39Sunday 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 their40wiles 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 wears41glasses 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 orderAraneida, he explained—if stretched out in a straight line would reach from the city of Chicago to the city of Paris. I told him that this was a most wonderful and a most interesting piece of information and hoped that some day we could verify it by actual test. Yet when I inquired whether he meant merely the environs of the city of Paris, or the very heart of the city such as the Place de l’Opéra, he studied me with the meditative eye with which Huxley must have once studied beetles.42
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 the43fifth 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.
44Friday 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 thatIshould 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 squeezed45out 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 loveThe Arabian NightsandThe 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.”46
“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 same47in his little igloo of ice with a pot of whale-blubber at his elbow,” observed my husband.
“You’re a brute, my dear Diddums, and more casually cruel than a Baffin-land cannibal,” I retorted. “But we’ll let it pass. For I’m talking about something that’s too fundamental to be upset by a bitter tongue. There was a time, I know, when I used to fret about the finer things I thought I was losing out of life, about the little hand-made fripperies people have been forced to conjure up and carpenter together to console them for having to live in human beehives made of steel and concrete. But I’m beginning to find out that joy isn’t a matter of geography and companionship isn’t a matter of over-crowded subways. And the strap-hangers and the train-catchers and the first-nighters can have what they’ve got. I don’t seem to envy them the way I used to. I don’t need a Louvre when I’ve got the Northern Lights to look at. And I can get along without an Æolian Hall when I’ve got a little music in my own heart—for it’s only what you’ve got there, after all, that really counts in this world!”
“All of which means,” concluded my husband, “that you are most unmistakably growing old!”48
“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.49
“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. They50did 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. It51makes 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 little52circle. 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 getatthe 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,53for 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. Iknowhe 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.
54Sunday 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 decaying55you’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’tfeelwithered—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. A56woman 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 of57all 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 undermyfeet and a creak in my knees and a fixed conviction that young folks never acted up inmyyouth 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. Sosursum 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-Dunk58walked 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.
59Wednesday the Seventh
Gershom has been studying some of my carbon-prints. He can’t for the life of him understand why I consider Dewing’sOld-fashioned Gownso beautiful, or why I should love Childe Hassam’sChurch at Old Lymeor see anything remarkable about Metcalf’sMay 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 inThe Old-fashioned Gownreminded him of me, only I was more vital. But all that talk about landscape and composition60and line and tone made me momentarily homesick for a glimpse of Old Lyme again, before I go to my reward.
But the mood didn’t last. And I no longer regret what’s lost. I don’t know what mysterious Divide it is I have crossed over, but it seems to be peace I want now instead of experience. I’m no longer envious of the East and all it holds. I’m no longer fretting for wider circles of life. The lights may be shining bright on many a board-walk, at this moment, but it means little to this ranch-lady. What I want now is a better working-plan for that which has already been placed before me. Often and often, in the old days, when I realized how far away from the world this lonely little island of Casa Grande and its inhabitants stood, I used to nurse a ghostly envy for the busier tideways of life from which we were banished. I used to feel that grandeur was in some way escaping me. I could picture what was taking place in some of those golden-gray old cities I had known: The Gardens of the Luxembourg when the horse-chestnuts were coming out in bloom, and the Château de Madrid in the Bois at the luncheon hour, or the Pre Catalan on a Sunday with heavenly sole in lemon and melted butter and a still more heavenly waltz as you sat eatingfraises des boissmothered in thick61crême 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’sQuelque-fleursall 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!62
They were all lovely enough, and still are, I suppose, but it’s a loveliness in some way involved with youth. So the memory of those far-off gaieties, which, after all, were so largely physical, no longer touch me with unrest. They’re wine that’s drunk and water that’s run under the bridge. Younger lips can drink of that cup, which was sweet enough in its time. Let the newer girls dance their legs off under the French crystals of the Ritz, and powder their noses over the Fountain of the Sunken Boat, and eat the numbered duck so reverentially doled out at La Tour d’Argent and puff their cigarettes behind the beds of begonias and marguerites at the Château Madrid. They too will get tired of it, and step aside for others. For the petal falls from the blossom and the blossom plumps out into fruit. And all those golden girls, when their day is over, must slip away from those gardens of laughter. When they don’t, they only make themselves ridiculous. For there’s nothing sadder than an antique lady of other days decking herself out in the furbelows of a lost youth. And I’ve got Dinky-Dunk’s overalls to patch and my bread to set, so I can’t think much more about it to-night. But after I’ve done my chores, and before I go up to bed, I’m going to readRabbi Ben Ezraright through63to 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 wasinme. 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 andTristanseemed shoddily sung to me. There was no thrill to it. And evenThe Jewels of the Madonnaimpressed 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 the64trick 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 the65thought 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 theBeaux Artscocktails 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 of66old 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!
67Saturday 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 to68get 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 given69up 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 and70tarnished 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 a71moment 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 lady72who 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 use73of 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 observed74not long ago, if that hunger can’t be satisfied at home, we wander off and snatch what we can on the wing. Some day when they’re rich, I overheard Dinky-Dunk announcing the other night, Pauline Augusta and her Dad are going to make the Grand Tour of Europe. And there, undoubtedly, do their best to pick up a Prince of the Royal Blood and have a château in Lombardy and a villa on the Riviera and a standing invitation to all the Embassy Balls!
Well, not if I know it. None of that penny-a-liner moonshine for my daughter. And as she grows older, I feel sure, I’ll have more influence over her. She’ll begin to realize that the battle of life hasn’t scarred up for nothing this wary-eyed old mater who’s beginning to know a hawk from a henshaw. I’ve learned a thing or two in my day, and one or two of them are going to be passed on to my offspring.
75Thursday 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—has76to 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 drawing77them 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 stay78with 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’sHoratiusto 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, at79that 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.