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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Prairie Child, by Arthur Stringer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Prairie Child
+
+Author: Arthur Stringer
+
+Illustrator: E. F. Ward
+
+Release Date: April 6, 2009 [EBook #28514]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 _creche_, 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'Opera, 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 AEolian 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
+Chateau 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 _creme 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 Chateau 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 chateau 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 Jose 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 Gerome's _Death of
+Caesar_, 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 Caesar'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 Gerome pictures, this one being the familiar old
+_Cleopatra and Caesar_. 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 Caesar 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.
+
+"Caesar, 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 Caesar 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 Caesar stayed feasting and forgetting
+himself for nearly a year with her. It must have been very pleasant,
+for Caesar 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 Caesar 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 coulees 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 coulee 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_ role. 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."
+
+"You needn't worry about my condition," he cried out--and I could see
+by the way he said it that he was still blind with rage. "Come here,
+you!" he called to Dinkie.
+
+It was then that the fatal little bell clanged somewhere at the back
+of my head, the bell that rings down the curtain on all the slowly
+accumulated civilization the centuries may have brought to us. I not
+only faced my husband with a snort of scorn, but I tightened my grip
+on the child's hand. I tightened my grip on his hand and backed slowly
+and deliberately away until I came to the door of my sewing-room.
+Then, still facing my husband, I opened that door and said: "Go
+inside, Dinkie." I could not see the boy, but I knew that he had done
+as I told him. So I promptly slammed the door shut and stood there
+facing the gray-lipped man with the riding-quirt in his hand. He took
+two slow steps toward me. His chin was thrust out in a way that made
+me think of a fighting-cock's beak. He had not shaved that morning,
+and his squared jaw looked stubbled and blue and ugly.
+
+"You can't pull that petticoat stuff this time," he said in a hard and
+throaty tone which I had never heard from him before. "Get out of my
+way!"
+
+"You will not beat that child!" And I myself couldn't have made a
+very pretty picture as I flung that challenge up in his teeth.
+
+"Get out of my way," he repeated. He did not shout it. He said it
+almost quietly. But I knew, even before he reached out a shaking hand
+to thrust me aside, that he was in deadly earnest, that nothing I
+could say would hold him back or turn him aside. And it was then that
+my eye fell on the big Colt in its stained leather holster, hanging up
+high over one corner of the book-cabinet, where it had been put beyond
+the reach of the children.
+
+I have no memory of giving any thought to the matter. My reaction must
+have been both immediate and automatic. I don't think I even intended
+to bunt my husband in the short-ribs the way I did, for the impact of
+my body half twisted him about and sent him staggering back several
+steps. All I know is that holster and belt came tumbling down as I
+sprang and caught at the Colt handle. And I was back at the door
+before I had even shaken the revolver free. I was back just in time to
+hear my husband say, rather foolishly, for the third time: "Get out of
+my way!"
+
+"You stay back there!" I called, quite as foolishly, for by this time
+I had the Colt balanced in my hand and was pointing it directly at his
+body.
+
+He stopped short, with a vacuous look in his eyes.
+
+"_You fool!_" he said, in a sort of strangled whisper. But it was my
+face, and not the weapon, that he was staring at all the while.
+
+"Stay back!" I said again, with my eyes fixed on his.
+
+He hesitated, for a moment, and made a sound that was like the short
+bark of a laugh. It was too hard and horrible, though, ever to be
+taken for laughter. And I knew that he was not going to do what I had
+said.
+
+"Stay back!" I warned him still again. But he stepped forward, with a
+grim sort of deliberation, with his challenging gaze locked on mine. I
+could hear a thousand warning voices, somewhere at the back of my
+brain, and at the same time I could hear a thousand singing devils in
+my blood trying to drown out those voices. I could see my husband's
+narrowed eyes slowly widen, slowly open like the gills of a dying
+fish, for the hate that he must have seen on my face obviously
+arrested him. It arrested him, but it arrested him only for a moment.
+He dropped his eyes to the Colt in my hand. Then he moved deliberately
+forward until his body was almost against the barrel-end. I must have
+known what it meant, just as he must have known what it meant. It was
+his final challenge. And I must have met that challenge. For, without
+quite knowing it, I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.
+
+There had been something awful, I know, in that momentary silence. And
+there was something awful in the sound that came after it, though it
+was not the sound my subconscious mind was waiting for. It was
+distinct enough and significant enough, heaven knows. But instead of
+the explosion of a shell it was the sharp snap of steel against
+steel.
+
+The revolver was empty. It was empty-had been empty for weeks. But the
+significant fact remained that I had deliberately pulled the trigger.
+I had stood ready, in my moment of madness, to kill the man that I
+lived with....
+
+Had a ball of lead gone through that man's body, I don't think he
+could have staggered back with a more startled expression on his face.
+He looked more than bewildered; he looked vaguely humiliated, oddly
+and wordlessly affronted, as he stood leaning against the table-edge,
+breathing hard, his skin a mottled blue-white to the very lips. He
+made an effort to speak, but no sound came from him. For a moment the
+dreadful thought raced through me that I had indeed shot him, that in
+some mysterious way he was mortally hurt, without this particular
+bullet announcing itself as bullets usually do. I looked at the
+revolver, stupidly. It seemed to have grown heavy, as heavy as a
+cook-stove in my hand.
+
+"You'd do that?" whispered my husband, very slowly, with a stricken
+light in his eyes which I couldn't quite understand. I intended to put
+the Colt on the table. But something must have been wrong with my
+vision, for the loathsome thing fell loathsomely to the floor. I felt
+sick and shaken and a horrible misty feeling of homelessness settled
+down about me, of a sudden, for I remembered how closely I had skirted
+the black gulf of murder.
+
+"Oh, Dinky-Dunk!" I blubbered, weakly, as I groped toward him. He must
+have thought that I was going to fall, for he put out his arm and held
+me up. He held me up, but there wasn't an atom of warmth in his
+embrace. He held me up about the same as he'd hold up an open
+wheat-sack that threatened to tumble over on his granary floor. I
+don't know what reaction it was that took my strength away from me,
+but I clung to his shoulders and sobbed there. I felt as alone in the
+gray wastes of time as one of Gershom's lost stars. And I knew that
+my Dinky-Dunk would never bend down now and whisper into my ear any
+word of comfort, any word of forgiveness. For, however things may have
+been at the first, I was the one who was now so hopelessly in the
+wrong, _I_ was the big offender. And that knowledge only added to my
+misery as I stood there clinging to my husband's shoulders and
+blubbering "Oh, Dinky-Dunk!"
+
+It must have grown distasteful to him, my foolish hanging on to him as
+though he were a hitching-post, for he finally said in a remote voice:
+"I guess we've had about enough of this." He led me rather
+ceremoniously to a chair, and slowly let me down in it. Then he
+crossed over to the old leather holster and picked it up, and stooped
+for the revolver, and pushed it down in the holster and buckled the
+cover-flap and tossed the whole thing up to the top of the
+book-cabinet again. Then, without speaking to me, he walked slowly out
+of the room.
+
+I was tempted to call him back, but I knew, on second thought, that it
+would be no use. I merely sat there, staring ahead of me. Then I shut
+my eyes and tried to think. I don't know why, but I was thinking about
+the bigness of Betelgeuse, which was twenty-seven million times as big
+as our sun and which was going on through its millions of miles of
+space without knowing anything about Chaddie McKail and what had
+happened to her that morning. I was wondering if there were worlds
+between me and Betelgeuse with women on them, with women as alone as I
+was, when I felt a pair of small arms tighten about my knees and an
+adoring small voice whispered "Mummsy!" And I forgot about Betelgeuse.
+For it was my Dinkie there, with his little rough hand reaching
+hungrily for mine....
+
+Minty has been removed from Casa Grande. I took him over to the
+Teetzel ranch in the car, and young Dode Teetzel is to get a dollar a
+week for looking after him and feeding him. Only Elmer and I know of
+his whereabouts. And once a week the boy can canter over on Buntie and
+keep in touch with his pup.
+
+We have a tacit understanding that the occurrences of yesterday
+morning are a closed chapter, are not to be referred to by word or
+deed. Duncan himself found it necessary to team in to Buckhorn and
+left word with Struthers that he would stay in town over night. The
+call for the Buckhorn trip was, of course, a polite fabrication, an
+expedient _pax in bello_ to permit the dust of battle to settle a
+little about this troubled house of McKail. All day to-day I have
+felt rather languid. I suppose it's the lethargy which naturally
+follows after all violence. Any respectable woman, I used to think,
+could keep a dead-line in her soul, beyond which the impulses of evil
+dare not venture. But I must have been wrong.... All week I've been
+looking for a letter from Peter Ketley. But for once in his life he
+seems to have forgotten us.
+
+
+
+
+_Sunday the Twentieth_
+
+
+I've been wondering to-day just what I'd do if I had to earn my own
+living. I could run a ranch, I suppose, if I still had one, but two or
+three years of such work would see me a hatchet-faced old termagant
+with fallen arches and a prairie-squint. Or I could raise chickens and
+peddle dated eggs in a flivver-and fresco hen-coops with whitewash
+until the trap-nest of time swallowed me up in oblivion. Or I could
+take a rural school somewhere and teach the three R's to little
+Slovenes and Frisians and French-Canadians even more urgently in need
+of soap and water. Or perhaps I could be housekeeper for one of our
+new beef-kings in his new Queen-Anne Norman-Georgian Venetian palace
+of Alberta sandstone with tesselated towers and bungalow
+sleeping-porches. Or I might even peddle magazines, or start a little
+bakery in one of the little board-fronted shops of Buckhorn, or take
+in plain sewing and dispose of home-made preserves to the elite of the
+community.
+
+But each and all of them would be mere gestures of defeat. I'm of no
+value to the world. There was a time when I regarded myself as quite a
+Somebody, and prided myself on having an idea or two. Didn't Percy
+even once denominate me as "a window-dresser"? There was a time when I
+didn't have to wait to see if the pearl-handled knife was the one
+intended for the fish-course, and I could walk across a waxed floor
+without breaking my neck and do a bit of shopping in the Rue de la
+Paix without being taken for a tourist. But that was a long, long time
+ago. And life during the last few years has both humbled me and taught
+me my limitations. I'm a house-wife, now, and nothing more--and not
+even a successful house-wife. I've let everything fall away except the
+thought of my home and my family. And now I find that the basket into
+which I so carefully packed all my eggs hasn't even a bottom to it.
+
+But I've no intention of repining. Heaven knows I've never wanted to
+sit on the Mourner's Bench. I've never tried to pull a sour mug, as
+Dinky-Dunk once inelegantly expressed it. I love life and the joy of
+life, and I want all of it I can get. I believe in laughter, and I've
+a weakness for men and women who can sing as they work. But I've
+blundered into a black frost, and even though there was something to
+sing about, there's scarcely a blue-bird left to do the singing. But
+sometime, somewhere, there'll be an end to that silence. The blight
+will pass, and I'll break out again. I know it. I don't intend to be
+held down. I _can't_ be held down. I haven't the remotest idea of how
+it's going to happen, but I'm going to love life again, and be happy,
+and carol out like a meadow-lark on a blue and breezy April morning.
+It may not come to-morrow, and it may not come the next day. But it's
+going to come. And knowing it's going to come, I can afford to sit
+tight, and abide my time....
+
+I've just had a letter from Uncle Chandler, enclosing snap-shots of
+the place he's bought in New Jersey. It looks very palatial and
+settled and Old-Worldish, shaded and shadowed with trees and softened
+with herbage, dignified by the hand of time. It reminds me how many
+and many a long year will have to go by before our bald young prairie
+can be tamed and petted into a homeyness like that. Uncle Chandler has
+rather startled me by suggesting that we send Elmer through to him, to
+go to school in the East. He says the boy can attend Montclair
+Academy, that he can be taken there and called for every day by
+faithful old Fisher, in the cabriolet, and that on Sunday he can be
+toted regularly to St. Luke's Episcopal Church, and occasionally go
+into New York for some of the better concerts, and even have a
+governess of his own, if he'd care for it. And in case I should be
+worrying about his welfare Uncle Chandler would send me a weekly
+night-letter "describing the condition and the activities of the
+child," as the letter expresses it. It sounds very appealing, but
+every time I try to think it over my heart goes down like a dab-chick.
+My Dinkie is such a little fellow. And he's my first-born, my
+man-child, and he means so much in my life. Yet he and his father are
+not getting along very well together. It would be better, in many
+respects, if the boy could get away for a while, until the raw edges
+healed over again. It would be better for both of them. But there's
+one thing that would happen: he would grow away from his mother. He'd
+come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his
+shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing
+and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home
+with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym
+nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those
+things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd get used to them and he'd
+expect them.
+
+But there's one thing he wouldn't and couldn't have. He wouldn't have
+his mother. And no one can take a mother's place, with a boy like
+that. No one could understand him, and make allowances for him, and
+explain things to him, as his own mother could. I've been thinking
+about that, all afternoon as I ironed his waists and his blue
+flannellet pajamas with frogs on like his dad's. And I've been
+thinking of it all evening as I patched his brown corduroy knickers
+and darned his little stockings and balled them up in a neat little
+row. I tried to picture myself as packing them away in a trunk, and
+putting in beside them all the clothes he would need, and the books
+that he could never get along without, and the childish little
+treasures he'd have to carry away to his new home. But it was too much
+for me. There was one thing, I began to see, which could never, never
+happen. I could never willingly be parted from my Dinkie. I could
+think of nothing to pay me up for losing him. And he needed me as I
+needed him. For good or bad, we'd have to stick together. Mother and
+son, together in some way we'd have to sink or swim!
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Thirtieth_
+
+
+The tension has been relieved by Dinky-Dunk going off to Calgary.
+Along with him he has taken a rather formidable amount of his personal
+belongings. But he explains this by stating that business will keep
+him in the city for at least six or seven weeks. He has been talking a
+good deal about the Barcona coal-mine of late, and the last night he
+was with us he talked to Gershom for an hour and more about the
+advantages of those newer mines over the Drumheller. The newer field
+has a solid slate roof which makes drifting safe and easy, a finer
+type of coal, and a chance for big money once the railway runs in its
+spur and the officials wake up to the importance of giving them the
+cars they need. The whole country, Dinky-Dunk claims, is underlaid
+with coal, and our province alone is estimated to contain almost
+seventeen per cent. of the world's known supply. And my lord and
+master expressed the intention of being in on the clean-up.
+
+I don't know how much of this was intended for my ears. But it served
+to disquiet me, for reasons I couldn't quite discern. And the same
+vague depression crept over me when Dinky-Dunk took his departure. I
+kept up my air of blitheness, it is true, to the last moment, and was
+as casual as you please in helping Duncan to pack and reminding him to
+put his shaving-things in his bag and making sure the last button was
+on his pajamas. I kissed him good-by, as a dutiful wife ought, and
+held Pauline Augusta up in the doorway so that she might attempt a
+last-minute hand-waving at her daddy.
+
+But I slumped, once it was all over. I felt mysteriously alone in an
+indifferent big world with the rime of winter creeping along its
+edges. Even Gershom, after the children had had their lesson, became
+conscious of my preoccupation and went so far as to ask if I wasn't
+feeling well.
+
+I smilingly assured him that there was nothing much wrong with me.
+
+"_Lerne zu leiden ohne zu klagen!_" as the dying Frederick said to a
+singularly foolish son.
+
+"But you're upset?" persisted Gershom, with his valorous brand of
+timidity that so often reminds me of a robin defending her eggs.
+
+"No, it's not that," I said with a shake of the head. "It's only that
+I'm--I'm a trifle too chilly to be comfortable."
+
+And the foolish youth, at that, straightway fell to stoking the fire.
+I had to laugh a little. And that made him study me with solemn eyes.
+
+"Just think, Gershom," I said as I gathered up my sewing, "my heart is
+perishing of cold in a province which is estimated to contain almost
+seventeen per cent. of the world's known coal supply!"
+
+And that, apparently, left him with something to think about as I made
+my way off to bed ... It's hard to write coherently, I find, when
+you're not living coherently ...
+
+Syd Woodward, of Buckhorn, having learned that I can drive a tractor,
+has asked me if I'll take part in the plowing-match to-morrow. And
+I've given my promise to show Mere Man what a woman can do in the
+matter of turning a mile-long furrow. I feel rather audacious over it
+all. And I'm glad to inject a little excitement into life ... I'm
+saving up for a new sewing-machine ... Tarzanette has got rather badly
+cut up in some of our barb-wire fencing.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Fifteenth_
+
+
+The plowing-match was good fun, and I enjoyed it even more than I had
+expected. The men "kidded" me a good deal, and gave me a cheer at the
+end (I don't quite know whether it was for my work or my costume) and
+I had to pose for photographs, and a moving-picture man even followed
+me about for a round, shooting me as I turned my prairie stubble
+upside down. But the excitement of the plowing-match has been eclipsed
+by a bit of news which has rather taken my breath away. _It is Peter
+Ketley who has bought the Harris Ranch._
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Twenty-Third_
+
+
+The rains have brought mushrooms, slathers of mushrooms, and I joy in
+gathering them.
+
+Yesterday afternoon I rode past the Harris Ranch. The old place
+brought back a confusion of memories. But I was most disturbed by the
+signs of building going on there. It seems to mean a new shack on
+Alabama Ranch. And a new shack of very considerable dimensions. I've
+been wondering what this implies. I don't know whether to be elated or
+depressed. And what business is it, after all, of mine?
+
+My Dinkie--I have altogether given up trying to call my Dinkie
+anything but Dinkie--came home two evenings ago with a discolored eye
+and a distinct air of silence. Gershom, too, seemed equally reticent.
+So I set about discreetly third-degreeing Poppsy, who finally
+acknowledged, with awe in her voice, that Dinkie had been in a fight.
+
+It was, according to my petticoated Herodotus, a truly terrible fight.
+Noses got bloodied, and no one could make the fighters stop. But
+Dinkie was unquestionably the conqueror. Yet, oddly enough, I am
+informed that he cried all through the combat. He was a crying
+fighter. And he had his fight with Climmie O'Lone--trust the Irish to
+look for trouble!--who seems to have been accepted as the ring-master
+of his younger clan. Their differences arose out of the accusation
+that Dinkie, my bashful little Dinkie, had been forcing his unwelcomed
+attention on one Doreen O'Lone, Climmie's younger sister. That's
+absurd, of course. And Dinkie must have realized it. He didn't want to
+fight, acknowledged Poppsy, from the first. He even cried over it. And
+Doreen also cried. And Poppsy herself joined in.
+
+I fancy it was a truly Homeric struggle, for it seems to have lasted
+for round after round. It lasted, I have been able to gather, until
+Climmie was worsted and down on his back crying "Enough!" Which Poppsy
+reports Dinkie made him say three times, until Doreen nodded and said
+she'd heard. But my young son, apparently, is one of those crying
+fighters, who are reckoned, if I remember right, as the worst breed of
+belligerents!
+
+I have decided not to tell Dinkie what I know. But I'm rather anxious
+to get a glimpse of this young Mistress Doreen, for whom lances are
+already being shattered in the lists of youth. The O'Lones regard
+themselves as the landed aristocracy of the Elk-trail District. And
+Doreen O'Lone impresses me as a very musical appellative. Yet I prefer
+to keep my kin free from all entangling alliances, even though they
+have to do with a cattle-king's offspring....
+
+I had a short letter from Dinky-Dunk to-day, asking me to send on a
+package of papers which he had left in a pigeon-hole of his desk here.
+It was a depressingly non-committal little note, without a glimmer of
+warmth between the lines. I'm afraid there's a certain ugly truth
+which will have to be faced some day. But I intend to stick to the
+ship as long as the ship can keep afloat. I am so essentially a family
+woman that I can't conceive of life without its home circle. Home,
+however, is where the heart is. And it seems to take more than one
+heart to keep it going. I keep reminding myself that I have my
+children at the same time that I keep asking myself why my children
+are not enough, why they can't seem to fill my cup of contentment as
+they ought. Now that their father is so much away, a great deal of
+their training is falling on my shoulders. And I must, in some way, be
+a model to them. So I'll continue to show them what a Penelope I can
+be. Perhaps, after all, they will prove our salvation. For our
+offspring ought to be the snow-fences along the wind-harried rails of
+matrimony. They should prevent drifting along the line, and from
+terminal to lonely terminal should keep traffic open ... I have
+to-night induced Poppsy to write a long and affectionate letter to her
+_pater_, telling him all the news of Casa Grande. Perhaps it will
+awaken a little pang in the breast of her absent parent.
+
+
+
+
+_Monday the Twenty-Fifth_
+
+
+I have aroused the ire of the Dour Man. He has sent me a message
+strongly disapproving of my conduct. He even claims that I've
+humiliated him. I never dreamed, when that movie-man with the camera
+followed me about at the plowing-match, that my husband would wander
+into a Calgary picture-house and behold his wife in driving gauntlets
+and Stetson mounted on a tractor and twiddling her fingers at the
+camera-operator, just to show how much at home she felt! Dinky-Dunk
+must have experienced a distinctly new thrill when he saw his own wife
+come riding through that pictorial news weekly. He would have
+preferred not recognizing me, I suppose. But there I was, duly named
+and labeled--and hence the ponderous little note of disapproval.
+
+But I'm not going to let Duncan start a quarrel over trivialities like
+this. I intend to sit tight. There'd be little use in argument,
+anyway, for Duncan would only ignore me as the predatory tom-cat
+ignores the foolishly scolding robin. I'm going to be a regular
+mallard, and stick to these home regions until the ice forms. And our
+most mountainous troubles, after all, can't quite survive being
+exteriorated through the ink-well. It relieves me to write about them.
+But I wish I had a woman of my own age to talk to. I get a bit lonely,
+now that winter is slipping down out of the North again. And I find
+that I'm not so companionable as I ought to be. It comes home to me,
+now and then, how far away from the world we are, how remote from
+everything that counts. The tragedy of life with Chaddie McKail, I
+suppose, is that she's let existence narrow down to just one thing, to
+her family. Other women seem to have substitutes. But I've about
+forgotten how to be a social animal. I seem to grow as segregative as
+the timber-wolf. There's nothing for me in the woman's club life one
+gets out here. I can't force myself into church work, and the rural
+reading-club is something beyond me. I simply couldn't endure those
+Women's Institute meetings which open with a hymn and end up with
+sponge-cake and green tea, after a platitudinous paper on the Beauty
+of Prairie Life. It has its beauties, God knows, or we'd all go mad.
+We women, in this brand-new land, try to bolster ourselves up with the
+belief that we have greatnesses which the rest of the world must get
+along without. But that is only the flaunting of _La Panache_, the
+feather of courage in our cap of discouragement. There is so much, so
+much, we are denied! So much we must do without! So much we must see
+go to others! So much we must never even hope for! Oh, pioneers, great
+you are and great you must be, to endure what you have endured! You
+must be strong in your hours of secret questioning and you must be
+strong in your quest for consolation. If nothing else, you must at
+least be strong. And these western men of ours should all be strong
+men, should all be great men, because they must have been the children
+of great mothers. A prairie mother _has_ to be a great woman. She must
+be great to survive, to endure, to leave her progeny behind her. I've
+heard the Wise Men talk about nature looking after her own. I've heard
+sentimentalists sing about the strength that lies in the soil. But,
+oh, pioneers, you know what you know! In your secret heart of hearts
+you remember the lonely hours, the lonely years, the lonely graves!
+For in the matter of infant mortality alone, prairie life shows a
+record shocking to read. We are making that better, it is true, with
+our district nursing and our motherhood clubs and our rural phones
+and our organized letting in of light and passing on of knowledge. We
+are not so overburdened as those nobler women who went before us. But,
+oh, pioneers along these lonely northern trails, I salute you and
+honor you for your courage! Your greatness will never be known. It
+will be seen only in the great country which you gave up your lives to
+bring to birth!
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Twenty-Seventh_
+
+
+What weather-cocks we are! My blue Monday is over and done with, this
+is a crystalline winter day with all the earth at peace with itself,
+and I've just had a letter from Peter asking if I could take care of
+his sister's girl, Susie Mumford, until after Christmas. The Mumfords,
+it seems, are going through the divorce-mill, and Susie's mother is
+anxious that her one and only child should be afar from the scene when
+the grist of liberty is a-grinding.
+
+I know nothing of Susie except what Peter has told me, that she is not
+yet nineteen, that she is intelligent, but obstreperous, and much
+wiser than she pretends to be, that the machinery of life has always
+run much too smoothly about her for her own good, and that a couple of
+months of prairie life might be the means of introducing her to her
+own soul.
+
+That's all I know of Susie, but I shall welcome her to Casa Grande.
+I'll be glad to see a city girl again, to talk over face-creams and
+the _Follies_ and Tchaikowsky and brassieres and Strindberg with. And
+I'll be glad to do a little toward repaying big-hearted old Peter for
+all his kindnesses of the past. Susie may be both sophisticated and
+intractable, but I await her with joy. She seems almost the answer to
+my one big want.
+
+But Casa Grande, I have been realizing, will have to be refurbished
+for its coming guest. We have grown a bit shoddy about the edges here.
+It's hard to keep a house spick and span, with two active-bodied
+children running about it. And my heart, I suppose, has not been in
+that work of late. But I've been on a tour of inspection, and I
+realize it's time to reform. So Struthers and I are about to doll up
+these dilapidated quarters of ours. And I intend to have my dolorously
+neglected Guest Room (for such I used to call it) done over before the
+arrival of Susie....
+
+I rode over to the Teetzels' this afternoon, to explain about our
+cattle getting through on their land. It was the road-workers who
+broke down the Teetzel fence, to squat on a coulee-corner for their
+camp. And they hadn't the decency to restore what they had wrecked. So
+Bud Teetzel and I rode seven miles up the new turn-pike and overtook
+those road-workers and I harangued their foreman for a full fifteen
+minutes. But it made little impression on him. He merely grinned and
+stared at me with a sort of insolent admiration on his face. And when
+I had finished he audibly remarked to one of his teamsters that I made
+a fine figure of a woman on horseback.
+
+Bud says they're thinking of selling out if they can get their price.
+The old folks want to move to Victoria, and Bud and his brother have a
+hankering to try their luck up in the Peace River District. I asked
+Bud if he wouldn't rather settle down in one of the big cities. He
+merely laughed at me. "No thank you, lady! This old prair-ee is
+comp'ny enough for me!" he said as he loped, brown as a nut, along the
+trail as tawny as a lion's mane, with a sky of steel-cold blue smiling
+down on his lopsided old sombrero. I studied him with a less
+impersonal eye. He was a handsome and husky young giant, with the joy
+of life still frankly imprinted on his face.
+
+"Bud," I said as I loped along beside him, "why haven't you ever
+married?"
+
+That made him laugh again. Then he turned russet as he showed me the
+white of an eye.
+
+"All the peaches seemed picked, in this district," he found the
+courage to proclaim.
+
+This made me trot out the old platitude about the fish in the sea
+being as good as any ever caught--and there really ought to be an
+excise tax on platitudes, for being addicted to them is quite as bad
+as being addicted to alcohol, and quite as benumbing to the brain.
+
+But Bud, with his next speech, brought me up short.
+
+"Say, lady, if _you_ was still in the runnin' I'd give 'em a race
+that'd make a coyote look like a caterpillar on crutches!"
+
+He said it solemnly, and his solemnity kept it respectful. But it was
+my turn to laugh. And ridiculous as it may sound, this doesn't impress
+me as such a dark world as I had imagined! A woman, after all, is a
+good deal like mother earth: each has to be cultivated a little to
+keep it mellow.
+
+... Where the Female is, there also is the Unexpected. For when I got
+home I found that my decorous Poppsy, my irreproachable Poppsy, had
+succumbed before the temptation to investigate my new sewing-machine.
+And once having nibbled at the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she
+went rampaging through the whole garden. She made a stubborn effort to
+exhaust the possibilities of all the little hemmers, and tried the
+shirrer and the fire-stitch ruffler, and obviously had a fling at the
+binder and a turn at the tucker. What she did to the tension-spring
+heaven only knows. And my brand-new machine is on the blink. And my
+meek-eyed little Poppsy isn't as impeccable as the world about her
+imagined!
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Third_
+
+
+Susie Mumford arrived yesterday. The weather, heaven be thanked, was
+perfect, an opal day with the earth as fresh-smelling as Poppsy just
+out of her bath. There was just enough chill in the air to make one's
+blood tingle and just enough warmth in the sunlight to make it feel
+like a benediction. Whinstane Sandy, in fact, avers that we're in for
+a spell of Indian Summer.
+
+I motored in to Buckhorn and met Susie, who wasn't in the least what I
+expected. I was looking for a high-spirited and insolent-eyed young
+lady who'd probably be traveling with a French maid and a van-load of
+trunks, after the manner of Lady Alicia. But the Susie I met was a
+tired and listless and rather white-faced girl who reminds me just
+enough of her Uncle Peter to make me like her. The poor child knows
+next to nothing of the continent on which she was born, and the
+immensity of our West has rather appalled her. She told me, driving
+home, that she had never before been this side of the Adirondacks.
+Yet she has crossed the Atlantic eight times and knows western Europe
+about as well as she knows Long Island itself. There is a
+matter-of-factness about Susie which makes her easy to get along with.
+Poppsy took to her at once and was a garrulous and happy witness of
+Susie's unpacking. Dinkie, on the other hand, developed an altogether
+unlooked-for shyness and turned red when Susie kissed him. There was
+no melting of the ice until the strange lady produced a very wonderful
+toy air-ship, which you wind up and which soars right over the
+haystacks, if you start it right. This was a present which Peter sent
+out. Dinkie, in fact, spent most of his spare time last night writing
+a letter to his Uncle Peter, a letter which he intimated he had no
+wish for the rest of the family to read. He was willing to
+acknowledge, this morning, that since he and Susie both had the same
+Uncle Peter, they really ought to be cousins....
+
+Susie has not been sleeping well, and for all her weariness last night
+had to take five grains of veronal before she could settle down. The
+result is that she looks whiter than ever this morning and ate very
+little of Struthers' really splendiferous breakfast. But she made a
+valorous enough effort to be blithe and has rambled about Casa Grande
+with the febrile, quick curiosity of a young setter, making friends
+with the animals and for the first time in her life picking an egg out
+of a nest. I was afraid, at first, that she was going to complain
+about the quietness of existence out here, for our pace must seem a
+slow one, after New York. But Susie says the one thing she wants is
+peace. It's not often a girl not yet out of her teens makes any such
+qualified demand on life. I can't help feeling that the break-up of
+her family must be depressing her more than she pretends. She speaks
+about it in a half-joking way, however, and said this morning: "Dad
+certainly deserves a little freedom!" We sat for an hour at the
+breakfast-table, pow-wowing about everything under the blessed sun.
+
+In some ways Susie is a very mature woman, for nineteen and
+three-quarters. She is also an exceptionally companionable one. She
+has a sort of lapis-lazuli eye with paler streaks in the iris, like
+banded agate. It is a brooding eye, with a great deal of beauty in it.
+And she has a magnolia-white skin which one doesn't often see on the
+prairie. It's not the sort of skin, in fact, which could last very
+long on the open range. It's the sort that's had too much bevel plate
+between it and the buffeting winds of the world. But it's lovely to
+look upon, especially when it's touched with its almost imperceptible
+shell-pink of excitement as it was this afternoon when Susie climbed
+on Buntie and tried a canter or two about the corrals. Susie, I
+noticed, rode well. I couldn't quite make out why her riding made me
+at once think of Theobald Gustav. But she explained, later, that she
+had been taught by a German riding-master--and then I understood.
+
+But I must not overlook Gershom, who duly donned his Sunday best in
+honor of Susie's arrival and who is already undertaking to educate the
+brooding-eyed young lady from the East. He explained to her that there
+were eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of Canada still
+unexplored, and Susie said: "Then lead me into the most far-away part
+of it!" And when he told her, during their first meal together, that
+the human brain was estimated to contain half a billion cells and that
+the number of brain impressions collected by an average person during
+fifty years of life aggregated three billion, one hundred and
+fifty-five million, seven hundred and sixty thousand, Susie sighed and
+said it was no wonder women were so contradictory. Which impressed me
+as very like one of my own retorts to Gershom. I saw Susie studying
+him, studying him with a quiet and meditative eye. "I believe your
+Gershom is one of the few good men in the world," she afterward
+acknowledged to me. And I've been wondering why one so young should be
+saturated with cynicism.
+
+A small incident occurred to-night which disturbed me more than I can
+explain to myself. Susie, who had been looking through one of Dinkie's
+school scribblers, guardedly passed the book over to me where I sat
+sewing in front of the fire. For, whatever may happen, a prairie
+mother can always find plenty of sewing to do. I looked at the bottom
+of the page which Susie pointed out to me. There I saw two names, one
+above the other, with certain of the letters stricken out, two names
+written like this:
+
+[E][l]m[e][r] McKai[l]----love
+Do[r][e][e]n O'[L]on[e]----friendship
+
+[Transcriber's note: In original, letters in brackets are struck out,
+each with a diagonal slash.]
+
+And that set me off in a brown study which even Susie seemed to
+fathom. She smiled understandingly and turned and inspected Dinkie,
+bent over his arithmetic, with an entirely new curiosity.
+
+"I suppose that's what every mother has to face, some day," she said
+as she sat down beside me in front of the fire.
+
+But it seemed a fire without warmth. Life, apparently, had brought me
+to another of its Great Divides. My boy had a secret apart from his
+mother. My son was no longer all mine.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Fifth_
+
+
+This morning at breakfast, when Dinkie and I were alone at the table,
+I crossed over to him and sat down beside him.
+
+"Dinkie," I said, with my hand on his tousled young head, "whom do you
+love best in all the world?"
+
+"Mummy!" he said, looking me straight in the eye. And at that I drank
+in a deep breath.
+
+"Are you sure?" I demanded.
+
+"As sure as death and taxes," he said with his one-sided little smile.
+It was a phrase which his father used to use, on similar occasions, in
+the long, long ago. And it didn't quite drive the mists out of my
+heart.
+
+"And who comes next?" I asked, with my hand still on his head.
+
+"Buntie," he replied, with what I suspected to be a barricaded look on
+his face.
+
+"No, no," I told him. "It has to be a human being."
+
+"Then Poppsy," he admitted.
+
+"And who next?" I persisted.
+
+"Whinnie!" exclaimed my son.
+
+But I had to shake my head at that.
+
+"Aren't you forgetting somebody very important?" I hinted.
+
+"Who?" he asked, deepening just a trifle in color.
+
+"How about daddy?" I asked. "Isn't it about time for him there?"
+
+"Yes, daddy," he dutifully repeated. But his face cleared, and my own
+heart clouded, as he went through the empty rite.
+
+Dinkie was studying that clouded face of mine, by this time, and I
+began to feel embarrassed. But I was determined to see the thing
+through. It was hard, though, for me to say what I wanted to.
+
+"Isn't there somebody, somebody else you are especially fond of?" I
+inquired, as artlessly as I could. And it hurt like cold steel to
+think that I had to fence with my own boy in such a fashion.
+
+Dinkie looked at me and then he looked out of the window.
+
+"I think I like Susie," he finally admitted.
+
+"But in your own life, Dinkie, in your work and your play, in your
+school, isn't--isn't there _somebody_?" I found the courage to ask.
+
+Dinkie's face grew thoughtful. For just a moment, I thought I caught a
+touch of the Holbein Astronomer in it.
+
+"There's lots of boys and girls I like," he noncommittally asserted.
+And I began to see that it was hopeless. My boy had reservations from
+his own mother, reservations which I would be compelled to respect. He
+was no longer entirely and unequivocally mine. There was a wild-bird
+part of him which had escaped, which I could never recapture and cage
+again. The thing that his father had foretold was really coming about.
+My laddie would some day grow out of my reach. I would lose him. And
+my happiness, which had been trying its wings for the last few days,
+came down out of the sky like a shot duck. All day long, for Susie's
+sake, I've tried to be light-hearted. But my efforts make me think of
+a poor old worn-out movie-hall piano doing its pathetic level best to
+be magnificently blithe. It's a meaningless clatter in a meaningless
+world.
+
+
+
+
+_Thursday the Eleventh_
+
+
+It ought to be winter, according to the almanac, but our wonderful
+Indian Summer weather continues. Susie and I have been "blue-doming"
+to-day. We converted ourselves into a mounted escort for Gershom and
+the kiddies as far as the schoolhouse, and then rode on to Dead Horse
+Lake, in the hope of getting a few duck. But the weather was too fine,
+though I managed to bring down a couple of mallard, after one of which
+Susie, having removed her shoes and stockings, waded knee-deep in the
+slough. She enjoys that sort of thing: it's something so entirely new
+to the child of the city. And Susie, I might add, is already looking
+much better. She is sleeping soundly, at last, and has promised me
+there shall be no more night-caps of veronal. What is more, I am
+getting to know her better--and I have several revisions to make.
+
+In the first place, it is not the family divorce cloud that has been
+darkening Susie's soul. She let the cat out of the bag, on the way
+home this afternoon. Susie has been in love with a man who didn't come
+up to expectations. She was very much in love, apparently, and
+disregarded what people said about him. Then, much to her surprise,
+her Uncle Peter took a hand in the game. It must have been rather a
+violent hand, for a person so habitually placid. But Peter,
+apparently, wasn't altogether ignorant of the club-talk about the
+young rake in question. At any rate, he decided it was about time to
+act. Susie declined to explain in just what way he acted. Yet she
+admits now that Peter was entirely in the right and she, for a time,
+was entirely in the wrong. But it is rather like having one's appendix
+cut out, she protests, without an anesthetic. It takes time to heal
+such wounds. Susie obviously was bowled over. She is still suffering
+from shock. But I like the spirit of the girl. She's not the kind that
+one disappointment is going to kill. And prairie life is already doing
+her good. For she announced this morning that her clothes were
+positively getting tight for her. And such clothes they are! Such
+delicate silks and cobwebs of lace and pale-pink contraptions of
+satin! Such neatly tailored skirts and short-vamped shoes and
+thing-a-ma-jigs of Irish linen and platinum and gold trinkets to deck
+out her contemptuous little body with. For Susie takes them all with a
+shrug of indifference. She loves to slip on my oil-stained old
+hunting-jacket and my weather-beaten old golf-boots and go meandering
+about the range.
+
+Another revision which I am compelled to make is that while I expected
+to be the means of cheering Susie up, Susie has quite unconsciously
+been the means of rejuvenating _me_. I think I've been able to catch
+at least a hollow echo of her youth from her. I _know_ I have. Two
+days ago, when we motored in to Buckhorn with my precious marketing of
+butter and eggs--and Susie never before quite realized how butter and
+eggs reached the ultimate consumer--a visiting Odd-Fellows' band was
+playing a two-step on the balcony of the Commercial Hotel. Susie and I
+stopped the car, and while Struthers stared at us aghast from the back
+seat, we two-stepped together on the main street of Buckhorn. We just
+let the music go to our heads and danced there until the crowd in
+front of the band began to right-about-face and a cowboy in chaps
+brazenly announced that he was Susie's next partner. So we danced to
+our running-board, stepped into our devil-wagon, and headed for home,
+in the icy aura of Struthers' sustained indignation.
+
+I begin to get terribly tired of propriety. I don't know whether it's
+Struthers, or Struthers and Gershom combined, or having to watch one's
+step so when there are children about one. But I'm tired of being
+respectable. I'm tired of holding myself in. I warn the world that I'm
+about ready for anything, anything from horse-stealing to putting a
+dummy-lady in Whinstane Sandy's bed. I don't believe there's any
+wickedness that's beyond me. I'm a reckless and abandoned woman. And
+if that cold-blooded old Covenanter doesn't get home from Calgary
+pretty soon I'm going buckboard riding with Bud Teetzel!
+
+I've been asking Susie if we measure up to her expectations. She said,
+in reply, that we fitted in to a T. For her Uncle Peter, she
+acknowledged, had already done us in oils on the canvas of her
+curiosity. She accused me, however, of reveling in that primitiveness
+which is the last resort of the sophisticated--like the log cabins the
+city folk fashion for themselves when they get up in the Adirondacks.
+And Casa Grande, she further amended, impressed her as being almost
+disappointingly comfortable.
+
+After that Susie fell to talking about Peter. She is affectionately
+contemptuous toward her uncle, protesting that he's forever throwing
+away his chances and letting other people impose on his good nature.
+It was lucky, averred Susie, that he was born with a silver spoon in
+his mouth. For he was a hopeless espouser of Lost Causes. She inclined
+to the belief that he should have married young, should have married
+young and had a flock of children, for he was crazy about kiddies.
+
+I asked Susie what sort of wife Peter should have chosen. And Susie
+said Peter should have hitched up with a good, capable,
+practical-minded woman who could manage him without letting him know
+he was being managed. There was a widow in the East, acknowledged his
+niece, who had been angling for poor Peter for years. And Peter was
+still free, Susie suspected, because in the presence of that widow he
+emulated Hamlet and always put an antic disposition on. Did the most
+absurd things, and appeared to be little more than half-witted. The
+widow in question had even spoken to Susie about her uncle's
+eccentricities and intimated that his segregative manner of life might
+in the end affect his intellect!
+
+The thought of Peter marrying rather gave me a shock. It was like
+being told by some authority in astronomy that your earth was about to
+collide with Wernecke's Comet. And, vain peacock that I was, I rather
+liked to think of Peter going through life mourning for me, alone and
+melancholy and misogynistic for the rest of his days! Yet there must
+be dozens, there must be hundreds, of attractive girls along the paths
+which he travels. I found the courage to mention this fact to Susie,
+who merely laughed and said her Uncle Peter would probably be saved by
+his homeliness. But I can't say that I ever regarded Peter Ketley as
+homely. He may never carry off a blue ribbon from a beauty show, but
+he has the sort of face that a woman of sense can find tremendous
+appeal in. Your flapper type, I suppose, will always succumb to the
+curled Romeo, but it's the ruggeder and stronger man with the bright
+mind and the kindly heart who will always appeal to the clearer-eyed
+woman who has come to know life.... Susie has told me, by the way,
+that Josie Langdon and her husband quarreled on their honeymoon,
+quarreled the first week in Paris and right across the Continent for
+the momentous reason that Josie _insisted on putting sugar in her
+claret_!
+
+I've been doing a good deal of thinking, the last few hours. I've been
+wondering if I'm a Lost Cause. And I've been wondering why women
+should want to put sugar in their claret. If it's made to be bitter,
+why not accept the bitterness, and let it go at that?
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Twelfth_
+
+
+Dinky-Dunk has just sent word that he will be home to-morrow night and
+asks if I'll mind motoring in to Buckhorn for him.
+
+It impresses me as a non-committal little message, yet it means more
+to me than I imagined. _My husband is coming home._
+
+Susie has been eying me all afternoon, with a pucker of perplexity
+about her lapis-lazuli eyes. We are busy, getting things to rights.
+And I've made an appallingly long list of what I must buy in Buckhorn
+to-morrow. Even Struthers has perked up a bit, and is making furtive
+preparations for a sage-tea wash in the morning.
+
+
+
+
+_Tuesday the Sixteenth_
+
+
+Why is life so tangled up? Why can't we be either completely happy or
+completely the other way? Why must wretchedness come sandwiched in
+between slices of hope and contentment, and why must happiness be
+haunted by some ghostly echo of pain? And why can't people be all good
+or all bad, so that the tares and the wheat never get mixed up
+together and make a dismal mess of our harvest of Expectation?
+
+These are some of the questions I've been asking myself since Duncan
+went back to Calgary last night. He stayed only two days. And they
+were days of terribly complicated emotions. I went to the station for
+him, on Saturday, and in my impatience to be there on time found
+myself with an hour and a half of waiting, an hour and a half of
+wandering up and down that ugly open platform in the clear cool light
+of evening. There was a hint of winter in the air, an intimidating
+northern nip which made the thought of a warm home and an open fire a
+consolation to the chilled heart. And I felt depressed, in spite of
+everything I could do to bolster up my courage. In the first place, I
+couldn't keep from thinking of Alsina Teeswater. And in the second
+place, never, never on the prairie, have I watched a railway-train
+come in or a railway-train pass away without feeling lonesome. It
+reminds me how big is the outside world, how infinitesimal is Chaddie
+McKail and her unremembered existence up here a thousand miles from
+Nowhere! It humbles me. It reminds me that I have in some way failed
+to mesh in with the bigger machinery of life.
+
+I had a lump in my throat, by the time Dinky-Dunk's train pulled in
+and I saw him swing down from the car-steps. I made for him through
+the crowd, in fact, with my all but forgotten Australian crawl-stroke,
+and accosted him with rather a briny kiss and so tight a hug that he
+stood back and studied my face. He wanted to ask, I know, if anything
+had happened. He was obviously startled, and just a trifle
+embarrassed. My lump, by this time, was bigger than ever, but I had to
+swallow it in secret. Dinky-Dunk, I found, was changed in many ways.
+He was tired, and he seemed older. But he was prosperous-looking, in
+brand-new raiment, and reported that luck was still with him and
+everything was flourishing. Give him one year, he protested, and he'd
+show them he wasn't a piker.
+
+I waited for him to ask about the children, but his mind seemed full
+of his Barcona coal business. The railway was learning to treat them
+half decently and the coal was coming out better than they'd hoped
+for. They'd a franchise to light the town, developing their power from
+the mine screenings, and what they got from this would be so much
+velvet. And he had a chance to take over one of the finest houses in
+Mount Royal, if he had a family along with him to excuse such
+magnificence.
+
+That final speech of his brought me up short. It was dark along the
+trail, and dark in my heart. And more things than one had happened
+that day to humble me. So I took one hand off the wheel and put it on
+his knee.
+
+"Do you want me to go to Calgary?" I asked him.
+
+"That's up to you," he said, without budging an inch. He said it, in
+fact, with a steel-cold finality which sent my soul cringing back into
+its kennel. And the trail ahead of me seemed blacker than ever.
+
+"I'll have to have time to think it over," I said with a composure
+which was nine-tenths pretense.
+
+"Some wives," he remarked, "are willing to help their husbands."
+
+"I know it, Dinky-Dunk," I acknowledged, hoping against hope he'd give
+me the opening I was looking for. "And I want to help, if you'll only
+let me."
+
+"I think I'm doing my part," he rather solemnly asserted. I couldn't
+see his face, in the dark, but there was little hope to be wrung from
+the tone of his voice. So I knew it would be best to hold my peace.
+
+Casa Grande blazed a welcome to us, as we drove up to it, and the
+children, thank heaven, were relievingly boisterous over the adventure
+of their dad's return. He seemed genuinely amazed at their growth,
+seemed slightly irritated at Dinkie's long stares of appraisal, and
+feigned an interest in the paraded new possessions of Poppsy and her
+brother--until it came to Peter's toy air-ship, which was thrust
+almost bruskly aside.
+
+And that reminds me of one thing which I am reluctant to acknowledge.
+Dinky-Dunk was anything but nice to Susie. He may have his perverse
+reasons for disliking everything in any way connected with Peter
+Ketley, but I at least expected my husband to be agreeable to the
+casual guest under his roof. Through it all, I must confess, Susie
+was wonderful. She made no effort to ignore Duncan, as his ignoring of
+her only too plainly merited. She remained, not only poised and
+imperturbable, but impersonal and impenetrable. She found herself, I
+think, driven just a tiny bit closer to Gershom, who still shows a
+placid exterior to Duncan's slightly contemptuous indifference.
+
+My husband, I'm afraid, was not altogether happy in his own home. In
+one way, of course, I can not altogether blame him for that, since his
+bigger interests now are outside that home. But I begin to see how
+dangerous these long separations can be. Somewhere and at some time,
+before too much water runs under the bridges, there will have to be a
+readjustment.
+
+I realized that, in fact, as I drove Duncan back to the station last
+night, after I'd duly signed the different papers he'd brought for
+that purpose. I had a feeling that every chug of the motor was
+carrying him further and further out of my life. Heaven knows, I was
+willing enough to eat crow. I was ready to bury the hatchet, and bury
+it in my own bosom, if need be, rather than see it swinging free to
+strike some deeper blow.
+
+"Dinky-Dunk," I said after a particularly long silence between us,
+"what is it you want me to do?"
+
+My heart was beating much faster than he could have imagined and I was
+grateful for the chance to pretend the road was taking up most of my
+attention.
+
+"Do about what?" he none too encouragingly inquired.
+
+"We don't seem to be hitting it off the way we should be," I went on,
+speaking as quietly as I was able. "And I want you to tell me where
+I'm failing to do my share."
+
+That note of humility from me must have surprised him a little, for we
+rode quite a distance without a word.
+
+"What makes you feel that way?" he finally asked.
+
+I found it hard to answer that question. It would never be easy, at
+any rate, to answer it as I wanted to.
+
+"Because things can't go on this way forever," I found the courage to
+tell him.
+
+"Why not?" he asked. He seemed indifferent again.
+
+"Because they're all wrong," I rather tremulously replied. "Can't you
+see they're all wrong?"
+
+"But why do you want them changed?" he asked with a disheartening sort
+of impersonality.
+
+"For the sake of the children," I told him. And I could feel the
+impatient movement of his body on the car seat beside me.
+
+"The children!" he repeated with acid-drop deliberation. "The
+children, of course! It's always the children!"
+
+"You're still their father," I reminded him.
+
+"A sort of honorary president of the family," he amended.
+
+Hope ebbed out of my heart, like air out of a punctured tire.
+
+"Aren't you making it rather hard for me?" I demanded, trying to hold
+myself in, but feeling the bob-cat getting the better of the purring
+tabby.
+
+"I've rather concluded that was the way you made it for _me_,"
+countered Duncan, with a coolness of manner which I came more and more
+to resent.
+
+"In what way?" I asked.
+
+"In shutting up shop," he rather listlessly responded.
+
+"I don't think I quite understand," I told him.
+
+"Well, in crowbarring me out of your scheme of life, if you insist on
+knowing," were the words that came from the husband sitting so close
+beside me. "You had your other interests, of course. But you also
+seem to have had the idea that you could turn me loose like a range
+horse. I could paw for my fodder and eat snow when I got thirsty. You
+didn't even care to give me a wind-break to keep a forty-mile blizzard
+out of my bones. You didn't know where I was browsing, and didn't much
+care. It was up to me to rustle for myself and be rounded up when the
+winter was over and there was another spell of work on hand!"
+
+We rode on in silence, for almost a mile, with the cold air beating
+against my body and a colder numbness creeping about the corner of my
+heart.
+
+"Do you mean, Dinky-Dunk," I finally asked, "that you want your
+freedom?"
+
+"I'm not saying that," he said, after another short silence.
+
+"Then what is it you want?" I asked, wondering why the windshield
+should look so blurred in the half-light.
+
+"I want to get something out of life," was his embittered retort.
+
+It was a retort that I thought over, thought over with an oddly
+settling mind, like a stirred pool that has been left to clear itself.
+For that grown man sitting there beside me seemed ridiculously like a
+spoiled child, an indulged child forlornly alone in the fogs of his
+own arrogance. He made me think of a black bear which bites at the
+bullet wound in his own body. I felt suddenly sorry for him, in a
+maternal sort of way. I felt sorry for him at the same time that I
+remained a trifle afraid of him, for he still possessed, I knew, his
+black-bear power of inflicting unlooked-for and ursine blows. I simply
+ached to swing about on him and say: "Dinky-Dunk, what you need is a
+good spanking!" But I didn't have the courage. I had to keep my sense
+of humor under cover, just as you have to blanket garden-geraniums
+before the threat of a black frost. Yet, oddly enough, I felt
+fortified by that sense of pity. It seemed to bring with it the
+impression that Duncan was still a small boy who might some day grow
+out of his badness. It made me feel suddenly older and wiser than this
+overgrown child who was still crying for the moon. And with that
+feeling came a wave of tolerance, followed by a smaller wave of faith,
+of faith that everything might yet come out right, if only I could
+learn to be patient, as mothers are patient with children.
+
+"And I, on my part, Dinky-Dunk, want to see you get the very best out
+of life," I found myself saying to him. My intentions were good, but I
+suppose I made my speech in a very superior and school-teachery sort
+of way.
+
+"I guess I've got about all that's coming to me," he retorted, with
+the note of bitterness still in his voice.
+
+And again I had the feeling of sitting mother-wise and mother-patient
+beside an unruly small boy.
+
+"There's much more, Dinky-Dunk, if you only ask for it," I said as
+gently as I was able.
+
+He turned, at that, and studied me in the failing light, studied me
+with a sharp look of interrogation on his face. I had the feeling, as
+he did so, of something epochal in the air, as though the drama of
+life were narrowing up to its climactic last moment. Yet I felt
+helpless to direct the course of that drama. I nursed the impression
+that we stood at the parting of the ways, that we stood hesitating at
+the fork of two long and lonely trails which struck off across an
+illimitable world, farther and farther apart. I vaguely regretted that
+we were already in the streets of Buckhorn, for I was half hoping that
+Duncan would tell me to stop the car. Then I vaguely regretted that I
+was busy driving that car, as otherwise I might have been free to get
+my arms about that granitic Dour Man of mine and strangle him into
+submitting to that momentary mood of softness which seems to come less
+and less to the male as he grows older.
+
+But Duncan merely laughed, a bit uneasily, and just as suddenly grew
+silent again. I had a sense of asbestos curtains coming down between
+us, coming down before the climax was reached or the drama was ended.
+I couldn't help wondering, as we drove into the cindered station-yard
+where the lights were already twinkling, if Dinky-Dunk, like myself,
+sat waiting for something which failed to manifest itself, if he too
+had held back before the promise of some decisive word which I was
+without the power to utter. For we were only half-warm, the two of us,
+toying with the ghosts of the dead past and childishly afraid of the
+future. We were Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, without the primal
+hunger to reach out and possess what we too timidly desired. We were
+more neutral even than Ferdinand and the Lady of the Bust, for we no
+longer cared sufficiently to let the other know we cared, but waited
+and waited in that twilight where all cats are gray.
+
+There was, mercifully, very little time left for us before the train
+came in. We kept our masks on, and talked only of every-day things,
+about the receipt for the ranch taxes and what steers Whinnie should
+"finish" and the new granary roof and the fire-lines about the
+haystacks. Without quite knowing it, when the train pulled in, I put
+my arm through my husband's--and for the second time that evening he
+turned sharply and inspected my face. I felt as though I wanted to
+hold him back, to hold him back from something unescapable but
+tragically momentous. I think he felt sorry for me. At any rate, after
+he had swung his suit-case up on the car-platform, he turned and
+kissed me good-by. But it was the sort of kiss one gets at funerals.
+It left me standing there watching the tail-lights blink off down the
+track, as desolate as though I had been left alone on the deadest
+promontory of the deadest planet lost in space. I stood there until
+the lights were gone. I stood there until the platform was empty again
+and my car was the only car left along the hard-packed cinders. So I
+climbed into the driving-seat, and pulled on my gauntlets, and headed
+for home....
+
+Back at Casa Grande I found Dinkie and Whinnie beside the bunk-house
+stove, struggling companionably through the opening chapters of
+_Treasure Island_. My boy smiled up at me, for a moment, but his
+mind, I could see, was intent on the page along which Whinnie's
+stubbled finger was crawling like a plowshare beside each furrow of
+text. He was in the South Pacific, a thousand miles away from me. In
+my own house Struthers was putting a petulant-voiced Poppsy to bed,
+and Gershom, up in his room, was making extraordinary smells at his
+chemistry experiments. Susie I found curled comfortably up in front of
+the fire, idling over my first volume of _Jean Christophe_.
+
+She read three sentences aloud as I sat down beside her. "How happy he
+is! He is made to be happy!...Life will soon see to it that he is
+brought to reason."
+
+She seemed to expect some comment from me, but I found myself with
+nothing to say. In fact, we both sat there for a long time, staring in
+silence at the fire.
+
+"Why do you live with a man you don't love?" she suddenly asked out of
+the utter stillness.
+
+It startled me, that question. It also embarrassed me, for I could
+feel my color mount as Susie's lapis-lazuli eyes rested on my face.
+
+"What makes you think I don't love him?" I countered, reminding myself
+that Susie, after all, was still a girl in her teens.
+
+"It's not a matter of thinking," was Susie's quiet retort. "I _know_
+you don't."
+
+"Then I wish I could be equally certain," I said with a defensive
+stiffening of the lines of dignity.
+
+But Susie smiled rather wearily at my forlorn little parade of
+_hauteur_. Then she looked at the fire.
+
+"It's hell, isn't it, being a woman?" she finally observed,
+unconsciously paraphrasing a much older philosopher.
+
+"Sometimes," I admitted.
+
+"I don't see why you stand it," was her next meditative shaft in my
+direction.
+
+"What would you do about it?" I guardedly inquired.
+
+Susie's face took on one of its intent looks. She was only in her
+teens, but life, after all, hadn't dealt over-lightly with her. She
+impressed me, at the moment, as a secretly ardent young person whose
+hard-glazed little body might be a crucible of incandescent though
+invisible emotions.
+
+"What would you do about it?" I repeated, wondering what gave some
+persons the royal right of doing the questionable and making it seem
+unquestionable.
+
+"_Live!_" said Susie with quite unlooked-for emphasis.
+"_Live_--whatever it costs!"
+
+"Wouldn't you regard this as living?" I asked, after a moment of
+thought.
+
+"Not as you ought to be," averred Susie.
+
+"Why not?" I parried.
+
+Susie sighed. She began to see that it was beyond argument, I suppose.
+Then she too had her period of silence.
+
+"But what are you getting out of it?" she finally demanded. "What is
+going to happen? What ever _has_ happened?"
+
+"To whom?" I asked, resenting the unconscious cruelty of her
+questioning.
+
+"To you," was the reply of the hard-glazed young hedonist confronting
+me.
+
+"Are you flattering me with the inference that I was cut out for
+better things?" I interrogated as my gaze met Susie's. It was her turn
+to color up a bit. Then she sighed again, and shook her head.
+
+"I don't suppose it's doing either of us one earthly bit of good," she
+said with a listless small smile of atonement. "And I'm sorry."
+
+So we let the skeletons stalk away from our pleasant fireside and
+secrete themselves in their customary closets of silence.
+
+But I've been thinking a good deal about that question of Susie's.
+What _has_ happened to me, out here on the prairie? What has indeed
+come into my life?...
+
+I married young and put a stop to those romantic adventurings which
+enrich the lives of most girls and enlighten the days of many women. I
+married a man and lived with him in a prairie shack, and sewed and
+baked for him, and built a new home and lost it, and began over again.
+I had children, and saw one of them die, and felt my girlhood slip
+away, and sold butter and eggs, and loved the man of my choice and
+cleaved to him and planned for my children, until I saw the man of my
+choice love another woman. And still I clung to my sparless hulk of a
+home, hoping to hold close about me the children I had brought into
+the world and would some day lose again to the world. And that was
+all. That was everything. It is true, nothing much has ever happened
+to me....
+
+But I stop, to think this over. If these are the small things, then
+what are the big things of life? What is it that other women get? I
+have sung and been happy; I have known great joy and walked big with
+Hope. I have loved and been loved. I have known sorrow, and I have
+known birth, and I have sat face to face with death. I have, after
+all, pretty well run the whole gamut, without perhaps realizing it.
+For these, after all, are the big things, the elemental things, of
+life. They are the basic things which leave scant room for the
+momentary fripperies and the hand-made ornaments of existence....
+
+Heigho! I seem to grow into a melancholy Jacques with the advancing
+years. That's the way of life, I suppose. But I've no intention of
+throwing up the sponge. If I can no longer get as much fun out of the
+game as I want, I can at least watch my offspring taking their joy out
+of it. God be thanked for giving us our children! We can still rest
+our tired old eyes on them, just as the polisher of precious stones
+used to keep an emerald in front of him, to relieve his strained
+vision by gazing at its soft and soothing greenness.
+
+I have just crept in to take a look at my precious Dinkie, fast asleep
+in the old cast-iron crib that is growing so small for him he has to
+lie catercornered on his mattress. He seemed so big, stretched out
+there, that he frightened me with the thought he couldn't be a child
+much longer. There are no babies left now in my home circle. And I
+still have a shamefaced sort of hankering to hold a baby in my arms
+again!
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Thirty-First_
+
+
+Susie has promised to stay with us until after Christmas. And the
+holidays, I realize, are only a few weeks away. Struthers is knitting
+a sweater of flaming red and rather grimly acknowledged, when I pinned
+her down, that it was for Whinstane Sandy. There was a snow-flurry
+Sunday, and Gershom took Susie riding in the old cutter, scratching
+grittily along the half-covered trails but apparently enjoying it. My
+poor little Poppsy, who rather idolizes Gershom, is transparently
+jealous of his attentions to Susie. Yet Gershom, I know, is nice to
+Susie and nothing more. He is still my loyal but carefully restrained
+knight. It's a shame, I suppose, to bobweasel him the way I
+occasionally do. But I can't quite help it. His goody-goodiness is as
+provocative to my baser nature as a red flag to an Andulasian bull.
+And a woman who was once reckoned as a heart-breaker has to keep her
+hand in with _something_. I've got to convince myself that the last
+shot hasn't gone from the locker which Duncan Argyll McKail once
+rifled. I spoiled Gershom's supper for him the other night by asking
+what it was made some people have such a mysterious influence over
+other people. And I caught him up short, last Sunday morning, when he
+tried to argue that I was a sort of paragon in petticoats.
+
+"Don't you run away with the idea I'm that kind of an angel," I
+promptly assured him. "I'm an outlaw, from saddle to sougan, and I can
+buck like a bear fightin' bees. I'm a she-devil crow-hopping around in
+skirts. And I could bu'st every commandment slap-bang across my knee,
+once I got started, and leave a trail of crime across the fair face of
+nature that would make an old Bow-Gun vaquero's back-hair stand up.
+I'm just a woman, Gershom, a little lonely and a little loony, and
+there's so much backed-up bad in me that once the dam gives way
+there'll be a hell-roaring old whoop-up along these dusty old
+trails!"
+
+Gershom turned white.
+
+"But there's your little ones to think of," he quaveringly reminded
+me.
+
+"Yes, there's my little ones to think of," I echoed, wondering where
+I'd heard that familiar old refrain before. My bark, after all, is
+much worse than my bite. About all I can do is take things out in
+talk. I'm only a faded beauty, brooding over my antique adventures as
+a heart-breaker. But I know of one heart I'd still like to break--if I
+had the power. No; not break; but bend up to the cracking point!
+
+
+
+
+_Monday the Nineteenth_
+
+
+How Time takes wing for the busy! It's only six days to Christmas and
+I've still my box to get off for Olga and her children. We've sent to
+Peter some really charming snap-shots of the children, which Susie
+took. The general effect of one, I must acknowledge, is seriously
+damaged by the presence of their Mummy.
+
+Dinky-Dunk doubts if he'll be able to get home for the holidays. But I
+sent him a box, on Saturday, made up of those things which he likes
+best to eat and a set of the children's pictures, nicely mounted. I've
+also had Dinkie and Poppsy write a long letter to their dad, a task
+which they performed with more constraint than I had anticipated. I
+had my own difficulties, along the same line, for I had taken a
+photograph of poor little Pee-Wee's grave with a snow-drift across one
+end of it, and had written on the bottom of the mounting-card: "_We
+must remember._" But as I stood studying this, before putting it in
+next to Poppsy's huge Christmas-card gay with powdered mica I felt a
+foolish tear or two run down my cheek. And I realized it would never
+do to cloud my Dinky-Dunk's day with memories which might not be
+altogether happy. So I've kept the picture of the little white-fenced
+bed with the white snow-drift across its foot....
+
+Susie is in bed with a bad cold, which she caught studying astronomy
+with Gershom. Poppsy was not in the least put out when she watched me
+preparing a mustard-plaster for the invalid. My daughter, I am
+persuaded, has a revived faith in the operation of retributive
+justice. But I hope Susie is better by the holiday. Whinnie has the
+Christmas Tree hidden away in the stable, and already a number of
+mysterious parcels have arrived at Casa Grande. Bud Teetzel very
+gallantly sent me over a huge turkey, an eighteen-pounder, and
+to-morrow I have to go into Buckhorn for my mail-order shipments. We
+have decorated the house with a whole box of holly from Victoria and
+I've hung a sprig of mistletoe in the living-room doorway. The
+children, of course, are on tiptoe with expectation. But I can't
+escape the impression that I'm merely acting a part, that I'm a
+Pagliacci in petticoats. Heaven knows I clown enough; no one can
+accuse me of not going through the gestures. But it seems like
+fox-trotting along the deck of a sinking ship.
+
+I stood under the mistletoe, this morning, and dared Gershom to kiss
+me. He turned quite white and made for the door. But I caught him by
+the coat, like Potiphar's wife, and pulled him back to the authorizing
+berry-sprig and gave him a brazen big smack on the cheek-bone. He
+turned a sunset pink, at that, and marched out of the room without
+saying a word. But he was shaking his head as he went, at my
+shamelessness, I suppose. Poor old Gershom! I wish there were more men
+in the world like him. The other day Susie intimated that he was too
+homosexual and that it was the polygamous wretches who really kept the
+world going. But I refuse to subscribe to that sophomoric philosophy
+of hers which would divide the race into fools and knaves. "It's safer
+being sane than mad; it's better being good than bad!" as Robert
+remarked. And I know at least one strong man who is not bad; and one
+bad man who is not strong.
+
+
+
+
+_Tuesday the Twenty-Seventh_
+
+
+The great Day has come and gone. And I'm not sorry. There was a cloud
+over my heart that kept me from getting the happiness out of it I
+ought. I hoped we would hear from Peter, but for the first time in
+history he overlooked us.
+
+Dinky-Dunk, as he had warned us, could not get home for the holidays.
+But he surprised me by sending a really wonderful box for the kiddies,
+and even a gorgeous silver-mounted collar for Scotty. Susie is up
+again, but she is still feeling a bit listless. I heard Gershom
+informing her to-night that her blood travels at the rate of seven
+miles per hour and that if all the energy of Niagara Falls were
+utilized it could supply the world with seven million horse-power. I
+do wish Gershom would get over trying to pat the world on the head,
+instead of shaking hands with it! I'm afraid I'm losing my lilt. I
+can't understand why I should keep feeling as blue as indigo. I am a
+well of acid and a little sister to the crab-apple. I think I'll make
+Susie come down so we can humanize ourselves with a little music. For
+I feel like a Marie Bashkirtseff with a bilious attack....
+
+Whinstane Sandy has just come in with Peter's box, two days late. I
+felt sure that Peter would not utterly forget us. There is still a
+great deal of shouting down in the kitchen, where that most miraculous
+of boxes has been unpacked. As for myself, I've had a hankering to be
+alone, to think things over. But my meditations don't seem to get me
+anywhere.... Dinkie has just come up to show me his brand-new bridle
+for Buntie. It is a magnificent bridle, as shiny and jingly as any lad
+could desire. I tried to get him to put it down, so that I could draw
+him over close to me and talk to him. But Dinkie is too excited for
+any such demonstration. He's beginning, I'm afraid, to consider
+emotion a bit unmanly. He seems to be losing his craving to be petted
+and pampered. There are times, I can see, when he desires his
+fence-lines to be respected.
+
+
+
+
+_Sunday the Twenty-Ninth_
+
+
+Nearly six weeks, I notice, have slipped by. For a month and a half,
+apparently, the impulse to air my troubles went hibernating with the
+bears. Yet it has been a mild winter, so far, with very little snow
+and a great deal of sunshine--a great deal of sunshine which doesn't
+elate me as it ought. I can't remember who it was said a happy people
+has no history. But that's not true of a happy woman. It's when her
+heart is full that she makes herself heard, that she sings like a lark
+to the world. When she's wretched, she retires with her grief....
+
+I haven't been altogether wretched, it's true, just as I haven't been
+altogether hilarious, but it disturbs me to find that for a month and
+a half I haven't written a line in this, the mottled old book of my
+life. It's not that the last month or two has been empty, for no
+months are really empty. They have to be filled with something. But
+there are times, I suppose, when lives lie fallow, the same as fields
+lie fallow, times when the days drag like harrow-teeth across the
+perplexed loam of our soul and nothing comes of it at all. Not, I
+repeat, that I have been momentously unhappy. It's more that a sort of
+sterilizing indifferency took possession of me and made the little ups
+and downs of existence as unworthy of record as the ups and downs of
+the waves on the deadest shores of the Dead Sea. It's not that I'm
+idle, and it's not that I'm old, and it's not that there's anything
+wrong with this disappointingly healthy body of mine. But I rather
+think I need a change of some kind. I even envy Susie, who has ambled
+on to the Coast and is staying with the Lougheeds in Victoria, playing
+golf and picking winter roses and writing back about her trips up
+Vancouver Island and her approaching journey down into California.
+
+"What do we know of the New World," she parodied in her last letter
+that came to me, "who only the old East know?" Then she goes on to
+say: "I'm just back from a West Coast trip on the roly-poly _Maquinna_
+and if my thoughts go wobbly and my hand goes crooked it's because my
+head is so prodigiously full of
+
+SEALS
+SALMON
+SUNSETS
+STARS
+SURF
+SOLANDER ISLAND
+SIWASHES
+SAGHALIE LAMONTIS
+SKOOKUM CHUCK
+SEA-LIONS
+
+[Transcriber's note: In original, initial "S" was one very large
+decorative letter, 10 letter-heights tall.]
+
+and alas, also _Seasickness_, that I can't think straight!"
+
+Susie's soul, apparently, has had the dry-shampoo it was in need of.
+But as for me, I'm like an old horse-shoe with its calks worn off. The
+Master-Blacksmith of Life should poke me deep into His fires and fling
+me on His anvil and make me over!
+
+I've been worrying about my Dinkie. It's all so trivial, in a way, and
+yet I can't persuade myself it isn't also tragic. He told Susie,
+before she left, that he was quite willing to go to bed a little
+earlier one night, because then "he could dream about Doreen." And I
+noticed, not long ago, that instead of taking just _one_ of our Newton
+Pippins to school with him, he had formed the habit of taking _two_.
+On making investigation, I discovered that this second apple
+ultimately and invariably found its way into the hands of Mistress
+Doreen O'Lone. And last week Dinkie autocratically commanded Whinstane
+Sandy to hitch Mudski up in the old cutter, to go sleigh-riding with
+the lady of his favor to the Teetzels' taffy-pull. Dinkie's mother was
+not consulted in the matter--and that is the disturbing feature of it
+all. I can't help remembering what Duncan once said about my boy
+growing out of my reach. If I ever lost my Dinkie I would indeed be
+alone, terribly and hopelessly alone.
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Eighth_
+
+
+Dinkie, who has been disturbing me the last few days by going about
+with an air of suppressed excitement, brought my anxiety to a head
+yesterday by staring into my face and then saying:
+
+"Mummy, I've got a secret!"
+
+"What secret?" I asked, doing my best to appear indifferent.
+
+But Dinkie was not to be trapped.
+
+"It wouldn't be a secret, if I told you," he sagaciously explained.
+
+I studied my child with what was supposed to be a reproving eye.
+
+"You mean you can't even tell your own Mummy?" I demanded.
+
+He shook his head, in solemn negation.
+
+"But can you, some day?" I pursued.
+
+He thought this over.
+
+"Yes, some day," he acknowledged, squeezing my knee.
+
+"How long will I have to wait?" I asked, wondering what could bring
+such a rhapsodic light into his hazel-specked eye. I thought, of
+course, of Doreen O'Lone. And I wished the O'Lones would follow in the
+footsteps of so many other successful ranchers and trek off to
+California. Then, as I sat studying Dinkie, I countermanded that wish.
+For its fulfillment would bring loneliness to the heart of my
+laddie--and loneliness is hell! So, instead, I struggled as best I
+could to banish all thought of the matter from my mind. But it was
+only half a success. I remembered that Gershom himself had been going
+about as abstracted as an ant-eater and as gloomy as a crow, during
+the last week; and I kept sniffing something unpropitious up-wind. I
+even hoped that Dinkie would return to the subject, as children with a
+secret have the habit of doing. But he has been as tight-lipped on the
+matter as his reticent old dad might have been.
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Fifteenth_
+
+
+I got an altogether unlooked-for Valentine yesterday. It was a brief
+but a significant letter from Dinky-Dunk, telling me that he had
+"taken over" the Goodhue house in Mount Royal and asking me if I
+intended to be its mistress. He has bought the house, apparently,
+completely furnished and is getting ready to move into it the first
+week in March.
+
+The whole thing has rather taken my breath away. I don't object to an
+ultimatum, but I do dislike to have it come like a bolt from the blue.
+I have arrived at my Rubicon, all right, and about everything that's
+left of my life, I suppose, will hang on my decision. I don't know
+whether to laugh or to cry, to be horrified or hilarious. At one
+moment I have a tendency to emulate Marguerite doing the Jewel-Song in
+_Faust_. "This isn't _me_! This isn't _me_!" I keep protesting to
+myself. But Marguerite, I know, would never be so ungrammatical. And
+then I begin to foresee difficulties. The mere thought of leaving Casa
+Grande tears my heart. When we go away, as that wise man of Paris
+once said, we die a little. This will always seem my home. I could
+never forsake it utterly. I dread to forsake it for even a portion of
+each year. I am a part of the prairie, now, and I could never be
+entirely happy away from it. And to accept that challenge--for however
+one may look at it, it remains a challenge--and go to the new home in
+Calgary would surely be another concession. And I have been conceding,
+conceding, for the sake of my children. How much more can I concede?
+
+Yet, when all is said and done, I am one of a family. I am not a free
+agent. I am chained to the oar for life. When we link up with the race
+we have more than the little ring of our own Ego to remember. It is
+not, as Dinky-Dunk once pointed out to me, a good thing to get
+"Indianized." We have our community obligations and they must be
+faced. The children, undoubtedly, would have advantages in the city.
+And to find my family reunited would be "_le desir de paraitre_." But
+I can't help remembering how much there is to remember. I'm humbler
+now, it's true, than I once was. I no longer say "One side, please!"
+to life, while life, like old Major Elmes on Murray Hill, declines to
+vary its course for one small and piping voice. Instead of getting
+gangway, I find, I'm apt to get an obliterating thump on the spine.
+Heaven knows, I want to do the right thing. But the issue seems so
+hopelessly tangled. I have brooded over it and I have even prayed over
+it. But it all seems to come to nothing. I sometimes nurse a ghostly
+sort of hope that it may be taken out of my hands, that some power
+outside myself may intervene to decide. For it impresses me as ominous
+that I should be able to hesitate at such a time, when a woman, for
+once in her life, should know her own mind, should see her own fixed
+goal and fight her way to it. I've been wondering if I haven't ebbed
+away into that half-warm impersonality which used to impress me as the
+last stage in moral decay.
+
+But I'm not the fishy type of woman. I know I'm not. And I'm not a
+hard-head. I've always had a horror of being hard, for fear my
+hardness might in some way be passed on to my Dinkie. I want to keep
+my boy kindly and considerate of others, and loyal to the people who
+love him. But I balk at that word "loyal." For if I expect loyalty in
+my offspring I surely must have it myself. And I stood up before a
+minister of God, not so many years ago, and took an oath to prove
+loyal to my husband, to cleave to him in sickness and in health. I
+also took an oath to honor him. But he has made that part of the
+compact almost impossible. And my children, if I go back to him, will
+come under his influence. And I can't help questioning what that
+influence will be. I have only one life to live. And I have a human
+anxiety to get out of it all that is coming to me. I even feel that it
+owes me something, that there are certain arrears of happiness to be
+made up.... I wish I had a woman, older and wiser than myself, to talk
+things over with. I have had the impulse to write to Peter, and tell
+him everything, and ask him what I ought to do. But that doesn't
+impress me as being quite fair to Peter. And, oddly enough, it doesn't
+impress me as being quite fair to Dinky-Dunk. So I'm going to wait a
+week or two and let the cream of conviction rise on the pan of
+indecision. There's a tiny parliament of angels, in the inner chambers
+of our heart, who talk these things over and decide them while we
+sleep.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Seventeenth_
+
+
+We had to dig in, like bears, for two whole days while the first real
+snow-storm of the winter raged outside. But the skies have cleared,
+the wind has gone, and the weather is crystal-clear again. Dinkie and
+Poppsy, furred to the ears, are out on the drifts learning to use the
+snow-shoes which Percy and Olga sent down to them for Christmas.
+Dinkie has made himself a spear by lashing his broken-bladed
+jack-knife to the handle of my headless dutch-hoe and has converted
+himself into a stealthy Iluit stalking a polar bear in the form of
+poor old Scotty, who can't quite understand why he is being driven so
+relentlessly from crevice to Arctic crevice. They have also built an
+igloo, and indulged in what is apparently marriage by capture, with
+the reluctant bride making her repeated escape by floundering over
+drifts piled even higher than the fence-tops. It makes me hanker to
+get my own snow-shoes on my moccasined feet again and go trafficking
+over that undulating white world of snow, where barb-wire means no
+more than a line-fence in Noah's Flood. No one could remain morose,
+in weather like this. You must dress for it, of course, since that
+arching blue sky has sword-blades of cold sheathed in its velvety soft
+azure. But it goes to your head, like wine, and you wonder what makes
+you feel that life is so well worth living.
+
+
+
+
+_Tuesday, the Twenty-First_
+
+
+The armistice continues. And I continue to sit on my keg of powder and
+sing "_O Sole Mio_" to the northern moon.
+
+I have had Whinstane Sandy build a toboggan-slide out of the old
+binder-shed, which has been pretty well blown to pieces by last
+summer's wind-storms. He picked out the soundest of the two-by-fours
+and made a framework which he boarded over with the best of the
+weather-bleached old siding. For when you haven't the luxury of a hill
+on your landscape, you can at least make an imitation one. Whinnie
+even planed the board-joints in the center of the runway and
+counter-sunk every nail-head--and cussed volubly when he pounded his
+heavily mittened thumb with the hammer. The finished structure could
+hardly be called a thing of beauty. We have only one of the
+stable-ladders to mount it from the rear, and instead of toboggans we
+have only Poppsy's home-made hand-sleigh and Dinkie's somewhat
+dilapidated "flexible coaster." But when water had been carried out
+to that smooth runway and the boards had been coated with ice, like
+brazil-nuts _glace_, and the snow along the lower course had been well
+packed down, it at least gave you a run for your money.
+
+The tip-top point of the slide couldn't have been much more than
+fourteen or fifteen feet above the prairie-floor, but it seemed
+perilous enough when I tried it out--much to the perturbation of
+Whinstane Sandy--by lying stomach-down on Dinkie's coaster and letting
+myself shoot along that well-iced incline. It was a kingly sensation,
+that of speed wedded to danger, and it took me back to Davos at a
+breath. Then I tried it with Dinkie, and then with Poppsy, and then
+with Poppsy and Dinkie together. We had some grand old tumbles, in the
+loose snow, and some unmentionable bruises, before we became
+sufficiently expert to tool our sleigh-runners along their proper
+trail. But it was good fun. The excitement of the thing, in fact,
+rather got into my blood. In half an hour the three of us were covered
+with snow, were shouting like Comanches, and were having an altogether
+wild time of it. There was climbing enough to keep us warm, for all
+the sub-zero weather, and I was finally allowed to escape to the house
+only on the promise that I risk my neck again on the morrow.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Twenty-Fourth_
+
+
+My Dinkie's secret is no longer a secret. It divulged itself to me
+to-day with the suddenness of a thunder-clap. _Peter Ketley has been
+back at Alabama Ranch for nearly three weeks._
+
+I was out with the kiddies this afternoon, having another wild time on
+the toboggan-slide, dressed in an old Mackinaw of Dinky-Dunk's buckled
+in close around my waist and a pair of Whinnie's heaviest woolen socks
+over my moccasins and a mangy old gray-squirrel cap on by head. The
+children looked like cherubs who'd been rolled in a flour-barrel, with
+their eyes shining and their cheeks glowing like Richmond roses, but I
+must have looked like something that had been put out to frighten the
+coyotes away. At any rate, there we were, all squealing like pigs and
+all powdered from tip to toe with the dry snow and all looking like
+Piutes on the war-path. And who should walk calmly about the corner of
+the buildings but Peter himself!
+
+My heart stopped beating and I had to lean against the end of the
+toboggan-slide until I could catch my breath.
+
+He called out, "Hello, youngsters!" as quietly as though he had seen
+us all the day before. I said "Peter!" in a strangled sort of whisper,
+and wondered what made my knees wabble as I stood staring at him as
+though he had been a ghost.
+
+But Peter was no ghost. He was there before me, in the body, still
+smoking his foolish little pipe, wearing the familiar old coonskin cap
+and coat that looked as though the moths had made many a Roman holiday
+of their generously deforested pelt. He took the pipe out of his mouth
+as he stepped over to me, and pulled off his heavy old gauntlet before
+he shook hands.
+
+"Peter!" I repeated in my ridiculous small whisper.
+
+He didn't speak. But he smiled, a bit wistfully, as he stared down at
+me. And for just a moment, I think, an odd look of longing came into
+his searching honest eyes which studied my face as though he were
+counting every freckle and line and eyelash there. He continued to
+X-ray me with that hungry stare of his until I took my hand away and
+could feel the blood surging back to my face.
+
+"It's a long time," he said as he puffed hard on his pipe, apparently
+to keep it from going out. The sound of his voice sent a little
+thrill through my body. I felt as rattle-headed as a rabbit, and was
+glad when Dinkie and Poppsy captured him by each knee and hung on like
+catamounts.
+
+"Where did you come from?" I finally asked, trying in vain to be as
+collected as Peter himself.
+
+Then he told me. He told me as nonchalantly as though he were giving
+me a piece of news of no particular interest. He had rather a
+difficult book to finish up, and he concluded the quietness of Alabama
+Ranch would suit him to a T. And when spring came he wanted to have a
+look about for a nest of the whooping crane. It has been rather a
+rarity, for some sixteen or seventeen years, this whooping crane, and
+the American Museum was offering a mighty handsome prize for a
+specimen. Then he was compelled to give his attention to Dinkie and
+Poppsy, and tried the slide a couple of times, and announced that our
+coaster was better than the chariot of Icarius. And by this time I had
+recovered my wits and my composure and got some of the snow off my
+Mackinaw.
+
+"Have I changed?" I asked Peter as he turned to study my face for the
+second time.
+
+"To me," he said as he brushed the snow from his gauntlets, "you are
+always adorable!"
+
+"_Verboten!_" I retorted to that, wondering why anything so foolish
+could have the power to make my pulses sing.
+
+"Why?" he asked, as his eyes met mine.
+
+"For the same old reason," I told him.
+
+"Reasons," he said, "are like shoes: Time has the trick of wearing
+them out."
+
+"When that happens, we have to get new ones," I reminded him.
+
+"Then what is the new one?" he asked, with an unexpectedly solemn look
+on his face.
+
+"My husband has just asked me to join him in Calgary," I said,
+releasing my bolt.
+
+"Are you going to?" he asked, with his face a mask.
+
+"I think I am," I told him. For I could see, now, how Peter's return
+had simplified the situation by complicating it. Already he had made
+my course plainer to me. I could foresee what this new factor would
+imply. I could understand what Peter's presence at Alabama Ranch would
+come to mean. And I had to shut my eyes to the prospect. I was still
+the same old single-track woman with a clear-cut duty laid out before
+her. There were certain luxuries, for the sake of my own soul's peace,
+I could never afford.
+
+"Why are you going back to your husband?" Peter was asking, with real
+perplexity on his face.
+
+"Because he needs me," I said as I stood watching the children go
+racing down the slide.
+
+"Why?" he asked, with what impressed me as his first touch of
+harshness.
+
+"Must I explain?" I inquired with my own first movement in
+self-defense, for it had suddenly occurred to me that any such
+explaining would be much more difficult than I dreamed.
+
+"Of course not," said Peter, changing color a little. "It's only that
+I'm so tremendously anxious to--to understand."
+
+"To understand what?" I questioned, both hoping and dreading that he
+would go on to the bitter end.
+
+"That _you_ understand," was his cryptic retort. And for once in his
+life Peter disappointed me.
+
+"I can't afford to," I said with an effort at lightness which seemed
+to hurt him more than it ought. Then I realized, as I stood looking up
+into his face, that I was doing little to merit that humble and
+magnificent loyalty of Peter's. _He_ would play fair to the end. He
+was too big of heart to think first of himself. It was _me_ he was
+thinking of; it was _me_ he wanted to see happy. But I had my own road
+to go, and no outsider could guide me.
+
+"It's no use, Peter," I said as I put my mittened hand on his
+gauntleted arm without quite knowing I was doing it. And I went on to
+warn him that he must not confront me with kindness, that I was a good
+deal like an Indian's dog which neither looks for kindness nor
+understands it. He laughed a trifle bitterly at that and reminded me,
+as he stood staring at me, of a Pribilof seal staring into an Arctic
+sun. Then he said an odd thing. "I wish I could make it a bit easier
+for you," he remarked as impersonally as though he were meditating
+aloud.
+
+I asked him why he said that. He evasively explained that he thought
+it was because I had what the Romans called _constantia_. So I asked
+him to explain _constantia_. And he said, with a shrug, that we might
+regard it as firm consideration of a question before acting on it. I
+explained, at that, that it wasn't a matter of choice, but of
+character. He was willing to acknowledge that I was right. But before
+that altogether unsatisfactory little debate was over Peter made me
+promise him one thing. He has made me promise that before I leave we
+have a tramp over the prairie together. And we have agreed that Sunday
+would be as good a day as any.
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Twenty-Fifth_
+
+
+I have sent word to Duncan to expect me in Calgary as soon as I can
+get things ready. My decision is made. And it is final. Two ghostly
+hands have reached out and turned me toward my husband. One is the
+Past. The other is the Proprieties. If life out here were a little
+more like the diamond-dyed Westerns, Peter Ketley and Duncan McKail
+would fight with hammerless Colts, the victor would throw me over the
+horn of his saddle, and vanish in a cloud of dust, while Struthers was
+turning Casa Grande into a faro-hall and my two kiddies were busy
+holding up the Elk Crossing stage-coach.
+
+But life, alas, isn't so dramatic as we dream it. It cross-hobbles us
+and hog-ties us and leaves us afraid of our own wilted impulses. I
+have a terror of failure. And it's plain enough I have only one
+mission on God's green footstool. I'm a home-maker, and nothing more.
+I'm a home-maker confronted by the last chance to make good at my one
+and only calling. And whatever it costs, I'm going to make my husband
+recognize me as a patient and long-suffering Penelope....
+
+But enough of the rue! To-morrow I'm going snow-shoeing with Peter.
+I'm praying that the weather will be propitious. I want one of our
+sparkling-burgundy days with the sun shining bright and a nip in the
+air like a stiletto buried in rose leaves. For it may be the last time
+in all my life I shall walk on the prairie with my friend, Peter
+Ketley. The page is going to be turned over, the candle snuffed out,
+and the singing birds of my freedom silenced. I have met my Rubicon,
+and it must be crossed. But last night, for the first time in a month,
+I plastered enough cold cream on my nose to make me look like a
+buttered muffin, and rubbed enough almond-oil meal on my arms to make
+them look like a miller's. And I've been asking myself if I'm the
+sedate old lady life has been trying to make me. There are certain
+Pacific Islands, Gershom tells me, where the climate is so stable that
+the matter of weather is never even mentioned, where the people who
+bathe in that eternal calm are never conscious of the conditions
+surrounding them. That's the penalty, I suppose, that humanity pays
+for constancy. There are no lapses to record, no deviations to be
+accounted for, no tempests to send us tingling into the shelters of
+wonder. And I can't yet be quite sure whether this rebellious old
+heart of mine wants to be a Pacific Islander or not.
+
+
+
+
+_Monday the Twenty-Seventh_
+
+
+Peter and I have had our tramp in the snow. It wasn't a sunny day, as
+I had hoped. It was one of those intensely cold northern days without
+wind or sun, one of those misted days which Balzac somewhere describes
+as a beautiful woman born blind. It was fifty-three below zero when we
+left the house, with the smoke going up in the gray air as straight
+and undisturbed as a pine-tree and the drifts crunching like dry
+charcoal under our snow-shoes. We were woolened and mittened and
+capped and furred up to the eyes, however, and I was warmer than I've
+been many a time on Boston Common in March, even though we did look
+like a couple of deep-sea divers and steamed like fire-engines when we
+breathed.
+
+We tramped until we were tired, swung back to Casa Grande, and Peter
+came in for a cup of tea and then trudged off to Alabama Ranch again.
+And that was the lee and the long of it, as the Irish say. What did we
+talk about? Heaven knows what we didn't talk about! Peter told me
+about a rancher named Bidwell, north of The Crossing, being found
+frozen to death in a snow-drift, frozen stiff, with the horse still
+standing and the rider still sitting upright in the saddle. He said
+there was a lot of rot talked about the great clean outdoors. The
+sentimentalists found that they naturally felt a bit niftier in fresh
+air, but the great outdoors, according to Peter, is an arena of
+endless murder and rapine and warfare, and the cleanest acre of forest
+or prairie under the sun somewhere has its stains of blood and its
+record of cruelty. We talked about Susie and the negative phrasing of
+the ten moral laws and the Horned Dinosaur from Sand Hill Creek (whose
+bones Peter reckoned to be at least three million years old) and the
+marriage customs of the Innuits. And we talked about Matzenauer and
+Kreisler and the best cure for chilblains and about Gershom and Poppsy
+and Dinkie--but most of all about Dinkie.
+
+Peter asked me if I'd seen Dinkie's school essays on _The Flag_ and
+_The Capture of Quebec_, and rather surprised me by handing over
+crumpled copies of the same, Dinkie having proudly despatched these
+masterpieces all the way to Philadelphia for his "Uncle Peter's"
+approval. It hurt me, for just one foolish fraction of a second, to
+think my boy had confidences with an outsider which he could not have
+with his own mother. And then I remembered that Peter wasn't an
+outsider. I realized how much he had brought into my laddie's life,
+how much, in a different way, he had brought into my own. I even tried
+to tell him about this. But he stopped me short by saying something in
+Latin which he later explained meant "by taking the middle course we
+shall not go amiss." So I came back to Casa Grande, not exactly with a
+feeling of frustration, but with a feeling of possibilities withheld
+and issues deferred. It was a companionable enough tramp, I suppose.
+But I'm afraid I was a disappointment to Peter. His gaiety impressed
+me as a bit forced. I am slightly mystified by his refusal, while
+taking serious things seriously, to take anything tragically. Even at
+tea, with all its air of the valedictory hanging over us, he was nice
+and gay, like the Christmas beeves the city butchers stick paper
+rosettes into, or the circus-band playing like mad while the tumbler
+who has had a fall is being carried out to the dressing-tent. Peter
+even offhandedly inquired, as he was going, if he might have Scotty to
+take care of, provided it was not expedient to take Dinkie's dog
+along to Calgary with us.... I'm not quite certain--I may be wrong,
+but there are moments, odd earthquakey moments, when I have a
+suspicion that Peter will be keeping more than Scotty after we've
+trekked off to Calgary!
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Fourth_
+
+
+This tearing up of roots is a much sorrier business than I had
+imagined. And more difficult. I find it hard to know what to take and
+what to leave behind. And there is so much to be thought of, so much
+to be arranged for, so much to be done. I have had to write Duncan and
+tell him I'll be a few days later than I intended. My biggest problem
+has been with Whinstane Sandy and Struthers. I called them in and had
+a talk with them and told them I wanted them to keep Casa Grande going
+the same as ever. Then I made myself into the god from the machine by
+calmly announcing the only way things could be arranged would be for
+the two of them to get married.
+
+Struthers, at this suggestion, promptly became as coy as a
+partridge-hen. Whinnie, of course, remained Scottish and canny. He
+became more shrewdly magnanimous, however, after we'd had a bit of
+talk by ourselves. "Weel, I'll tak' the woman, rather than see her
+frettin' hersel' to death!" he finally conceded, knowing only too
+well he'd nest warm and live well for the rest of his days. He'd been
+hoping, he confessed to me, that some day he'd get back to that claim
+of his up in the Klondike. But he wasn't so young as he once was. And
+perhaps Dinkie, when he was grown to a man, could go up and look after
+his rights. 'Twould be a grand journey, he averred with a sigh, for a
+high-spirited lad turned twenty.
+
+"I'll be stayin' with Pee-Wee and the old place here," concluded
+Whinstane Sandy, giving me his rough old hand as a pledge. And with
+tears in my eyes I lifted that faithful old hand up to my lips and
+kissed it. Whinnie, I knew, would die for me. But he would pass away
+before he'd be willing to put his loyalty and his courage and his
+kind-heartedness into pretty speeches. Struthers, on the other hand,
+has become too flighty to be of much use to me in my packing. She has
+plunged headlong into a riot of baking, has sent for a fresh supply of
+sage tea, and is secretly perusing a dog-eared volume which I have
+reason to know is _The Marriage Guide_.
+
+Gershom, all things considered, is the most dolorous member of our
+home circle. He says little, but inspects me with the wounded eyes of
+a neglected spaniel. He will stay on at Casa Grande until the Easter
+holidays, and then migrate to the Teetzels'. As for Dinkie and Poppsy,
+they are too young to understand. The thought of change excites them,
+but they have no idea of what they are leaving behind.
+
+Last night, when I was dog-tired after my long day's work, I
+remembered about Dinkie's school-essays and took them out to read. And
+having done so, I realized there was something sacred about them. They
+gave me a glimpse of a groping young soul reaching up toward the
+light.
+
+"We have a Flag," I read, "to thrill our bones and be prod of and no
+man boy woman or girl" (and the not altogether artless _diminuendo_
+did not escape me!) "should never let it drag in the dust. It flotes
+at the bow of our ships and waves from the top of most post offices
+etc. And now we have a flag and a flag staf in front of our school and
+on holdays and when every grate man dies we put said flag up at haf
+mast.... It is the flag of the rich and the poor, the flag of our
+country which all of whose citizens have a right to fly, the hig"
+(obviously meant for _high_) "and the low, the rich and the poor. And
+we must not only keep our flag but blazen it still further with deeds
+nobely done. If ever you have to shed your blood for your country
+remeber its for the nobelest flag that flies the same being an emblen
+of our native land to which it represens and stands in high esteem by
+the whole people of a country." ... God bless his patriotic little
+bones! My bairn knew what he was trying to get at, but it's plain he
+didn't quite know how to get there.
+
+But the drama of the Capture of Quebec plainly put him on easier
+ground. For here was a story worth the telling. And what could be more
+glorious than the death of Wolfe as I see it through my little
+Dinkie's eyes?
+
+For I read: "The french said Wolfe" (_can_ has first been written and
+then scratched out and _would_ substituted) "never get up that rivver
+but Wolfe fooled them with a trick by running the french flag up on
+his shipps so the french pilots without fear padled out and come abord
+when Wolfe took them prissoners and made them pilot the english ships
+safe to the iland of Orlens. He wanted to capsture the city of Quebec
+without distroiting it. But the clifs were to high and the brave
+Montcalm dified Wolfe who lost 400 men and got word Amherst could not
+come and so himself took sick and went to bed. But a desserter from
+the french gave Wolfe the pass word and when his ships crept further
+up the rivver in the dark a french senntry called out qui vive and one
+of Wolfe's men who spoke french well ansered la france and the senntry
+said to himself they was french ships and let them go on. Next day
+Wolfe was better and saw a goat clime up the clifs near the plains of
+Abraham and said where a goat could go he could go to. So he forgot
+being sick and desided to clime up Wolfe's cove which was not then
+called that until later. It was a dark night and they went in row
+boats with all the oars mufled. It was a formadible sight that would
+have made even bolder men shrink with fear. But it was the brave
+Higlanders who lead with their muskits straped to their sholdiers
+climing up the steep rock by grabbing at roots of trees and shrubbs
+and not a word was wispered but the french senntrys saw the tree
+moving and asked qui vive again. The same sholdier who once studdied
+hard and lernt french said la france as he had done before and they
+got safe to the top and faced the city. At brake of day they stood
+face to face, french and english. But Montcalm marched out to cut them
+off there and Wolfe lined his men up in a line and said hold your fire
+until they are within forty paces away from us. The french caused
+many causilties but the english never wavered. Montcalm still on horse
+back reseaved a mortal wound, he would of fell off if two of his tall
+granadeers hadn't held him up and Wolfe too was shot on the wirst but
+went right on. Again he was shot this time more fataly and as they
+were laying him down one of the men exclaimed See how they run. Who
+run murmurred the dieing Wolfe. The enemy sir replied the man. Then I
+die happy said Generral Wolfe and with a great sigh rolled over on his
+side and died.... And when the doctor told Montcalm he could only live
+a few hours he said God be prased I shall not live to see Quebec fall.
+Brave words like those should not be forgoten and what Wolfe said was
+just as brave. No more fiting words could be said by anybody than
+those he said in the boats with the mufled oars that night that the
+paths of glory leed but to the grave." ...
+
+I have folded up the carefully written pages, reverently, remembering
+my promise to return them to Peter. But for a while at least I shall
+keep them with me. They have set me thinking, reminding me how time
+flies. Here is my little boy, grown into an historian, sagely
+philosophizing over the tragedies of life. My wee laddie, expressing
+himself through the recorded word.... It seems such a short time ago
+that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of
+language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly
+after his birth and kept up for so long, the naive journal of a young
+mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It
+became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped
+past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a
+bit hurried and often incoherent. But I have dutifully noted how my
+Dinkie first said "Ah goom" for "All gone," just as I have fondly
+remarked his persistent use of the reiterative intensive, with careful
+citations of his "da-da" and his "choo-choo car," and a "bow-wow" as
+applied to any living animal, and "wa-wa" for water, and "me-me" for
+milk, and "din-din" for dinner, and going "bye-bye" for going to sleep
+on his little "tum-tum." I even solemnly ask, forgetting my Max
+Mueller, what lies at the root of this strange reduplicative process.
+Then I come to where I have set down for future generations the
+momentous fact that my Dinkie first said "let's playtend" for "let's
+pretend," and spoke of "nasturtiums" as "excursions," and announced
+that he could bark loud enough to make Baby Poppsy's eyes "bug out"
+instead of "bulge out." And I come again to where I have
+affectionately registered the fact that my son says "set-sun" for
+"sunset" and speaks of his "rumpers" instead of his "rompers," and
+coins the very appropriate word "downer" to go with its sister word of
+"upper" and describes his Mummy as "_wearing_ Daddy's coffee-cup" when
+he really meant _using_ Daddy's coffee-cup.
+
+It all seems very fond and foolish now, just as at one time it all
+seemed very big and wonderful. And I remember schooling my Poppsy to
+say "Daddy's all sweet" and how her little tongue, stumbling over the
+sibilant, converted it into the non-complimentary "Daddy's all feet,"
+which my Dinky-Dunk so scowlingly resented. And I have even compiled a
+list of Dinkie's earliest "howlers," from the time he was first
+interested in Adam and Eve and asked to be told about "The Garden of
+Sweden" until he later explained one of Poppsy's crying-spells by
+announcing she had dug a hole out by the corral and wanted to bring it
+into the house. I used to smile a bit skeptically over these
+tongue-twists of children, but now I know they are re-born with each
+new generation, the same old turns of thought and the same old kinks
+of utterance. I don't know why, but there is even a touch of sadness
+about the old jokes now. The patina of time gathers upon them and
+mellows them and makes me realize they belong to the past--the past
+with its pain and its joy, that can never come back to mortal mothers
+again.
+
+
+
+
+_Monday the Thirtieth_
+
+
+"We die a little, when we go away." How true it is! By to-morrow we
+will be gone. My heart is heavy as lead. I go about, doing things for
+the last time, looking at things for the last time, and pretending to
+be as matter-of-fact as a tripper breaking camp. But there's a
+laryngitis lump in my throat and there are times when I'm glad I'm
+almost too busy to think.
+
+I was hoping that the weather would be bad, as it ought to at this
+time of the year, so that I might leave my prairie with some lessened
+pang of regret. But the last two days have been miraculously mild. A
+Chinook has been blowing, the sky has been a palpitating soft dome of
+azure, and a winey smell of spring has crept over the earth....
+To-night, knowing it was the last night, I crept out to say good-by to
+my little Pee-Wee asleep in his lonely little bed. It was a perfect
+night. The Lights were playing low in the north, weaving together in a
+tangle of green and ruby and amethyst. The prairie was very still.
+The moonlight lay on everything, thick and golden and soft with
+mystery. I knelt beside Pee-Wee's grave, not in bitterness, but bathed
+in peace. I knelt there and prayed.
+
+It frightened me a little, when I looked up, to see Peter standing
+beside the little white fence. I thought, at first, that he was a
+ghost, he stood so still and he seemed so tall in the moonlight.
+
+"I'll watch your boy," he said very quietly, "until you come back."
+
+He made me think of the Old Priest in _The Sorrowful Inheritance_. He
+seemed so calmly benignant, so dependable, so safe in his simple
+other-worldliness.
+
+"Oh, Peter!" was all I could say as I moved toward him in the
+moonlight. He nodded, as much to himself as to me, as he took my hand
+in his. I felt a great ache, which was not really an ache, and a new
+kind of longing which never before, in all my life, I had nursed or
+known. I must have moved closer to Peter, though I could feel his hand
+pull itself away from mine. It made me feel terribly alone in the
+world.
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?" I cried out, with my hand on
+his shoulder.
+
+Peter shook his head from side to side, very slowly.
+
+"_Verboten!_" he said as he put his hand over the hand which I had put
+on his shoulder.
+
+"But I may never come back. Peter!" I whispered, feeling the tears go
+slowly down my wet cheek.
+
+Peter took my unsteady fingers and placed them on the white pickets of
+the little rectangular fence.
+
+"You'll come back," he said very quietly. And when I looked up he had
+turned away.
+
+I could see him walking off in the yellow moonlight with his shoulders
+back and his head up. He walked slowly, with an odd wading movement,
+like a man walking through water. I was tempted, for a moment, to call
+after him. But some power that was not of me or any part of me
+prompted me to silence. I stood watching him until he seemed a moving
+shadow along the level floor of the world flooded with
+primrose-yellow, until he became a shifting stroke of umber on a
+background of misty gold. I stood looking after him as he passed away,
+out of my sight, and far, far off to the north a coyote howled and
+over Casa Grande I could see a thin pennon of chimney-smoke going up
+toward Arcturus.... Good-by, Peter, and God bless you....
+
+Unlimited, indeed, is the power of Eros. For when I went to slip
+quietly into the house, I found Whinnie and Struthers seated together
+beside the kitchen range. And Struthers was reading _Tam O'Shanter_
+aloud to her laird.
+
+"Read slow, noo, lassie, an' tak' it a' in," said the placidly
+triumphant voice of Whinstane Sandy, "for it'll be lang before ye ken
+its like!"
+
+
+
+
+_Thursday the Seventeenth_
+
+
+The migration has been effected ... I am alone in my room, I have two
+and three-quarters trunks unpacked, and I feel like a President's wife
+the night after Inauguration. It is well past midnight, but I am too
+tired and too unsettled to sleep. Things turn out so differently to
+what one expects! And all change, to the home-staying heart, can be so
+abysmally upsetting!...
+
+We were a somewhat disheveled and intimidated flock when we emerged
+from our train and found Duncan awaiting us with an amazingly big
+touring-car which, as he explained with a short laugh at my gape of
+wonder, the Barcona Mines would pay for in a week.
+
+"It's no piker you're pulling with now," he exclaimed as we climbed
+stiff and awkward into that deep-upholstered grandeur on wheels. He
+said that the children had grown but would have to be togged out with
+some new duds--little knowing how I had stayed up until long past
+midnight mending and pressing and doing my best to make my bucolic
+offspring presentable. And he told me it was _some_ city I had come
+to, as I'd very soon see for myself. And it was _some_ shack he'd
+corralled for his family, he added with a chuckle of pride.
+
+I tried to be interested in the skyscrapers he showed me along Eighth
+Avenue, and the Palliser, and the concreted subway, and the Rockies,
+in the distance, with the wine-glow on their snow-clad peaks. And
+while I did my best to shake off the Maud-Muller feeling which was
+creeping over me, by studying the tranquillizingly remote
+mountain-tops, Duncan confided to me that he had first said: "Fifty
+thousand or bu'st!" But two months ago he had amended that to "A
+hundred thousand or bu'st!" and now he had his reasons for saying,
+with his jaw set: "Just a cool quarter of a million, before I quit
+this game!"
+
+It was for us, I told myself as I looked down at my kiddies, that the
+Dour Man behind the big mahogany wheel was fighting. This, I felt,
+should bring me happiness, and a new sense of security. And it was
+only because my stomach was empty, I tried to assure myself, that my
+poor old prairie heart felt that way. I should have been happy, for I
+was going to a brand-new home--and it was one of those foot-hill late
+afternoons that make you think of the same old razor-blade muffled up
+in the same old panne-velvet, an evening of softness shot through with
+a steely sharpness. There was a Chinook arch of Irish point-lace still
+in the sky, very much like the one I had left behind me, and the sky
+itself was a canopy of robin-egg blue _crepe de chine_ hemmed with
+salmon pink.
+
+But as we whirled up out of the city into the higher ground of some
+boulevarded and terraced residential district the evening air seemed
+colder and the solemn old Rockies toward the west took on an air of
+lonesomeness. It made the thought of home and open fires and quiet
+rooms very welcome. The lights came out along the asphalted streets,
+spangling the slopes of that sedate new suburb with rectangular lines
+of brilliants. Duncan, in answer to the questions of the children,
+explained that he was taking the longer way round, so as to give us
+the best view of the house as we drove in.
+
+"Here we are!" he exulted as we slowed down and turned into a crescent
+lined with baby poplar and Manitoba maple.
+
+I leaned out and saw a big new house of tapestry brick, looking oddly
+palatial on its imposing slope of rising ground. My husband stopped,
+in fact, midway in a foolishly pillared gate that bisected a long
+array of cobble-stone walls, so that we might get a look at the
+gardens. They seemed very new gardens, but much of their newness was
+lost in that mercifully subduing light in which I saw trim-painted
+trellises and sepulchral white flower-urns and pergolas not yet
+softened with creepers. There was also a large iron fountain, painted
+white, which Duncan apparently liked very much, from the way he looked
+at it. From two of the chimneys I could see smoke going up in the
+quiet air. In the windows I could see lights, rose-shaded and warm,
+and beyond the shrubbery somewhere back in the garden a workman was
+driving nails. His hammer fell and echoed like a series of
+rifle-shots. From the garage chimney, too, came smoke, and it was
+plain from the sounds that somebody inside was busy tuning up a
+car-engine.
+
+I sat staring at the grounds, at the cobble-stone walls, at the
+tapestry-brick house with the high-shouldered French cornices. It
+began to creep over me how it meant service, how it meant protection,
+how it meant guarded lives for me and mine, how it stood an amazingly
+complicated piece of machinery which took much thought to organize and
+much money to maintain. And the mainspring behind it all, I
+remembered, was the man sitting at the mahogany wheel so close to me.
+Light and warmth and comfort and safety--they were all to come from
+the conceiting and the struggling of my Dour Man, fighting for an
+empty-headed family who were scarcely worth it. He was, after all, the
+stoker down in the hole, and without him everything would stop. So
+when I saw that he was studying my face with that intent sidelong
+glance of his, I reached over and put my hand on his knee, as I had
+done so often, in the old days.
+
+He looked down, at that, with what was almost an appearance of
+embarrassment.
+
+"I want to play my part," I said with all the earnestness of my
+earnest old heart, as he let in his clutch and we started up the
+winding drive.
+
+"It ought to be a considerable part," he said as we drew up under a
+bone-white porte-cochere where a small-bodied Jap stood respectfully
+impassive and waiting to open the door for us.
+
+My husband got down out of the car. I sat wondering why I should feel
+so much like a Lady Jane Grey approaching the headsman's _makura_.
+
+"Come on, kids!" Duncan called out with a parade of joviality, like a
+cheer-leader who realized that things weren't going just right. For
+Dinkie, I could see, was shrinking back in the padded seat. His
+underlip was trembling a trifle as he sat staring at the strange new
+house. But Poppsy, true little woman that she was, smiled
+appreciatively about at the material grandeurs which confronted her.
+If she'd had a tail, I'm sure, she'd have been wagging it. And this so
+tickled her dad that he lifted her out of the car and carried her
+bodily and triumphantly up the steps.
+
+I waited for Dinkie, whose eye met mine. I did my best to show my
+teeth, that he might understand how everything was eventually to be
+for the best. But his face was still clouded as we climbed the steps
+and passed under the yoke.
+
+The little Jap, whose name, I have since found out, is Tokudo, bowed a
+jack-knife bow and said "_Irashai_" as I passed him. And "_Irashai_" I
+have also discovered, is perfectly good Japanese for "Welcome."
+
+We had dinner at seven. It was a well-ordered meal, but it went off
+rather dismally. I was depressed, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom,
+and the children were tired, and Duncan, I'm afraid, was a bit
+disappointed in us all. Tokudo had brought cocktails for us, and
+Duncan, seeing I wasn't drinking mine, stowed both away in his
+honorable stomach. He ate heartily, I noticed, and gave scant
+appearance of a man pining away with a broken heart. After dinner he
+sat back and bit off the end of a cigar.
+
+"This is my idea of living," he proclaimed as he sent a blue cloud up
+toward the rather awful dome-light above the big table. "There's stir
+and movement here, all day long. Something more than sunsets to look
+at! You'll see--something to fill up your day! Why, night seems to
+come before I even know it. And before I'm out of bed I'm brooding
+over what's ahead of me for that particular date and day--Say, that
+girl of ours is falling asleep in her chair there!"
+
+So I escaped and put the children to bed. And while thus engaged I
+discovered that some of Duncan's new friends were dropping in on him.
+I wanted to stay up-stairs, for my head was aching a lot and my heart
+just a little, but Duncan called to me from the bottom of the stairs.
+So down I went, like a dutiful wife, to the room full of smoke and
+talk, where two big men and one very thin woman in a baby-bear motor
+coat were drinking Scotch highballs with my lord and master. They were
+genial and jolly enough, but I couldn't understand their allusions and
+I couldn't see the points to their jokes. And they seemed to stay an
+interminable length of time. I was secretly uncomfortable, until they
+went, but I became still more uncomfortable after they had gone.
+
+For as we sat there together, in that oppressive big room, I made
+rather an awful discovery. I found that my husband and I had scarcely
+anything we could talk about together. So I sat there, like an
+alligator in a bayou, wondering why his rather flushed face should be
+turned toward me every now and then.
+
+My heart beat a little faster as I saw him take out his watch and wind
+it up.
+
+"Let's go to bed," he said as he pushed it back in his waistcoat
+pocket. My heart stopped beating altogether, for a moment or two. I
+felt like a slave-girl in a sheik's tent, like a desert-woman just
+sold into bondage.
+
+It was the smoky air and the highballs, I suppose, which left his eyes
+a little bloodshot as he turned slowly about and studied my face. Then
+he repeated what he had said before.
+
+"_I can't!_" I told him, with a foolish surge of terror.
+
+He sat quite a long time without speaking. I could see the corners of
+the Holbein-Astronomer mouth go down.
+
+"As you say," he finally remarked, with a grim sort of quietness. But
+every bit of color had gone from his face. I was glad when Tokudo came
+in to take away the glasses.
+
+Duncan stood up, after the servant had gone again, and bowed to me
+very solemnly.
+
+"_Oyasumi nasi_," he said with a stabilizing ironic smile.
+
+"What does that mean?" I asked, doing my best to smile back at him.
+
+"That means 'sleep well,'" explained my husband. "But Tokudo would
+probably translate it into 'Condescend to enjoy honorable
+tranquillity.'"
+
+Instead of enjoying honorable tranquillity, however, I am sitting up
+into the wee sma' hours of the night, patrolling the gloomy ramparts
+of my soul's unrest.
+
+
+
+
+_Wednesday the Twenty-Third_
+
+
+This change to the city means a new life to my children. But I can
+also see it means new dangers and new influences. The simplicity of
+ranch life has vanished. And Dinkie and Poppsy are already getting
+acquainted with their neighbors. A Ford truck came within an inch of
+running over Poppsy this morning. She has announced a curiosity to
+investigate ice-cream sodas, and Dinkie has proclaimed his intention
+of going to the movies Saturday afternoon with Benny McArthur, the
+banker's son in the next block. On Monday I'm to take my children to
+school. "One of the finest school-buildings in all the West," Duncan
+has proudly explained. I can't help thinking of Gershom and his little
+cubby-hole of a wooden building where he is even now so solemnly and
+yet so kind-heartedly teaching the three R's to a gathering of little
+prairie outlaws.
+
+I shall have time on my hands, I see, for Hilton and his wife, our
+English gardener-chauffeur and our portly maid-of-all-work, pretty
+well cover what the wonderful Tokudo overlooks. And Tokudo _is_ a
+wonder. That cat-footed little Jap does the ordering and cooking and
+serving; he answers the door and the telephone; he attends to the rugs
+and the hardwood floors; he rules over the butler's pantry and
+polishes the silver and inspects the linen, and even keeps the keys to
+Duncan's carefully guarded wine-cellar, which the mistress of the
+house herself has not yet dared to invade.
+
+My husband seems to be very busy with his coal-mines and his other
+interests. He said last night that his idea of happiness is to be so
+immersed in his work as to be unconscious of time and undisturbed by
+its passing. And he _has_ been happy, in that way. But Time, that
+patient remodeler of all things mortal, can still work while we sleep.
+And something has been happening, without Duncan quite knowing it. He
+has changed. He is older, for one thing. I don't mean that my husband
+is an old man. But I can see a number of early-autumnal alterations in
+him. He's a trifle heavier and stiffer. He's lost a bit of his
+springiness. And he seems to know it, in his secret heart of hearts,
+for he tries to make up for that loss with a sort of coerced
+blitheness which doesn't always carry. He affects a sort of creaking
+jauntiness which sometimes falls short of its aim. When he can't
+clear the hurdle, I notice, he has the habit of whipping up his tired
+spirits with a cocktail or a highball or a silver-fizz. But he is
+preoccupied, at times. And at other times he is disturbingly
+short-tempered. He announced this morning, almost gruffly, that we'd
+had about enough of this "Dinkie and Poppsy business," and the
+children might as well be called by their real names. So I shall make
+another effort to get back to "Elmer" and "Pauline Augusta." But I
+feel, in my bones, that those pompous appellatives will not be always
+remembered. It has just occurred to me that my old habit of calling my
+husband "Dinky-Dunk" has slipped away from me. Endearing diminutives,
+I suppose, are not elicited by polar bears.
+
+
+
+
+_Thursday the Thirty-First_
+
+
+I don't quite know what's the matter with me. I'm like a cat in a
+strange garret. I don't seem to be fitting in. I sat at the piano last
+night playing "What's this dull town to me, Robin Adair?" And Duncan,
+with the fit and natural spirit of the home-booster, actively resented
+that oblique disparagement of his new business-center. He believes
+implicitly in Calgary and its future.
+
+As for myself, I am rigidly suspending all judgments. I'm at least
+trying to play my part, even though my spirit isn't in it. There are
+times when I'm tempted to feel that a foot-hill city of this size is
+neither fish nor fowl. It impresses me as a frontier cow-town grown
+out of its knickers and still ungainly in its first long trousers. But
+I can't help being struck by people's incorruptible pride in their own
+community. It's a sort of religious faith, a fixed belief in the
+future, a stubborn optimism that is surely something more than
+self-interest. It's the Dutch courage that makes deprivation and long
+waiting endurable.
+
+It's the women, and the women alone, who seem left out of the
+procession. They impress me as having no big interests of their own,
+so they are compelled to _playtend_ with make-believe interests. They
+race like mad in the social squirrel-cage, or drug themselves with
+bridge and golf and the country club, or take to culture with a
+capital C and read papers culled from the Encyclopedias; or spend
+their husbands' money on year-old Paris gowns and make love to other
+women's mates. The altitude, I imagine, has quite a little to do with
+the febrile pace of things here. Or perhaps it's merely because I'm an
+old frump from a back-township ranch!
+
+But I have no intention of trying to keep up with them, for I have a
+constitutional liking for quietness in my old age. And I can't engross
+myself in their social aspirations, for I've seen a bit too much of
+the world to be greatly taken with the internecine jealousies of a
+twenty-year-old foot-hill town. My "day" in this aristocratic section
+is Thursday, and Tokudo this afternoon admitted callers from seven
+closed cars, two landaulets, three Detroit electrics and one hired
+taxi. I know, because I counted 'em. The children and I posed like a
+Raeburn group and did our best to be respectable, for Duncan's sake.
+But he seems to have taken up with some queer people here, people who
+drop in at any time of the evening and smoke and drink and solemnly
+discuss how a shandygaff should be mixed and tell stories I wouldn't
+care to have the children hear.
+
+There's one couple Duncan asked me to be especially nice to, a Mr. and
+Mrs. Murchison. The latter, I find, is usually addressed as "Slinkie"
+by her friends, and the former is known as "Cattalo Charley" because
+he once formed a joint-stock company which was to make a fortune
+interbreeding buffalo and range-cattle, the product of that happy
+union being known, I believe, as "cattalo." Duncan calls him a
+"promoter," but my earlier impression of him as a born gambler has
+been confirmed by the report that he's interested in a lignite
+briquetting company, that he's fathering a scheme, not only to raise
+stock-yard reindeer in the sub-Arctics but also to grow karakule sheep
+in the valleylands of the Coast, that he once sold mummy wheat at
+forty dollars a bushel, and that in the old boom days he promoted no
+less than three oil companies. And the time will come, Duncan avers,
+when that man will be a millionaire.
+
+As for "Slinkie," his wife, I can't be quite sure whether I like her
+or not. I at least admire her audacity and her steel-trap quickness of
+mind. She has a dead white skin, green eyes, and most wonderful hair,
+hair the color of a well-polished copper samovar. She is an extremely
+thin woman who affects sheathe skirts and rather reminds me of a
+boa-constrictor. She always reeks of _Apres londre_ and uses a
+lip-stick as freely before the world as an orchestra conductor uses a
+baton or a street-sweeper a broom. She is nervous and sharp-tongued
+and fearless and I thought, at first, that she was making a dead set
+at my Duncan. But I can now see how she confronts all men with that
+same dangerous note of intimacy. Her real name is Lois. She talks
+about her convent days in Belgium, sings _risque_ songs in very bad
+French, and smokes and drinks a great deal more than is good for her.
+In Vancouver, when informed that she was waiting for a street-car on a
+non-stop corner, she sat down between the tracks, with her back to the
+approaching car. The motorman, of course, had to come to a
+stop--whereupon she arose with dignity and stepped aboard. Duncan has
+told me this story twice, and tends to consider Lois a really
+wonderful character. I am a little afraid of her. She asked me the
+other day how I liked Calgary. I responded, according to Hoyle, that
+I liked the clear air and the clean streets and the Rockies looking so
+companionably down over one's shoulder. Lois hooted as she tapped a
+cigarette end against her hennaed thumb-nail.
+
+"Just wait until the sand-storms, my dear!" she said as she struck a
+match on her slipper-heel.
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Second_
+
+
+My old friend Gershom has very slyly written a _rondeau_ to me. I have
+just found it enclosed in my _Golden Treasury_, which he handed back
+to me that last night at Casa Grande. It's the first actual _rondeau_
+I ever had indited to my humble self, and while I'm a bit set up about
+it, I can't quite detach from Gershom's lines a vaguely obituarial
+atmosphere which tends to depress me.
+
+I can see that it may not be the best _rondeau_ in the world, but I'm
+going to keep it until my bones are dust, for good old Gershom's sake.
+And some day, when he marries the nice girl he deserves to marry, and
+has a kiddy or two of his own, I'll shame his gray hairs by parading
+it before his offspring! I have just been re-reading the lines, in
+Gershom's copperplate script. They are as follows:
+
+                         _To C. McK._
+
+        _On Returning Her Copy of the Golden Treasury_
+
+        This golden book, dear friend, wherein each line
+          Holds close a charm for knowing eyes to meet,
+          Holds doubly mystical and doubly sweet
+        An inner charm no language may define:
+
+        For o'er each page a woman's soul divine
+          Bent low a space for kindred souls to greet,
+          And here her eyes were lit with gladness fleet
+        Because of songs that graced with rare design
+            This book of thine!
+
+        And now I give back into Beauty's hand
+          Her borrowed songs, but I shall hold always
+        Secret and safe from every care's demand,
+          A flame of light to fill my emptier days,
+        That quieter fellowship, which made a shrine
+           This book of thine!
+                                                      G. B.
+
+
+
+
+_Tuesday the Fifth_
+
+
+The weather is balmier, and just a tinge of green is creeping into the
+tan of the foot-hill slopes. Spring is coming again.
+
+I went shopping in the Hudson Bay Store yesterday and found it much
+more metropolitan than I had expected. And I find I am three whole
+laps behind in that steeplechase known as Style. But I got a raft of
+things for Pauline Augusta, and a Boy Scout outfit for my laddie.
+
+One of the few women I like in Calgary is Dinkie's--I mean
+Elmer's--new school-teacher. Her name is Lossie Brown and she is an
+earnest-eyed girl who's saving up to go to Europe some day and study
+art. She's a trifle shy, and unmistakably moody, but her mind is as
+bright as a new pin. And some bright morning, when the rose of
+womanhood has really opened, she's going to wake up a howling beauty.
+I love her, too, for the interest she has taken in my boy, whom she
+reports as getting along much better than she had expected. So I have
+asked her to write a little note to Gershom Binks, advising him of
+his ex-pupil's advance. For Lossie is a girl I'd like Gershom to know.
+And she has done this for me. I ask her over to the house as often as
+I can and yesterday I had Dinkie slip a little platinum-banded
+fountain-pen, with a card, into the pocket of her rather threadbare
+ulster. Duncan, however, is not in the least interested in Lossie. He
+despises what he calls insignificant people.
+
+On my way home from shopping I had Hilton drive me about some of the
+less-known parts of the city. And I have been compelled to recast some
+of my earlier impressions of Calgary. It is wonderful, in many ways,
+and some day, I can see, it will be beautiful, just as Lossie Brown
+will some day be beautiful.
+
+In the first place, it is so happily situated, lying as it does
+half-way between the mountains and the plain. And the blue Bow comes
+dancing so joyously down from the Rockies and the older city sleeps so
+happily in the sunny crook of its valley-arm, while the newer suburbs
+seem to boil up and run over the surrounding hills like champagne
+bubbling over the rim of a glass. There are raw edges, of course, but
+time will eventually attend to these. Now and then, between the
+motor-cars, you will see a creaking Red River cart. Next to an
+office-building of gray sandstone you're likely to spot what looks
+like a squatter's wickyup of rusty galvanized iron. Yesterday, on our
+main street where the electric-cars were clanging and the limousines
+were throwing their exhaust incense to the gods of the future, I
+caught sight of a lonely and motionless figure, isolated in the midst
+of a newer world. It was the figure of a Cree squaw, blanketed and
+many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and
+the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized,
+as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that
+stolid old lady in the blanket.
+
+I'm even beginning to find that one can get tired of optimism,
+especially when it is being so plainly converted from a psychic
+abstraction into a municipal asset. There's a sort of communal
+Christian Science in this place which ordains that thought shall not
+dwell on such transient evils as drought or black rust or early frost
+or hail-storms or money stringencies. And there's a sort of youthful
+greediness in people's longing to live all there is of life to live
+and to know all there is of life to know. For there is a limit to the
+sensations we can digest, just as there is a limit to the meat we can
+digest. And out here we have a tendency to bolt more than is good for
+us, to bolt it without pausing to get the true taste of it. The women
+of this town remind me more and more of mice in an oxygen bell; they
+race round and round, drunk with an excitement they can't quite
+understand, until they burn up their little lives the same as the mice
+burn up their little lungs.
+
+... I've had a letter from Whinstane Sandy to-day, writing about
+seed-wheat and the repairs for the tractor. It seems like a message
+from another world. He reports that poor old Scotty is eating again
+and no longer mourns day in and day out for his lost master. And Mr.
+Ketley has very kindly brought over the liniment for Mudski's
+shoulder. ... Whatever I may be, or whatever I may have done, I feel
+that I can still cleanse my heart by sacrifice.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Ninth_
+
+
+One can get out of the habit, apparently, of having children about. My
+kiddies, I begin to see, occasionally grate on Duncan. He brought
+tears to the eyes of Pauline Augusta yesterday by the way he scolded
+her for using a lead-pencil on the living-room woodwork. And the night
+before he shouted much strong language at Elmer for breaking a
+window-pane in the garage with Benny McArthur's new air-gun.
+
+Elmer and his father, I'm afraid, have rather grown away from each
+other. More than once I've caught Duncan staring at his son and heir
+in a puzzled and a slightly frustrated sort of way. And Elmer's soul
+promptly becomes _incommunicado_ when his iron-browed pater is in the
+neighborhood.
+
+Duncan is very proud of his grand new house. He is anxious to build a
+conservatory out along the southwest wing. But he has asked how long a
+conservatory would last with two young mountain-goats gamboling along
+its leads.... Lossie, little suspecting the pang she was giving me,
+laughingly showed me a manuscript which she found by accident in my
+Dinkie's reader. It was a poem, dedicated to "D. O'L." And written in
+a stiff little hand I read:
+
+                  "Your lips are lined with roses,
+                    Your eyes they shinne like gold
+                  If you call me from the sunlight,
+                    I'll answer from the cold.
+                  But I wonder why, Oh, why,
+                    You stay so far from me?
+                  If you whisper from the prarrie,
+                    I'll call from Calgary."
+
+"Won't it be wonderful," said Lossie as I sat pondering over those
+foolish little lines, "won't it be wonderful, if Dinkie grows up to be
+a great poet?"
+
+
+
+
+_Monday the Eleventh_
+
+
+Elmer, _alias_ Dinkie, after many days' mourning for his lost Scotty,
+is consoling himself, as other men do, with a substitute. Last Friday
+he Brought home a flop-eared pup with a drooping tail and an
+indefinite ancestry, explaining that he had come into possession of
+the aforementioned animal by the duly delivered purchase-price of
+thirty-seven cents.
+
+Remembering Minty and certain matters of the past, I was troubled in
+spirit. But I couldn't see why my son shouldn't have an animal to
+love. And I have had Hilton fix a little box in one corner of the
+garage for Dinkie's new pet, which he has christened Rowdy.
+
+Rowdy, I now see, is a canine of limited spirit and is not likely to
+repeat the offenses of Minty. But Dinkie really loves his new pup,
+despite the latter's indubitably democratic ancestry. And I begin to
+suspect that my laddie's weakness for mongrels may arise from his
+earlier experience with Duncan's blooded bulldog, which he struggled
+with for three whole days, fondly and foolishly trying to teach that
+stolid animal the art of "pointing."
+
+On Saturday Dinkie smuggled the verminous Rowdy to the upper
+bathroom and gave him a thorough but quite unrelished soaping ...
+Dinkie, by the way, is now a "cub" in the Boy Scouts and after
+adorning himself in khaki goes off on hikes and takes lessons in
+woodcraft. Saturday the Scouts of his school marched behind a real
+band and Lossie and I sat in the car waiting for my laddie to appear.
+He wiggled one hand, and smiled sheepishly, as he caught sight of us.
+But he kept "eyes front" and refused to give any further sign as he
+marched bravely on behind that brave music. He is learning the law
+of the pack. For some first frail ideas of service are beginning
+to incubate in that egoistic little bean of his. And he's suffering,
+I suppose, the old contest between the ancestral lust to kill and
+the new-born inclination to succor and preserve. That means he may
+some day be "a gentleman." And I've a weakness for that old Newman
+definition of a gentleman as one who never inflicts pain--"tender
+towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful
+towards the absurd"--conducting himself toward his enemy as if he
+were some day to be his friend. And I also wish there were a few
+more of them in this hard old world of ours!
+
+Speaking of gentlemen, there's a Captain Goodhue here whom I rather
+like. Lois Murchison brought us together in the tea-room of the
+Palliser. In more ways than one he reminds me of Peter. But Captain
+Goodhue is a much older man, and is English, coming from a very
+excellent family in Sussex. He's one of those iron-gray ex-Army men
+who still believe in a monocle and can be loyal to a queen even though
+she wears a basque with darts in it. And he doesn't talk to a woman
+with that ragging air of condescension which seems to be peculiar to
+western American civilization. He is courteous and thoughtful and
+sincere, though I noticed that he winced a trifle when I suddenly
+remembered, as he was taking his departure, that the McKails were
+living in what must have once been his house. He blinked, like a
+well-groomed old eagle, when I reminded him of this. I never dreamed,
+of course, that the subject would be painful to him. But it was an
+honor, he acknowledged with a bow, to pass his household gods on to a
+lady to whom so much had already been given.
+
+When I asked Lois about it, later on, she rather indifferently
+acknowledged that the old gentleman had been making a mess of his
+different business ventures. He was much better at golf than getting
+in on the ground-floor of a land deal. He was too old fogy, said
+Slinkie, to make good in the West. He still kept his head up, but
+they'd pretty well picked him to the bones.... Lois, by the way,
+describes me as something new in her menagerie and drops in to see me
+at the most unexpected moments. Then her tongue goes like a
+mower-knife. She is persuaded that I should permanent-wave my hair,
+lower my waist-line, and go in for amethysts. "And interest yourself,
+my dear, in an outside man or two," she has sagely advised me. "For
+husbands, you'll find, always accept you at the other mutt's
+valuation!"
+
+I was tempted to make her open her jade-green eyes, for a moment, by
+telling her I was already interested in an outside man or two and that
+my lord and master hadn't been much influenced by the extraneous
+appreciations. But I'm a little afraid of Slinkie and her serpent's
+tongue. And I'm a little afraid of this new circle into which my
+Duncan has so laboriously engineered himself. They more and more
+impress on my simple old prairie soul that the single-track woman is
+the woman who gets most out of life, that there's nothing really
+great and nothing really enduring that is not built on loyalty and
+truth. Character is Fate, as I once before inscribed in this book of
+my life. And I've been sitting up to-night, while the eternal bridge
+game is going on below, asking myself if all is well with Chaddie
+McKail. Have I, or have I not, conceded too much? Am I turning into
+nothing more than a mush of concession? Haven't I been bribed by
+comfort, and blinded to a situation which I am now almost afraid to
+face? Haven't I been selfishly scheming for the welfare of my children
+and endangering all their future and my own by the price I am paying?
+Haven't I been crazily manning a rickety old pump, trying to keep
+afloat a family hulk whose seams are wide open and whose timbers are
+water-logged? And how long can this sort of thing go on? And what will
+be the end of it?
+
+I try to warn myself not to smash my goods to kill a rat, as the
+Chinese say. I try to flatter myself that I am not letting
+circumstances stampede me into any hasty decision. There's many a
+woman, I suppose, with a husband whose legal promise has outlived his
+loyalty. But all is not well here about my heart. I know that, by the
+way it keeps sending up little trial-balloons, to see which way the
+wind is really blowing.
+
+... And Sunday night Cattalo Charlie went home quite drunk. And our
+local member, emboldened by his seventh highball, offhandedly invited
+me to accompany him on a little run up to Banff, stabbing me with a
+hurt look when I told him I'd see when Duncan could get away from his
+work....
+
+I wonder if spring is coming to Casa Grande? And at Alabama Ranch? And
+are the pussy-willows showing in the slough-ends? And why doesn't
+Peter Ketley ever write to me?
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Sixteenth_
+
+
+Lossie and Gershom, I find, have drifted into the habit of writing to
+each other. It is, of course, all purely platonic and pedagogic,
+arising out of a common interest in my Dinkie's academic advancement.
+But Lossie borrowed Dinkie this morning to have a photograph taken
+with him, one copy of which she has very generously promised to send
+on to Gershom.... Struthers has sent me a very satisfactory report
+from Casa Grande, which I dreamed last night had burned to the ground,
+compelling me and my kiddies to live in the old prairie-schooner,
+laboriously pulled about the prairie by Tithonus and Calamity Kate.
+And when I applied at Peter's door for a handful of meal for my
+starving children, he called me worse than a fallen woman and drove me
+off into the wilderness.
+
+Duncan asked me to-day if I'd motor up to the mines with him for the
+week-end. I had to tell him that I'd promised to take Elmer and
+Pauline Augusta to hear Kathleen Parlow and that it wouldn't seem
+quite fair to break my word. Duncan said that I was the best judge of
+that. Then he slammed a drawer shut and asked me, in his newer manner,
+how long I intended to pull this iceberg stuff. "For I can't see," he
+concluded after calling out for Tokudo to bring his hat and coat,
+"that I'm getting such a hell of a lot out of this arrangement!"
+
+I asked him, as quietly as I could, what he expected of me. But I
+could feel my heart pounding quick against my ribs. I am not, and
+never pretended to be, any stained-glass saint. And there were a few
+things I felt it was about time to unload. But Tokudo cat-footed back
+with the coat, and I could hear Lossie's clear laugh as she came in
+through the front door with the returning Dinkie, and some inner voice
+warned me to hold my peace. So Duncan and I merely stood there staring
+at each other, for a moment or two, across an abysmal and unbridgeable
+gulf of silence. Then he strode out to his car without as much as a
+howdy-do to the startled and slightly mystified Lossie.
+
+
+
+
+_Monday the Eighteenth_
+
+
+I have just learned that we were blackballed from the Country Club. My
+husband, at least, has met with that experience.
+
+It was Lois who let the cat out of the bag. She wasn't clear on all
+the details, but it was that old has-been of a Goodhue who was at the
+bottom of it all, according to the lady known as Slinkie. Duncan and
+he had clashed, from the first. Then Duncan had bought up his paper,
+and compelled him to mortgage his home. It was because of something to
+do with the Barcona Mines directorate, Lois thought, that Captain
+Goodhue had had Duncan blackballed when he applied for membership in
+the Country Club, the Captain being vice-president of the original
+holding company. Lois laughed none too pleasantly when she added that
+her Charley and my Duncan had joined hands to go after the old man's
+scalp. And they had got it. They turned him inside out, before they
+got through with him. They took his fore-lock and his teepee and his
+last string of wampum. And the old snob, of course, would never
+forgive them.
+
+... They took his fore-lock, and his teepee ... And it was Chaddie
+McKail and her bairns who were now housing warm in that captured
+teepee! And all this toiling and moiling, on the part of my husband,
+all this scheming and intriguing and juggling with figures, had been a
+campaign for power, a plotting and working to get even with this
+haughty old enemy who could carry his defeat so lightly! To be
+blackballed like that, I remembered, was to be proclaimed not a
+gentleman. And it must have cut deep. At one time, I suppose, Duncan
+would have called his monocled captain out. But men seem to fight
+differently nowadays. They fight differently, but no less grimly. And
+Duncan, whether it is a virtue or a vice in his make-up, would always
+be a fighter.... Yet I have no sense of gratitude to Lois Murchison
+for depositing her painful truths in my lap. She warned me, in her
+artless soprano, that there wasn't much good in sentimentalizing the
+situation. But she has thrown a shadow across the house which I was
+trying to make into a home. Without quite knowing it, she has
+cheapened her life-mate in my eyes. Without quite intending it, she
+has left my own husband more ignominious than he once stood. I was
+trying hard to school myself into a respect for his material
+successes. I was struggling to excuse a great many things by the
+engrossing nature of his work. But the motive behind all his efforts
+seemed suddenly a sordid one, in many ways a mean one.
+
+I keep remembering what Lois said about not sentimentalizing a
+situation. But I'm not yet such a mush of concession that I can't tell
+black from white. And there's some part of us, some vague but
+unescapable part of us, which we must respect, otherwise we have no
+right to walk God's good earth....
+
+I want to get away, for a day or two, to think things out. I think,
+before Duncan gets back to-morrow, I shall take Poppsy and run up to
+Banff. I may get my view-point back. And the mountain quietness may do
+me good....
+
+I keep having that same dull ache of disappointment which came to me
+as a girl, after I'd idolized a great man called Meredith and after
+I'd almost prayed to a great poet called Browning, on finding that one
+was so imperfectly monogamous and that the other philandered and
+talked foolishly to women. I had thrust my girlish faith in their
+hands, as so often befalls with the young, and they had betrayed
+it.... But for the second time since I married, I have been reading
+_Modern Love_. And I can almost forgive the Apollo of Box Hill for
+that betrayal which he knew nothing about.
+
+
+
+
+_Thursday the Twenty-Eighth_
+
+
+This is Thursday the twenty-eighth of April. I want to be sure of
+that. For there are very few things I can be sure of now.
+
+The bottom has fallen out of my world. I sit here, telling myself to
+be calm. But it's not easy to sit quiet when you face the very worst
+that all life could confront you with. _My Dinkie has run away._
+
+My boy has left me, has left his home, has vanished like smoke into
+the Unknown. He is gone and I have no trace of him.
+
+I find it hard to write. Yet I _must_ write, for the mere expression
+of what I feel tends to ease the ache. It helps to keep me sane. And
+already I realize I was wrong when I wrote "the very worst that all
+life could confront you with." For my laddie, after all, is not dead.
+He must still be alive. And while there's life, there's hope.
+
+I got back from Banff yesterday morning about nine, and Hilton was
+there with the car to meet me, as I had told him to be. I was anxious
+to know at once if everything was all right, but I found it hard to
+put a question so personal before that impersonal-eyed Englishman. So
+I strove to give my interrogation an air of the casual by offhandedly
+inquiring: "How's Rowdy, Hilton?"
+
+"Dead, ma'am," was his prompt reply.
+
+This rather took my breath away.
+
+"Do you mean to say that Rowdy is _dead_?" I insisted, noticing
+Poppsy's color change as she listened.
+
+"Killed, ma'am," said the laconic Hilton.
+
+"By whom?" I demanded.
+
+"Mr. Murchison, ma'am," was the answer.
+
+"How?" I asked, feeling my vague dislike for that particular name
+sharpen up to something dangerously like hatred.
+
+"He always comes up the drive a bit fast-like, ma'am. He hit the pup,
+and that was the end of him!"
+
+"Does Dinkie know?" was my first question, after that.
+
+"He _saw_ it, ma'am," admitted my car-driver.
+
+"Saw what?"
+
+"Saw Mr. Murchison throw the dog over the wall into the brush!"
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"He swore a bit, ma'am, and then laughed," admitted Hilton, after a
+pause.
+
+"Dinkie laughed?" I cried, incredulous.
+
+"No; Mr. Murchison, ma'am," explained Hilton.
+
+"What did Dinkie say?" I insisted. And again the man on the
+driving-seat remained silent a moment or two.
+
+"It was what he _did_, ma'am," he finally remarked.
+
+"What did he do?" I demanded.
+
+"Ran into the house, ma'am, and snatched the icepick off the kitchen
+table. Then he went to the big car like a mad 'un, he did. Pounded
+holes in every blessed tire with his pick!"
+
+"And then what?" I asked, with my heart up in my throat.
+
+Hilton waited until he had taken a crowded corner before answering.
+
+"Then he found the dead dog, ma'am, and bathed it, and borrowed the
+garden spade from me. Then he took it somewheres back in the ravine
+and buried it. I gave him the tool-box off the old roadster, to put
+what was left of the pup in."
+
+"And then?" I prompted, with a quaver in my voice I couldn't control.
+
+"He met Mr. Murchison coming out and he called him w'at I'd not like
+to repeat, ma'am, until Mr. McKail stepped out to see what was wrong,
+and interfered."
+
+"_How_ did he interfere?" was my next question.
+
+"By taking the lad into the house, ma'am," was my witness's retarded
+reply.
+
+"Then what happened?" I exacted.
+
+I waited, knowing what was coming, but I dreaded to hear it.
+
+"He gave him a threshing, ma'am," I heard Hilton's voice saying, far
+away, as though it came to me over a long-distance telephone on a wet
+night.
+
+I sat rigid as we mounted American Hill. I sat rigid as we swerved in
+through the ridiculous manor-like gate and up the winding drive and in
+under the ugly new porte-cochere. I didn't even wait for Poppsy as I
+got out of the car. I didn't even speak to Tokudo as he ran mincingly
+to take my things. I walked straight to the breakfast-room where I saw
+my husband sitting at the end of the oblong white table, stirring a
+cup of coffee with a spoon.
+
+"Where's Dinkie?" I asked, trying to keep my voice low but not quite
+succeeding.
+
+Duncan looked up at me with a coldly meditative eye.
+
+"Where he usually is at this time of day," he finally answered.
+
+"Where?" I repeated.
+
+"At school, of course," admitted my husband as he reached out for a
+piece of buttered toast. He was making a pretense at being very
+tranquil-minded. But his hand, I noticed, wasn't so steady as it might
+have been.
+
+"Is he all right?" I demanded, with my voice rising in spite of
+myself.
+
+"Considerably better, I imagine, than he has been for some time," was
+the deliberate answer from the man with the bloodshot eyes at the end
+of the table.
+
+"What do you mean by that?" I asked. And any one of intelligence, I
+suppose, could see I was making that question a challenge.
+
+"I mean that since you saw him last he's had a damned good whaling,"
+said Duncan, with his jaw squared, so that he reminded me of a
+King-Lud bulldog.
+
+I paid no attention to Tokudo, who came into the room to repeat that
+his master was wanted at the telephone.
+
+"Do you mean you struck that child?" I demanded, leaning on the table
+and looking straight into his eyes, which met mine quite unabashed,
+and with an air of mockery about them.
+
+My husband nodded as he pushed back his chair.
+
+"He got a good one," he asserted as he rose to his feet and rather
+leisurely brushed a crumb or two from his vest-front. He could even
+afford to smile as he said it. My expression, I suppose, would have
+made any man smile. But there was something maddening in his mockery,
+at such a moment. There was something gratuitously cruel in his parade
+of unconcern. Yet, oddly enough, as I looked at his slightly blotched
+face I couldn't help remembering that that was the face I had once
+kissed and held close against my cheek, had _wanted_ to hold against
+my cheek. And now I hated it.
+
+I had to wait and cast about for words of hatred strong enough to
+carry the arrows of enmity which nothing could stop me from
+delivering. But while I waited Tokudo announced for the third time
+that my husband was wanted at the telephone. And a very simple thing
+happened. My husband answered his call.
+
+I saw Duncan turn and walk out of the room. I could hear his steps in
+the hallway, loud on the waxed hardwood and low on the rugs. I could
+hear his deliberated chest-tones as he talked over the wire, talked
+quietly and earnestly, talked me and my hatred out of his head and out
+of his world. And I realized, as I sat there at the table-end with my
+gloves twisted up under my hands and my heart even more twisted up
+under my ribs, that it was all useless, that it was all futile. He was
+beyond the reach of my resentment. We were in different worlds,
+forevermore.
+
+I was still sitting there when he looked in at the door, with his hat
+and coat on, on his way out. I could feel him there, without directly
+seeing him. And I could feel, too, that he wanted to say something.
+But I declined to lift my head, and I could hear the door close as he
+went out to the waiting car.
+
+I sat there for a long time, thinking about my Dinkie. Twice I almost
+surrendered to the impulse to telephone to Lossie Brown. But I knew it
+would be no easy matter to get in touch with her. And in two hours it
+would be twelve, and any minute after that my boy would be home again.
+I tried to cross-examine Tokudo, but I could get nothing out of that
+tight-lipped Jap. I watched the clock. I noticed Hilton, when he got
+back, raking blood-stains off the gravel of the driveway. I wandered
+about, like a lost turkey-hen, trying to dramatize my meeting with
+Dinkie, doing my best to cooper together some incident which might
+keep our first minute or two together from being too hard on my poor
+kiddie. I heard the twelve o'clock whistles, at last, and then the
+Westminster-chimes of the over-ornate clock in the library announce
+that noon had come. And still the minutes dragged on.
+
+And when the tension was becoming almost unbearable I heard a step on
+the gravel and my heart started to pound.
+
+But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and
+inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid
+walking.
+
+"Where's Dinkie?" I asked.
+
+She stopped short, still smiling.
+
+"That's exactly what I was going to ask?" I heard her saying. Then her
+smile faded as she searched my face. "There's--there's nothing
+happened, has there?"
+
+I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochere and leaned against
+it.
+
+"Didn't Dinkie come to school this morning?" I asked as the earth
+wavered under my feet.
+
+"No," acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of
+perplexity came into her own.
+
+I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to
+Dinkie's room and started my frantic search through his things. I
+could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were
+gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some
+hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his
+books and broken toys, at the still open copy of _The Count of Monte
+Cristo_ which he must have been poring over only the night before, at
+his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn
+shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial.
+Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into
+tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself
+becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging
+like lead from my heart.
+
+I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan's office. He was
+still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get
+in touch with him.
+
+I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the
+message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy
+had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, and remind me
+that much worse things could have happened.
+
+But I knew at once that he was genuinely alarmed at the news which I'd
+given him. It apparently staggered him for a moment. Then he said in
+his curt telephonic chest-tones, "I'll be up at the house, at once."
+
+He came, before I'd even completed a second and more careful search.
+His face was cold and non-committal enough, but his color was gone and
+there was a look that was almost one of contrition in his troubled
+eyes, which seemed unwilling to meet mine. He questioned Lossie and
+cross-examined Hilton and Tokudo, and then called up the Chief of
+Police. Then he telephoned to the different railway stations, and
+carried Lossie off in the car to the McArthurs', to interview Benny,
+and came back an hour later with that vague look of frustration still
+on his face.
+
+He sat down to luncheon, but he ate very little. He was silent for
+quite a long time.
+
+"Your boy's all right," he said in a much softer voice than I had
+expected from him. "He's big enough to look after himself. And we'll
+be on his trail before nightfall. He can't go far."
+
+"No; he can't go far," I echoed, trying to fortify myself with the
+knowledge that he must have taken little more than a dollar from the
+gilded cast-iron elephant which he used as a bank.
+
+"I don't want this to get in the papers," explained my husband.
+"It's--it's all so ridiculous. I've put Kearney and two of his men on
+the job. He's a private detective, and he'll keep busy until he gets
+the boy back."
+
+Duncan got up from the table, rather heavily. He stood hesitating a
+moment and then stepped closer to my chair.
+
+"I know it's hard," he said as he put a hand on my shoulder. "But
+it'll be all right. We'll get your boy back for you."
+
+I didn't speak, because I knew that if I spoke I'd break down and make
+an idiot of myself. My husband waited, apparently expecting me to say
+something. Then he took his hand away.
+
+"I'll get busy with the car," he said with a forced matter-of-factness,
+"and let you know when there's any news. I've wired Buckhorn and sent word
+to Casa Grande--and we ought to get some news from there."
+
+But there was no news. The afternoon dragged away and the house seemed
+like a tomb. And at five o'clock I did what I had wanted to do for
+six long hours. I sent off a forty-seven word telegram to Peter
+Ketley, telling him what had happened....
+
+Duncan came back, at seven o'clock, to get one of the new photographs
+of Dinkie and Lossie for identification purposes. They had rounded up
+a small boy at Morley and Kearney was motoring out to investigate.
+We'd know by midnight....
+
+It is well after midnight, and Duncan has just had a phone-message
+from Morley. The little chap they had rounded up was a Barnado boy
+fired with a sudden ambition to join his uncle in the gold-fields of
+Australia. Somewhere, in the blackness of this big night, my homeless
+Dinkie is wandering unguarded and alone.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Twenty-Ninth_
+
+
+I have had no word from Peter.... I've had no news to end the ache
+that pins me like a spear-head to the wall of hopelessness. Duncan, I
+know, is doing all he can. But there is so little to do. And this
+world of ours, after all, is such a terrifyingly big one.
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Thirtieth_
+
+
+I was called to the phone before breakfast this morning and it was the
+blessed voice of Peter I heard from the other end of the wire. My
+telegram had got out to him from Buckhorn a day late. But he had no
+definite news for me. He was quite fixed in his belief, however, that
+Dinkie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.
+
+"The boy will travel this way," he assured me. "He's bound to do that.
+It's as natural as water running down-hill!"
+
+Duncan asked me whom I'd been talking to, and I had to tell him. His
+face clouded and the familiar quick look of resentment came into his
+eyes.
+
+"I can't see what that Quaker's got to do with this question," he
+barked out. But I held my peace.
+
+
+
+
+_Sunday the First_
+
+
+I have found a message from my Dinkie. I came across it this morning,
+by accident. It was in my sewing-basket, the basket made of birch-bark
+and stained porcupine quills and lined with doe-skin, which I'd once
+bought from a Reservation squaw in Buckhorn with a tiny papoose on her
+back. Duncan had upbraided me for passing out my last five-dollar bill
+to that hungry Nitchie, but the poor woman needed it.
+
+My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the note. And written there in
+the script I knew so well I read:
+
+  "Darligest Mummsey:
+
+  I am going away. But dont worry about me for I will be alright. I
+  couldn't stay Mummsey after what hapened. Some day I will come
+  back to you. But I'm not as bad as all that. I'll love you always
+  as much as ever. I can take care for myself so don't worry,
+  please. And please feed my two rabits reglar and tell Benny I'll
+  save his jacknife and rember every day I'm rembering you. X X X X
+  X X X
+
+  Your aff'cte son,
+
+                                                            DINKIE."
+
+It seemed like a voice from the dead, it was bittersweet consolation,
+and, in a way, it stood redemption of Dinkie himself. I'd been
+upbraiding him, in my secret heart of hearts, for his silence to his
+mother. That's a streak of his father in him, had been my first
+thought, that unthinking cruelty which didn't take count of the
+anguish of others. But he hadn't forgotten me. Whatever happens, I
+have at least this assuaging secret message from my son. And some day
+he'll come back to me. "Ye winna leave me for a', laddie?" I keep
+saying, in the language of old Whinstane Sandy. And my mind goes back,
+almost six years at a bound, to the time he was lost on the prairie.
+That time, I tell myself, God was good to me. And surely He will be
+good to me again!
+
+
+
+
+_Tuesday the Third_
+
+
+We still have no single word of our laddie.... They all tell me not to
+worry. But how can a mother keep from worrying? I had rather an awful
+nightmare last night, dreaming that Dinkie was trying to climb the
+stone wall about our place. He kept falling back with bleeding
+fingers, and he kept calling and calling for his mother. Without being
+quite awake I went down to the door in my night-gown, and opened it,
+and called out into the darkness: "Is anybody there? Is it you,
+Dinkie?"
+
+My husband came down and led me back to bed, with rather a frightened
+look on his face.
+
+They tell me not to worry, but I've been up in Dinkie's room turning
+over his things and wondering if he's dead, or if he's fallen into the
+hands of cruel people who would ill-use a child. Or perhaps he has
+been stolen by Indians, and will come back to me with a morose and
+sullen mind, and with scars on his body....
+
+
+
+
+_Thursday the Fifth_
+
+
+What a terrible thing is loneliness. The floors of Hell, I'm sure, are
+paved with lonesome hearts. Day by day I wait and long for my laddie.
+Always, at the back of my brain, is that big want. Day by day I brood
+about him and night by night I dream of him. I turn over his old
+playthings and his books, and my throat gets tight. I stare at the
+faded old snap-shots of him, and my heart turns to lead. I imagine I
+hear his voice, just outside the door, or just beyond a bend in the
+road, and a two-bladed sword of pain pushes slowly through my
+breast-bone. Dear old Lossie comes twice a day, and does her best to
+cheer me up. And Gershom has offered to give up his school and join in
+the search. Peter Ketley, he tells me, has been on the road for a
+week, in a car covered with mud and clothes that have never come off.
+
+
+
+
+_Friday the Sixth_
+
+
+There is no news of my Dinkie. And _that_, I remind myself, is the
+only matter that counts.
+
+Lois Murchison drove up to-day in her hateful big car. She did not
+find me a very agreeable hostess, I'm afraid, but curled up like a
+nonchalant green snake in one of my armchairs and started to smoke and
+talk. She asked where Duncan was and I had to explain that he'd been
+called out to the mines on imperative business. And that started her
+going on the mines. Duncan, she said, should clean up half a million
+before he was through with that deal. He had been very successful.
+
+"But don't you feel, my dear," she went on with quiet venom in her
+voice, "that a great deal of his success has depended on that
+bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?"
+
+"Is she that wonderful?" I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I
+was.
+
+"She's certainly wonderful to him!" announced the woman known as
+Slinkie. And having driven that poisoned dart well into the flesh,
+she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach
+for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she'd have to be toddling on
+to the hair-dresser's.
+
+Lois Murchison's implication, at that moment, didn't bother me much,
+for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell
+on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea
+of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a
+ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my
+husband's office and see his secretary, "to inspect the whaup," as
+Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more
+interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or
+two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he'd have news for
+me before the week was out.
+
+I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of
+hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter--and I know he would not
+trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.
+
+
+
+
+_Saturday the Seventh_
+
+
+There is no news of my Dinkie.... But there is news of another
+nature.
+
+Between ten and eleven this morning I had Hilton motor me down to
+Duncan's office in Eighth Avenue. It struck me as odd, at first, that
+I had never been there before. But Duncan, I remembered, had never
+asked me, the domestic fly, to step into his spider's parlor of
+commerce. And I found a ridiculous timidity creeping over me as I went
+up in the elevator, and found the door-number, and saw myself
+confronted by a cadaverous urchin in horn-rimmed specs, who thrust a
+paper-covered novel behind his chair-back and asked me what I wanted.
+So I asked him if this was Mr. McKail's office.
+
+"Sure," he said in the established vernacular of the West.
+
+"What is your name, little boy?" I inquired, with the sternest brand
+of condescension I could command.
+
+The young monkey drew himself up at that and flushed angrily. "Oh, I
+don't know as I'm so little," he observed, regarding me with a
+narrowing eye as I stepped unbidden beyond the sacred portals.
+
+"Where will I find Mr. McKail's secretary?" I asked, noticing the door
+in the stained-wood partition with "Private" on its frosted glass. The
+youth nodded his head toward the door in question and crossed to a
+desk where he proceeded languidly to affix postage-stamps to a small
+pile of envelopes.
+
+I hesitated for a moment, as though there was something epochal in the
+air, as though I was making a step which might mean a great deal to
+me. And then I stepped over to the door and opened it.
+
+I saw a young woman seated at a flat-topped desk, with a gold-banded
+fountain-pen in her fingers, checking over a column of figures. She
+checked carefully on to the end of her column, and then she raised her
+head and looked at me.
+
+Her face stood out with singular distinctness, in the strong
+side-light from the office-window. And the woman seated at the
+flat-topped desk was Alsina Teeswater.
+
+I don't know how long I stood there without speaking. But I could see
+the color slowly mount and recede on Alsina Teeswater's face. She put
+down her fountain-pen, with much deliberation, and sat upright in her
+chair, with her barricaded eyes every moment of the time on my face.
+
+"So this has started again?" I finally said, in little more than a
+whisper.
+
+I could see the girl's lips harden. I could see her fortifying herself
+behind an entrenchment of quietly marshaled belligerency.
+
+"It has never stopped, Mrs. McKail," she said in an equally low voice,
+but with the courage of utter desperation.
+
+It took some time, apparently, for that declaration to filter through
+to my brain. Everything seemed suddenly out of focus; and it was hard
+to readjust vision to the newer order of things. But I was calmer,
+under the circumstances, than I expected to be.
+
+"I'm glad I understand," I finally admitted.
+
+The woman at the desk seemed puzzled. Then she looked from me to her
+column of figures and from her column of figures to the huddled roofs
+and walls of the city and the greening foot-hills and the solemn white
+crowns of the Rockies behind them.
+
+"Are you quite sure, Mrs. McKail, that you do understand?" she asked
+at last, with just a touch of challenge in the question.
+
+"Isn't it quite simple now?" I demanded.
+
+She found the courage to face me again.
+
+"I don't think this sort of thing is ever simple," she replied, with
+much more emotion than I had expected of her.
+
+"But it's at least clear how it must end," I found the courage to
+point out to her.
+
+"Is that clear to _you_?" demanded the woman who was stepping into my
+shoes. It seemed odd, at the moment, that I should feel vaguely sorry
+for her.
+
+"Perhaps you might make it clearer," I prompted.
+
+"I'd rather Duncan did that," she replied, using my husband's first
+name, obviously, without knowing she had done so.
+
+"Wouldn't it be fairer--for the two of us--now? Wouldn't it be
+cleaner?" I rather tremulously asked of her.
+
+She nodded and stared down at the sheet covered with small columns of
+figures.
+
+"I don't know whether you know it or not," she said with a studied
+sort of quietness, "but last week Mr. McKail began making arrangements
+to establish a residence in Nevada. He will have to live there, of
+course, for at least six months, perhaps even longer."
+
+I could feel this sinking in, like water going through
+blotting-paper. The woman at the desk must have misinterpreted my
+silence, for she was moved to say, in a heavier effort at
+self-defense, "He _knew_, of course, that you cared for some one
+else."
+
+I looked at her, as though she were a thousand miles away. I stood
+there impressed by the utter inadequacy of speech. And the thing that
+puzzled me was that there was an air of honesty about the woman. She
+still so desperately clung to her self-respect that she wanted me to
+understand both her predicament and her motives. I could hear her
+explaining that my husband had no intention of going to Reno, but
+would live in Virginia City, where he was taking up some actual mining
+interests. Such things were not pleasant, of course. But this one
+could be put through without difficulty. Mr. McKail had been assured
+of that.
+
+I tried to pull myself together, wondering why I should so suddenly
+feel like a marked woman, a pariah of the prairies, as friendless and
+alone as a leper. Then I thought of my children. And that cleared my
+head, like a wind sweeping clean a smoky room.
+
+"But a case has to be made out," I began. "It would have to be proved
+that I----"
+
+"There will be no difficulty on that point, Mrs. McKail," went on the
+other woman as I came to a stop. "Provided the suit is not opposed."
+
+The significance of that quietly uttered phrase did not escape me. Our
+glances met and locked.
+
+"There are the children," I reminded her. And she looked a very
+commercialized young lady as she sat confronting me across her many
+columns of figures.
+
+"There should be no difficulty there--_provided_ the suit is not
+opposed," she repeated with the air of a physician confronted by a
+hypochondriacal patient.
+
+"The children are mine," I rather foolishly proclaimed, with my first
+touch of passion.
+
+"The children are yours," she admitted. And about her hung an air of
+authority, of cool reserve, which I couldn't help resenting.
+
+"That is very generous of you," I admitted, not without ironic
+intent.
+
+She smiled rather sadly as she sat looking at me.
+
+"It's something that doesn't rest with either of us," she said with
+the suspicion of a quaver in her voice. And _she_, I suddenly
+remembered, might some day sit eating her pot of honey on a grave. I
+realized, too, that very little was to be gained by prolonging that
+strangest of interviews. I wanted quietude in which to think things
+over. I wanted to go back to my cell like a prisoner and brood over my
+sentence....
+
+And I have thought things over. I at last see the light. From this day
+forward there shall be no vacillating. I am going back to Casa
+Grande.
+
+I have always hated this house; I have always hated everything about
+the place, without having the courage to admit it. I have done my
+part, I have made my effort, and it was a wasted effort. I wasn't even
+given a chance. And now I shall gather my things together and go back
+to my home, to the only home that remains to me. I shall still have my
+kiddies. I shall have my Poppsy and--But sharp as an arrow-head the
+memory of my lost boy strikes into my heart. My Dinkie is gone. I no
+longer have him to make what is left of my life endurable....
+
+It is raining to-night, I notice, steadily and dismally. It is a dark
+night, outside, for lost children....
+
+Duncan has just come home, wet and muddy, and gone up to his room. The
+gray-faced solemnity with which he strode past me makes me feel sure
+that he has been conversing with his lady-love. But what difference
+does it make? What difference does _anything_ make? In the matter of
+women, I have just remembered, what may be one man's meat is another
+man's poison. But I can't understand these reversible people, like
+house-rugs, who can pretend to love two ways at once.... I only know
+one man, in all the wide world, who has not shattered my faith in his
+kind. He is one of those neck-or-nothing men who never change.
+
+There are many ranchers, out in this country, who keep what they call
+a blizzard-line. It's a rope that stretches in winter from their
+house-door to their shed or their stable, a rope that keeps them from
+getting lost when a blizzard is raging. Peter, I know, has been my
+blizzard-line. And in some way, please God, he will yet lead me back
+to warmth. He is himself out there in the cold, accepting it, all the
+time, with the same quiet fortitude that a Polar bear might. But he
+will thole through, in the end. For with all his roughness he can be
+unexpectedly adroit. Whinstane Sandy once told me something he had
+learned about Polar bears in his old Yukon days: with all their
+heaviness, they can go where a dog daren't venture. If need be, they
+can flatten out and slide over a sheet of ice too thin to support a
+running dog. And the drift-ice may be widening, but I refuse to give
+up my hope of hope. "Let the mother go," as the Good Book says, "that
+it may be well with thee!" ...
+
+I have just remembered that I tried to shoot my husband once. He may
+make use of _that_, when he gets down to Virginia City. It might, in
+fact, help things along very materially. And Susie's eyes will
+probably pop out, when she reads it in a San Francisco paper....
+
+I've thought of so many clever things I should have said to Alsina
+Teeswater. As I look back, I find it was the other lady who did about
+all the talking. There were old ulcerations to be cleared away, of
+course, and I let her talk about the same as you let a dentist work
+with his fingers in your mouth.... But now I must go up and make sure
+my Poppsy is safely tucked in. I have just opened the door and looked
+out. It is storming wretchedly. God pity any little boys who are
+abroad on such a night!
+
+
+
+
+_Two Hours Later_
+
+
+It is well past midnight. But there is no sleep this night for Chaddie
+McKail. I am too happy to sleep. I am too happy to act sane. For my
+boy is safe. _Peter has found my Dinkie!_
+
+I was called to the telephone, a little after eleven, but couldn't
+hear well on the up-stairs extension, so I went to the instrument
+down-stairs, where the operator told me it was long-distance, from
+Buckhorn. So I listened, with my heart in my mouth. But all I could
+get was a buzz and crackle and an occasional ghostly word. It was the
+storm, I suppose. Then I heard Peter's voice, thin and faint and far
+away, but most unmistakably Peter's voice.
+
+"Can you hear me now?" he said, like a man speaking from the bottom of
+the sea.
+
+"Yes," I called back. "What is it?"
+
+"Get ready for good news," said that thin but valorous voice that
+seemed to be speaking from the tip-top mountains of Mars. But the
+crackling and burring cut us off again. Then something must have
+happened to the line, or we must have been switched to a better
+circuit. For, the next moment, Peter's voice seemed almost in the next
+room. It seemed to come closer at a bound, like a shore-line when you
+look at it through a telescope.
+
+"Is that any better?" he asked through his miles and miles of
+rain-swept blackness.
+
+"Yes, I can hear you plainly now," I told him.
+
+"Ah, yes, that _is_ better," he acknowledged. "And everything else is,
+too, my dear. For I've found your Dinkie and----"
+
+"You've found Dinkie?" I gasped.
+
+"I have, thank God. And he's safe and sound!"
+
+"Where?" I demanded.
+
+"Fast asleep at Alabama Ranch."
+
+"Is he all right?"
+
+"As fit as a fiddle--all he wants is sleep."
+
+"_Oh, Peter!_" It was foolish. But it was all I could say for a full
+minute. For my boy was alive, and safe. My laddie had been found by
+Peter--by good old Peter, who never, in the time of need, was known to
+fail me.
+
+"Where are you now?" I asked, when reason was once more on her
+throne.
+
+"At Buckhorn," answered Peter.
+
+"And you went all that way through the mud and rain, just to tell me?"
+I said.
+
+"I had to, or I'd blow up!" acknowledged Peter. "And now I'd like to
+know what you want me to do."
+
+"I want you to come and get me, Peter," I said slowly and distinctly
+over the wire.
+
+There was a silence of several seconds.
+
+"Do you understand what that means?" he finally demanded. His voice, I
+noticed, had become suddenly solemn.
+
+"Yes, Peter, I understand," I told him. "Please come and get me!" And
+again the silence was so prolonged that I had to cut in and ask: "Are
+you there?"
+
+And Peter's voice answered "Yes."
+
+"Then you'll come?" I exacted, determined to burn all my bridges
+behind me.
+
+"I'll be there on Monday," said Peter, with quiet decision. "I'll be
+there with Tithonus and Tumble-Weed and the old prairie-schooner. And
+we'll all trek home together!"
+
+"_Skookum!_" I said with altogether unbecoming levity.
+
+I patted the telephone instrument as I hung up the receiver. Then I
+sat staring at it in a brown study.
+
+Then I went careening up-stairs and woke Poppsy out of a sound sleep
+and hugged her until her bones were ready to crack and told her that
+our Dinkie had been found again. And Poppsy, not being quite able to
+get it through her sleepy little head, promptly began to bawl. But
+there was little to bawl over, once she was thoroughly awake. And then
+I went careening down to the telephone again, and called up Lossie's
+boarding-house, and had her landlady root the poor girl out of bed,
+and heard _her_ break down and have a little cry when I told her our
+Dinkie had been found. And the first thing she asked me, when she was
+able to talk again, was if Gershom Binks had been told of the good
+news. And I had to acknowledge that I hadn't even _thought_ of poor
+old Gershom, but that Peter Ketley would surely have passed the good
+word on to Casa Grande, for Peter always seemed to think of the right
+thing.
+
+And then I remembered about Duncan. For Duncan, whatever he may have
+been, was still the boy's father. And he must be told. It was my duty
+to tell him. So once more I climbed the stairs, but this time more
+slowly. I had to wait a full minute before I found the courage, I
+don't know why, to knock on Duncan's bedroom door.
+
+I knocked twice before any answer came.
+
+"What is it?" asked the familiar sleepy _bass_--and I realized what
+gulfs yawned between us when my husband on one side of that closed
+door could be lying lost in slumber and I on the other side of it
+could find life doing such unparalleled things to me. I felt for him
+as a girl home, tired from her first dance, feels for a young brother
+asleep beside a Noah's Ark.
+
+"What is it?" I heard Duncan's voice repeating from the bed.
+
+"It's me," I rather weakly proclaimed.
+
+"What has happened?" was the question that came after a moment's
+silence.
+
+I leaned with my face against the painted door-panel. It was smooth
+and cool and pleasant to press one's skin against.
+
+"They've found Dinkie," I said. I could hear the squeak of springs as
+my husband sat up in bed.
+
+"Is he all right?"
+
+"Yes, he's all right," I said with a great sigh. And I listened for an
+answering sigh from the other side of the door.
+
+But instead of that Duncan's voice asked: "Where is he?"
+
+"At Alabama Ranch," I said, without realizing what that acknowledgment
+meant. And again a brief period of silence intervened.
+
+"Who found him?" asked my husband, in a hardened voice.
+
+"Peter Ketley," I said, in as collected a voice as I could manage. And
+this time the significance of the silence did not escape me.
+
+"Then your cup of happiness ought to be full," I heard the voice on
+the other side of the door remark with heavy deliberateness. I stood
+there with my face leaning against the cool panel.
+
+"It is," I said with a quiet audacity which surprised me almost as
+much as it must have surprised the man on the bed a million miles away
+from me.
+
+
+
+
+_Sunday the Eighth_
+
+
+How different is life from what the fictioneers would paint it! How
+hopelessly mixed-up and macaronic, how undignified in what ought to be
+its big moments and how pompous in so many of its pettinesses!
+
+I told my husband to-day that Poppsy and I were going back to Casa
+Grande. And that, surely, ought to have been the Big Moment in the
+career of an unloved invertebrate. But the situation declined to take
+off, as the airmen say.
+
+"I guess that means it's about time we got unscrambled," the man I had
+once married and lived with quietly remarked.
+
+"Wasn't that your intention?" I just as quietly inquired.
+
+"It's what I've had forced on me," he retorted, with a protective
+hardening of the Holbein-Astronomer jaw-line.
+
+"I'm sorry," was all I could find to say.
+
+He turned to the window and stared out at his big white iron fountain
+set in his terraced lawn behind his endless cobble-stone walls. I
+couldn't tell, of course, what he was thinking about. But I myself was
+thinking of the past, the irrecoverable past, the irredeemable past,
+the singing years of my womanly youth that seemed to be sealed in a
+lowered coffin on which the sheltering earth would soon be heaped, on
+which the first clods were already dropping with hollow sounds. We
+each seemed afraid to look the other full in the eyes. So we armored
+ourselves, as poor mortals must do, in the helmets of pretended
+diffidence and the breast-plates of impersonality.
+
+"How are you going back?" my husband finally inquired. Whatever ghosts
+it had been necessary to lay, I could see, he had by this time laid.
+He no longer needed to stare out at the white iron fountain of which
+he was so proud.
+
+"I've sent for the prairie-schooner," I told him.
+
+His flush of anger rather startled me.
+
+"Doesn't that impress you as rather cheaply theatrical?" he demanded.
+
+"I fancy it will be very comfortable," I told him, without looking up.
+I'd apparently been attributing to him feelings which, after all, were
+not so desolating as I might have wished.
+
+"Every one to his own taste," he observed as he called rather sharply
+to Tokudo to bring him his humidor. Then he took out a cigar and
+lighted it and ordered the car. And that was the lee and the long of
+it. That was the way we faced our Great Divide, our forked trail that
+veered off East and West into infinity!
+
+
+
+
+_Thursday the Eleventh_
+
+
+The trek is over. And it was not one of triumph. For we find
+ourselves, sometimes, in deeper water than we imagine. Then we have to
+choke and gasp for a while before we can get our breath back.
+
+Peter, in the first place, didn't appear with the prairie-schooner. He
+left that to come later in the day, with Whinnie and Struthers. He
+appeared quite early Monday morning, with fire in his eye, and with a
+demand to see the master of the house. Heaven knows what he had heard,
+or how he had heard it. But the two men were having it hot and heavy
+when I felt it was about time for me to step into the room. To be
+quite frank, I had not expected any such outburst from Duncan. I knew
+his feelings were not involved, and where you have a vacuum it is
+impossible, of course, to have an explosion. I interpreted his
+resentment as a show of opposition to save his face. But I was wrong.
+And I was wrong about Peter. That mild-eyed man is no plaster saint.
+He can fight, if he's goaded into it, and fight like a bulldog. He
+was saying a few plain truths to Duncan, when I stepped into the room,
+a few plain truths which took the color out of the Dour Man's face and
+made him shake with anger.
+
+"For two cents," Duncan was rather childishly shouting at him, "I'd
+fill you full of lead!"
+
+"Try it!" said Peter, who wasn't any too steady himself. "Try it, and
+you'd at least end up with doing something in the open!"
+
+Duncan studied him, like a prize-fighter studying his waiting
+opponent.
+
+"You're a cheap actor," he finally announced. "This sort of thing
+isn't settled that way, and you know it."
+
+"And it's not going to be settled the way you intended," announced
+Peter Ketley.
+
+"What do you know about my intentions?" demanded Duncan.
+
+"Much more than you imagine," retorted Peter. "I've got your record,
+McKail, and I've had it for three years. I've stood by, until now; but
+the time has come when I'm going to have a hand in this thing. And
+you're not going to get your freedom by dragging this woman's name
+through a divorce-court. If there's any dragging to be done, it's
+your carcass that's going to be tied to the tail-board!"
+
+Duncan stood studying him with a face cheese-colored with hate.
+
+"Aren't you rather double-crossing yourself?" he mocked.
+
+"I'm not thinking about myself," said Peter.
+
+"Then what's prompting all the heroics?" demanded Duncan.
+
+"For two years and more, McKail," Peter cried out as he stepped closer
+to the other man, "you've given this woman a pretty good working idea
+of hell. And I've seen enough of it. It's going to end. It's got to
+end. But it's not going to end the way you've so neatly figured out!"
+
+"Then how do you propose to end it?" Duncan demanded, with a sort of
+second-wind of composure. But his face was still colorless.
+
+"You'll see when the time comes," retorted Peter.
+
+"You may have rather a long wait," taunted Duncan.
+
+"I have waited a number of years," answered the other man, with a
+dignity which sent a small thrill up and down my spine. "And I can
+wait a number of years more if I have to."
+
+"We all knew, of course, that you were waiting," sneered my husband.
+
+Peter turned to fling back an answer to that, but I stepped between
+them. I was tired of being haggled over, like marked-down goods on a
+bargain-counter. I was tired of being a passive agent before forces
+that seemed stripping me of my last shred of dignity. I was tired of
+the shoddiness of the entire shoddy situation.
+
+And I told them so. I told them I'd no intention of being bargained
+over, and that I'd had rather enough of men for the rest of my natural
+life, and if Duncan wanted his freedom he was at liberty to take it
+without the slightest opposition from me. And I said a number of other
+things, which I have no wish either to remember or record. But it
+resulted in Duncan staring at me in a resurrection-plant sort of way,
+and in Peter rather dolorously taking his departure. I wanted to call
+him back, but I couldn't carpenter together any satisfactory excuse
+for his coming back, and I couldn't see any use in it.
+
+So instead of journeying happily homeward in the cavernous old
+prairie-schooner, I felt a bit ridiculous as Tokudo impassively
+carried our belongings out to the canvas-covered wagon and Poppsy and
+I climbed aboard. The good citizens of American Hill stared after us
+as we rumbled down through the neatly boulevarded streets, and I felt
+suspiciously like a gypsy-queen who'd been politely requested by the
+local constabulary to move on.
+
+It wasn't until we reached the open country that my spirits revived.
+Then the prairie seemed to reach out its hand to me and give me peace.
+We camped, that first night, in the sheltering arm of a little coulee
+threaded by a tiny stream. We cooked bacon and eggs and coffee while
+Whinnie out-spanned his team and put up his tent.
+
+I sat on an oat-sack, after supper, with Poppsy between my knees,
+watching the evening stars come out. They were worlds, I remembered,
+some of them worlds perhaps with sorrowing men and women on them. And
+they seemed very lonely and far-away worlds, until I heard the drowsy
+voice of my Poppsy say up through the dusk: "In two days more, Mummy,
+we'll be back to Dinkie, won't we?"
+
+And there was much, I remembered, for which a mother should be
+thankful.
+
+
+
+
+_Sunday the Fourteenth_
+
+
+_Dark, and true, and tender is the North._ Heaven bless the rhymster
+who first penned those words. Spring is stealing hack to the prairie,
+and our world is a world of beauty. The sky to-day is windrowed with
+flat-bottomed cumulus-clouds, tier beyond tier above a level plane of
+light, marking off the infinite distance like receding mile-stones on
+a world turned over on its back. Occasionally the outstretched head of
+a wild duck, pumping north with a black throb of wings, melts away to
+a speck in the opaline air. Back among the muskeg reeds the waders are
+courting and chattering, and early this morning I heard the plaintive
+winnowing call-note of the Wilson snipe, and later the _punk-e-lunk_
+love-cry of a bittern to his mate. There's an eagle planing in lazy
+circles high in the air, even now, putting a soft-pedal on the noise
+of the coots and grebes as he circles over their rush-lined cabarets.
+And somewhere out on the range a bull is lowing. It is the season of
+love and the season of happiness. Dinkie and Poppsy and I are going
+out to gather prairie-crocuses. They are thick now in the prairie-sod,
+soft blue and lavender and sometimes mauve. We must dance to the
+vernal saraband while we can: Spring is so short in this norland
+country of ours. It comes late. But as Peter says, A late spring never
+deceives....
+
+I thought I had offended Peter for life. But when he appeared late
+this afternoon and I asked him why he had kept away from me, he said
+these first few days naturally belonged to Dinkie and he'd been busy
+studying marsh-birds. He looked rather rumpled and muddy, and
+impressed me as a man sadly in need of a woman to look after his
+things.
+
+"Let's ride," said Peter. "I want to talk to you."
+
+I was afraid of that talk, but I was more afraid something might
+happen to interfere with it. So I changed into my old riding-duds and
+put on my weather-stained old sombrero and we saddled Buntie and
+Laughing-Gas and went loping off over the sun-washed prairie with our
+shadows behind us.
+
+We rode a long way before Peter said anything. I wanted to be happy,
+but I wasn't quite able to be. I tried to think of neither the past
+nor the future, but there were too many ghosts of other days loping
+along the trail beside us.
+
+"What are you going to do?" Peter finally inquired.
+
+"About what?" I temporized as he pulled up beside me.
+
+"About everything," he ungenerously responded.
+
+"I don't know what to do, Peter," I had to acknowledge. "I'm like a
+barrel without hoops. I want to stick together, but one more thump
+will surely send me to pieces!"
+
+"Then why not get the hoops around?" suggested Peter.
+
+"But where will I get the hoops?" I asked.
+
+"Here," he said. He was, I noticed, holding out his arms. And I
+laughed, even though my heart was heavy.
+
+"Men have been a great disappointment to me, Peter," I said with a
+shake of my sombrero.
+
+"Try me," suggested Peter.
+
+But still again I had to shake my head.
+
+"That wouldn't be fair, Peter," I told him. "I can't spoil your life
+to see what's left of my own patched up."
+
+"Then you're going to spoil two of 'em!" he promptly asserted.
+
+"But I don't believe in that sort of thing," I did my best to explain
+to him. "I've had my innings, and _I'm out_. I've a one-way heart, the
+same as a one-way street. I don't think there's anything in the world
+more odious than promiscuity. That's a big word, but it stands for an
+even bigger offense against God. I've always said I intended to be a
+single-track woman."
+
+"But your track's blown up," contended Peter.
+
+"Then I'll have to lay me a new one," I said with a fine show of
+assurance.
+
+"And do you know where it will lead?" he demanded,
+
+"Where?" I asked.
+
+"Straight to me," he said as he studied me with eyes that were so
+quiet and kind I could feel a flutter of my heart-wings.
+
+But still again I shook my head.
+
+"That would be bringing you nothing but a withered up old has-been," I
+said with a mock-wail of misery.
+
+And Peter actually laughed at that.
+
+"It'll be a good ten years before you've even grown up," he retorted.
+"And another twenty years before you've really settled down!"
+
+"You're saying I'll never have sense," I objected. "And I know you're
+right."
+
+"That's what I love about you," averred Peter.
+
+"What you love about me?" I demanded.
+
+"Yes," he said with his patient old smile, "your imperishable
+youthfulness, your eternal never-ending eternity-defying golden-tinted
+girlishness!"
+
+A flute began to play in my heart. And I knew that like Ulysses's men
+I would have to close my ears to it. But it's easier to row past an
+island than to run away from your own heart.
+
+"I know it's a lie, Peter, but I love you for saying it. It makes me
+want to hug you, and it makes me want to pirouette, if I wasn't on
+horseback. It makes my heart sing. But it's only the singing of one
+lonely little chickadee in the middle of a terribly big pile of ruins.
+For that's all my life can be now, just a hopeless smash-up. And
+you're cut out for something better than a wrecking-car for the rest
+of your days."
+
+"No, no," protested Peter. "It's _you_ who've got to save _me_."
+
+"Save you?" I echoed.
+
+"You've got to give me something to live for, or I'll just rust away
+in the ditch and never get back to the rails again."
+
+"Peter!" I cried.
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+"You're not playing fair. You're trying to make me pity you."
+
+"Well, don't you?" demanded Peter.
+
+"I would if I saw you sacrificing your life for a woman with a
+crazy-quilt past."
+
+"I'm not thinking of the past," asserted Peter, "I'm thinking of the
+future."
+
+"That's just it," I tried to explain. "I'll have to face that future
+with a clouded name. I'll be a divorced woman. Ugh! I always thought
+of divorced women as something you wouldn't quite care to sit next to
+at table. I hate divorce."
+
+"I'm a Quaker myself," acknowledged Peter. "But I occasionally think
+of what Cobbett once said: 'I don't much like weasels. Yet I hate
+rats. Therefore I say success to the weasels!'"
+
+"I don't see what weasels have to do with it," I complained.
+
+"Putting one's house in order again may sometimes be as beneficent as
+surgery," contended Peter.
+
+"And sometimes as painful," I added.
+
+"Yet there's no mistake like not cleaning up old mistakes."
+
+"But I hate it," I told him. "It all seems so--so cheap."
+
+"On the contrary," corrected Peter, "it's rather costly." He pulled up
+across my path and made me come to a stop. "My dear," he said, very
+solemn again, "I know the stuff you're made of. I know you've got to
+climb to the light by a path of your own choosing. And you have to see
+the light with your own eyes. But I'm willing to wait. I _have_
+waited, a very long time. But there's one fact you've got to face: I
+love you too much ever to dream of giving you up."
+
+I don't think either of us moved for a full moment. The flute was
+singing so loud in my heart that I was afraid of myself. And,
+woman-like, I backed away from the thing I wanted.
+
+"It's not _me_, Peter, I must remember now. It's my bairns. I've two
+bairns to bring up."
+
+"I've got the three of you to bring up," maintained Peter. And that
+made us both sit silent for another moment or two.
+
+"It's not that simple," I finally said, though Peter smiled guardedly
+at my ghost of a smile.
+
+"It would be if you cared for me as much as Dinkie does," he said with
+quite unnecessary solemnity.
+
+"Oh, Peter, I do, I do," I cried out as the memory of all I owed him
+surged mistily through my mind. "But a gray hair is something you
+can't joke away. And I've got five of them, right here over my left
+ear. I found them, months ago. And they're there to stay!"
+
+"How about my bald spot?" demanded my oppressor and my deliverer
+rolled into one.
+
+"What's a bald spot compared to a bob-cat of a temper like mine?" I
+challenged, remembering how I'd once heard a revolver-hammer snap in
+my husband's face.
+
+"But it's your spirit I like," maintained the unruffled Peter.
+
+"You wouldn't always," I reminded him.
+
+Yet he merely looked at me with his trust-me-and-test-me expression.
+
+"I'll chance it!" he said, after a quite contented moment or two of
+meditative silence.
+
+"But don't you see," I went forlornly arguing on, "it mustn't be a
+chance. That's something people of our age can never afford to take."
+
+And Peter, at that, for some reason I couldn't fathom, began to wag
+his head. He did it slowly and lugubriously, like a man who inspects a
+road he has no liking for. But at the same time, apparently, he was
+finding it hard to tuck away a small smile of triumph.
+
+"Then we must never see each other again," he solemnly asserted.
+
+"Peter!" I cried.
+
+"I must go away, at once," he meditatively observed.
+
+"_Peter!_" I said again, with the flute turning into a pair of
+ice-tongs that clamped into the corners of my heart.
+
+"Far, far away," he continued as he studiously avoided my eye. "For
+there will be safety now only in flight."
+
+"Safety from what?" I demanded.
+
+"From you," retorted Peter.
+
+"But what will happen to _me_, if you do that?" I heard my own voice
+asking as Buntie started to paw the prairie-floor and I did my level
+best to fight down the black waves of desolation that were
+half-drowning me. "What'll there be to hold me up, when you're the
+only man in all this world who can keep my barrel of happiness from
+going slap-bang to pieces? What----?"
+
+"_Verboten!_" interrupted Peter. But that solemn-soft smile of his
+gathered me in and covered me, very much as the rumpled feathers of a
+mother-bird cover her young, her crazily twittering and crazily
+wandering young who never know their own mind.
+
+"What'll happen to me," I went desperately on, "when you're the only
+man alive who understands this crazy old heart of mine, when you've
+taught me to hitch the last of my hope on the one unselfish man I've
+ever known?"
+
+This seemed to trouble Peter. But only remotely, as the lack of
+grammar in the Lord's Prayer might affect a Holy Roller. He insisted,
+above all things, on being judicial.
+
+"Then I'll have to come back, I suppose," he finally admitted, "for
+Dinkie's sake."
+
+"Why for Dinkie's sake?" I asked.
+
+"Because some day, my dear, our Dinkie is going to be a great man. And
+I want to have a hand in fashioning that greatness."
+
+I sat looking at the red ball of the sun slipping down behind the
+shoulder of the world. A wind came out of the North, cool and sweet
+and balsamic with hope. I heard a loon cry. And then the earth was
+still again.
+
+"_We'll be waiting_," I said, with a tear of happiness tickling the
+bridge of my nose. And then, so that Peter might not see still another
+loon crying, I swung Buntie sharply about on the trail. And we rode
+home, side by side, through the twilight.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Prairie Child, by Arthur Stringer
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