367Thursday 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.368He 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. If369there’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.”370
“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 climbed371aboard. 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 coulée 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.
372Sunday 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 thepunk-e-lunklove-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 going373out 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.374
“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 did375my best to explain to him. “I’ve had my innings, andI’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!”376
“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’syouwho’ve got to saveme.”
“Save you?” I echoed.
“You’ve got to give me something to live for, or377I’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.378
“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. Ihavewaited, 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 notme, 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.379
“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’t380fathom, 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 tome, 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 barrel381of 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 with382hope. 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