-hearted Peter has showered out on us. Peter always was
ridiculously open-handed. And he always loved my Dinkie. And it's only
natural that our thoughts should turn back to where our love has been
left. Peter, I know, gets quite as much fun out of those elaborately
playful letters to Dinkie as Dinkie does himself. And it's left the
boy more anxious to learn, to the end that he may pen a more
respectable reply to them.

Some of Peter's gifts, it is true, have been embarrassingly ornate,
but Peter, who has been given so much, must have remembered how little
has come to my kiddies. It was my intention, for a while, to talk this
over with Dinky-Dunk, to try to make him see it in a more reasonable
light. But I have now given up that intention. There's a phantasmal
something that holds me back....

I dreamt last night that my little Dinkie was a grown youth in a Greek
academy, wearing a toga and sitting on a marble bench overlooking a
sea of lovely sapphire. There both Peter and Percy, also arrayed in
togas, held solemn discourse with my offspring and finally agreed that
once they were through with him he would be the Wonder of the Age....

Dinky-Dunk asked me point-blank to-day if I'd consider the sale of
Casa Grande, provided he got the right price for the ranch. I felt,
for a moment, as though the bottom had been knocked out of my world.
But it showed me the direction in which my husband's thoughts have
been running of late. And I just as pointedly retorted that I'd never
consent to the sale of Casa Grande. It's not merely because it's our
one and only home. It's more because of the little knoll where the
four Manitoba maples have been set and the row of prairie-roses have
been planted along the little iron fence, the little iron fence which
twice a year I paint a virginal white, with my own hands. For that's
where my Pee-Wee sleeps, and that lonely little grave must never pass
out of my care, to be forgotten and neglected and tarnished with
time. It's not a place of sorrow now, but more an altar, duly tended,
the flower-covered bed of my Pee-Wee, of my poor little Pee-Wee who
was so brimming with life and love. He used to make me think of a
humming-bird in a garden--and now all I have left of him is my small
chest of toys and trinkets and baby-clothes. God, I know, will be good
to that lonely little newcomer in His world of the statelier dead, in
His gallery of whispering ghosts. Oh, be good to him, God! Be good to
him, or You shall be no God of mine! I can't think of him as dead, as
going out like a candle, as melting into nothingness as the little
bones under their six feet of earth molder away. But my laddie is
gone. And I must not be morbid. As Peter once said, misery loves
company, but the company is apt to seek more convivial quarters. Yet
something has gone out of my life, and that something drives me back
to my Dinkie and my Poppsy with a sort of fierceness in my hunger to
love them, to make the most of them.

Gershom, who has been giving Poppsy a daily lesson at home, has just
inquired why she shouldn't be sent to school along with Dinkie. And
her father has agreed. It gave me the wretched feeling, for a moment
or two, that they were conspiring to take my last baby away from me.
But I have to bow to the fact that I no longer possess one, since
Poppsy announced her preference, the other day, for a doll "with real
livings in it." She begins to show as fixed an aversion to baby-talk
as that entertained by old Doctor Johnson himself, and no longer
yearns to "do yidin on the team-tars," as she used to express it. The
word "birthday" is still "birfday" with her, and "water" is still
"wagger," but she now religiously eschews all such reiterative
diminutives as "roundy-poundy" and "Poppsy-Woppsy" and "beddy-bed."
She has even learned, after much effort, to convert her earlier "keam
of feet" into the more legitimate and mature "cream of wheat." And now
that she has a better mastery of the sibilants the charm has rather
gone out of the claim, which I so laboriously taught her, that "Daddy
is all feet," meaning, of course, that he was altogether sweet--which
he gave small sign of being when he first caught the point of my
patient schooling. She is not so quick-tongued as her brother Dinkie,
but she has a natural fastidiousness which makes her long for
alignment with the proprieties. She is, in fact, a conformist, a
sedate and dignified little lady who will never be greatly given to
the spilling of beans and the upsetting of apple-carts. She is, in
many ways, amazingly like her pater. She will, I know, be a nice girl
when she grows up, without very much of that irresponsibility which
seems to have been the bugbear of her maternal parent. I'm even
beginning to believe there's something in the old tradition about
ancestral traits so often skipping a generation. At any rate, that
crazy-hearted old Irish grandmother of mine passed on to me a muckle
o' her wildness, the mad County Clare girl who swore at the vicar and
rode to hounds and could take a seven-barred gate without turning a
hair and was apt to be always in love or in debt or in hot water. She
died too young to be tamed, I'm told, for say what you will, life
tames us all in the end. Even Lady Hamilton took to wearing
red-flannel petticoats before she died, and Buffalo Bill faded down
into plain Mr. William Cody, and the abducted Helen of Troy gave many
a day up to her needlework, we are told, and doubtlessly had trouble
with both her teeth and her waist measurement.

Dinky-Dunk is proud of his Poppsy and has announced that it's about
time we tucked the "Poppsy" away with her baby-clothes and resorted to
the use of the proper and official "Pauline Augusta." So Pauline we
shall try to have it, after this. There are several things, I think,
which draw Dinky-Dunk and his Poppsy--I mean his Pauline--together.
One is her likeness to himself. Another is her tractability, though I
hate to hitch so big a word on to so small a lady. And still another
is the fact that she is a girl. There's a subliminal play of
sex-attraction about it, I suppose, just as there probably is between
Dinkie and me. And there's something very admirable in Pauline
Augusta's staid adoration of her dad. She plays up to him, I can see,
without quite knowing she's doing it. She's hungry for his approval,
and happiest, always, in his presence. Then, too, she makes him
forget, for the time at least, his disappointment in a soul-mate who
hasn't quite measured up to expectations! And I devoutly thank the
Master of Life and Love that my solemn old Dinky-Dunk can thus care
for his one and only daughter. It softens him, and keeps the sordid
worries of the moment from vitrifying his heart. It puts a rainbow in
his sky of every-day work, and gives him something to plan and plot
and live for. And he needs it. We all do. It's our human and natural
hunger for companionship. And as he observed not long ago, if that
hunger can't be satisfied at home, we wander off and snatch what we
can on the wing. Some day when they're rich, I overheard Dinky-Dunk
announcing the other night, Pauline Augusta and her Dad are going to
make the Grand Tour of Europe. And there, undoubtedly, do their best
to pick up a Prince of the Royal Blood and have a château in Lombardy
and a villa on the Riviera and a standing invitation to all the
Embassy Balls!

Well, not if I know it. None of that penny-a-liner moonshine for my
daughter. And as she grows older, I feel sure, I'll have more
influence over her. She'll begin to realize that the battle of life
hasn't scarred up for nothing this wary-eyed old mater who's beginning
to know a hawk from a henshaw. I've learned a thing or two in my day,
and one or two of them are going to be passed on to my offspring.




_Thursday the Fifteenth_


Struthers and I have been house-cleaning, for this is the middle of
May, and our reluctant old northern spring seems to be here for good.
It has been backward, this year, but the last of the mud has gone, and
I hope to have my first setting of chicks out in a couple of days.
Dinkie wants to start riding Buntie to school, but his pater says
otherwise. Gershom goes off every morning, with Calamity Kate hitched
to the old buckboard, with my two kiddies packed in next to him and
provender enough for himself and the kiddies and Calamity Kate under
the seat. The house seems very empty when they are away. But some time
about five, every afternoon, I see them loping back along the trail.
Then comes the welcoming bark of old Bobs, and a raid on the
cooky-jar, and traces of bread-and-jelly on two hungry little faces,
and the familiar old tumult about the reanimated rooms of Casa Grande.
Then Poppsy--I beg her ladyship's pardon, for I mean, of course,
Pauline Augusta--has to duly inspect her dolls to assure herself that
they are both well-behaved and spotless as to apparel, for Pauline
Augusta is a stickler as to decorum and cleanliness; and Dinkie falls
to working on his air-ship, which he is this time making quite
independent of Whinnie, whose last creation along that line betrayed a
disheartening disability for flight. But even this second effort, I'm
afraid, is doomed to failure, for more than once I've seen Dinkie back
away and stand regarding his incompetent flier with a look of
frustration on his face. He is always working over machinery--for he
loves anything with wheels--and I'm pretty well persuaded that the
twentieth-century mania of us grown-ups for picking ourselves to
pieces is nothing more than a development of this childish hunger to
get the cover off things and see the works go round. Dinkie makes
wagons and carts and water-wheels, but some common fatality of
incompetence overtakes them all and they are cast aside for
enterprises more novel and more promising. He announces, now, that he
intends to be an engineer. And that recalls the time when I was
convinced in my own soul that he was destined for a life of art, since
he was forever asking me to draw him "a li'l' man," and later on fell
to drawing them himself. He would do his best to inscribe a circle
and then emboss it with perfectly upright hair, as though the person
in question had just been perusing the most stirring of
penny-dreadfuls. Then he would put in two dots of eyes, and one
abbreviated and vertical line for the nose, and another elongated and
horizontal line for the mouth, and arms with extended and extremely
elocutionary fingers, to say nothing of extremely attenuated legs
which invariably toed-out, to make more discernible the silhouette of
the ponderously booted feet. I have several dozen of these "li'l' men"
carefully treasured in an old cigar-box. But he soon lost interest in
these purely anthropocentric creations and broadened out into the
delineation of boats and cars and wheel-barrows and rocking-chairs and
tea-pots, lying along the floor on his stomach for an hour at a time,
his tongue moving sympathetically with every movement of his pencil.
He held the latter clutched close to the point by his stubby little
fingers.

I had to call a halt on all such artistry, however, for he startled
me, one day, by suddenly going crosseyed. It came, of course, from
working with his nose too close to the paper. I imagined, with a
sinking heart, that it was an affliction which was to stay with him
for the rest of his natural life. But a night's sleep did much to
restore the over-taxed eye-muscles and before the end of a week they
had entirely righted themselves.

To-morrow Dinkie will probably want to be an aeronaut, and the next
day a cowboy, and the next an Indian scout, for I notice that his
enthusiasms promptly conform to the stimuli with which he chances to
be confronted. Last Sunday he asked me to read Macaulay's _Horatius_
to him. I could see, after doing so, that it was going to his head
exactly as a second Clover-Club cocktail goes to the head of a
sub-deb. On Tuesday, when I went out about sun-down to get him to help
me gather the eggs, I found that he had made a sword by nailing a bit
of stick across a slat from the hen-house, and also observed that he
had possessed himself of my boiler-top. So I held back, slightly
puzzled. But later on, hearing much shouting and clouting and banging
of tin, I quietly investigated and found Dinkie in the corral-gate,
holding it against all comers. So earnest was he about it, so rapt was
he in that solemn business of warfare, that I decided to slip away
without letting him see me. He was sixteen long centuries away from
Casa Grande, at that moment. He was afar off on the banks of the
Tiber, defending the Imperial City against Lars Porsena and his
footmen. All Rome was at his back, cheering him on, and every time his
hen-coop slat thumped that shredded old poplar gate-post some proud
son of Tuscany bit the dust.




_Sunday the Twenty-Fifth_


Duncan, it's plain to see, is still in the doldrums. He is
uncommunicative and moody and goes about his work with a listlessness
which is more and more disturbing to me. He surprised his wife the
other day by addressing her as "Lady Selkirk," for the simple reason,
he later explained, that I propose to be monarch of all I survey, with
none to dispute my domain. And a little later he further intimated
that I was like a miser with a pot of gold, satisfied to live anywhere
so long as my precious family-life could go clinking through my
fingers.

That was last Sunday--a perfect prairie day--when I sat out on the end
of the wagon-box, watching Poppsy and Dinkie. I sat in the warm
sunlight, in a sort of trance, staring at those two children as they
went about their solemn business of play. They impressed me as two
husky and happy-bodied little beings and I remembered that whatever
prairie-life had cost me, it had not cost me the health of my family.
My two bairns had been free of those illnesses and infections which
come to the city child, and I was glad enough to remember it. But I
was unconscious of Dinky-Dunk's cynic eye on me as I sat there
brooding over my chicks. When he spoke to me, in fact, I was thinking
how odd it was that Josie Langdon, on the very day before her
marriage, should have carried me down to the lower end of Fifth Avenue
and led me into the schoolroom of the Church of the Ascension, and
asked me to study Sorolla's _Triste Herencia_ which hangs there.

I can still see that wonderful canvas where the foreshore of Valencia,
usually so vivacious with running figures and the brightest of
sunlight on dancing sails, had been made the wine-dark sea of the
pagan questioner with the weight of immemorial human woe to shadow it.
Josie had been asking me about marriage and children, for even she was
knowing her more solemn moments in the midst of all that feverishly
organized merriment. But I was surprised, when she slipped a hand
through my arm, to see a tear run down her nose. So I looked up again
at Sorolla's picture of the naked little cripples snatching at their
moment's joy along the water's edge, at his huddled group of maimed
and cast-off orphans trying to be happy without quite knowing how. I
can still see the stunted little bodies, naked in sunlight that
seemed revealing without being invigorating, clustered about the
guardian figure of the tall old priest in black, the somberly
benignant old figure that towered above the little wrecks on crutches
and faced, as majestic as Millet's _Sower_, as austere and unmoved as
Fate itself, a dark sea overhung by a dark sky. Sorolla was great in
that picture, to my way of thinking. He was great in the manner in
which he attunes nature to a human mood, in which he gives you the
sunlight muffled, in some way, like the sunlight during a partial
eclipse, and keys turbulence down to quietude, like the soft pedal
that falls on a noisy street when a hearse goes by.

Josie felt it, and I felt it, that wordless thinning down of radiance,
that mysterious holding back of warmth, until it seemed to strike a
chill into the bones. It was the darker wing of Destiny hovering over
man's head, deepening at the same time that it shadows the receding
sky-line, so that even the memory of it, a thousand miles away, could
drain the jocund blitheness out of the open prairie and give an air of
pathos and solitude to my own children playing about my feet. Sorolla,
I remembered, had little ones of his own. He _knew_. Life had taught
him, and in teaching, had enriched his art. For the artist, after all,
is the man who cuts up the loaf of his own heart, and butters it with
beauty, and at tuppence a slice hands it to the hungry children of the
world.

So when Dinky-Dunk laughed at me, for going into a trance over my own
children, I merely smiled condoningly back at him. I felt vaguely
sorry for him. He wasn't getting out of them what I was getting. He
was being cheated, in some way, out of the very harvest for which he
had sowed and waited. And if he had come to me, in that mood of
relapse, if he had come to me with the slightest trace of humility,
with the slightest touch of entreaty, on his face, I'd have hugged his
salt-and-peppery old head to my bosom and begged to start all over
again with a clean slate....

Gershom and I get along much better than I had expected. There's
nothing wrong with the boy except his ineradicable temptation to
impart to you his gratuitous tidbits of information. I can't object,
of course, to Gershom having a college education: what I object to is
his trying to give me one. I don't mind his wisdom, but I do hate to
see him tear the whole tree of knowledge up by the roots and floor
one with it. He has just informed me that there are estimated to be
30,000,000,000,000 red blood corpuscles in this body of mine, and I
made him blink by solemnly challenging him to prove it. Quite
frequently and quite sternly, too, he essays to correct my English. He
reproved me for saying: "Go to it, Gershom!" And he declared I was in
error in saying "The goose hangs high," as that was merely a vulgar
corruption for "The goose whangs high," the "whanging" being the call
of the wild geese high in the air when the weather is settled and
fair. We live and learn!

But I can't help liking this pedagogic old Gershom who takes himself
and me and all the rest of the world so seriously. I like him because
he shares in my love for Dinkie and stands beside Peter himself in the
fondly foolish belief that Dinkie has somewhere the hidden germ of
greatness in him. Not that my boy is one of those precocious little
bounders who are so precious in the eyes of their parents and so
odious to the eyes of the rest of the world. He is a large-boned boy,
almost a rugged-looking boy, and it is only I, knowing him as I do,
who can fathom the sensibilities housed in that husky young body.
There is a misty broodiness in his eyes which leaves them
indescribably lovely to me as I watch him in his moments of raptness.
But that look doesn't last long, for Dinkie can be rough in play and
at times rough in speech, and deep under the crust of character I
imagine I see traces of his Scottish father in him. I watch with an
eagle eye for any outcroppings of that Caledonian-granite strain in
his make-up. I inspect him as Chinkie used to inspect his fruit-trees
for San José scale, for if there is any promise of hardness or cruelty
there I want it killed in the bud.

But I don't worry as I used to, on that score. He may be rough-built,
but moods cluster thick about him, like butterflies on a shelf of
broken rock. And he is both pliable and responsive. I can shake him,
when in the humor, by the mere telling of a story. I can control his
color, I can excite him and exalt him, and bring him to the verge of
tears, if I care to, by the mere tone of my voice as I read him one of
his favorite tales out of one of Peter's books. But I shrink, in a
way, from toying with those feelings. It seems brutal, cruel,
merciless. For he is, after all, a delicate instrument, to be treated
with delicacy. The soul of him must be kept packed away, like a
violin, in its case of reserve well-padded with discretion. Two
things I see in him: tenseness and beauty. And these are things which
are lost, with rough handling. He shrinks away from brutality. Always,
when he came to the picture of Samson pulling down the pillars of the
temple, in Whinstane Sandy's big old illustrated Bible, he used to
cover with one small hand a certain child on the temple steps as
though to protect to the last that innocent one from the falling
columns and cornices.

But I'm worried, at times, about Dinky-Dunk's attitude toward the boy.
There are ways in which he demands too much from the child. His father
is often unnecessarily rough in his play with him, seeming to take a
morose delight in goading him to the breaking point and then lamenting
his lack of grit, edging him on to the point of exasperation and then
heaping scorn on him for his weakness. More than once I've seen his
father actually hurt him, although the child was too proud to admit
it. Dinky-Dunk, I think, really wants his boy to be a bigger figure in
the world than his dad. Milord's a middle-aged man now and knows his
limitations. He has realized just how high the supremest high-water
mark of his life will stand. And being human, he must nurse his human
regrets over his failures in life. So now he wishes to see his
thwarted powers come to fuller fruit in his offspring. I'm afraid he'd
even run the risk of sacrificing the boy's happiness for the sake of
knowing Dinkie's wagon was to be hitched to the star of success. For I
know my husband well enough to realize that he has always hankered
after worldly success, that his god, if he had any, has always been
the god of Power. I, too, want to see my son a success. But I want him
to be happy first. I want to see him get some of the things I've been
cheated out of, that I've cheated myself out of. That's the only way
now I can get even with life. I can't live my own days over again. But
I can catch at the trick of living them over again in my Dinkie.




_Thursday the Twenty-Ninth_


We have arrived at an armistice, Dinky-Dunk and I. It was forced on
us, for things couldn't have gone on in the old intolerable manner.
Dinky-Dunk, I fancy, began to realize that he hadn't been quite fair,
and started making oblique but transparent enough efforts at
appeasement. When he sat down close beside me, and I moved away, he
said in a spirit of exaggerated self-accusation: "I'm afraid I've got
a peach-stain on my reputation!" I retorted, at that, that she had
never impressed me as much of a peach. Whereupon he merely laughed, as
though it were a joke out of a Midnight Revue. Then he clipped a
luridly illustrated advertisement of a nerve-medicine out of his
newspaper and pinned it on my bedroom door, after I had ignored his
tentative knock thereon the night before. The picture showed an anemic
and woebegone couple haggling and shaking their fists at each other,
while a large caption announced that "Thousands of Married Folks Lead
a Cat and Dog Life--Are Cross, Crabbed and Grumpy!"--all of which
could be obviated if they used Oxygated Iron.

What made it funny, of course, was the ridiculousness of the drawing.
Then Dinky-Dunk, right before the blushing Gershom, accused me of
being a love-piker. I could sniff which way the wind was blowing, but
I sat tight. Then, to cap the climax, my husband announced that he had
something for me which was surely going to melt my mean old prairie
heart. And late that afternoon he came trundling up to Casa Grande
with nothing more nor less than an old prairie-schooner.

It startled me, when I first caught sight of it. But its acquisition
was not so miraculous as it might have seemed. Dinky-Dunk, who is a
born dickerer, has been trading some of his ranch-stock for town-lots
on the outskirts of Buckhorn. On the back of one of these lots stood a
tumble-down wooden building, and hidden away in this building was the
prairie-schooner. Something about it had caught his fancy, so he had
insisted that it be included in the deal. And home he brought it, with
Tithonus and Tumble-Weed yoked to its antique tongue and his own
Stetsoned figure high on the driving seat. They had told Dinky-Dunk it
wasn't a really-truly authentic prairie-schooner, since practically
all of the trekking north of the Fiftieth Parallel has been done by
means of the Red River cart. But Dinky-Dunk, after looking more
carefully over the heavy-timbered running-gear and the cumbersome
iron-work, and discovering even the sturdy hooks under its belly from
which the pails and pots of earlier travelers must have hung,
concluded that it was one of the genuine old-timers, one of the
"Murphies" once driven by a "bull-whacker" and drawn by "wheelers" and
"pointers." Where it originally came from, Heaven only knows. But it
had been used, five years before, for a centenary procession in the
provincial capital and had emerged into the open again last summer for
a town-booming _Rodeo_ twenty miles down the steel from Buckhorn. It
looked like the dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History,
with every vestige of its tarpaulin top gone. But Whinnie has already
sewed together a canvas covering for its weather-beaten old roof-ribs,
and has put clean wheat-straw in its box-bottom, so that it makes a
kingly place for my two kiddies to play. I even spotted Dinkie,
enthroned high on the big driving-seat, with a broken binder-whip in
his hand, imagining he was one of the original Forty-Niners pioneering
along the unknown frontiers of an unknown land. I could see him duck
at imaginary arrows and frenziedly defend his family from imaginary
Sioux with an imaginary musket. And I stood beside it this morning,
dreaming of the adventures it must have lumbered through, of the
freight it must have carried and the hopes it must have ferried as it
once crawled westward along the floor of the world, from water-hole to
lonely water-hole. I've been wondering if certain perforations in its
side-boards can be bullet-holes and if certain dents and abrasions in
its timbers mean the hostile arrows of skulking Apaches when women and
children crouched low behind the ramparts of this tiny wooden
fortress. I can't help picturing what those women and children had to
endure, and how trivial, after all, are our puny hardships compared
with theirs.

And I don't intend to dwell on those hardships. I'm holding out the
hand of compromise to my fellow-trekker. Existence is only a
prairie-schooner, and we have to accommodate ourselves to it. And I
thank Heaven now that I can see things more clearly and accept them
more quietly. That's a lesson Time teaches us. And Father Time, after
all, has to hand us something to make up for so mercilessly
permitting us to grow old. It leaves us more tolerant. We're not
allowed to demand more life, but we can at least ask for more light.
So I intend to be cool-headedly rational about it all. I'm going to
keep Reason on her throne. I'm going to be a bitter-ender, in at least
one thing: I'm going to stick to my Dinky-Dunk to the last ditch. I'm
going to patch up the old top and forget the old scars. For we're in
the same schooner, and we must make the most of it. And if I have to
eat my pot of honey on the grave of all our older hopes, I'm at least
going to dig away at that pot until its bottom is scraped clean. I'm
going to remain the neck-or-nothing woman I once prided myself on
being. I'm even going to overlook Dinky-Dunk's casual cruelty in
announcing, when I half-jokingly inquired why he preferred other women
to his own Better-Half, that no horse eats hay after being turned out
to fresh grass. I'm going on, I repeat, no matter what happens. I'm
going on to the desperate end, like my own Dinkie with the
chocolate-cake when I warned him he'd burst if he dared to eat another
piece and he responded: "Then pass the cake, Mummy--and everybody
stand back!"




_Tuesday the Fourth_


_Sursum corda_ is the word--so here goes! I am determined to be blithe
and keep the salt of humor sprinkled thick across the butter-crock of
concession. Dinky-Dunk watches me with a guarded and wary eye and
Pauline Augusta does not always approve of me. Yesterday, when I got
on Briquette and made that fire-eater jump the two rain-barrels put
end to end Dinky-Dunk told me I was too old to be taking a chance like
that. So I promptly and deliberately turned a somersault on the
prairie-sod, just to show him I wasn't the old lady he was trying to
make me out. Gershom, who'd just got back with the children and was
unhitching Calamity Kate, retreated with his eyebrows up, toward the
stable. And on the youthful face of Pauline Augusta I saw nothing but
pained incredulity touched with reproof, for Poppsy is not a believer
in the indecorous. She has herself staidly intimated that she'd prefer
the rest of the family to address her as "Pauline Augusta" instead of
"Poppsy" which still so unwittingly creeps into our talk. So
hereafter we must be more careful. For Pauline Augusta can already sew
a fine seam and array her seven dolls with a preciseness and neatness
which is to be highly commended.

On Saturday, when we motored into Buckhorn for supplies, I escorted
Pauline Augusta to Hunk Granby, the town barber, to have her hair cut
Dutch. Her lip quivered and she gave every indication of an outbreak,
for she was mortally afraid of that strange man and his still stranger
clipping-machine. But I spotted a concert-guitar on a bench at the
back of Hunk's emporium and as it was the noon-hour and there was no
audience, I rendered a jazz _obbligato_ to the snip of the scissors.

"Say, Birdie, you'll sure have me buck and wing dancin' if you keep
that up!" remarked the man of the shears. I merely smiled and gave him
_Texas Tommy_, _cum gusto_, whereupon he acknowledged he was having
difficulty in making his feet behave. We became quite a companionable
little family, in fact, as the bobbing process went on, and when
Dinky-Dunk called for us as he'd promised he was patently scandalized
to find his superannuated old soul-mate sight-reading _When Katy
Couldn't Katy Wouldn't_--it was a new one to me--in the second ragged
plush shaving-chair of a none too clean barber-shop festooned with
lithographs which would have made old Anthony Comstock turn in his
grave. But you have to be feathered to the toes like a ptarmigan in
this northern country so that rough ways and rough winds can't strike
a chill into you. The barber, in fact, refused to take any money for
Dutching my small daughter's hair, proclaiming that the music was more
than worth it. But my husband, with a dangerous light in his eye,
insisted on leaving four bits on the edge of the shelf loaded down
with bottled beautifiers, and escorted us out to the muddy old
devil-wagon where Dinkie sat awaiting us.

"Dinky-Dunk," I said with a perfectly straight face as we climbed in,
"what is it gives me such a mysterious influence over men?"

Instead of answering me, he merely ground his gears as though they had
been his own teeth. So I repeated my question.

"Why don't you ask that school-teacher of yours?" he demanded.

"But what," I inquired, "has Gershom got to do with it?"

He turned and inspected me with such a pointed stare that we nearly
ran into a Bain wagon full of bagged grain.

"You don't suppose I can't see that that beanpole's fallen in love
with you?" he rudely and raucously challenged.

"Why, I feel exactly like a mother to that poor boy," I innocently
protested.

"Mother nothing!" snorted my lord and master. "Any fool could see he's
going mushy on you!"

I pretended to be less surprised than I really was, but it gave me
considerable to think over. My husband was wrong, in a way, but no
woman feels bad at the thought that somebody is fond of her. It's nice
to know there's a heart or two at which one can still warm one's
outstretched hands. The short-cut to ruin, with a man, is the
knowledge that women are fond of him. But let a woman know that she is
not unloved and she walks the streets of Heaven, to say nothing of
nearly breaking her neck to make herself worthy of those transporting
affections.

But I soon had other things to think of, that afternoon, for Dinkie
and I had a little secret shopping to do. And in the midst of it I
caught the familiar tawny look which occasionally comes into my
man-child's eyes. It's the look of dreaming, the look of brooding
wildness where some unknown Celtic great-great-grandfather of a
great-great-grandfather stirs in his moorland grave like a collie-dog
in his afternoon sleep. And it all arose out of nothing more than a
blind beggar sitting on an upturned nail-keg at the edge of the
sidewalk and rather miraculously playing a mouth-organ and a guitar at
one and the same time. The guitar was a dog-eared old instrument that
had most decidedly seen better days, stained and bruised and
greasy-looking along the shank. The mouth-organ was held in position
by two wires that went about the beggar's neck, to leave his hands
free for strumming on the larger instrument. The music he made was
simple enough, rudimentary old waltz-tunes and plaintive old airs that
I hadn't heard for years. But I could see it go straight to the head
of my boy. His intent young face took on the fierce emptiness of a
Barres lion overlooking some time-worn desert. He forgot me, and he
forgot the shopping that had kept him awake about half the night, and
he forgot Buckhorn and the fact that he was a small boy on the streets
of a bald little prairie town. He was thousands of years and thousands
of miles away from me. He was a king's son in Babylon, commanding the
court-musicians to make sweet discourse for him. He was Saul
harkening to David. He was a dreamy-eyed Pict listening to music
wafted at dusk from a Roman camp about which helmeted sentries paced.
He was a medieval prince, falsely imprisoned, leaning from dark and
lonely towers to catch the strains of some wandering troubadour from
his native Southlands. He was a Magyar chieftain listening to the
mountain-side music of valleyed goat-herders with a touch of madness
to it. It engulfed him and entranced him and awoke ancestral tom-toms
in his blood. And I waited beside him until the afternoon sunlight
grew thinner and paler and my legs grew tired, for I knew that his
hungry little soul was being fed. His eye met mine, when it was all
over, but he had nothing to say. I could see, however, that he had
been stirred to the depths,--and by a tin mouth-organ and a
greasy-sided guitar!

To-night I found Dinkie poring over the pictures in my Knight edition
of Shakespeare. He seemed especially impressed, as I stopped and
looked over his shoulder, by a steel engraving of Gérôme's _Death of
Cæsar_, where the murdered emperor lies stretched out on the floor of
the Forum, now all but empty, with the last of the Senators crowding
out through the door. Two of the senatorial chairs are overturned,
and Cæsar's throne lies face-down on the dais steps. So Dinkie began
asking questions about a drama which he could not quite comprehend.
But they were as nothing to the questions he asked when he turned to
another of the Gérôme pictures, this one being the familiar old
_Cleopatra and Cæsar_. He wanted to know why the lady hadn't more
clothes on, and why the big black man was hiding down behind her, and
what Cæsar was writing a letter for, and why he was looking at the
lady the way he did. So, glancing about to make sure that Dinky-Dunk
was within ear-shot, I did my best to explain the situation to little
Dinkie.

"Cæsar, my son, was a man who set out in the world to be a great
conqueror. But when he got quite bald, as you may see by the picture,
and had reached middle age, he forgot about being a great conqueror.
He even forgot about being so comfortably middle-aged and that it was
not easy for a man of his years to tumble gracefully into love, for
those romantic impulses, my son, are associated more with
irresponsible youth and are apt to be called by rather an ugly name
when they occur in advanced years. But Cæsar fell in love with the
lady you see in the picture, whose name was Cleopatra and who was one
of the greatest man-eaters that ever came out of Egypt. She had a
weakness for big strong men, and although certain authorities have
claimed that she was a small and hairy person with a very uncertain
temper, she undoubtedly set a very good table and made her gentlemen
friends very comfortable, for Cæsar stayed feasting and forgetting
himself for nearly a year with her. It must have been very pleasant,
for Cæsar loved power, and intended to be one of the big men of his
time. But the lady also loved power, and was undoubtedly glad to see
that she could make Cæsar forget about going home, though it was too
bad that he forgot, for always, even after he had lived to write about
all the great things he had done in the world, people remembered more
about his rather absurd infatuation for the lady than about all the
battles he had won and all the prizes he had captured. And the lady,
of course----"

But I was interrupted at this point. And it was by Dinky-Dunk.

"Oh, hell!" he said as he flung down his paper and strode out into the
other room. And those exits, I remembered, were getting to be a bit of
a habit with my harried old Diddums.




_Sunday the Fifth_


The Day of Rest seems to be the only day left to me now for my
writing. There are no idlers in the neighborhood of Casa Grande. The
days are becoming incredibly long, but they still seem over-short for
all there is to do. The men are much too busy on the land to give
material thought to any thing so womanish as a kitchen-garden. So I
have my own garden to see to. And sometimes I work there until I'm
almost ready to drop. On a couple of nights, recently, when it came
watering-time, even these endless evenings had slipped into such
darkness that I could scarcely see the plants I was so laboriously
irrigating by hand. It wasn't until the water turned the soil black
that the growing green stood pallidly out against the mothering dark
earth.... But it is delightful work. I really love it. And I love to
see things growing. After the bringing up of a family, the bringing up
of a garden surely comes next.

Yet too much work, I find, can make tempers a trifle short. I spoke
rather sharply to Dinky-Dunk yesterday regarding the folly of leaving
firearms about the house where children can reach them. And he was
equally snappy as he flung his ugly old Colt in its ugly old holster
up over the top corner of our book-cabinet. So, to get even with him,
when Dinkie came in with some sort of wide-petaled field-flower and
asked if I didn't want my fortune told, I announced I rather fancied
it was pretty well told already.... Scotty, by the way, now follows
Dinkie to school and waits outside and comes loping home with him
again. And my two bairns have a new and highly poetic occupation. It
is that of patiently garnering youthful potato-bugs and squashing the
accumulated harvest between two bricks.




_Sunday the Twelth_


I have been examining Gershom with a more interested eye. And when he
changed color, under that inspection, I apologized for making him
blush. And as that only added to his embarrassment, I artlessly asked
him what a blush really was. That, of course, was throwing the rabbit
straight back into the brier-patch, as far as Gershom was concerned.
For he promptly and meticulously informed me that a blush was a
miniature epilepsy, a vasomotor impulse leading to the dilation or
constriction of the facial blood-vessels, some psychologists even
claiming the blush to be a vestigial survival of the prehistoric
flight-effort of the heart, coming from the era of marriage by
capture, when to be openly admired meant imminent danger.

"That isn't a bit pretty," I told Gershom. "It's as horrid as what my
husband said about handshaking originating in man's desire to be dead
sure his gentleman friend didn't have a knife up his sleeve, for use
before the greeting was over. It would have been so much nicer,
Gershom, if you could have told me that the first blush was born on
the same day as the first kiss."

"Kissing," that youth solemnly informed me, "was quite unknown to
primitive man. It evolved, in fact, out of the entirely
self-protective practice of smelling, to determine the health of a
prospective mate, though this in turn evolved into the ceremonial
habit of the rubbing together of noses, which is still the form of
affectionate salutation largely prevalent among the natives of the
South Sea Islands."

"What a perfectly horrible origin for such a heavenly pastime," I just
as solemnly announced to Gershom, who studied me with a stern and
guarded eye, and having partaken of his eleventh flap-jack, escaped to
the stable and the matutinal task of harnessing Calamity Kate.




_Sunday the Second_


Summer is here, in earnest, and the last few days have been hot and
windless. School is over, for the next eight weeks, and I shall have
my kiddies close beside me. Gershom, after a ten-day trip down to
Minneapolis for books and clothes, is going to come back to Casa
Grande and help Dinky-Dunk on the land, as long as the holidays last.
He thinks it will build him up a bit. He is also solemnly anxious to
study music. He feels it would round out his accomplishments, which,
he acknowledged, have threatened to become overwhelmingly scientific.
So I'm to give Gershom music lessons in exchange for his tutoring
Dinkie. They will be rather awful, I'm afraid, for Gershom has about
as much music in his honest old soul as Calamity Kate. I may not teach
him much. But all the time, I know, I will be learning a great deal
from Gershom. He informed me, last night, that he had carefully
computed that the Bible mentioned nineteen different precious stones,
one hundred and four trees or plants, six metals, thirty-five
animals, thirty-nine birds, six fishes, twenty insects, and eleven
reptiles.

As I've already said, summer is here. But it doesn't seem to mean as
much to me as it used to, for my interests have been taken away from
the land and more and more walled up about my family. Dinky-Dunk's
grain, however, has come along satisfactorily, and there is every
promise of a good crop. Yet this entirely fails to elate my husband.
Every small mischance is a sort of music-cue nowadays to start him
singing about the monotony of prairie-life. Ranching, he protests,
isn't the easy game it used to be, now that cattle can't be fattened
on the open range and now that wheat itself is so much lower in price.
One has to work for one's money, and watch every dollar. And my
Diddums keeps railing about the government doing so little for the
farmer and driving the men off the land into the cities. He has fallen
into the habit of protesting he can see nothing much in life as a
back-township hay-tosser and that all the big chances are now in the
big centers. I had been hoping that this was a new form of
spring-fever which would eventually work its way out of his system.
But I can see now that the matter is something more mental than
physical. He hasn't lost his strength, but he has lost his driving
power. He is healthy enough, Heaven knows. Indeed, he impresses me as
being a bit too much that way, for he has quite lost his old-time lean
and hungry look and betrays a tendency to take on a ventral contour
unmistakably aldermanic. He may be heavy, but he is hard-muscled and
brown as an old meerschaum. There is a canker, however, somewhere
about the core of his heart. And I can see him more clearly than I
used to. He is a strong man, but he is a strong man without
earnestness. And being such, I vaguely apprehend in him some splendid
failure. For the wings that soar to success in this world are plumed
with faith and feathered with conviction.

It did not surprise me this morning when Dinky-Dunk announced that he
felt a trifle stale and suggested that the family take a holiday on
Tuesday and trek out to Dead-Horse Lake for the day. We're to hitch
Tumble-Weed and Tithonus to the old prairie-schooner--for we'll be
taking side-trails where no car could venture--and pike off for a
whole blessed day of care-free picnicking. So to-morrow Struthers and
I will be solemnly busy in the kitchen concocting suitable dishes to
be taken along in the old grub-box, and when that is over we'll patch
together something in the form of bathing-suits, for there'll be a
chance for a dip in the slough-water, and our kiddies have arrived at
an age imposing fit and proper apparel on their sadly pagan but
chastened parents.




_Wednesday the Fifth_


We have had our day at Dead-Horse Lake, but it wasn't the happy event
I had anticipated. Worldly happiness, I begin to feel, usually dies
a-borning: it makes me think of wistaria-bloom, for invariably one end
is withering away before the other end is even in flower. At any rate,
we were off early, the weather was perfect, and the sky was an
inverted tureen of lazulite blue. Dinkie drove the team part of the
way, his dad smoked beside him up on the big driving-seat, and I
raised my voice in song until Pauline Augusta fell asleep and had to
be bedded down in the wagon-straw and covered with a blanket.

Dead-Horse Lake is really a slough, dolorously named because a near-by
rancher once lost eight horses therein, the foolish animals wandering
out on ice that was too thin to hold them up.

We were hungry by the time we had hobbled out our teams and gathered
wood and made a fire. And after dinner Dinky-Dunk fell asleep and the
children and I tried to weave a willow basket, which wasn't a
success. Poppsy, in fact, cut her finger with her pater's pocket-knife
and because of this physical disability declined to don her
bathing-suit when we made ready for the water.

The slough-water was enticingly warm, under the hot July sun, and we
ventured in at the west end where a firmer lip of sand and alkali gave
us footing. And I enjoyed the swim, although Dinky-Dunk made fun of my
improvised bathing-suit. It seemed like old times, to bask lazily in
the sun and float about on my back with my fingers linked under my
head. My lord and master even acknowledged that my figure wasn't so
bad as he had expected, in a lady of my years. I splashed him for
that, and he dove for my ankles, and nearly drowned me before I could
get away.

It was all light-hearted enough, until Dinky-Dunk happened to notice
that Dinkie wasn't enjoying the water as an able-bodied youngster
ought. The child, in fact, was afraid of it--which was only natural,
remembering what a land-bird he had been all his life. His father,
apparently, decided to carry him out and give him a swimming-lesson.

I was on shore by this time, trying to sun out my sodden mop of hair,
which I had fondly imagined I could keep dry. I heard Dinkie's cry as
his father captured him, and I called out to Dinky-Dunk, through my
combed out tresses, to have a heart.

Dinky-Dunk called back that the Indian way, after all, was the only
way to teach a youngster. I didn't give much thought to the matter
until the two of them were out in deeper water and I heard Dinkie's
scream of stark terror. It came home to me then that the Indian method
in such things was to toss the child into deep water and leave him
there to struggle for his life.

Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, hadn't intended to do quite that. But the boy
was naturally terrified at being carried out beyond his depth, and
when I looked up I could see his bony little body struggling to free
itself. That timidity, I take it, angered the boy's father. And he
intended to cure it. He was doing his best, in fact, to fling the
clutching and clawing little body away from him when I heard those
repeated short screams of horror and promptly took a hand in the
matter. Something snapped in my skull, and I saw red. I hated my
husband for what he was doing. I hated him for the mere thought that
he could do it. And I hated him for calling out that this was what
people got by mollycoddling their children.

But that didn't stop me. I made for Dinky-Dunk like a hundred-weight
of wildcats. I went through the water like a hell-diver, and without
quite knowing what I was doing I got hold of him and tried to garrote
him. I don't remember what I said, but I have a hazy idea it was not
the most ladylike of language. He stared at me, as I tore Dinkie away
from him, stared at me with a hard and slightly incredulous eye. For
I'm afraid I was ready to fight with my teeth and nails, if need be,
and I suppose my expression wasn't altogether angelic. We were both
shaking, at any rate, when we got back to dry land. Dinky-Dunk stood
staring at us, for a silent moment or two, with a look of black
disgust on his wet face. I'm even afraid it was something more than
disgust. Then he strode away and proceeded to dress on the other side
of the prairie-schooner, without so much as a second look at us. And
then he went off for the horses, absenting himself a quite unnecessary
length of time. But I took advantage of that to have a talk with
Dinkie.

"Dinkie," I said, "you and I are going to walk out into that water,
and this time you're not going to be afraid!"

I could see his eye searching mine, although he did not speak.

I put one hand on the wet tangle of his hair.

"Will you come?" I asked him.

He took a deep breath. Then he looked at the slough-water. Then he
looked back into my eyes.

"Yes," he said, though I noticed his lips were not so red as usual.

So side by side and hand in hand the two of us walked out into
Dead-Horse Lake. His eyes questioned me, once, as the water came up
about his armpits. But he shut his teeth tight and made no effort to
draw back. I could see the involuntary spasms of his chest as that
terrifying flood closed in about his little body, yet he was ready
enough to show me he wasn't a coward. And when I saw that he had met
and faced his ordeal I turned him about and led him quietly back to
land. We were both prouder and happier for what had just happened. We
didn't even need to talk about it, for each knew that the other
understood. What still disturbs me, though, is something not in my
boy's make-up, but in my own. During the long and silent drive home I
noticed a mark on my husband's neck. And I was the termagant who must
have put it there, though I have no memory of doing so. But from it I
realize that I haven't the control over myself every civilized and
self-respecting woman should have. I begin to see that I can't
altogether trust myself where my female-of-the-species affections are
involved. I'm no better, I'm afraid, than the Bengal tigress which
Dinky-Dunk once intimated I was, the Bengal tigress who will battle so
unreasoningly for her offspring. It may be natural in mothers, whether
they wear fur or feathers or lisle-thread stockings--but it worries
me. I was an engine running wild. And when you run wild you are apt to
run into catastrophe.




_Friday the Seventh_


Dinky-Dunk is on his dignity. He has put a fence around himself to
keep me at a distance, the same as he puts a fence around his
haystacks to keep off the cattle. We are coolly polite to each other,
but that is as far as it goes. There is something radically wrong with
this home, as a home, but I seem helpless to put the matter right.
It's about all I have left, in this life of mine, but I'm in some way
failing in my duty as a house-wife. "Home" is a beautiful word, and
home-life should be beautiful. Any sacrifice and any concession a
woman is willing to make to keep that home, and to keep ugliness out
of it, ought to be well considered by the judge of her final
destinies. I'm ready to do my part, but I don't know where to begin.
I'm depressed by a teasing sense of frustration, not quite tangible
enough to fight, like cobwebs across your face. It's not easy to carry
around the milk of human kindness after they've pretty well kicked the
bottom out of your can!

Torrid and tiring are these almost endless summer days. But it's what
the grain needs, and who am I to look this gift-horse of heat in the
face. Yet there are two things, I must confess, in which the prairie
is sadly lacking. One is trees; and the other is shade, the cool green
sun-filtering shade of woodlands where birds can sing and mossy little
brooks can babble. I've been longing all day for just an hour up in an
English cherry tree, with the pectoral smell of the leaves against my
face and the chance of eating at least half my own weight of fresh
fruit. But even in the matter of its treelessness, I'm told, the
prairie is reforming. There are men living who remember when there
were no trees west of Brandon, except in the coulées and the
river-bottoms. Now that fire no longer runs wild, however, the trees
are creeping in, mile by mile and season by season. Already the
eastern line of natural bush country reaches to about ten miles from
Regina two hundred miles west. Oxbow and Estevan, Dinky-Dunk once told
me, had no trees whatever when first settled, though much of that
country now has a comfortable array of bluffs. And forestry, of
course, is giving nature a friendly push along, in the matter. In the
meantime, we have to accommodate ourselves to the conditions that
prevail, just as the birds of the air must do. Here the haughty crow
of the east is compelled to nest in the low willows of the coulée and
raise its young within hand-reach of mother earth. Like our women, it
can enjoy very little privacy of family life. The only thing that
saves us and the crows, I suppose, is that the men-folks of this
country are too preoccupied with their own ends to go around
bird-nesting. They are too busy to break up homes, either in
willow-tops or women's hearts.... I ought to be satisfied. But I've
been dogged, this last day or two, by a longing to be scudding in a
single-sticker off Orienta Point again or to motor-cruise once more
along the Sound in a smother of spray.




_Thursday the Thirteenth_


Dinky-Dunk has been called to Calgary on business. It sounds simple
enough, in these Unpretentious Annals of an Unloved Worm, but I can't
help feeling that it marks a trivially significant divide in the trend
of things. It depresses me more than I can explain. My depression, I
imagine, comes mostly from the manner in which Duncan went. He was
matter-of-fact enough about it all, but I can't get rid of the
impression that he went with a feeling very much like relief. His
manner, at any rate, was not one to invite cross-examination, and he
insisted, to the end, on regarding his departure as an every-day
incident in the life of a preoccupied rancher. So I caught my cue from
him, and was as quiet about it all as he could have wished. But under
the crust was the volcano....

The trouble with the tragedies of real life is that they are never
clear-cut. It takes art to weave a selvage about them or fit them into
a frame. But in reality they're as ragged and nebulous as
wind-clouds. The days drag on into weeks, and the weeks into months,
and life on the surface seems to be running on, the same as before.
There's the same superficial play of all the superficial old forces,
but in the depths are dangers and uglinesses and sullen bombs of
emotional TNT we daren't even touch!

Heigho! I nearly forgot my _sursum-corda_ rôle. And didn't old Doctor
Johnson say that peevishness was the vice of narrow minds? So here's
where we tighten up the belt a bit. But we humans, who come into the
world alone, and go out of it alone, are always hungering for
companionship which we can't quite find. Our souls are islands, with a
coral-reef of reserve built up about them. Last night, when I was
patching some of Gershom's undies for him, I wickedly worked an
arrow-pierced heart, in red yarn, on one leg of his B.V.D.'s. This
morning, I noticed, his eye evaded mine and there was marked
constraint in his manner. I even begin to detect unmistakable signs of
nervousness in him when we happen to be alone together. And during his
last music lesson there was a _vibrata_ of emotion in his voice which
made me think of an April frog in a slough-end.

Even my little Dinkie, day before yesterday, asked me if I'd mind not
bathing him any more. He explained that he thought he could manage
very nicely by himself now. It seemed trivial enough, and yet, in a
way, it was momentous. I am to be denied the luxury of tubbing my own
child. I, who always loved even the smell of that earthy and
soil-grubbing young body, who could love it when it wasn't any too
clean and could glory in its musky and animal-like odors as well as
the satin-shine of the light on its well-soaped little ribs, must now
stand aside before the reservations of sex. It makes me feel that I've
reached still another divide on the continent of motherhood.

This afternoon, when I wandered into the study, I observed Dinkie
stooping over a Chesterfield pillow with his right hand upraised in a
perplexingly dramatic manner. He turned scarlet when he saw me
standing there watching him. But the question in my eyes did not
escape him.

"I was pr'tendin' to be King Arthur when he found out Guinevere was in
love with Launcelot," he rather lamely explained as he walked away to
the window and stood staring out over the prairie. But for the life of
me I can't understand what should have turned his thoughts into that
particular channel of romance. Those are matters with which the young
and the innocent should have nothing to do. They are matters, in fact,
which it behooves even the old and the wary to eschew.




_Sunday the Sixteenth_


It seems strange, in such golden summer weather, that every man and
woman and child on this sunbathed footstool of God shouldn't be sanely
and supremely happy.... My husband, I am glad to say, is once more
back in his home. And I have been realizing, the last few days, that
home is an empty and foolish place without its man about. It's a ship
without a captain, a clan without a chief. Yet I found it both
depressing and humbling to be brought once more face to face with that
particular fact.

Dinky-Dunk, on the other hand, has come back with both an odd sense of
elation and an odd sense of estrangement. He has taken on a vague
something which I find it impossible to define. He is blither and at
the same time he is more solemnly abstracted. And he protests that his
journey was a success.

"I'm going to ride two horses, from now on," he announced to me this
morning. "I've got my chance and I'm going to grab it. I've swapped
my Buckhorn lots for some inside Calgary stuff and I'm lumping
everything that's left of my Coast deal for a third-interest in those
Barcona coal-fields. There's a quarter of a million waiting there for
the people with money enough to swing it. And I'm going to edge in
while it's still open."

"But is it possible to ride two horses?" I asked, waywardly depressed
by all this new-found optimism.

"It's _got_ to be possible, until we find out which horse is the
better traveler," announced Dinky-Dunk. Then he added, without caring
to meet my eye: "And I can't say I see much promise of action out of
this particular end of the team."

I must have flamed red, at that speech, for I thought at the moment he
was referring to me. It was only after I'd turned the thing over in my
mind, as I helped Struthers put together our new butter-worker, that I
saw he really referred to Casa Grande. But my husband knows I will
never part with this ranch. He will never be so foolish as to ask me
to do that. Yet one thing is plain. His heart is no longer here. He
will stick to this prairie farm of ours only for what he can get out
of it.

Dinkie warmed the cockles of my heart by telling me this afternoon
when we were out salting the horses that he never wanted to go away
from Casa Grande and his mummy. The child, I imagine, had overheard
some of this morning's talk. He put his arm around my knees and hugged
me tight. And I could see the tawny look come into his hazel eyes
speckled with brown. My Dinkie is a prairie child. His soul is not a
cramped little soul, but has depth and wideness and undiscerned
mysteries.




_Sunday the Thirtieth_


Two weeks have slipped by. Two weeks have gone, and left no record of
their going. But a prairie home is a terribly busy one, at times, and
it's idleness that leads to the ink-pot. I'm still trying to make the
best of a none too promising situation, and I'll thole through, as
Whinstane Sandy puts it. After breakfast this morning, in fact, when
Pauline Augusta was swept by one of those little gales of lonesomeness
to which children and women are so mysteriously subjected, she climbed
up into my lap and I rocked her on my shoulder as I might have rocked
a baby. Dinky-Dunk wandered in and inspected that performance with a
slightly satiric eye. So, resenting his expression, I promptly began
to sing:

                    "Bye-bye, Baby Bunting,
                    Daddy's gone a-hunting,
                    To gather up a pile of tin
                    To wrap the Baby Bunting in!"

Dinky-Dunk, when the significance of this lilted flippancy of mine
had sunk home, regarded me with a narrowed and none too friendly eye.

"Feeling a bit larkier than usual this morning, aren't you?" he
inquired with what was merely a pretense at carelessness.

It was merely a pretense, I know, because we'd been over the old
ground the night before, and the excursion hadn't added greatly to the
happiness of either of us. Duncan, in fact, had rather horrified me by
actually asking if I thought there was a chance of his borrowing
eleven thousand dollars from Peter Ketley.

"We can't all trade on that man's generosity!" I cried, without giving
much thought to the manner in which I was expressing myself.

"Oh, _that's_ the way you feel about it!" retorted my husband. And I
could see his face harden into Scotch granite. I could also see the
look of perplexity in my small son's eyes as he stood studying his
father.

"Is there anything abnormal in my feeling the way I do?" I parried,
resenting the beetling brow of the Dour Man.

"Not if you regard him as your personal and particular fairy
god-father," retorted my husband.

"I've no more reason for regarding him as that," I said as calmly as
I could, "than I have for regarding him as a professional
money-lender."

Duncan must have seen from my face that it would be dangerous to go
much further. So he merely shrugged a flippant shoulder.

"They tell me he's got more money than he knows what to do with," he
said with a heavy jocularity which couldn't quite rise.

"Then lightening his burdens is a form of charity we can scarcely
afford to indulge in," I none too graciously remarked. And I saw my
husband's face harden again.

"Well, I've got to have ready money and I've got to have it before the
year's out," was his retort. He told me, when the air had cleared a
little, that he'd have to open an office in Calgary as soon as
harvesting was over. There was already too much at stake to take
chances. Then he asked me if there were any circumstances under which
I'd be willing to sell Casa Grande. And I told him, quite promptly and
quite definitely, that there was none.

"Then how about the old Harris Ranch?" he finally inquired.

"But why should we sell that?" I asked. Alabama Ranch, I knew, was in
my name, and I had always regarded it as a sort of nest-egg for the
children. It was something put by for a rainy day, something to fall
back on, if ill-luck ever overtook us again.

"Because I can double and treble every dollar we get out of it, inside
of a year," averred Dinky-Dunk.

"But how am I to know that?" I contended, hating to seem hard and
selfish and narrow in the teeth of an ambitious man's enterprise.

"You'd have to take my word for it," retorted my husband.

"But we've more than ourselves to consider," I contended, knowing he'd
merely scoff at that harping on the old string of the children.

"That's why I intend to get out of this rut!" he cried with unexpected
bitterness. And a few minutes later he made the suggestion that he'd
deed Casa Grande entirely over to me if I'd consent to the sale of
Alabama Ranch and give him a chance to swing the bigger plans he
intended to swing.

The suggestion rather took my breath away. My rustic soul, I suppose,
is stupidly averse to change. But I realize that when you travel in
double-harness you can't forever pull back on your team-mate. So I've
asked Dinky-Dunk to give me a few days to think the thing over.




_Wednesday the Second_


Casa Grande has had an invasion of visitors. It was precious old Percy
and his Olga who blew in on us, after being swallowed up by the Big
Silence for almost four long years. They came without warning, which
is the free and easy way of the westerner, appearing in a
mud-splattered and dust-covered Ford that had carried them blithely
over two hundred and thirty miles of prairie trails. And with them
they brought a quartet of rampageous young buckaroos who promptly
turned our sedate homestead into a rodeo.

Percy himself is browner and stouter and more rubicund than I might
have expected, with just a sprinkling of gray under his lopsided
Stetson to announce that Time hasn't been standing still for any of
us. But one would never have taken him for an ex-lunger. And there is
a wholesomeness about the man, for all his quietness, which draws one
to him. Olga herself still again impressed me as a Zorn etching come
to life, as a Norse myth in petticoats, with the same old largeness of
limb and the same old suggestion of sky-line vastnesses about her. She
still looks as though the Lord had made her when the world was young
and the women of Homer did their spinning in the sunlight. Some
earlier touch of morning freshness is gone from her, it's true, for
you can't move about with four little toddlers in your wake and still
suggest the budding vine. But that morning freshness has been
supplanted by a full and mellow noonday contentedness which is not
without its placid appeal. To her husband, at any rate, she seems
mysteriously perfect. He can still sit and stare at her with a
startlingly uxorious eye. And she, in turn, bathes him in that pale
lunar stare of meditative approval which says plainer than words just
how much her "man" means to her.

Percy and his family stayed overnight with us and hit the trail again
yesterday morning. An old friend of Percy's from Brasenose has taken a
parish some forty odd miles south of Buckhorn--a parish, by the way,
which ought to shake a little of the Oxford dreaminess out of his
system--and Olga and her husband are "packing" their newly-arrived
Toddler Number Four down to the new curate to have him christened.

We were all a bit shy and constrained, during our first hour together
but this soon wore away. It wasn't long before Olga's offspring and
mine were fraternizing together, over-running the bathroom tub and
emptying our water-tank, and making a concerted attack on one of
Dinky-Dunk's self-binders, which would have been dismantled in short
order, if Percy hadn't gone out to investigate the cause of the sudden
quiet.

"My boy loves everything with wheels," explained the proud Olga, in
extenuation of her Junior's oil-blackened fingers.

That brought me up short, for I was on the point of making the same
statement about my Dinkie. After thinking it over, in fact, I realized
that _every_ normal boy loves everything with wheels. And it began to
dawn on me that there was nothing so extraordinary, after all, in my
son's fondness for machinery. I began to see that he was merely one of
a very wide-spread clan, when, an hour later, the entire excited six
united in playing Indian about the haystacks, and kept it up until
even the docile Pauline Augusta was driven to revolt against so
persistently being the Pale-face captive. She announced that she was
tired of being scalped. So, for variety's sake, the boys turned to
riding and roping and hog-tying one another like the true little
westerners they were, and many an imaginary brand was planted on many
a bleating set of ribs.

But now they are gone, and I've been thinking a great deal about Olga.
I fancy I have even been envying her a little. She's of that annealing
softness which can rivet and hold a family together. I've even been
trying to solace myself with the claim that she's a trifle ox-like in
her make-up. But that is not being just to Olga. She makes a perfect
wife. She is as tranquil-minded as summer moonlight on a convent-roof.
She is as soft-spoken as a wind-harp swinging in an abbey door. She
surrenders to the will of her husband and neither frets nor questions
nor walks with discontent. I suppose she has a will of her own, packed
somewhere away in that benignant big body of hers, but she never
obtrudes it. She placidly awaits her time, as the bosom of the prairie
awaits its harvesting. And I've been wondering if that really isn't
the best type of woman for married life, the autumnally contented and
pensively quiet woman who can remain unruffled by man and his
meanderings.

I wasn't built according to that plan, and I suppose I've had to pay
for it. I've just about concluded, in fact, that I would have been a
hard nut for any man to crack. I've never been conspicuous for my
efforts at self-obliteration. I've a temper that's as brittle as a
squirrel bone. I'm too febrile and flightly, too chameleon-mooded and
critical. The modern wife should be always a conservative. She should
hold back her husband's impulses of nervous expenditure, conserving
his tranquil-mindedness about the same as cotton-waste in a
journal-box conserves oil. Heaven knows I started with theories
enough--but I must be a good deal like old Schramm, that teacher of
Heine's who was so busy inditing a study of Universal Peace that his
boys had all the chance they could wish for pummeling one another. But
I've been thinking, Reuben. And I'm going to see if I can't save
what's left of the ship. I'm no Renaissance cherub on a cloudlet, but
I'm going to knuckle down and see if I can't jibe along a little
better with my old Dinky-Dunk. I've decided to back off and give him
his chance. If he's set on selling Alabama Ranch, on the terms he's
mentioned, I'm not going to object. He's determined to make money, to
advance. And I don't want to see him accusing me of lying down in the
shafts!... What is more, I'm going out in the fields, when the push is
on, to help stook the wheat. That may wear me down and make me a
little more like Olga.




_Thursday the Tenth_


It's difficult to be a woman, as the over-sensitive Jean Christophe
once remarked. Men are without those confounding emotions which women
seem to be both cursed with and blessed with. When I announced to
Dinky-Dunk my willingness to part with Alabama Ranch, he took it quite
as a matter of course. He betrayed no tendency to praise me for my
sacrifices, for my willingness to surrender to strangers the land
which had once been our home, the acres on which we'd once been happy
and heavy-hearted. He merely remarked that under the circumstances it
seemed the most sensible thing to do. There's a one-horse lawyer in
Buckhorn who has been asking about the Harris Ranch and Dinky-Dunk
says he suspects this inquiring one has a client up his sleeve.

What I had looked forward to as a talk which might possibly beat down
a few of the barriers of reserve between us proved a bit of a
disappointment. My husband refused to accept me as a heroine. And on
his way out, as ill-luck would have it, he stopped to observe Pauline
Augusta struggling over a letter to her "Uncle Peter." It was a maiden
effort along that line and she was dictating her messages to Dinkie,
who, in turn, was laboriously and carefully inscribing them on my
writing-pad, with a nose and a sympathetically working tongue not more
than ten inches away from the paper. Pauline Augusta, in fact, had
just proclaimed to her amanuensis that "we had a geese for dinner
to-day" when her father stopped to size up the situation.

"To whom are you describing the home circle?" questioned Pauline
Augusta's parent, with an intonation that didn't escape me.

"It's a letter to Uncle Peter," explained Dinkie's little sister. And
I could see Duncan's face harden.

"It's funny my whole family should fall for that damned Quaker!" were
the words he flung over his shoulder at me as he walked out of the
room.




_Tuesday the Fifth_


School has started again. And it's a solemn business, this matter of
planting wisdom in little prairie heads. Dinky-Dunk, who has been up
to his ears in haying and is now watching his grain with a nervous
eye, remarked that our offspring would be once more mingling with
Mennonites and Swedes and Galicians and Ukrainians. I resented that
speech, though I said nothing in reply to it. But I decided to
investigate Gershom's school.

So yesterday afternoon I drove over in the car. I had a blow-out on
the way, a blow-out which I had to patch up with my own hands, so I
arrived too late to inspect Gershom conducting his classes. It was
almost four, in fact, before I got there, so I pulled up beside the
school-gate and sat waiting for the children to come out. And as I sat
there in the car-seat, under a sky of unimaginable blue, with the
prairie wind whipping my face, I couldn't help studying that bald
little temple of learning which stood out so clear-cut in the sharp
northern sunlight. It was a plain little frame building set in one
corner of a rancher's half-section, an acre of land marked off by a
wire fence where the two trails crossed, the two long trails that
melted away in the interminable distance. It seemed a lonely little
house of scholarship, with its playground worn so bare that even two
months of idleness had given scant harborage for the seeds that wind
and bird must have brought there. But as I stared at it it seemed to
take on a dignity all its own, the dignity of a fixed and far-off
purpose. It was the nest of a nation's greatness. It was the outpost
of civilization. It was the advance-guard of pioneering man, driving
the wilderness deeper and deeper into the North. It was life preparing
wistfully for the future.

From it I heard a sudden shrill chorus of voices and the clatter of
feet, and I knew that the day's work was over. I saw the children
emerge, like bees out of a beehive, and loneliness no longer reigned
over that bald yard in the betraying northern sunlight. Yet they were
not riotous, those children confronting the wine-like air of the open.
They were more subdued than I had looked for, since I could only too
easily remember one of my earlier calls for Dinkie at noon, when I
found the entire class turned out and riding a rancher's pig, a heavy
brood-sow that had in some luckless moment wandered into the
school-yard and had been chased and raced until it was too weary to
resent a young barbarian mounting its broad back and riding thereon,
to the shouts of the other boys and the shrill cries of the girls. But
now, from my car-seat, I could see Gershom surrounded by a
multi-colored group of little figures, as he stopped to fix a
strap-buckle on the school-bag of one of his pupils. And as he stood
there in the slanting afternoon sunlight surrounded by his charges he
suddenly made me think of the tall old priest in Sorolla's _Triste
Herencia_ surrounded by his waifs. I caught the echo of something
benignant and Lincoln-like from that raw-boned figure in the
big-lensed eye-glasses and the clothes that didn't quite fit him. And
my respect for Gershom went up like a Chinook-fanned thermometer. He
took those children of his seriously. He liked them. He was trying to
give them the best that was in him. And that solemn purpose saved him,
redeemed him, ennobled his baldness just as it ennobled the baldness
of the four-square little frame building behind him. I don't know why
it was, but for some reason or other that picture of the northern
prairie and the gaunt school-teacher surrounded by his pupils in the
thinning afternoon sunlight became memorable to me. It photographed
itself on my mind, not sharply, but softened with a fringing prism of
feeling, like a picture taken with what camera-men call a
"soft-focus." It touched my heart, in some way, and threatened to
bring a choke up into my foolish old throat.

It was Pauline Augusta who saw me first. She came toward the car with
her strapped school-books and her lunch-box in her hand and a prim
little smile on her slightly freckled face. She impressed me as a
startingly shabby figure, in the old sealskin coat which I had made
over for her, worn clean to the hide along the front, for even those
early autumn days found a chill in the air when the sun began to get
low. She had just climbed in beside me when I caught sight of Dinkie.
I saw him come down the school-steps, stuffing something into the
pocket of his reefer-jacket as he came. He looked startlingly tall,
for a boy of his years. He seemed deep in thought. There was, indeed,
an air of remoteness about him which for a moment rather startled me,
an air of belonging, not to me, but to the world into which he was
peering with such ardent young eyes. Then he caught sight of me, and
at the same moment his face both lightened and brightened. He came
toward the car quietly, none the less, and with that slightly sidewise
twist of the body which overtakes him in his occasional moments of
embarrassment, for it was plain that he stood averse to any undue
display of emotion before his playmates. He merely said, "Hello,
Mummy" and smiled awkwardly. But after he had climbed up into the car
and wormed down between Pauline Augusta and me, and after I had tucked
the old bear-robe about them and called out to Gershom that I'd carry
my kiddies home, I could feel Dinkie's arm push shyly in behind my
back and work its way as far around my waist as it was able to reach.
He didn't speak. But his solemn little face gazed up at me, with its
habitual hungry look, and I could see the hazel specks in the brown
iris of the upturned eye as the arm tightened its hold on me. It made
me ridiculously happy. For I knew that my boy loved me. And I love
him. I love him so much that it brings a tapering spear-head of pain
into my heart, and at the very moment I'm so happy I feel a tear just
under the surface.




_Sunday the Tenth_


I have been reading Peter's latest letter to Dinkie, reading it for
the second time. It is not so frolicsome as many of its fellows, but
it impresses me as typical of its sender.

  "I've to-day told fourteen cents' worth of postage-stamps to carry
  out to you, dear Dinkie, a copy of my own _Tales from Homer_,
  which may be muddy with a few big words but which the next year or
  two will surely see tramped down into easier going. You may not
  like it now, but later on, I know, you will like it better. For it
  tells of heroes and battles and travels which only a boy can
  really understand. It tells of the wanderings and adventures of
  strong and simple-hearted men, men who are as scarce, nowadays, as
  the shining helmets they used to wear. It tells of women superb
  and simple and lovely as goddesses, such as your own prairie might
  give birth to, such as your own mother must always seem to us. It
  tells of flashing temples and cities of marble overlooking singing
  seas of sapphire, of stately ships venturing over dark waters and
  landing on unknown islands, of siege and sword-fights and caves
  and giants and sea-goddesses and magic songs, and all that
  sunnier and simpler life which the world, as a prosaic old
  grown-up, has left behind....

  "But I'm wrong in this, perhaps, for out in the land where you
  live there is still largeness and the gold-green ache of wonder
  beyond every sky-line. And I can't help envying you, Dinkie, for
  being a part of that world which is so much more heroic than mine.
  I live where a very shabby line of horse-cars used to run; and you
  live where the buffaloes used to run. I hear the rattle of the
  ash-cans in the morning; and you hear the song of the wind playing
  on the harp of summer. I pay five hundred dollars a year to wander
  about a smoky club no bigger than your corral; you wander about a
  Big Outdoors that rambles off up to the Arctic Circle itself. And
  you open a window at night and see the Aurora Borealis in all its
  beauty; and I open mine and observe an electric roof-sign
  announcing that Somebody's Tonic will take away my tired feeling.
  You put up your blind and see God's footstool bright with dew and
  dizzy with distance; I put up mine and overlook a wall of brick
  and mortar with one window wherein a fat man shaves himself. And
  you can go out in the morning and pick yellow crowfoot and range
  lilies; and all we can pick about this place of ours are
  milk-bottles and morning-papers packed full of murder and theft
  and tax-notices!"

Much of that letter, I know, was over Dinkie's head. But it carried a
message or two to Dinkie's mother which in some way threw her heart
into high. It was different from the letter that came the week
before, the one arriving two days ahead of Kingsley's _Water Babies_
with six lines of Hagedorn inscribed on its fly-leaf:

          "And here you are to live, and help us live.
          Bend close and listen, bird with folded wings.
          Here is life's secret: Keep the upward glance;
          Remember Aries is your relative,
          The Moon's your uncle, and those twinkling things
          Your sisters and your cousins and your aunts!"

This letter seemed like the Peter Ketley we knew best, the sad-eyed
Peter with the feather of courage in his cap, the Peter who could
caper and make you forget that his heart had ever been heavy. For he
wrote:

  "This time, Dinkie-Boy, I'm going to tell you about the sea. For
  the water-tank, as I remember it, is the biggest sea you have at
  Casa Grande--unless you count the mud when winter breaks up! And
  your prairie, with its long waves of green, is, I suppose, really
  a sea that has gone to sleep. But I mean the truly
  honest-to-goodness sea which has tides and baby-whales and
  steamers and cramps and sea-serpents in it. You saw it once at
  Santa Monica, I know, though you may have been too small to
  remember. But yesterday, I motored to a place called Atlantic City
  where they sell picture post-cards and push you in a wheeled chair
  and let you sit on the sand and watch the Water Babies, whom the
  policemen send to jail if they so much as walk along the beach
  without their stockings on. These Water Babies were not in a
  bottle--like the ones you'll read about in the book--but I think
  there was a bottle or two in some of them, from the way they
  acted. But one of them was in a pickle, for Father Neptune caught
  her in his under-tow--which you must not mix up with his
  under-toe, something with which only the mermaids are
  familiar--and a life-guard had to swim out and bring her in. And a
  few minutes after that I saw a real beach-comber. I had read about
  them in the South Sea Islands, but had never seen one before. This
  one sat under a striped parasol, with a mirror between her knees,
  and combed and combed her hair until it was quite dry again. I was
  disappointed in her knees, because I was hoping, at first, she
  wouldn't have any, but would be a mermaid who had come up on the
  sand to sun herself and would have a long and tapering tail
  covered with scales like a tarpon's. But all she had was
  beach-shoes tied with silk ribbons, and I preferred watching the
  water. For when I watch the ocean I always feel like Mr. Hood and
  wish I was at least three small boys, so that I could pull off my
  three pairs of shoes and stockings and go paddling up to my six
  bare knees and let the rollers slap against my three startled
  little tummies and have thirty toes to step on the squids and
  star-fish with. And when I went back to the board-walk and watched
  all the gulls (I don't think I ever saw so many of 'em in one
  place at once) I couldn't help thinking it was too bad the Pilgrim
  Fathers didn't wait for three centuries and land at a bright and
  lively place like this, since it would have made them so much
  jollier and fizzier. They'd probably have turned the _Mayflower_
  into a diving-float and we'd never have had any Blue Laws to break
  and that curious thing known as The New England Conscience to keep
  us from being as happy as we feel we ought to be."




_Sunday the Twenty-Fourth_


Harvest is on us, and Casa Grande hums like a beehive. There are three
extra "hands" to feed, and Whinnie is going about with a moody eye
because Struthers is directing more attention than necessary toward
one of the smooth-spoken cutthroats now nesting in our bunk-house. His
name is Cuba Sebeck and in times of peace he professes to be a
horse-wrangler. Struthers, intent on showing Whinnie that he is not
the only man in her world, is placidly but patiently showering the
lanky Cuba with a barrage of her fluffiest pastries. She has also
given her hair an extra strong wash of sage-tea, which is Struthers'
pet and particular way of putting on war-paint. Whinnie, I notice,
shuts himself up after supper with that copy of Burns' poems we gave
him last Christmas, morosely exiling himself from all the laughing and
gaming and pow-wowing which takes place in the long cool twilights,
just outside the bunk-house. Cuba undertook to serenade the dour one
by donning certain portions of Struthers' apparel and playing my old
banjo under his window. Whinnie quietly retaliated by emptying his
bath-water on the musician's head--and the language was indescribable.
I have been forced to speak to Dinky-Dunk, in fact, about the men's
profanity before my children. It is something I will not endure. My
husband, on the other hand, refuses to take the matter very seriously.
But I have been keeping a close eye over my kiddies--and woe betide
the horse-wrangler who uses unseemly language within their hearing. So
far they seem to have gone through it unscathed, about the same as a
child can go through the indecorous moments of _The Arabian Nights_,
which stands profoundly wicked to only Arabs and old gentlemen.




_Wednesday the Twenty-Eighth_


Summer is slipping away. The days are shortening and there have been
light frosts at night, but not enough to hurt Dinky-Dunk's late oats,
which he has been watching with a worried eye. There is a saber-blade
edge to the evening air now and we have been having some glorious
displays of Northern Lights. I can't help feeling that these Merry
Dancers of the Pole, as some one has called them, make up for what the
prairie may lack in diversity. Dusk by dusk they drown our world in
color, they smother our skies in glory. They are terrifying,
sometimes, to the tenderfoot, giving him the feeling that his world is
on fire. Poor old Struthers, during an especially active display,
invariably gets out her Bible. Used to them as I am, I find they can
still touch me with awe. They make me lonesome. They seem like the
search-lights of God, showing up my human littlenesses of soul. They
are Armadas of floating glory reminding me there are seas I can never
traverse. And the farther north one goes, of course, the more
magnificent the displays.

Last night we watched the auroral bands gather and grow in a cold
green sky, straight to the north of us, and then waver and deepen
until they reached the very zenith, where they hung, swaying curtains
of fire. No wonder the redskins call that wild pageantry of color the
ghost-dance of their gods. Even as we watched them, opal and gold and
rose and orange and green, we could see them come wheeling down on our
little world like an army of angels with incandescent swords. It made
one imagine that the very heavens were aflame, going up in quivering
veils of white and red and green. And when it was over I listened to a
long argument about the Aurora Borealis, or the Aurora Polaris, as
Gershom insisted it should be called.

Dinky-Dunk contended that one could _hear_ these Northern Lights
overhead, on a clear night. He described the sound as sometimes a
faint crackling, like that of a comb drawn through your hair, and
sometimes as a soft rustling noise, like the rustling of a silk
petticoat heard through a closed door, coming closer and closer as the
display wavered farther and farther toward the south.

Gershom was disposed to dispute this, so our old Klondiker, Whinstane
Sandy, was called in to give evidence. He did so promptly and
positively, saying he'd heard the Lights many a night in the Far
North. Gershom is still unconvinced, but intends to look up his
authorities on the matter. He attributes them to sun-spots and asserts
it's a well-known fact they often put the telephone and telegraph
wires out of commission. He has proposed that we sit up and study them
some night, through his telescope, which he is disinterring from the
bottom of his trunk....

My lord and master is going about with a less clouded eye, for he has
succeeded in selling the Harris Ranch, and selling it for thirty-five
hundred dollars more than he had expected. It is to go, eventually, to
some tenderfoot out of the East, to some tenderfoot who can have very
little definite knowledge of land-values in this jumping-off place on
the edge of the world. But may that tenderfoot, whoever he is, be
happy in his new home! Dinky-Dunk is now forever figuring up what he
will get for his grain. He's preoccupied with his plans for branching
out in the business world. His heart is no longer in his work here. I
sometimes feel that we're all merely accidents in his life. And that
feeling leaves me with a heart so heavy that I have to keep busy, or
I'd fall to luxuriating in that self-pity which is good for neither
man nor beast.

Yet Dinky-Dunk is not all hardness. He surprises me, now and then, by
disturbing little gestures of boyishness. He announced to me the other
night that the only way to get any use out of a worn-out husband was
to revamp him, with the accent on the vamp. I understood what he
meant, and I think I actually changed color a trifle. But I know of
nothing more desolating than trying to make love to a man either
against his will or against your own will. It would be a terrible
thing to have him tell you there was no longer any kick in your
kisses. So I remain on my dignity. I am companionable, and nothing
more. When we were saying good-by, the last time he went off to the
city, and he looked up at my perfunctory and quite meaningless peck on
his cheek, I felt myself blushing before his quiet and half-quizzical
stare. Then he laughed a little as he turned away and pulled on his
gauntlets. "The sweeter the champagne, I suppose, the colder it should
be served!" he rather cryptically remarked as he climbed into the
waiting car. And yesterday he let his soul emerge from its tent of
reticence when he climbed up on the wagon-box to stare out over his
sea of all but ripened wheat. "Come, money!" he said, with his arms
stretched out before him. Now, that was a trick which he had caught
from my little Dinkie. I don't know how or where the boy first picked
up the habit, but when he particularly wants something he stands
solemnly out in the open, with his two little arms outstretched, as
though he were supplicating Heaven itself, and says "Come,
jack-knife!" or "Come, jelly-roll!" or "Come, rain!" according to his
particular desires of the particular moment. I think he really caught
it from an illustration in _The Arabian Nights_, from the picture of
Cassim grandiloquently proclaiming "Open Sesame!" He is an imaginative
little beggar. "Mummy," he said to me the other night, "see all the
moonlight that's been spilled on the grass!" But children are made
that way. Even my sage little Poppsy, when a marigold-leaf fell in the
bowl of our solitary gold-fish, cried out to me: "See, Mummy, our fish
has had a baby!" Sex is still an enigma to her, as much an enigma as
it was away last spring when, not being quite sure whether her new
kitten was a little boy-cat or a little girl-cat, she sagaciously
christened it "Willie-Alice." And a few weeks later, when the
unmistakable appearance of tail-feathers finally persuaded even her
optimistic young heart that the two chicks which had been bequeathed
to her were dishearteningly masculine in their tendencies, she
officially re-christened the apostate "Elaine" and "Rowena," and
thereafter solemnly accepted them as "Archie" and "Albert." And while
speaking of this mysteriously ramifying factor of sex, I am compelled
to acknowledge that I encountered a rather disturbing little
back-flare of Freudian hell-fire only a couple of evenings ago. It
took my thoughts galloping back to the time in our post-nuptial era
when Dinky-Dunk went Berserker and chased me around the haystacks with
my hair flying. I'd taken Dinkie upon my lap, and, without quite
knowing it, sat stroking his frowsy young head. My thoughts, in fact,
were a thousand miles away. Then, still without giving much attention
to what I was doing, I squeezed that warm little body up close against
my own. I was astounded, the next moment, to see my small offspring
turn on me with all the lusty fierceness of the cave man. He got his
arms about me and buried his face in my neck and kissed me as no
gentleman, big or little, should ever kiss a lady. His small body was
shaken with a subliminal and quite unexpected gust of feeling, just
as I've seen a June-time garden shaken by an unexpected gust of wind.
It passed away, of course, about as quickly as it came--but with it
went a scattering of the white petals of childhood unconcern.

I don't suppose my poor little Dinkie has yet awakened to the fact
that his body is a worn river-bed down which must race the freshets of
far-off racial instincts. But the thing disturbed me more than I'd be
willing to admit. There are murky corridors in the house of life. They
stand there, and they must be faced. There are rooms where the air
must be kept stirring, corners into which the clear sanity of sunlight
must be thrown. Dinkie, since he has stepped into his first experience
in the keeping of rabbits, has been asking me a number of rather
disconcerting questions. His father, I notice, has the habit of
half-diffidently referring the boy to me, just as I nursed the earlier
habit of referring him to his father. But some time soon Dinkie and I
will have to have a serious talk about this thing called Life, this
Life which is so much more uncompromisingly brutal than the child-mind
can conceive....

By the way, there's a lot of nonsense talked about motherhood
softening women. It may soften them in some ways, but there are many
others in which it hardens them. It draws their power of love together
into a fixed point, just as the lens of a burning-glass concentrates
the vague warmth of the sun into one small and fiercely illuminated
area. It is a form of selfishness, I suppose, but it is a selfishness
nature imposes upon us. And it is sanctified by the end it serves. At
every turn, now, I find that I am thinking of my children. I seem to
have my eyes set steadily on something far, far ahead. I'm not quite
certain just what this something is. It's a sort of secret between me
and the Master of Life. But the memory of it makes my days more
endurable. It allows me to face the future without a quaver of regret.
I am a woman, and I am no longer young. But it gives me courage to
laugh in the teeth of Time.

And to laugh, to laugh whatever happens--that is the great thing! It
isn't age I dread. But I'd hate to lose that lightness with which
those blessed ones we call the young can move through the world, that
self-renewing freshness which converts every daybreak into a dewy new
world and mints every sunrise into a brand new life ... I asked
Gershom to-day if he could possibly tell me how many Parker House
rolls a square mile of wheat running forty bushels to the acre would
make. And he surprised me by inquiring how many quarts of buttermilk
it would take to shingle a cow. Gershom is widening out a bit....

Dinkie, I notice, has just compiled a list of horses. I read from his
carefully ruled half-page:

"Draght horses; carriege horses; riding horses; racing horses;
ponyies; percheron from france; Belgain from Beljium; shire clyesdale
and saffold punch from great Britain; french coach and German coach;
contucky saddle horses; through-breads; Shetland ponies; mushstand
ponies; pacers and pintoes." Thus recordeth my Toddler.




_Sunday the Ninth_


I have had Dinkie in bed for the last five days, with a bruised foot.
Duncan shortened the stirrups and put the boy on Briquette, who had
just proved a handful for even an old horse-wrangler like Cuba Sebeck.
Briquette bucked and threw the boy. And Dinkie, in the mix-up, got a
hoof-pound on the ankle. No bones were broken, luckily, but the foot
was very sore and swollen for a few days. No word about the episode
has passed between Duncan and me. But I'm glad, all things considered,
that I was not a witness of the accident. The clouds are already quite
heavy enough over Casa Grande.

Dinkie and his mater, however, have been drawn much closer together
during the last few days. I've talked to him, and read to him, and
without either of us being altogether conscious of it there has been
an opening of a closed door or two. Dinkie loves to be read to. The
new world of the imagination is just opening up to him. And I envy the
rapture of the child in books, rapture not yet spoiled by the
intellectual conceit of the grown-up.

But I'm not the only reader about this ranch. I'm afraid the copy of
Burns which Santa Claus brought to Whinstane Sandy last Christmas is
not adding to his matrimonial tendencies as love-plaints of that
nature should. At noon, as soon as dinner is over, he sits on the back
step, poring over his beloved Tammas. And at night, now that the
evenings are chillier, he retreats to the bunk-house stove, where he
smokes and reads aloud. His own mother, he tells me, used to say many
of those pieces to him when he was a wee laddie. He both outraged and
angered poor Struthers, last Sunday, by reading _Tam O'Shanter_ aloud
to her. That autumnal vestal proclaimed that it was anything but
suitable literature for an old philanderer who still saw fit to live
alone. It showed, she averred, a shocking lack of respect for
women-folk and should be taken over by the police.

Struthers even begins to suspect that this much-thumbed volume of
Burns lies at the root of Whinnie's accumulating misanthropy. She has
asked me if I thought a volume of Mrs. Hemans would be of service in
leading the deluded old misogynist back to the light. The matter has
become a more urgent one since Cuba Sebeck suffered a severe bilious
attack and a consequent sea-change in his affections. But I'm afraid
our Whinnie is too old a bird to be trapped by printer's ink. I
notice, in fact, that Struthers is once more spending her evenings in
knitting winter socks. And I have a shadow of a suspicion that they
are for the obdurate one.

My Dinkie, by the way, has written his first poem, or, rather, his
first two poems. The first one he slipped folded into my sewing-basket
and I found it when I was looking for new buttons for Pauline
Augusta's red sweater. It reads:

               No more we smel the sweet clover,
               Floting on the breeze all over.
               But now we hear the wild geese calling;
               And lissen, tis the grey owl yowling.

The second one, however, was a more ambitious effort. He worked over
it, propped up in bed, for an hour or two. Then, having looked upon
his work and having seen that it was good, he blushingly passed it
over to me. So I went to the window and read it.

         O blue-bird, happy robbin--
       Who teached those birds to stick theirselves together?
       Who teached them how to put their tails on?
       Who teached them how to hold tight on the tree tops?
       Who gived them all the fetthers on their brest?
       Who gived them all the eggs with little birdies in them?
       Who teached them how to make the shells so blue?
       Who teached them how to com home in the dark?
       Twas God. Twas God. He teached him!

I read it over slowly, with a crazy fluttering of the heart which I
could never explain. They were so trivial, those little halting lines,
and yet so momentous to me! It was life seeking expression, life
groping so mysteriously toward music. It was man emerging out of the
dusk of time. It was Rodin's _Penseur_, not in grim and stately
bronze, but in a soft-eyed and white-bodied child, groping his
stumbling way toward the border-land of consciousness, staring out on
a new world and finding it wonderful. It was my Little Stumbler, my
Precious Piece-of-Life, walking with his arm first linked through the
arm of Mystery. It was my Dinkie looking over the rampart of the
home-nest and breaking lark-like into song.

I went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and took my
man-child in my arms.

"It's wonderful, Dinkie," I said, trying to hide the tears I was so
ashamed of. "It's so wonderful, my boy, that I'm going to keep it with
me, always, as long as I live. And some day, when you are a great
man, and all the world is at your feet, I'm going to bring it to you
and show it to you. For I know now that you are going to be a great
man, and that your old mother is going to live to be so proud of you
it'll make her heart ache with joy!"

He hugged me close, in a little back-wash of rapture, and then settled
down on his pillows.

"I could do better ones than that," he finally said, with a glowing
eye.

"Yes," I agreed. "They'll be better and better. And that'll make your
old Mummsy prouder and prouder!"

He lay silent for several minutes. Then he looked at the square of
paper which I held folded in my hand.

"I'd like to send it to Uncle Peter," he rather startled me by
saying.




_Saturday the Twenty-Ninth_


Once more I'm a grass widow. My Duncan is awa'. He scooted for Calgary
as soon as his threshing-work was finished up. But that tumult is over
and once more I've a chance to sit down and commune with my soul.
Everything here is over-running with wheat. Our bins are bursting. The
lord of the realm is secretly delighted, but he has said little about
it. He has a narrow course to steer. He is grateful for the money that
this wheat will bring in to him, yet he can see it would never do to
harp too loudly on the productiveness of our land--on _my_ land, I
ought to say, for Casa Grande has now been formally deeded to me. I
find no sense of triumph, however, in that transfer. I am depressed,
in fact, at the very thought of it. It seems to carry a vague air of
the valedictory. But I refuse to be intimidated by the future.

Gershom and I, indeed, have been indulging in the study of astronomy.
The air was crystal clear last night, so that solemn youth suggested
that we take out the old telescope and study the stars. Which we did.
And which was much more wonderful than I had imagined. But Gershom had
no reflector, so after getting a neck-ache trying to inspect the
heavens while on our feet we took the old buffalo-robe and a couple of
rugs out to a straw-pile that had been hauled in to protect our winter
perennials. There we indecorously reposed on our backs and went
stargazing in comfort. And Gershom even forgot that painful
bashfulness of his when he fell to talking about the planets. He
slipped out of his shell and spoke with genuine feeling.

He suggested that we begin with the Big Dipper, which I could locate
easily enough well up in the northern sky. That, Gershom told me, was
sometimes called the Great Bear, though it was only a part of the real
_Ursa Major_ of the astronomers. Then he showed me Benetnasch at the
end of the Dipper's handle, and Mizar at the bend in the handle, then
Alioth, and then Megrez, which joins the handle to the bowl. Then he
showed me Phaed and Merak, which mark the bottom of the bowl, and then
Dubhe at the bowl's outer rim.

I tried hard, but I was very stupid about getting the names right.
Then Gershom asked me to look up at Mizar, and see if I could make
out a small star quite close to it. I did so, without much trouble,
and Gershom thereupon condescended to admit that I had exceptionally
good eyes. For that star, he explained, was Alcor, and Alcor was
Arabic for "the proof," and for centuries and centuries the ability to
see that star had been accepted as the proof of good vision.

Then Gershom went on to the other constellations, and talked of suns
of the first and second magnitude, and pointed out Sirius, in whose
honor great temples had once been built in Egypt, and Arcturus, the
same old Arcturus that a Hebrew poet by the name of Job had sung
about, and Vega and Capella and Rigel, which he said sent out eight
thousand times more light than our sun, and is at least thirty-four
thousand times as big.

But it only made me dizzy and staggered my mind. I couldn't comprehend
the distances he was talking about. I just couldn't make it, any more
than a bronco that had been used to jumping a six-barred gate could
vault over a windmill tower. And I had to tell Gershom that it didn't
do a bit of good informing me that Sirius was comparatively close to
us, as it stood only nine light-years away. I remembered how he had
explained that light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles
a second, and that there are thirty million seconds in a year, so that
a light-year is about five and a half million million of miles. But
when he started to tell me that some of the so-called photographic
stars are thirty-two thousand light-years away from us my imagination
just curled up and died. It didn't mean anything to me. It couldn't. I
tried in vain to project my puny little soul through all that space.
At first it was rather bewildering. Then it grew into something
touched with grandeur. Then it took on an aspect of awfulness. And
from that it grew into a sort of ghastliness, until the machinery of
the mind choked and balked and stopped working altogether, like an
overloaded motor. I had to reach out in the cold air and catch hold of
Gershom's arm. I felt a hunger to cling to something warm and human.

"We call this world of ours a pretty big world," Gershom was saying.
"But look at Betelgeuse up there, which Michelson has been able to
measure. He has, at least, succeeded in measuring the angle at the eye
that Betelgeuse subtends, so that after estimating its parallax as
given by a heliometer, it's merely a matter of trigonometry to work
out the size of the star. And he estimated Betelgeuse to be two
hundred and sixty million miles in diameter. That means it would take
twenty-seven million of our suns to equal it in bulk. So that this big
world of ours, which takes so many weeks to crawl about on the fastest
ships and the fastest trains, is really a mote of dust, something
smaller than the smallest pin-prick, compared to that far-away sun up
there on the shoulder of Orion!"

"Stop!" I cried. "You're positively giving me a chill up my spine.
You're making me feel so lonesome, Gershom, that you're giving me
goose-flesh. You're not leaving me anything to get hold of. You
haven't even left me anything to stand on. I'm only a little speck of
Nothing on a nit of a world in a puny little universe which is only a
little freckle on the face of some greater universe which is only a
lost child in a city of bigger constellations which in turn have still
lonelier suns to swing about, until I go on and on, and wonder with a
gasp what is beyond the end of space. But I can't go on thinking about
it. I simply can't. It upsets me, the same as an earthquake would,
when you look about for something solid and find that even your solid
old earth is going back on you!"

"On the contrary," said Gershom as he put down his telescope, "I know
nothing more conducive to serenity than the study of astronomy. It has
a tendency to teach you, in the first place, just how insignificant
you are in the general scheme of things. The naked eye, in clear air
like this, can see over eight thousand stars. The larger telescopes
reveal a hundred million stars, and the photographic dry-plate has
shown that there are several thousands of millions which can be
definitely recorded. So that you and I are not altogether the whole
works. And to remember that, when we are feeling a bit important, is
good for our Ego!"

I didn't answer him, for I was busy just then studying the Milky Way.
And I couldn't help feeling that it must have been on a night like
this that a certain young shepherd watching his flocks on the uplands
of Canaan sat studying the infinite stairways of star-dust that
"sloped through darkness up to God" and was moved to say: "When I
consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, or
the son of man that Thou visitest him?"

"Yes, Gershom, it's horribly humiliating," I said as I squinted up at
those serene heavens. "They last forever. And we come and go out, and
nobody knows why!"

"Pardon me," corrected the literal-minded Gershom. "They do not last
forever. They come and go out, just as we do. Only they take longer.
Consider the Dipper up there, for instance. A hundred thousand years
from now that Dipper will be perceptibly altered, for we know the
lateral movement of Dubhe and Benetnasch will give the outer line of
the bowl a greater flare and make the crook of the handle a trifle
sharper. Even a thousand years would show change enough for
instruments to detect. And a million years will probably show the
group pretty well broken up. But the one regrettable feature, of
course, is that we will not be here to see it."

"Where will we be?" I asked Gershom.

"I don't know," he finally admitted, after an unexpectedly long
silence.

"But will it all go on, forever and forever and forever?"

"To do so is not in the nature of things," was Gershom's quiet-toned
reply. "It is the destiny of our own earth, of course, which most
interests us. And however we look at it, that destiny is a gloomy
one. Its heat may fail. Stupart, in fact, has established that its
temperature is going down one and a half degrees every thousand years.
Or its volcanic elevating forces may give out, so that the land will
subside and the water wash over it from pole to pole. Or a comet may
wipe up its atmosphere, the same as one sponge-sweep wipes up moisture
from a slate. Or the sun itself may cool, so that the last of our race
will stand huddled together in a solarium somewhere on the Equator. Or
as our sun rushes toward Lyra, it may bump into a derelict sun, just
as a ship bumps into a wreck. If that derelict were as big as our sun,
astronomers would see it at least fifteen years before the collision.
For five or six years it would even be visible to the naked eye, so
that the race, or what remained of the race, would have plenty of time
to think things over and put its house in order. Then, of course, we'd
go up like a singed feather. And there'd be no more breakfasts to
worry over, and no more wheat to thresh, and no more school fires to
start in the morning, and no more children to make think you know more
than you really do, and not even any more hearts to ache. There would
be just Emptiness, just voiceless and never-ending Nothingness!"

Gershom stopped speaking and sat staring up at Orion. Then he turned
and looked at me.

"What's the matter?" he asked, for he must have felt my shiver under
the robe.

"Nothing," I said in a thin and pallid voice. "Only I think I'll go
back to the house. And I'm going to make a pot of good hot cocoa!" ...
And that's mostly what life is: making little pots of cocoa to keep
our bodies warm in the midst of a never-ending chilliness!




_Tuesday the Eighth_


My husband is home again. He came back with the first blizzard of the
winter and had a hard time getting through to Casa Grande. This gives
him all the excuses he could desire for railing at prairie life. I
told him, after patiently listening to him cussing about everything in
sight, that it was plain to see that he belonged to the land of the
beaver. He promptly requested to know what I meant by that.

"Doesn't the beaver regard it as necessary to dam his home before he
considers it fit to live in?" I retorted. But Duncan, in that
estranging new mood of his, didn't relax a line. He even announced, a
little later on, that a quick-silver wit might be all right if it
could be kept from running over. And it was my turn to ask if he had
any particular reference to allusions.

"Well, for one thing," he told me, "there's this tiresome habit of
hitching nicknames on to everything in sight."

I asked him what names he objected to.

"To begin right at home," he retorted, "I regard 'Dinkie' as an
especially silly name for a big hulk of a boy. I think it's about time
that youngster was called by his proper name."

I'd never thought about it, to tell the truth. His real name, I
remembered, was Elmer Duncan McKail. That endearing diminutive of
"Dinkie" had stuck to him from his baby days, and in my fond and
foolish eyes, of course, had always seemed to fit him. But even
Gershom had spoken to me on the matter, months before, asking me if I
preferred the boy to be known as "Dinkie" to his school mates. And I'd
told Gershom that I didn't believe we could get rid of the "Dinkie" if
we wanted to. His father, I knew, had once objected to "Duncan," as he
had no liking to be dubbed "Old Duncan" while his offspring would
answer to "Young Duncan." And "Duncan," as a name, had never greatly
appealed to me. But it is plain now that I have been remiss in the
matter. So hereafter we'll have to make an effort to have our little
Dinkie known as Elmer. It's like bringing a new child into the family
circle, a new child we're not quite acquainted with. But these things,
I suppose, have to be faced. So hereafter my laddie shall officially
be known as "Elmer," Elmer Duncan McKail. And I have started the ball
rolling by duly inscribing in his new books "Elmer D. McKail" and
requesting Gershom to address his pupil as "Elmer."

I've been wondering, in the meantime, if Duncan is going to insist on
a revision of all our ranch names, the names so tangled up with love
and good-natured laughter and memories of the past. Take our horses
alone: Tumble-weed and timeless Tithonus, Buntie and Briquette,
Laughing-gas and Coco the Third, Mudski and Tarzanette. I'd hate now
to lose those names. They are the register of our friendly love for
our animals.

It begins to creep through this thick head of mine that my husband no
longer nurses any real love for either these animals or prairie life.
And if that is the case, he will never get anything out of prairie
living. It will be useless for him even to try. So I may as well do
what I can to reconcile myself to the inevitable. I am not without my
moments of revolt. But in those moods when I feel a bit uppish I
remember about my recent venture into astronomy. What's the use of
worrying, anyway? There was one ice age, and there is going to be
another ice age. I tell myself that my troubles are pretty trivial,
after all, since I'm only one of many millions on this earth and
since this earth is only one of many millions of other earths which
will swing about their suns billions and billions of years after I and
my children and my children's children are withered into dust.

It rather takes my breath away, at times, and I shy away from it the
same as Pauline Augusta shies away from the sight of blood. It reminds
me of Chaddie's New York lady with whom the Bishop ventured to discuss
ultimate destinies. "Yes, I suppose I shall enter into eternal bliss,"
responded this fair lady, "but would you mind not discussing such
disagreeable subjects at tea-time?"

Speaking of disagreeable subjects, we seem to have a new little
trouble-maker here at Casa Grande. It's in the form of a brindle pup
called Minty, which Dinkie--I mean, of course, which Elmer, acquired
in exchange for a jack-knife and what was left of his _Swiss Family
Robinson_. But Minty has not been well treated by the world, and was
brought home with a broken leg. So Whinnie and I made splints out of
an old cigar-box cover, and padded the fracture with cotton wool and
bound it up with tape. Minty, in the moderated spirits of invalidism,
was a meek and well behaved pup during the first few days after his
arrival, sleeping quietly at the foot of Elmer's bed and stumping
around after his new master like a war veteran awaiting his discharge.
But now that Minty's leg is getting better and he finds himself in a
world that flows with warm milk and much petting, he betrays a
tendency to use any odd article of wearing apparel as a teething-ring.
He has completely ruined one of my bedroom slippers and done
Mexican-drawn-work on the ends of the two living-room window-curtains.
But what is much more ominous, Minty yesterday got hold of
Dinky-Dunk's Stetson and made one side of its rim look as though it
had been put through a meat-chopper. So my lord and master has been
making inquiries about Minty and Minty's right of possession. And the
order has gone forth that hereafter no canines are to sleep in this
house. It impresses me as a trifle unreasonable, all things
considered, and Elmer, with a rather unsteady underlip, has asked me
if Minty must be taken away from him. But I have no intention of
countermanding Duncan's order. The crust over the volcano is quite
thin enough, as it is. And whatever happens, I am resolved to be a
meek and dutiful wife. But I've had a talk with Whinnie and he's going
to fix up a comfortable box behind the stove in the bunk-house, and
there the exiled Minty will soon learn to repose in peace. It's
marvelous, though, how that little three-legged animal loves my
Dinkie, loves my Elmer, I should say. He licks my laddie's shoes and
yelps with joy at the smell of his pillow ... Poor little
abundant-hearted mite, overflowing with love! But life, I suppose,
will see to it that he is brought to reason. We must learn not to be
too happy on this earth. And we must learn that love isn't always
given all it asks for.




_Thursday the Seventeenth_


The crust over the volcano has shown itself to be even thinner than I
imagined. The lava-shell gave way, under our very feet, and I've had a
glimpse of the molten fury that can flow about us without our knowing
it. And like so many of life's tragic moments, it began out of
something that is almost ridiculous in its triviality.

Night before last, when Struthers was rather late in setting her
bread, she heard Minty scratching and whimpering at the back door, and
without giving much thought to what she was doing, let him into the
house. Minty, of course, went scampering up to Dinkie's bed, where he
slept secretly and joyously until morning. And all might have been
well, even at this, had not Minty's return to his kingdom gone to his
head. To find some fitting way of expressing his joy must have taxed
that brindle pup's ingenuity, for, before any of us were up, he
descended to the living-room, where he delightedly and diligently
proceeded to remove the upholstery from the old Chesterfield. By the
time I came on the scene, at any rate, there was nothing but a grisly
skeleton of the Chesterfield left. Now, that particular piece of
furniture had known hard use, and there were places where the mohair
had been worn through, and I'd even discussed the expediency of having
the thing done over. But I knew that Minty's efforts to hasten this
movement would not meet with approval. So I discreetly decided to have
Whinnie and Struthers remove the tell-tale skeleton to the bunk-house.
Before that transfer could be effected, however, the Dour Man invaded
the living-room and stood with a cold and accusatory eye inspecting
that monument of destructiveness.

"Where's Elmer?" he demanded, with a grim look which started by heart
pounding.

"Elmer's dressing," I said as quietly as I could. "Do you want him?"

"I do," announced my husband, whiter in the face than I had seen him
for many a day.

"What for?" I asked.

"I think you know what for," he said, meeting my eye.

"I'm not sure that I do," I found the courage to retort. "But I'd
prefer being certain."

Duncan, instead of answering me, went to the foot of the stairs and
called his son. Then he strode out of the room and out of the house.
Struthers, in the meantime, circumspectly took possession of Minty,
who was still indecorously shaking a bit of mohair between his jocund
young teeth. She and Minty vanished from the scene. A moment later,
however, Duncan walked back into the room. He had a riding-quirt in
his hand.

"Where's that boy?" he demanded.

I went out to the foot of the stairs, where I met Elmer coming down,
buttoning his waist as he came. For just a moment his eye met mine. It
was a questioning eye, but not a cowardly one. I had intended to speak
to him, but my voice, for some reason, didn't respond to my will. So I
merely took the boy's hand and led him into the living-room. There his
father stood confronting him.

"Did that pup sleep on your bed last night?" demanded the man with the
quirt.

"Yes," said the child, after a moment of silence.

"Did you hear me say that no dog was to sleep in this house?" demanded
the child's father.

"Yes," said Elmer, with his own face as white as his father's.

"Then I think that's about enough," asserted Duncan, turning a
challenging eye in my direction.

"What are you going to do?" I asked. My voice was shaking, in spite of
myself.

"I'm going to whale that youngster within an inch of his life," said
the master of the house, with a deadly sort of intentness.

"I don't want you to do that," I quavered, wondering why my words,
even as I uttered them, should seem so inadequate.

"Of course you don't," mocked my husband. "But this is the limit. And
what you want isn't going to count!"

"I don't want you to do that," I repeated. Something in my voice, I
suppose, must have arrested him, for he stood there, staring at me,
with a little knot coming and going on one side of his skull, just in
front of his upper ear-tip.

"And why not?" he asked, still with that hateful rough ironic note in
his voice.

"Because you don't know what you're punishing this child for," I told
him with all the quietness I could command. "And because you're in no
fit condition to do it.

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