Saturday the Twenty-fifth
Dinky-Dunk is back. At least he sleeps and breakfasts at home, but the rest of the time he is over at Casa Grande getting his crop cut. He’s too busy, I fancy, to pay much attention to our mutual lack of attention. But the compact was made, and he seems willing to comply with it. The only ones who fail to regard it are the children. I hadn’t counted on them. There are times, accordingly, when they somewhat complicate the situation. It didn’t take them long to get re-acquainted with their daddy. I could see, from the first, that he intended to be very considerate and kind with them, for I’m beginning to realize that he gets a lot of fun out of the kiddies. Pee-Wee will go to him, now, from anybody. He goes with an unmistakable expression of “Us-men-have-got-to-stick-together” satisfaction on his little face.
But Dinky-Dunk’s intimacies, I’m glad to say, do not extend beyond the children. Three days ago, though, he asked me about turning his hogs in on my land. It doesn’t sound disturbingly emotional. But if what’s left of my crop, of course, is any use to Duncan, he’s welcome to it....
I looked for that letter which I wrote to Dinky-Dunk several weeks ago, looked for it for an hour and more this morning, but haven’t succeeded in finding it. I was sure that I’d put it between the pages of the old ranch journal. But it’s not there.
Last night before I turned in I read all of Meredith’sModern Love. It was nice to remember that once, at Box Hill, I’d felt the living clasp of the hand which had written that wonderful series of poems. But never before did I quite understand that elaborated essay in love-moods. It came like a friendly voice, like an understanding comrade who knows the world better than I do, and brought me comfort, even though the sweetness of it was slightly acidulated, like a lemon-drop. And as for myself, I suppose I’ll continue to
“............sit contentedly
And eat my pot of honey on the grave.”
Sunday the Second
I have written to Uncle Carlton again, asking him about my Chilean Nitrate shares. If the company’s reorganized and the mines opened again, surely my stock ought to be worth something.
The days are getting shorter, and the hot weather is over for good, I hope. I usually like autumn on the prairie, but the thought of fall, this year, doesn’t fill me with any inordinate joy. I’m unsettled and atonic, and it’s just as well, I fancy, that I’m weaning the Twins.
It’s not the simple operation I’d expected, but the worst is already over. Pee-Wee is betraying unmistakable serpentine powers, and it’s no longer safe to leave him on a bed. Poppsy is a fastidious little lady, and apparently a bit of a philosopher. She is her father’s favorite. Whinstane Sandy is loyal to little Dinkie, and, now that the evenings are longer, regales him on stories, stories which the little tot can only half understand. But they must always be about animals, and Whinnie seems to run to wolves. He’s told the story of the skater and the wolves, with personal embellishments, and Little Red Riding-Hood in aversion all his own, and last night, I noticed, he recounted the tale of the woman in the sleigh with her children when the pack of wolves pursued her. And first, to save herself and her family, she threw her little baby out to the brutes. And when they had gained on her once more, she threw out her little girl, and then her little boy, and then her biggest boy of ten. And when she reached a settlement and told of her deliverance, the Oldest Settler took a wood-ax and clove her head clear down to the shoulder-blades—the same, of course, being a punishment for saving herself at the expense of her little ones.
My Dinkie sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie’s autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in hisIvan Ivanovitch.
Dinky-Dunk, wandering in on the tail end of it, remarked: “That’s a fine story, that is, with all those coyotes singing out there!”
“The chief objection to it,” I added, “is that the lady didn’t drop her husband over first.”
Dinky-Dunk looked down at me as he filled his pipe.
“But the husband, as I remember the story, had been left behind to do what a mere husband could to save their home,” my spouse quietly reminded me.
Monday the Tenth
There was a heavy frost last night. It makes me feel that summer is over. Dinky-Dunk asked me yesterday why I disliked Casa Grande and never ventured over into that neighborhood. I evaded any answer by announcing that there were very few things I liked nowadays....
Only once, lately, have we spoken of Lady Allie. It was Dinky-Dunk, in fact, who first brought up her name in speaking of the signing of the transfer-papers.
“Is it true,” I found the courage to ask, “that you knew your cousin quite intimately as a girl?”
Dinky-Dunk laughed as he tamped down his pipe.
“Yes, itmusthave been quite intimately,” he acknowledged. “For when she was seven and I was nine we went all the way down Teignmouth Hill together in an empty apple-barrel—than which nothing that I know of could possibly be more intimate!”
I couldn’t join him in his mirth over that incident, for I happened to remember the look on Lady Alicia’s face when she once watched Dinky-Dunk mount his mustang and ride away. “Aren’t men lawds of creation?”she had dreamily inquired. “Not after you’ve lived with them for a couple of years,” I had been heartless enough to retort, just to let her know that I didn’t happen to have a skin like a Douglas pine.
Sunday the Sixteenth
I’ve just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It’s a very long and businesslike letter, in which he goes into details as to how our company has been incorporated inLa Association de Productores de Salitre de Chile, with headquarters at Valparaiso. It’s a new and rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies that with nitrate at ten shillings per Spanish quintal the returns on the investment, under the newer conditions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only, involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent. Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four,once the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America—and much more along the same lines.
That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have made me happy. But it didn’t. I couldn’t quite react to it. As usual, I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that, whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn’t come with sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence. I’ve even been wondering if there’s any news that could. For the one thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it’s youth, golden youth, that is slipping away from me?
It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow myself to become antiquated. I’m on the wrong track, in some way, but before I dry up into a winter apple I’m going to find out where the trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want life, Life—and oodles of it....
Among other things, by the way, which I’ve been missing are books. They at least are to be had forthe buying, and I’ve decided there’s no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I’ve had a “serious but not fatal wound,” as the newspapers say, to my personal vanity, but there’s no use in letting go of things, at my time of life. Pee-Wee, I’m sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that are slightly disturbing. Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked at me with widening eyes. “Mummy,” he called out, “I’ve got a m’sheen inside me!” And Whinnie’s explorations are surely worth emulating. I too have a machine inside me which some day I’ll be compelled to rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump, though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the emotions.
Saturday the Twenty-ninth
Dinky-Dunk is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, as a modern army of assault ignores a fortress by simply circling about its forbidding walls and leaving it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliberately and patiently making love to my children. He is entrenching himself in their affection.
He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me to interfere. Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old Dinky-Dunk’s face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me, in turn, of what a difference there is between your first child and the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year, but by the month.
It’s not that I love the Twins less. It’s only that the novelty has passed. And in one way it’s a good thing, for over your second and third baby you worryless. You know what is needed, and how to do it. You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. You know the way you have to go, henceforth, and you follow it. It is less a Great Adventure, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double-pointed tooth of Anxiety does not rowel quite so often at the core of your heart.... I’ve been wondering if, with the coming of the children, there is not something which slips away from the relationship between husband and wife. That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn’t big enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And itwasNature, you have to admit when you come to look it honestly in the face, Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I hadn’t loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. They would have been left to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that lonely and twilit No-Man’s Land of barren love and unwanted babes. And the only thing that keeps me human, nowadays, that keeps me from being a woman with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and bones and dehydrated ham-strings, is my kiddies. The thought of them, at any time of the day, can put a cedilla under my heart to soften it....
Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the children when they have their picture taken, is already deep in elaborating preparations for that expedition. She is improvising an English nurse’s uniform and has asked if there might be one picture of her and the children.
Tuesday the Fifteenth
The children have been away for a whole day, the first time in family history. And oh, what a difference it makes in this lonely little prairie home of ours! The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of it all was something quite beyond my imagination. I know now that I could never live apart from them. Whatever happens, I shall not be separated from my kiddies....
I spent my idle time in getting Peter’s music-box in working order. Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, thoughtlessly sat on the package of records and broke three of them. I’ve been trying over the others. They sound tinny and flat, and I’m beginning to suspect I haven’t my sound-box adjusted right. I’ve a hunger to hear good music. And without quite knowing it, I’ve been craving for city life again, for at least a taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a cloudy creature, and accused me of having a mutinous mouth. Men seem to think that love should be like an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of industrious winding-up rewarded by a long week of undeviating devotion.
Sunday the Twenty-seventh
The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and my being a mere spectator of the big and busy final act of the season’s drama reminds me of three years ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however, is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only woman in a circle of nine active-bodied men.
I begin to see that it’s true what Dinky-Dunk said about business looming bigger in men’s lives than women are apt to remember. He’s working hard, and his neck’s so thin that his Adam’s apple sticks out like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running much higher than he had figured. He’s as keen as ever he was for power and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he’s scheming for it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t deliberatelyusehis cousin Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. Yet Dinky-Dunk, with all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous. I feel sure of that.
He became philosophical, the other day when I complained about the howling of the coyotes, and protested it was these horizon-singers that kept the prairieclean. He even argued that the flies which seem such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing in disguise, since the unmolested animals over-eat when feed is plentiful and get black-rot. So out of suffering comes wisdom and out of endurance comes fortitude!
Thursday the Sixth
On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the season, or, rather, before the season. It wasn’t much of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was greatly worked up at the sight of it and I finally put on his little reefer and his waders and let him go out in it. But the weather had moderated, the snow turned to slush, and when I rescued Dinkie from rolling in what looked to him like a world of ice-cream he was a very wet boy.
On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and strong, woke up with a tight little chest-cough that rather frightened me. I went over to his crib and covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a couple of hours later, the cough had grown tighter. It turned into a sort of sharp bark. And this time I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got busy, rubbing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the skin was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry pectoral which I still had on the upper shelf of the cupboard.
When morning came he was no better. He seemed in a stupor, rousing only to bark into his pillow. I called Dinky-Dunk in, before he left in the pouringrain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indifferently, “Yes, the boy’s got a cold all right.” But that was all.
When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot gruel, but he declined it. He refused to eat, in fact, and remembering what Peter had once said about my first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect that I had a very sick boy on my hands.
At noon, when he seemed no better, I made a mild mustard-plaster and put it on the upper part of his little chest. I let it burn there until he began to cry with the discomfort of it. Then I tucked a double fold of soft flannel above his thorax.
As night came on he was more flushed and feverish than ever, and I wished to heaven that I’d a clinic thermometer in the house. For by this time I was more than worried: I was panicky. Yet Duncan, when he came in, and got out of his oil-skins, didn’t seem very sympathetic. He flatly refused to share my fears. The child, he acknowledged, had a croupy little chest-cold, but all he wanted was keeping warm and as much water as he could drink. Nature, he largely protested, would attend to a case like that.
I was ready to turn on him like a she-tiger, but I held myself in, though it took an effort. I saw Duncan go off to bed, dog-tired, of course, but I felt that to go to sleep, under the circumstances, would be criminal. Dinkie, in the meantime, was wakingevery now and then and barking like a baby-coyote. I could have stood it, I suppose, if that old Bobs of ours hadn’t started howling outside, in long-drawn and dreary howls of unutterable woe. I remembered about a dog always howling that way when somebody was going to die in the house. And I concluded, with an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to count Dinkie’s pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so nervous that I lost track of the beats. So I decided to call Dinky-Dunk.
He came in to us kind of sleepy-eyed and with his hair rumpled up, and asked, without thinking, what I wanted.
And I told him, with a somewhat shaky voice, what I wanted. I said I wanted antiphlogistine, and a pneumonia-jacket, and a doctor, and a trained nurse, and just a few of the comforts of civilization.
Dinky-Dunk, staring at me as though I were a madwoman, went over to Dinkie’s crib, and felt his forehead and the back of his neck, and held an ear against the boy’s chest, and then against his shoulder-blades. He said it was all right, and that I myself ought to be in bed. As though in answer to that Dinkie barked out his croupy protest, tight and hard, barked as I’d never heard a child bark before. And I began to fuss, for it tore my heart to think of that little body burning up with fever and being denied its breath.
“You might just as well get back to bed,” repeatedDinky-Dunk, rather impatiently. And that was the spark which set off the mine, which pushed me clear over the edge of reason. I’d held myself in for so long, during weeks and weeks of placid-eyed self-repression, that when the explosion did come I went off like a Big Bertha. I turned on my husband with a red light dancing before my face and told him he was a beast and a heartless brute. He tried to stop me, but it was no use. I even said that this was a hell of a country, where a white woman had to live like a Cree squaw and a child had to die like a sick hound in a coulée. And I said a number of other things, which must have cut to the raw, for even in the uncertain lamplight I could see that Dinky-Dunk’s face had become a kind of lemon-color, which is the nearest to white a sunburned man seems able to turn.
“I’ll get a doctor, if you want one,” he said, with an over-tried-patience look in his eyes.
“Idon’t want a doctor,” I told him, a little shrill-voiced with indignation. “It’s the child who wants one.”
“I’ll get your doctor,” he repeated as he began dressing, none too quickly. And it took him an interminable time to get off, for it was raining cats and dogs, a cold, sleety rain from the northeast, and the shafts had to be taken off the buckboard and a pole put in, for it would require a team to haul anything on wheels to Buckhorn, on such a night.
It occurred to me, as I stood at the window and saw Dinky-Dunk’s lantern wavering about in the rain while he was getting the team and hooking them on to the buckboard, that it would be only the decent thing to send him off with a cup of hot coffee, now that I had the kettle boiling. But he’d martyrize himself, I knew, by refusing it, even though I made it. And he was already sufficiently warmed by the fires of martyrdom.
Yet it was an awful night, I realized when I stood in the open door and stared after him as he swung out into the muddy trail with the stable lantern lashed to one end of his dashboard. And I felt sorry, and a little guilty, about the neglected cup of coffee.
I went back to little Dinkie, and found him asleep. So I sat down beside him. I sat there wrapped up in one of Dinky-Dunk’s four-point Hudson-Bays, deciding that if the child’s cough grew tighter I’d rig up a croup-tent, as I’d once seen Chinkie’s doctor do with little Gimlets. But Dinkie failed to waken. And I fell asleep myself, and didn’t open an eye until I half-tumbled out of the chair, well on toward morning.
By the time Dinky-Dunk got back with the doctor, who most unmistakably smelt of Scotch whisky, I had breakfast over and the house in order and the Twins fed and bathed and off for their morning nap. I had a fresh nightie on little Dinkie, who rather upset me by announcing that he wanted to get up and play withhis Noah’s Ark, for his fever seemed to have slipped away from him and the tightness had gone from his cough. But I said nothing as that red-faced and sweet-scented doctor looked the child over. His stethoscope, apparently, tickled Dinkie’s ribs, for after trying to wriggle away a couple of times he laughed out loud. The doctor also laughed. But Dinky-Dunk’s eye happened to meet mine.
It would be hard to describe his expression. All I know is that it brought a disagreeable little sense of shame to my hypocritical old heart, though I wouldn’t have acknowledged it, for worlds.
“Why, those lungs are clear,” I heard the man of medicine saying to my husband. “It’s been a nasty little cold, of course, but nothing to worry over.”
His optimism struck me as being rather unprofessional, for if you travel half a night to a case, it seems to me, it ought not to be brushed aside with a laugh. And I was rather sorry that I had such a good breakfast waiting for them. Duncan, it’s true, did not eat a great deal, but the way that red-faced doctor lapped up my coffee with clotted cream and devoured bacon and eggs and hot muffins should have disturbed any man with an elementary knowledge of dietetics. And by noon Dinkie was pretty much his old self again. I half expected that Duncan would rub it in a little. But he has remained discreetly silent.
Next time, of course, I’ll have a better idea of what to do. But I’ve been thinking that this exquisite and beautiful animalism known as the maternal instinct can sometimes emerge from its exquisiteness. Children are a joy and a glory, but you pay for that joy and glory when you see them stretched out on a bed of pain, with the shadow of Death hovering over them.
When I tried to express something like this to Dunkie last night, somewhat apologetically, he looked at me with an odd light in his somber old Scotch Canadian eye.
“Wait until you see him really ill,” he remarked, man-like, stubbornly intent on justifying himself. But I was too busy saying a little prayer, demanding of Heaven that such a day might never come, to bother about delivering myself of the many laboriously concocted truths which I’d assembled for my bone-headed lord and master. I was grateful enough for things as they were, and I could afford to be generous.
Sunday the Ninth
For the first time since I came out on the prairie, I dread the thought of winter. Yet it’s really something more than the winter I dread, since snow and cold have no terrors for me. I need only to look back about ten short months and think of those crystal-clear winter days of ours, with the sleigh piled up with its warm bear-robes, the low sun on the endless sea of white, the air like champagne, the spanking team frosted with their own breath, the caroling sleigh-bells, and the man who still meant so much to me at my side. Then the homeward drive at night, under violet clear skies, over drifts of diamond-dust, to the warmth and peace and coziness of one’s own hearth! It was often razor-edge weather, away below zero, but we had furs enough to defy any threat of frost-nip.
We still have the furs, it’s true, but there’s the promise of a different kind of frost in the air now, a black frost that creeps into the heart which no furs can keep warm....
We still have the furs, as I’ve already said, and I’ve been looking them over. They’re so plentifulin this country that I’ve rather lost my respect for them. Back in the old days I used to invade those mirrored and carpetedsalonswhere a trained and deferential saleswoman would slip sleazy and satin-lined moleskin coats over my arms and adjust baby-bear and otter and ermine and Hudson-seal next to my skin. It always gave me a very luxurious and Empressy sort of feeling to see myself arrayed, if only experimentally, in silver-fox and plucked beaver and fisher, to feel the soft pelts and observe how well one’s skin looked above seal-brown or shaggy bear.
But I never knew what it cost. I never even considered where they came from, or what they grew on, and it was to me merely a vague and unconfirmed legend that they were all torn from the carcasses of far-away animals. Prairie life has brought me a little closer to that legend, and now that I know what I do, it makes a difference.
For with the coming of the cold weather, last winter, Francois and Whinstane Sandy took to trapping, to fill in the farm-work hiatus. They made it a campaign, and prepared for it carefully, concocting stretching-rings and cutting-boards and fashioning rabbit-snares and overhauling wicked-looking iron traps, which were quite ugly enough even before they became stained and clotted and rusted with blood.
They had a very successful season, but even at thefirst it struck me as odd to see two men, not outwardly debased, so soberly intent on their game of killing. And in the end I got sick of the big blood-rusted traps and the stretching-rings and the blood-smeared cutting-boards and the smell of pelts being cured. For every pelt, I began to see, meant pain and death. In one trap Francois found only the foot of a young red fox: it had gnawed its leg off to gain freedom from those vicious iron jaws that had bitten so suddenly into its flesh and bone and sinew. He also told me of finding a young bear which had broken the anchor-chain of a twelve-pound trap and dragged it over one hundred miles. All the fight, naturally, was gone out of the little creature. It was whimpering like a woman when Francois came up with it—poor little tortured broken-hearted thing! And some empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metropolitan, on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky over her new ermine coat, without ever dreaming it’s a patchwork of animal sufferings that is keeping her fat body warm, and that she’s trying to make herself beautiful in a hundred tragedies of the wild.
If women only thought of these things! But we women have a very convenient hand-made imagination all our own, and what upsets us as perfect ladies we graciously avoid. Yet if the petticoated Vandal in that ermine coat were compelled to behold from herbox-chair in the Metropolitan, not a musty old love-affair set to music, but the spectacle of how each little animal whose skin she has appropriated had been made to suffer, the hours and sometimes days of torture it had endured, and how, if still alive when the trapper made the rounds of his sets, it had been carefully strangled to death by that frugal harvester, to the end that the pelt might not be bloodied and reckoned only as a “second”—if the weasel-decked lady, I repeat, had to witness all this with her own beaded eyes, our wilderness would not be growing into quite such a lonely wilderness.
Or some day, let’s put it, as one of these beaver-clad ladies tripped through the Ramble in Central Park, supposing a steel-toothed trap suddenly and quite unexpectedly snapped shut on her silk-stockinged ankle and she writhed and moaned there in public, over the week-end. Then possibly her cries of suffering might make her sisters see a little more light. But the beaver, they tell me, is trapped under the ice, always in running water. A mud-ball is placed a little above the waiting trap, to leave the water opaque, and when the angry iron jaws have snapped shut on their victim, that victim drowns, a prisoner. Francois used to contend shruggingly that it was an easy death. It may be easy compared with some of the other deaths imposed on his furry captives. Butit’s not my idea of bliss, drowning under a foot or two of ice with a steel trap mangling your ankle for full measure!
“We live forward, but we understand backward.” I don’t know who first said it. But the older I grow the more I realize how true it is.
Sunday the Umptieth
I’ve written to Peter, reminding him of his promise, and asking about the Pasadena bungalow.
It seems the one way out. I’m tired of living like an Alpine ibex, all day long above the snow-line. I’m tired of this blind alley of inaction. I’m tired of decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to get away to think things over, to step back and regain a perspective on the over-smudged canvas of life.
To remain at Alabama Ranch during the winter can mean only a winter of discontent and drifting—and drifting closer and closer to uncharted rocky ledges. There’s no ease for the mouth where one tooth aches, as the Chinese say.
Dinky-Dunk, I think, has an inkling of how I feel. He is very thoughtful and kind in small things, and sometimes looks at me with the eyes of a boy’s dog which has been forbidden to follow the village gang a-field. And it’s not that I dislike him, or that he grates on me, or that I’m not thankful enough for the thousand and one little kind things he does. But it’s rubbing on the wrong side of the glass. It can’t bring back the past. My husband of to-day is notthe Dinky-Dunk I once knew and loved and laughed with. To go back to dogs, it reminds me of Chinkie’s St. Bernard, “Father Tom,” whom Chinkie petted and trained and loved almost to adoration. And when poor old Father Tom was killed Chinkie in his madness insisted that a taxidermist should stuff and mount that dead dog, which stood, thereafter, not a quick and living companion but a rather gruesome monument of a vanished friendship. It was, of course, the shape and color of the thing he had once loved; but you can’t feed a hungry heart by staring at a pair of glass eyes and a wired tail without any wag in it.
Saturday the Ninth
Struthers and I have been busy making clothes, during the absence of Dinky-Dunk, who has been off duck-shooting for the last three days. He complained of being a bit tuckered out and having stood the gaff too long and needing a change. The outing will do him good. The children miss him, of course, but he’s promised to bring Dinkie home an Indian bow-and-arrow. I can see death and destruction hanging over the glassware of this household.... The weather has been stormy, and yesterday Whinnie and Struthers put up the stove in the bunk-house. They were a long time about it, but I was reluctant to stop the flutterings of Cupid’s wings.
Tuesday the Twelfth
I had a brief message from Peter stating the Pasadena house is entirely at my disposal.... Dinky-Dunk came back with a real pot-hunter’s harvest of wild ducks, which we’ll pick and dress and freeze for winter use. I’m taking the breast-feathers for my pillows and Whinstane Sandy is taking what’s left for a sleeping-bag—from which I am led to infer that he’s still reconciled to a winter of solitude. Struthers, I know, could tell him of a warmer bag than that, lined with downier feathers from the pinions of Eros. But, as I’ve said before, Fate, being blind, weaves badly.
Friday the Fifteenth
I’ve just told Dinky-Dunk of my decision to take the kiddies to California for the winter months. He rather surprised me by agreeing with everything I suggested. He feels, I think, as I do, that there’s danger in going aimlessly on and on as we have been doing. And it’s really a commonplace for the prairie rancher—when he can afford it—to slip down to California for the winter. They go by the thousand, by the train-load.
Friday the Sixth
It’s three long weeks since I’ve had time for either ink or retrospect. But at last I’m settled, though I feel as though I’d died and ascended into Heaven, or at least changed my world, as the Chinks say, so different is Pasadena to the prairie and Alabama Ranch. For as I sit here on theloggiaof Peter’s house I’m bathed in a soft breeze that is heavy with a fragrance of flowers, the air is the air of our balmiest midsummer, and in a pepper-tree not thirty feet away a mocking-bird is singing for all it’s worth. It seems a poignantly beautiful world. And everything suggests peace. But it was not an easy peace to attain.
In the first place, the trip down was rather a nightmare. It brought home to me the fact that I had three young barbarians to break and subjugate, three untrained young outlaws who went wild with their first plunge into train-travel and united in defiance of Struthers and her foolishly impressive English uniform which always makes me think of Regent Park. I have a suspicion that Dinky-Dunk all the while knew of the time I’d have, but sagely held his peace.
I had intended, when I left home, to take the boatat Victoria and go down to San Pedro, for I was hungry for salt water and the feel of a rolling deck under my feet again. But the antics of my three little outlaws persuaded me, before we pulled into Calgary, that it would be as well to make the trip south as short a one as possible. Dinkie disgraced me in the dining-car by insisting on “drinking” his mashed potatoes, and made daily and not always ineffectual efforts to appropriate all the fruit on the table, and on the last day, when I’d sagaciously handed him over to the tender mercies of Struthers, I overheard this dialogue:
“I want shooder in my soup!”
“But little boys don’t eat sugar in their soup.”
“I want shooder in my soup!”
“But, darling, mommie doesn’t eat sugar in her soup!”
“Shooder! Dinkie wants shooder, shooder in his soup!”
“Daddy never eats shooder in his soup, Sweetness.”
“I want shooder!”
“But really nice little boys don’t ask for sugar in their soup,” argued the patient-eyed Struthers.
“Shooder!” insisted the implacable tyrant. And he got it.
There was an exceptional number of babies and small children on board and my unfraternal little prairie-waifs did not see why every rattle and doll andautomatic toy of their little fellow travelers and sister tourists shouldn’t promptly become their own private property. And traveling with twins not yet a year old is scarcely conducive to rest.
And yet, for all the worry and tumult, I found a new peace creeping into my soul. It was the first sight of the Rockies, I think, which brought the change. I’d grown tired of living on a billiard-table, without quite knowing it, tired of the trimly circumscribed monotony of material life, of the isolating flat contention against hunger and want. But the mountains took me out of myself. They were Peter’s windmill, raised to the Nth power. They loomed above me, seeming to say: “We are timeless. You, puny one, can live but a day.” They stood there as they had stood from the moment God first whispered: “Let there be light”—and there was light. But no, I’m wrong there, as Peter would very promptly have told me, for it was only in the Cambrian Period that the cornerstone of the Rockies was laid. The geologic clock ticked out its centuries until the swamps of the Coal Period were full of Peter’s Oldest Inhabitants in the form of Dinosaurs and then came the Cretaceous Period and the Great Architect looked down and bade the Rockies arise, and tooled them into beauty with His blue-green glaciers and His singing rivers, and touched the lordliest peaks with wine-glow and filled the azure valleys with music and peace. And wethreaded along those valley-sides on our little ribbons of steel, skirted the shouting rivers and plunged into tiny twisted tubes of darkness, emerging again into the light and once more hearing the timeless giants, with their snow-white heads against the sunset, repeat their whisper: “We live and are eternal. Ye, who fret about our feet, dream for a day, and are forgotten!”
But we seemed to be stepping out into a new world, by the time we got to Pasadena. It was a summery and flowery and holiday world, and it impressed me as being solely and scrupulously organized for pleasure. Yet all minor surprises were submerged in the biggest surprise of Peter’s bungalow, which is really more like achâteau, and strikes me as being singularly like Peter himself, not amazingly impressive to look at, perhaps, but hiding from the world a startingly rich and luxurious interior. The house itself, half hidden in shrubbery, is of weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with thepatinaof time upon it. But it is a restful change from the spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of the paint-brush and the lawn-valet’s shears, so smug and new and strident in its paraded opulence. Peter’s gardens, in fact, are a rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of refinement driven too high had broken and tumbled over on itself.
The house, which is the shape of an “E” without the middle stroke, has a green-soddedpatiobetween the two wings, with a small fountain and a stained marble basin at the center. There are shade-trees and date-palms and shrubs and Romanesque-looking stone seats about narrow walks, for this is the only really formalized portion of the entire property. This leads off into a grove and garden, a confusion of flowers and trees where I’ve already been able to spot out a number of orange trees, some of them well fruited, several lemon and fig trees, a row of banana trees, or plants, whichever they should be called, besides pepper and palm and acacia and a long-legged double-file of eucalyptus at the rear. And in between is a pergola and a mixture of mimosa and wistaria and tamarisk and poppies and trellised roses and one woody old geranium with a stalk like a crab-apple trunk and growth enough to cover half a dozen prairie hay-stacks.
But, as I’ve already implied, it was the inside of the house that astonished me. It is much bigger than it looks and is crowded with the most gorgeous old things in copper and brass and leather and mahogany that I ever saw under one roof. It has three open fireplaces, a huge one of stone in the huge living-room, and rough-beamed ceilings of redwood, and Spanish tiled floors, and chairs upholstered with cowhide with the ranch-brand still showing in the tanned leather, and tables of Mexican mahogany set in redwoodframes, and several convenient little electric heaters which can be carried from room to room as they are needed.
Pinshaw, Peter’s gardener and care-taker, had before our arrival picked several clumps of violets, with perfume like the English violets, and the house was aired and everything waiting and ready when we came, even to two bottles of certified milk in the icebox for the babies and half a dozen Casaba melons for their elders. My one disturbing thought is that it will be a hard house to live up to. But Struthers, who is not untouched with herfolie de grandeur, has the slightly flurried satisfaction of an exile who has at last come into her own. One of the first things I must do, however, is to teach my kiddies to respect Peter’s belongings. In one cabinet of books, which is locked, I have noticed several which are by “Peter Ketley” himself. Yet that name meant nothing to me, when I met it out on the prairie and humiliated its owner by converting him into one of my hired hands.Ce monde est plein de fous.
Monday the Sixteenth
This is a great climate for meditation. And I have been meditating. Back at Alabama Ranch, I suppose, there’s twenty degrees of frost and a northwest wind like a search-warrant. Here there’s a pellucid blue sky, just enough breeze to rustle the bamboo-fronds behind me, and a tall girl in white lawn, holding a pale green parasol over her head and meandering slowly along the sun-steeped boulevard, which smells of hot tar.
I’ve been sitting here staring down that boulevard, with the strong light making me squint a little. I’ve been watching the two rows of date-palms along the curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring lazily in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth and shining asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished and opulent. The street is very quiet, but half-way down the block I can see a Jap gardener in brown denim sedately watering a well-barbered terrace. Stillfarther away, somebody, in one of the deep-shadowed porches, is tinkling a ukelele, and somebody that I can’t see is somewhere beating a rug. I can see a little rivulet of water that flows sparkling down the asphalted runnel of the curb. Then the clump of bamboos back by Peter’s bedroom window rustles crisply again and is quiet and the silence is broken by a nurse-maid calling to a child sitting in a toy motor-wagon. Then a touring-car purrs past, with the sun flashing on its polished metal equipment, and the toy motor child being led reluctantly homeward by the maid cries shrilly, and in the silence that ensues I can hear the faint hiss of a spray-nozzle that builds a transient small rainbow just beyond the trellis of Cherokee roses from which a languid white petal falls, from time to time.
It’s adolce-far-nienteday, as all the days seem to be here, and the best that I can do is sit and brood like a Plymouth Rock with a full crop. But I’ve been thinking things over. And I’ve come to several conclusions.
One is that I’m not so contented as I thought I was going to be. I am oppressed by a shadowy feeling of in some way sailing under false colors. I am also hounded by an equally shadowy impression that I’m a convalescent. Yet I find myself vulgarly healthy, my kiddies have all acquired a fine coat of tan, and only Struthers is slightly off her feed, having acquireda not unmerited attack of cholera morbus from over-indulgence in Casaba melon. But I keep wondering if Dinky-Dunk is getting the right sort of things to eat, if he’s lonely, and what he does in his spare time.
And another conclusion I’ve come to is that men, much as I hate to admit it, are built of a stronger fiber than women. They seem able to stand shock better than the weaker sex. They are not so apt to go down under defeat, to take the full count, as I have done. For I still have to face the fact that I was a failure. Then I turned tail and fled from the scene of my collapse. That flight, it is true, has brought me a certain brand of peace, but it is not an enduring peace, for you can’t run away from what’s in your own heart. And already I’m restless and ill-at-ease. It’s not so much that I’m dissatisfied; it’s more that I’m unsatisfied. There still seems to be something momentous left out of the plan of things. I have the teasing feeling of confronting something which is still impending, which is being withheld, which I can not reach out for, no matter how I try, until the time is ripe.... Those rustling bamboos so close to the room where I sleep have begun to bother me so much that I’m migrating to a new bedroom to-night. “There’s never anything without something!”