Tuesday the Eighth
Lady Alicia’s dinner is over and done with. I can’t say that it was a howling success. And I’m still very much in doubt as to itsraison d’être, as the youthful society reporters express it. At first I thought it might possibly be to flaunt my lost grandeur in my face. And then I argued with myself that it might possibly be to exhibit Sing Lo, the new Chink man-servant disinterred from one of the Buckhorn laundries. And still later I suspected that it might be a sort of demonstration of preparedness, like those carefully timed naval parades on the part of one of the great powers disquieted by the activities of a restive neighbor. And then came still another suspicion that it might possibly be a move to precipitate the impalpable, as it were, to put certain family relationships to the touch, and make finally certain as to how things stood.
But that, audacious as I felt Lady Alicia to be, didn’t quite hold water. It didn’t seem any more reasonable than my earlier theories. And all I’m really certain of is that the dinner was badly cooked and badly served, rather reminding me of a chow-housemeal on the occasion of a Celestial New Year. We all wore our every-day clothes (with Peter’s most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and Dinkie was given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the bareback rider who’s just been carried out on a stretcher. But Constraint was there, all the while, first in the form of Dinky-Dunk’s unoccupied chair, which remained that way until dinner was two-thirds through, and then in the form of Dinky-Dunk himself, whose explanation about some tractor-work keeping him late didn’t quite ring true. His harried look, I must acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me at least it was only too plain that he was there under protest.
I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met rôle, but it struck me as uncommonly like dancing on a coffin. And for all his garrulity, I know, Peter was really watching us with the eye of a hawk.
“I’m too old a dog,” I overheard him telling Lady Alicia, “ever to be surprised at the crumbling of an ideal or the disclosure of a skeleton.”
I don’t know what prompted that statement, but ithad the effect of making Lady Allie go off into one of her purl-two knit-two trances.
“I think you English people,” I heard him telling her a little later, “have a tendency to carry moderation to excess.”
“I don’t quite understand that,” she said, lighting what must have been about her seventeenth cigarette.
“I mean you’re all so abnormally normal,” retorted Peter—which impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie, worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him, “Lady Barbarina.” Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye: “Yes, I happen to have read a bit of Henry James.”
But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in what Lady Alicia had rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and airy over a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn’t sorry when those devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another theatricality presented itself when Dinky-Dunk announced that he’d take usback in the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble-Weed and our sea-going spring-wagon, with plenty of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of putting a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux and planted Peter meekly in the back seat with little Dinkie to hold and took the reins myself.
I started home with a lump in my throat and a weight in my heart, feeling it really wasn’t a home that I was driving toward. But it was one of those crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like electric-lights shining through cut-glass and the air was like a razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of sister-motes in the infinitudes of time and space.
“Nitchevo!” I said out loud, as I stopped on the trail to readjust and wrap the Twins in their rug-lined laundry-basket.
“In that case,” Peter unexpectedly remarked, “I’d like to climb into that front seat with you.”
“Why?” I asked, not greatly interested.
“Because I want to talk to you,” was Peter’s answer.
“But I think I’d rather not talk,” I told him.
“Why?” it was his turn to inquire.
“Isn’t it a rum enough situation as it is?” I demanded. For Peter, naturally, had not used his eyes for nothing that night.
But Peter didn’t wait for my permission to climb into the front seat. He plumped himself down beside me and sat there with my first-born in his arms and one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over his knees.
“I think I’m beginning to see light,” he said, after a rather long silence, as we went spanking along the prairie-trail with the cold air fanning our faces.
“I wishIdid,” I acknowledged.
“You’re not very happy, are you?” he ventured, in a voice with just the slightest trace ofvibratoin it.
But I didn’t see that anything was to be gained by parading my troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.
“Do you like me, Peter?” I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and the very sense of his remoteness, as I’d already told him, gives birth to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper “weenies.”
“What do you suppose I’ve been hanging aroundfor?” demanded Peter, with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.
“To fix the windmill, of course,” I told him. “Unless you have improper designs on Struthers!”
He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.
“If it’s true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the dark, I suppose that’s why she weaves so badly,” he observed, after a short silence.
“She undoubtedly drops a stitch now and then,” I agreed, wondering if he was thinking of me or Struthers when he spoke. “But you do like me, don’t you?”
“I adore you,” admitted Peter quite simply.
“In the face of all these?” I said with a contented little laugh, nodding toward my three children.
“In the face of everything,” asserted Peter.
“Then I wish you’d do something for me,” I told him.
“What?”
“Break that woman’s heart,” I announced, with a backward nod of my head toward Casa Grande.
“I’d much rather breakyours,” he coolly contended. “Or I’d prefer knowing I had the power of doing it.”
I shook my head. “It can’t be done, Peter. And it can’t even be pretended. Imagine the mother of twins trying to flirt with a man even as nice as youare! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dinosauria getting up and trying to do a two-step. And I’m getting old and prosy, Peter, and if I pretend to be skittish now and then it’s only to mask the fact that I’m on the shelf, that I’ve eaten my pie and that before long I’ll be dyeing my hair every other Sunday, the same as Struthers, and——”
“Rot!” interrupted Peter. “All rot!”
“Why rot?” I demanded.
“Because to me you’re the embodiment of undying youth,” asserted the troubadour beside me. It was untrue, and it was improper, but for a moment or two at least my hungry heart closed about that speech the same as a child’s hand closes about a chocolate-drop. Women are made that way. But I had to keep to the trail.
“Supposing we get back to earth,” I suggested.
“What’s the matter with the way we were heading?” countered the quiet-eyed Peter.
“It doesn’t seem quite right,” I argued. And he laughed a little wistfully.
“What difference does it make, so long as we’re happy?” he inquired. And I tried to reprove him with a look, but I don’t think it quite carried in the misty starlight.
“I can’t say,” I told him, “that I approve of your reasoning.”
“That’s just the point,” he said with a slightly more reckless note in his laughter. “It doesn’t pretend to be reasoning. It’s more like that abandoning of all reasoning which brings us our few earthly glories.”
“Cogito, ergo sum,” I announced, remembering my Descartes.
“Well, I’m going to keep on just the same,” protested Peter.
“Keep on at what?” I asked.
“At thinking you’re adorable,” was his reply.
“Well, the caterpillars have been known to stop the train, but you must remember that it’s rather hard on the caterpillars,” I proclaimed as we swung off the trail and headed in for Alabama Ranch.
Sunday the Thirteenth
On Friday night there were heavy showers again, and now Whinnie reports that our Marquis wheat couldn’t look better and ought to run well over forty bushels to the acre. We are assured of sufficient moisture, but our two enemies yclept Fire and Hail remain. I should like to have taken out hail insurance, but I haven’t the money on hand.
I can at least make sure of my fire-guards. Turning those essential furrows will be good training for Peter. That individual, by the way, has been quieter and more ruminative of late, and, if I’m not mistaken, a little gentler in his attitude toward me. Yet there’s not a trace of pose about him, and I feel sure he wouldn’t harm the morals of a lady-bug. He’s kind and considerate, and doing his best to be a good pal. Whinnie, by the way, regards me with a mildly reproving eye, and having apparently concluded that I am a renegade, is concentrating his affection on Dinkie, for whom he is whittling out a new Noah’s Ark in his spare time. He is also teaching Dinkie to ride horseback, lifting him up to the back of either Nip or Tuck when they come for water and letting him ride as far as the stable. He looks very small up on that big animal.
At night, now that the evenings are so long, Whinnie takes my laddie on his knee and tells him stories, stories which he can’t possibly understand, I’m sure, but Dinkie likes the drone of Whinnie’s voice and the feel of those rough old arms about his little body. We all hunger for affection. The idiot who said that love was the bitters in the cocktail of life wasn’t either a good liver or a good philosopher. For love is really the whole cocktail. Take that away, and nothing is left....
I seem to be getting moodier, as summer advances. Alternating waves of sourness and tenderness sweep through me, and if I wasn’t a busy woman I’d possibly make a fine patient for one of those fashionable nerve-specialists who don’t flourish on the prairie.
But I can’t quite succeed in making myself as miserable as I feel I ought to be. There seems to be a great deal happening all about us, and yet nothing ever happens. My children are hale and hearty, my ranch is fat with its promise of harvest, and I am surrounded by people who love and respect me. But it doesn’t seem enough. Coiled in my heart is one small disturbing viper which I can neither scotch nor kill. Yet I decline to be the victim of anything as ugly as jealousy. For jealousy is both poisonous and pathetic. But I’d like to choke that woman!
Yesterday Lady Alicia, who is now driving her own car, picked up Peter from his fire-guard work andcarried him off on an experimental ride to see what was wrong with her carbureter—the same old carbureter! She let him out at the shack, on her way home, and Struthers witnessed the tail end of thatenlèvement. It spoilt her day for her. She fumed and fretted and made things fly—for Struthers always works hardest, I’ve noticed, when in a temper—and surrendering to the corroding tides which were turning her gentle nature into gall and wormwood, obliquely and tremulously warned the somewhat startled Peter against ungodly and frivolous females who ’ave no right to be corrupting simple-minded colonials and who ’ave no scruples against playing with men the same as a cat would play with a mouse.
“So be warned in time,” I sternly exclaimed to Peter, when I accidentally overheard the latter end of Struthers’ exhortation.
“And there are others as ought to be warned in time!” was Struthers’ Parthian arrow as she flounced off to turn the omelette which she’d left to scorch on the cook-stove.
Peter’s eye met mine, but neither of us said anything. It reminded me of cowboy honor, which prompts a rider never to “touch leather,” no matter how his bronco may be bucking. Andomelette, I was later reminded, comes from the Frenchalumelle, which means ship’s plating, a bit of etymology well authenticated by Struthers’ skillet.
Wednesday the Twenty-third
Summer is here, here in earnest, and already we’ve had a few scorching days. Haying will soon be upon us, and there is no slackening in the wheels of industry about Alabama Ranch. My Little Alarm-Clocks have me up bright and early, and the morning prairie is a joy that never grows old to the eye. Life is good, and I intend to be happy, for
I’m going alone,
Though Hell forefend,
By a way of my own
To the bitter end!
And our miseries, after all, are mostly in our own minds. Yesterday I came across little Dinkie lamenting audibly over a scratch on his hand at least seven days old. He insisted that I should kiss it, and, after witnessing that healing touch, was perfectly satisfied. And there’s no reason why grown-ups should be more childish than children themselves.
One thing that I’ve been missing this year, more than ever before, is fresh fruit. During the last few days I’ve nursed a craving for a tart Northern-Spy apple, or a Golden Pippin with a water-core, or a juicy and buttery Bartlett pear fresh from the tree.Those longings come over me occasionally, like my periodic hunger for the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, a vague ache for just one vision of tumbling beryl water, for the plunge of cool green waves and the race of foam. And Peter overheard me lamenting our lack of fruit and proclaiming I could eat my way right across the Niagara Peninsula in peach time. So when he came back from Buckhorn this afternoon with the farm supplies, he brought on his own hook two small boxes of California plums and a whole crate of oranges.
It was very kind of him, and also very foolish, for the oranges will never keep in this hot weather, and the only way that I can see to save them is to make them up into marmalade. It was pathetic to see little Dinkie with his first orange. It was hard to persuade him that it wasn’t a new kind of ball. But once the flavor of its interior juices was made known to him, he took to it like a cat to cream.
It brought home to me how many things there are my kiddies have had to do without, how much that is a commonplace to the city child must remain beyond the reach of the prairie tot. But I’m not complaining. I am resolved to be happy, and in my prophetic bones is a feeling that things are about to take a turn for the better, something better than the humble stewed prune for Dinkie’s little tummy and something better than the companionship of the hired help forhis mother. Not that both Peter and Whinnie haven’t a warm place in my heart! They couldn’t be better to me. But I’m one of those neck-or-nothing women, I suppose, who are silly enough to bank all on a single throw, who have to put all their eggs of affection in one basket. I can’t be indiscriminate, like Dinkie, for instance, whom I found the other day kissing every picture of a man in the Mail-Order Catalogue and murmuring “Da-da!” and doing the same to every woman-picture and saying “Mummy.” To be lavish with love is, I suppose, the prerogative of youth. Age teaches us to treasure it and sustain it, to guard it as we’d guard a lonely flame against the winds of the world. But the flame goes out, and we grope on through the darkness wondering why there can never be another....
I wonder if Lady Alicia is as cold as she seems? For she has the appearance of keeping her emotions in an ice-box of indifferency, the same as city florists keep their flowers chilled for commercial purposes. Lady Allie, I’m sure, is fond of my little Dinkie. Yet there’s a note of condescension in her affection, for even in what seems like an impulse of adoration her exclamation nearly always is “Oh, you lovable little rabbit!” or, if not that, it’s likely to be “You adorable little donkey you!” She says it very prettily, of course, setting it to music almost with that melodious English drawl of hers. She is, she must be, a veryfascinating woman. But at the first tee, friendship ends, as the golf-nuts say.
...I asked Peter the other day what he regarded as my besetting sin and the brute replied: “Topping the box.” I told him I didn’t quite get the idea. “A passion to produce a good impression,” he explained, “by putting all your biggest mental strawberries on the top!”
“That sounds suspiciously like trying to be a Smart Aleck,” I retorted.
“It may sound that way, but it isn’t. You’re so mentally alive, I mean, that you’ve simply got to be slightly acrobatic. And it’s as natural, of course, as a child’s dancing.”
But Peter is wrong. I’ve been out of the world so long that I’ve a dread of impressing people as stupid, as being a clodhopper. And if trying hard not to be thought that is “topping the box,” I suppose I’m guilty.
“You are also not without vanity,” Peter judicially continued. “But every naturally beautiful woman has a right to that.” And I proved Peter’s contention by turning shell-pink even under my sunburn and feeling a warm little runway of pleasure creep up through my carcass, for the homeliest old prairie-hen that ever made a pinto shy, I suppose, loves to be told that she’s beautiful.
Peter, of course, is a conscienceless liar, but I can’thelp liking him, and he’ll always nest warm in the ashes of my heart....
There’s one thing I must do, as soon as I have the chance, and that is get in to a dentist and have my teeth attended to. And now that I’m so much thinner I want a new and respectable pair of corsets. I’ve been studying my face in the glass, and I can see, now, what an awful Ananias Peter really is. Struthers, by the way, observed me in the midst of that inspection, and, if I’m not greatly mistaken, indulged in a sniff. To her, I suppose, I’m one of those vain creatures who fall in love with themselves as a child and perpetuate, thereby, a life romance!
Saturday the Twenty-sixth
Coming events donotcast their shadows before them. I was busy in the kitchen this morning, making marmalade out of what was left of Peter’s oranges and contentedly hummingOh, Dry Those Tearswhen the earthquake that shook the world from under my feet occurred.
The Twins had been bathed and powdered and fed and put out in their sleeping-box, and Dinkie was having his morning nap, and Struthers was busy at the sewing-machine, finishing up the little summer shirts for Poppsy and Pee-Wee which I’d begun to make out of their daddy’s discarded B. V. D.’s. It was a glorious morning with a high-arching pale blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky-line and the milk of life running warm and rich in the bosom of the sleeping earth. And I was bustling about in my apron of butcher’s linen, after slicing oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until the house was aromatic with them, when the sound of a racing car-engine smote on my ear. I went to the door with fire in my eye and the long-handled preserving spoon in my hand, ready to call down destruction on the pinhead who’d dare to wake my kiddies.
My visitor, I saw, was Lady Alicia; and I beheld my broken wash-tub under the front axle of her motor-car.
I went out to her, with indignation still in my eye, but she paid no attention to either that or the tub itself. She was quite pale, in fact, as she stepped down from her driving-seat, glanced at her buckskin gauntlets, and then looked up at me.
“There’s something we may as well face, and face at once,” she said, with less of a drawl than usual.
I waited, without speaking, wondering if she was referring to the tub. But I could feel my heart contract, like a leg-muscle with a cramp in it. And we stood there, face to face, under the flat prairie sunlight, ridiculously like two cockerels silently estimating each other’s intentions.
“I’m in love with your husband,” Lady Alicia suddenly announced, with a bell-like note of challenge in her voice. “And I’d rather like to know what you’re going to do about it.”
I was able to laugh a little, though the sound of it seemed foolish in my own startled ears.
“That’s rather a coincidence, isn’t it?” I blithely admitted. “For so am I.”
I could see the Scotch-granite look that came into the thick-lashed tourmaline eyes. And they’d be lovely eyes, I had to admit, if they were only a little softer.
“That’s unfortunate,” was her ladyship’s curt retort.
“It’s more than unfortunate,” I agreed, “it’s extremely awkward.”
“Why?” she snapped, plainly annoyed at my lightness of tone.
“Because he can’t possibly have both of us, you know—unless he’s willing to migrate over to that Mormon colony at Red-Deer. And even there, I understand, they’re not doing it now.”
“I’m afraid this is something much too serious to joke about,” Lady Alicia informed me.
“But it strikes me as essentially humorous,” I told her.
“I’m afraid,” she countered, “that it’s apt to prove essentially tragic.”
“But he happens to bemyhusband,” I observed.
“Only in form, I fancy, if he cares for some one else,” was her ladyship’s deliberate reply.
“Then he has acknowledged that—that you’ve captured him?” I inquired, slowly but surely awakening to the sheer audacity of the lady in the buckskin gauntlets.
“Isn’t that rather—er—primitive?” inquired Lady Allie, paler than ever.
“If you mean coming and squabbling over another woman’s husband, I’d call it distinctly prehistoric,” I said with a dangerous little red light dancing beforemy eyes. “It’s so original that it’s aboriginal. But I’m still at a loss to know just what your motive is, or what you want.”
“I want an end to this intolerable situation,” my visitor averred.
“Intolerable to whom?” I inquired.
“To me, to Duncan, and toyou, if you are the right sort of woman,” was Lady Alicia’s retort. And still again I was impressed by the colossal egoism of the woman confronting me, the woman ready to ride rough-shod over the world, for all her sparkling veneer of civilization, as long, as she might reach her own selfish ends.
“Since you mention Duncan, I’d like to ask if you’re speaking now as his cousin, or as his mistress?”
Lady Alicia’s stare locked with mine. She was making a sacrificial effort, I could see, to remain calm.
“I’m speaking as some one who is slightly interested in his happiness, and his future,” was her coldly intoned reply.
“And has my husband acknowledged that his happiness and his future remain in your hands?” I asked.
“I should hate to see him waste his life in a hole like this,” said Lady Alicia, not quite answering my question.
“Have you brought any great improvement to it?” I parried. Yet even as I spoke I stood impressed by the thought that it was, after all, more than primitive.It was paleolithic, two prehistoric she-things in combat for their cave-man.
“That is not what I came here to discuss,” she replied, with a tug at one of her gauntlets.
“I suppose it would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my husband,” I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that Struthers’ attentive ear was just below the nearest window-sill.
Lady Alicia smiled forbearingly, almost pityingly.
“Any such donation, I’m afraid, is no longer your prerogative,” she languidly remarked, once more mistress of herself. “What I’m more interested in is your giving your husband his liberty.”
I felt like saying that this was precisely what I had been giving him. But it left too wide an opening. So I ventured, instead: “I’ve never heard my husband express a desire for his liberty.”
“He’s too honorable for that,” remarked my enemy.
“Then it’s an odd kind of honor,” I icily remarked, “that allows you to come here and bicker over a situation that is so distinctly personal.”
“Pardon me, but I’m not bickering. And I’m not rising to any heights of courage which would be impossible to your husband. It’s consoling, however,to know how matters stand. And Duncan will probably act according to his own inclinations.”
That declaration would have been more inflammatory, I think, if one small truth hadn’t gradually come home to me. In some way, and for some reason, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland was not so sure of herself as she was pretending to be. She was not so sure of her position, I began to see, or she would never have thrown restraint to the winds and come to me on any such mission.
“Then that counts me out!” I remarked, with a forlorn attempt at being facetious. “If he’s going to do as he likes, I don’t see that you or I have much to say in the matter. But before he does finally place his happiness in your hands, I rather think I’d like to have a talk with him.”
“That remains with Duncan, of course,” she admitted, in a strictly qualified tone of triumph, as though she were secretly worrying over a conquest too incredibly facile.
“He knows, of course, that you came to talk this over with me?” I suggested, as though it were an after-thought.
“He had nothing to do with my coming,” asserted Lady Alicia.
“Then it was your own idea?” I asked.
“Entirely,” she admitted.
“Then what did you hope to gain?” I demanded.
“I wasn’t considering my own feelings,” imperially acknowledged her ladyship.
“That was very noble of you,” I admitted, “especially when you bear in mind that you weren’t considering mine, either! And what’s more, Lady Newland, I may as well tell you right here, and right now, that you can’t get anything out of it. I gave up my home to you, the home I’d helped make by the work of my own hands. And I gave up the hope of bringing up my children as they ought to be brought up. I even gave up my dignity and my happiness, in the hope that things could be made to come out straight. But I’m not going to give up my husband. Remember that, I’m not going to give him up. I don’t care what he says or feels, at this particular moment; I’m not going to give him up to make a mess of what’s left of the rest of his life. He may not know what’s ahead of him,but I do! And now that you’re shown me just what you are, and just what you’re ready to do, I intend to take a hand in this. I intend to fight you to the last ditch, and to the last drop of the hat! And if that sounds primitive, as you’ve already suggested, it’ll pay you to remember that you’re out here in a primitive country where we’re apt to do our fighting in a mighty primitive way!”
It was a very grand speech, but it would have been more impressive, I think, if I hadn’t been suddenlystartled by a glimpse of Whinstane Sandy’s rock-ribbed face peering from the bunk-house window at almost the same moment that I distinctly saw the tip of Struthers’ sage-green coiffure above the nearest sill of the shack. And it would have been a grander speech if I’d stood quite sure as to precisely what it meant and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed sufficiently climactic for my visitor, who, after a queenly and combative stare into what must have looked like an ecstatically excited Fourth-of-July face, turned imperially about and swung open the door of her motor-car. Then she stepped up to the car-seat, as slowly and deliberately as a sovereign stepping up to her throne.
“It may not be so simple as it seems,” she announced with great dignity, as she proceeded to start her car. And the same dignity might have attended her entire departure, but in the excitement she apparently flooded her carbureter, and the starter refused to work, and she pushed and spun and re-throttled and pushed until she was quite red in the face. And when the car finally did get under way, the running-gear became slightly involved with my broken wash-tub and it was not until the latter was completely and ruthlessly demolished that the automobile found its right-of-way undisputed and anything like dignity returned to the situation.
I stood there, with the long-handled preservingspoon still in my hand, staring after Lady Alicia and the dust that arose from her car-wheels. I stood there in a sort of trance, with all the valor gone out of my bones and that foolish declamation of mine still ringing in my ears.
I began to think of all the clever things I might have said to Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland. But the more I thought it over the more desolated I became in spirit, so that by the time I meandered back to the shack I had a face as long as a fiddle. And there I was confronted by a bristling and voluble Struthers, who acknowledged that she’d heard what she’d heard, and could no longer keep her lips sealed, whether it was her place to speak or not, and that her ladyship was not all that she ought to be, not by any manner of means, or she would never have left England and hidden herself away in this wilderness of a colony.
I had been rather preoccupied with my own thoughts, and paying scant attention to the clattering-tongued Struthers, up to this point. But the intimation that Lady Allie was not in the West for the sake of her health brought me up short. And Struthers, when I challenged that statement, promptly announced that the lady in question was no more in search of health than a tom-cat’s in search of water and no more interested in ranching than an ox is interested in astronomy, seeing as she’d ‘a’ been co-respondent in the Allerby and Crewe-Buller divorce case ifshe’d stayed where the law could have laid a hand on her, and standing more shamed than ever when Baron Crewe-Buller shut himself up in his shooting-lodge and blew his brains out three weeks before her ladyship had sailed for America, and the papers that full of the scandal it made it unpleasant for a self-respecting lady’s maid to meet her friends of a morning in Finsbury Park. And as for these newer goings-on, Struthers had seen what was happening right under her nose, she had, long before she had the chance to say so openly by word of mouth, but now that the fat was in the fire she wasn’t the kind to sit by and see those she should be loyal to led about by the nose. And so forth. And so forth! For just what else the irate Struthers had to unload from her turbulent breast I never did know, since at that opportune moment Dinkie awakened and proceeded to page his parent with all the strength of his impatient young lungs.
By the time I’d attended to Dinkie and finished my sadly neglected marmalade—for humans must eat, whatever happens—I’d made an effort to get some sort of order back into my shattered world. Yet it was about Duncan more than any one else that my thoughts kept clustering and centering. He seemed, at the moment, oddly beyond either pity or blame. I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, as the prey of a predaceous and unscrupulous womanwho had intrigued and would continue to intrigue against his happiness, a woman away from her own world, a self-complacent and sensual privateer who for a passing whim, for a momentary appeasement of her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last of his self-respect. She was self-complacent, but she was also a woman with an unmistakable physical appeal. She was undeniably attractive, as far as appearances went, and added to that attractiveness was a dangerous immediacy of attack, a touch of outlawry, which only too often wins before resistance can be organized. And Dinky-Dunk, I kept reminding myself, was at that dangerous mid-channel period of a man’s life where youth and age commingle, where the monotonous middle-years slip their shackles over his shoulders and remind him that his days of dalliance are ebbing away. He awakens to the fact that romance is being left behind, that the amorous adventure which once meant so much to him must soon belong to the past, that he must settle down to his jog-trot of family life. It’s the age, I suppose, when any spirited man is tempted to kick up with a good-by convulsion or two of romantic adventure, as blind as it is brief and passionate, sadly like the contortions of a rooster with its head cut off.
I tried, as I sat down and struggled to think things out, to withhold all blame and bitterness. Then I tried to think of life without Dinky-Dunk. I attemptedto picture my daily existence with somebody else in the place that my Diddums had once filled. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t forget the old days. I couldn’t forget the wide path of life that we’d traveled together, and that he was the father of my children—my children who will always need him!—and that he and he alone had been my torch-bearer into the tangled wilderness of passion.
Then I tried to think of life alone, of going solitary through the rest of my days—and I knew that my Maker had left me too warm-blooded and too dependent on the companionship of a mate ever to turn back to single harness. I couldn’t live without a man. He might be a sorry mix-up of good and bad, but I, the Eternal Female, would crave him as a mate. Most women, I knew, were averse to acknowledging such things; but life has compelled me to be candid with myself. The tragic part of it all seems that there should and could be only one man. I had been right when I had only too carelessly called myself a neck-or-nothing woman.
It wasn’t until later that any definite thought of injustice to me at Dinky-Dunk’s hands entered my head, since my attitude toward Dinky-Dunk seemed to remain oddly maternal, the attitude of the mother intent on extenuating her own. I even wrung a ghostly sort of consolation out of remembering that it was not a young and dewy girl who had imposedherself on his romantic imagination, for youth and innocence and chivalric obligation would have brought a much more dangerous fire to fight. But Lady Alicia, with all her carefully achieved charm, could scarcely lay claim to either youth or the other thing. Early in the morning, I knew, those level dissecting eyes of hers would look hard, and before her hair was up she’d look a little faded, and there’d be moments of stress and strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments ofennuithat there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even though it’s a sustaining wall.
And somewhere in her make-up was a strain of cruelty or she would never have come to me the way she did, and struck at me with an open claw. That cruelty, quite naturally, could never have been paraded before my poor old Dinky-Dunk’s eyes. It would be, later on, after disillusionment and boredom. Then, and then only, it would dare to show its ugly head. So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to feel sorry for my Diddums, even though he was trying to switch me off like an electric-light. And all of a sudden I came to a decision.
I decided to write to Dinky-Dunk. That, I felt, would be safer than trying to see him. For in a letter I could say what I wanted to without being stopped or side-tracked. There would be no danger of accusations and recriminations, of anger leading to extremes, of injured pride standing in the path of honesty. It would be better than talking. And what was more, it could be done at once, for the mysterious impression that time was precious, that something ominous was in the air, had taken hold of me.
So I wrote to Dinky-Dunk. I did it on two crazy-looking pages torn out of the back of his old ranch ledger. I did it without giving much thought to precisely what I said or exactly how I phrased it, depending on my heart more than my brain to guide me in the way I should go. For I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that it was my last shot, my forlornest ultimatum, since in it went packed the last shred of my pride.
“Dear Dinky-Dunk,” I wrote, “I hardly know how to begin, but I surely don’t need to begin by saying we haven’t been hitting it off very well of late. We seem to have made rather a mess of things, and I suppose it’s partly my fault, and the fault of that stupid pride which keeps us tongue-tied when we should be honest and open with each other. But I’ve been feeling lately that we’re both skirting a cut-bank with our eyes blindfolded, and I’ve faced an incident, trivialin itself but momentous in its possibilities, which persuades me that things can’t go on as they are. There’s too much at stake to let either ruffled nerves or false modesty—or whatever you want to call it—come between you and the very unhappy woman who still is your wife. It’s time, I think, when we both ought to look everything squarely in the face, for, after all, we’ve only one life to live, and if you’re happy, at this moment, if you’re completely and tranquilly happy as I write this, then I’ve banked wrong, tragically wrong, on what I thought you were. For Ihavebanked on you, Dinky-Dunk, banked about all my life and happiness—and it’s too late to change, even if I wanted to. I’m alone in the world, and in a lonely part of the world, with three small children to look after, and that as much as anything, I suppose, drives me to plain speaking and compels me to clear thinking. But even as I write these words to you, I realize that it isn’t really a matter of thought or speech. It’s a matter of feeling. And the one thing I feel is that I need you and want you; that no one, that nothing, can ever take your place.... I thought I could write a great deal more. But I find I can’t. I seem to have said everything. Itiseverything, really. For I love you, Dinky-Dunk, more than everything in life. Perhaps I haven’t shown it very much, of late, but it’s there, trying to hide its silly old ostrich-head behind a pebble of hurtpride. So let’s turn the page and start over. Let’s start with a clean slate, before we lose the chance. Come back to me. I’m very unhappy. I find it hard to write. It’s only that big ache in my heart that allows me to write at all. And I’ve left a lot of things unsaid, that I ought to have said, and intended to say, but this will have to be enough. If there’s nothing that speaks up to you, from between these lines, then there’s nothing that can hold together, I’m afraid, what’s left of your life and mine. Think this over, Dinky-Dunk, and answer the way your heart dictates. But please don’t keep me waiting too long, for until I get that answer I’ll be like a hen on a hot griddle or Mary Queen of Scots on the morning before she lost her head, if that’s more dignified.”
The hardest part of all that letter, I found, was the ending of it. It took me a long time to decide just what to sign myself, just how to pilot my pen between the rocks of candor and dignity. So I ended up by signing it “Chaddie” and nothing more, for already the fires of emotion had cooled and a perplexed little reaction of indifferency had set in. It was only a surface-stir, but it was those surface-stirs, I remembered, which played such a lamentably important part in life.
When Whinstane Sandy came in at noon for his dinner, a full quarter of an hour ahead of Peter, I had his meal all ready for him by the time he hadwatered and fed his team. I cut that meal short, in fact, by handing him my carefully sealed letter and telling him I wanted him to take it straight over to Casa Grande.
I knew by his face as I helped him hitch Water-Light to the buckboard—for Whinnie’s foot makes it hard for him to ride horseback—that he nursed a pretty respectable inkling of the situation. He offered no comments, and he even seemed averse to having his eye meet mine, but he obviously knew what he knew.
He was off with a rattle of wheels and a drift of trail-dust even before Peter and his cool amending eyes arrived at the shack to “stoke up” as he expresses it. I tried to make Peter believe that nothing was wrong, and cavorted about with Bobs, and was able to laugh when Dinkie got some of the new marmalade in his hair, and explained how we’d have to take our mower-knives over to Teetzel’s to have them ground, and did my best to direct silent reproofs at the tight-lipped and tragic-eyed Struthers, who moved about like a head-mourner not unconscious of her family obligations. But Peter, I suspect, sniffed something untoward in the air, for after a long study of my face—which made me color a little, in spite of myself—he became about as abstracted and solemn-eyed as Struthers herself.
To my dying day I shall never forget that wait for Whinnie to come back. It threatened to become anendless one. I felt like Bluebeard’s wife up in the watch tower—no, it was her Sister Anne, wasn’t it, who anxiously mounted the tower to search for the first sign of deliverance? At any rate I felt like Luck—now before the Relief, or a prisoner waiting for the jury to file in, or a gambler standing over an invisible roulette-table and his last throw, wondering into what groove the little ivory ball was to run. And when Whinnie finally appeared his seamed old face wore such a look of dour satisfaction that for a weak flutter or two of the heart I thought he’d brought Dinky-Dunk straight back with him.
But that hope didn’t live long.
“Your maun’s awa’,” said Whinnie, with quite unnecessary curtness, as he held my own letter out to me.
“He’s away?” I echoed in a voice that was just a wee bit trembly, as I took the note from Whinnie, “what do you mean by away?”
“He left three hours ago for Chicago,” Whinstane Sandy retorted, still with that grim look of triumph in his gloomy old eyes.
“But what could be taking him to Chicago?” I rather weakly inquired.
“’Twas to see about buyin’ some blooded stock for the ranch. At least, so her ladyship informed me. But that’s nae more than one of her lies, I’m thinkin’.”
“What did she say, Whinnie?” I demanded, doing my best to keep cool.
“Naethin’,” was Whinnie’s grim retort. “’Twas me did the sayin’!”
“What did you say?” I asked, disturbed by the none too gentle look on his face.
“What was needed to be said,” that old sour-dough with the lack-luster eyes quietly informed me.
“What did you say?” I repeated, with a quavery feeling just under my floating ribs, alarmed at the after-light of audacity that still rested on his face, like wine-glow on a rocky mountain-tip.
“I said,” Whinstane Sandy informed me with his old shoulders thrust back and his stubby forefinger pointed to within a few inches of my nose, “I said that I kenned her and her kind well, havin’ watched the likes o’ her ridden out o’ Dawson City on a rail more times than once. I said that she was naethin’ but a wanton”—only this wasnotthe word Whinnie used—“a wanton o’ Babylon and a temptress o’ men and a corrupter o’ homes out o’ her time and place, bein’ naught but a soft shinin’ thing that was a mockery to the guid God who made her and a blight to the face o’ the open prairie that she was foulin’ with her presence. I said that she’d brought shame and sorrow to a home that had been filled with happiness until she crept into it like the serpent o’ hell she was, and seein’ she’d come into a lonely land where the people have the trick o’ tryin’ their own cases after their own way and takin’ when need be justice into their ownhands, she’d have one week, one week o’ seven days and no more, to gather up what belonged to her and take herself back to the cities o’ shame where she’d find more o’ her kind. And if she was not disposed to hearken a friendly and timely word such as I was givin’ her, I said, she’d see herself taken out o’ her home, and her hoorish body stripped to the skin, and then tarred and feathered, and ridden on the cap-rail of a corral-gate out of a settlement that had small taste for her company!”
“Whinnie!” I gasped, sitting down out of sheer weakness, “you didn’t say that?”
“I said it,” was Whinnie’s laconic retort.
“But what right had you to—”
He cut me short with a grunt that was almost disrespectful.
“I not only said it,” he triumphantly affirmed, “but what’s more to my likin’, I made her believe it, leavin’ her with the mockin’ laugh dead in her eyes and her face as white as yon table-cover, white to the lips!”