203Monday 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 be204a 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 have205greatnesses which the rest of the world must get along without. But that is only the flaunting ofLa 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 motherhasto 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 and206our 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!
207Wednesday 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 theFolliesand Tchaikowsky and brassieres and Strindberg with. And208I’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 coulée-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 full209fifteen 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.210
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, ifyouwas 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 of211all 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!
212Wednesday 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.213Yet 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,214quick 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 the215world. 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. I216saw 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:
love and friendship cypher
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.217
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.
218Friday 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.219
“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 theresomebody?” I found the courage to ask.220
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.
221Thursday 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 up222to 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 shrug223of 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 rejuvenatingme. I think I’ve been able to catch at least a hollow echo of her youth from her. IknowI 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’t224know 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.225It 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 life226mourning 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 Josieinsisted 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?
227Friday 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.
228Tuesday 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 the229chilled 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 reported230that 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.231
“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.232Through 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.233
“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.234
“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 forme,” 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 you235also 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 a236spoiled 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 I237made 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 into238submitting 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 receipt239for 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 ofTreasure Island. My boy smiled up at me, for a moment, but240his 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 ofJean 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.241
“It’s not a matter of thinking,” was Susie’s quiet retort. “Iknowyou 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 ofhauteur. 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!”242
“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 everhashappened?”
“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 that243question of Susie’s. Whathashappened 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 well244run 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!