Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: We gathered wood and made a fire]
THE PRAIRIE CHILD
By ARTHUR STRINGER
Author of
"Are All Men Alike and the Lost Titian," "The Prairie Mother,"
"The Prairie Wife," "The Wine of Life," "The Door of Dread,"
"The Man Who Couldn't Sleep," etc.
[Illustration]
With Frontispiece by
E. F. WARD
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Printed in U. S. A.
Copyright 1922
The Pictorial Review Company
Copyright 1922
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Printed in the United States of America
THE PRAIRIE CHILD
_Friday the Eighth of March_
"But the thing I can't understand, Dinky-Dunk, is how you ever
_could_."
"Could what?" my husband asked in an aerated tone of voice.
I had to gulp before I got it out.
"Could kiss a woman like that," I managed to explain.
Duncan Argyll McKail looked at me with a much cooler eye than I had
expected. If he saw my shudder, he paid no attention to it.
"On much the same principle," he quietly announced, "that the Chinese
eat birds' nests."
"Just what do you mean by that?" I demanded, resenting the fact that
he could stand as silent as a December beehive before my morosely
questioning eyes.
"I mean that, being married, you've run away with the idea that all
birds' nests are made out of mud and straw, with possibly a garnish
of horse hairs. But if you'd really examine these edible nests you'd
find they were made of surprisingly appealing and succulent tendrils.
They're quite appetizing, you may be sure, or they'd never be eaten!"
I stood turning this over, exactly as I've seen my Dinkie turn over an
unexpectedly rancid nut.
"Aren't you, under the circumstances, being rather stupidly clever?" I
finally asked.
"When I suppose you'd rather see me cleverly stupid?" he found the
heart to suggest.
"But that woman, to me, always looked like a frog," I protested, doing
my best to duplicate his pose of impersonality.
"Well, she doesn't make love like a frog," he retorted with his first
betraying touch of anger. I turned to the window, to the end that my
Eliza-Crossing-the-Ice look wouldn't be entirely at his mercy. A
belated March blizzard was slapping at the panes and cuffing the
house-corners. At the end of a long winter, I knew, tempers were apt
to be short. But this was much more than a matter of barometers. The
man I'd wanted to live with like a second "Suzanne de Sirmont" in
Daudet's _Happiness_ had not only cut me to the quick but was rubbing
salt in the wound. He had said what he did with deliberate intent to
hurt me, for it was only too obvious that he was tired of being on the
defensive. And it did hurt. It couldn't help hurting. For the man,
after all, was my husband. He was the husband to whom I'd given up the
best part of my life, the two-legged basket into which I'd packed all
my eggs of allegiance. And now he was scrambling that precious
collection for a cheap omelette of amorous adventure. He was my
husband, I kept reminding myself. But that didn't cover the entire
case. No husband whose heart is right stands holding another woman's
shoulder and tries to read her shoe-numbers through her ardently
upturned eyes. It shows the wind is not blowing right in the home
circle. It shows a rent in the dyke, a flaw in the blade, a breach in
the fortress-wall of faith. For marriage, to the wife who is a mother
as well, impresses me as rather like the spliced arrow of the
Esquimos: it is cemented together with blood. It is a solemn matter.
And for the sake of _mutter-schutz_, if for nothing else, it must be
kept that way.
There was a time, I suppose, when the thought of such a thing would
have taken my breath away, would have chilled me to the bone. But I'd
been through my refining fires, in that respect, and you can't burn
the prairie over twice in the same season. I tried to tell myself it
was the setting, and not the essential fact, that seemed so odious. I
did my best to believe it wasn't so much that Duncan Argyll McKail had
stooped to make advances to this bandy-legged she-teacher whom I'd so
charitably housed at Casa Grande since the beginning of the year--for
I'd long since learned not to swallow the antique claim that of all
terrestrial _carnivora_ only man and the lion are truly
monogamous--but more the fact it had been made such a back-stairs
affair with no solitary redeeming touch of dignity.
Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, would have laughed it away, if I hadn't walked
in on them with their arms about each other, and the bandy-legged one
breathing her capitulating sighs into his ear. But there was
desperation in the eyes of Miss Alsina Teeswater, and it was plain to
see that if my husband had been merely playing with fire it had become
a much more serious matter with the lady in the case. There was, in
fact, something almost dignifying in that strickenly defiant face of
hers. I was almost sorry for her when she turned and walked
white-lipped out of the room. What I resented most, as I stood facing
my husband, was his paraded casualness, his refusal to take a tragic
situation tragically. His attitude seemed to imply that we were about
to have a difference over a small thing--over a small thing with brown
eyes. He could even stand inspecting me with a mildly amused glance,
and I might have forgiven his mildness, I suppose, if it had been
without amusement, and that amusement in some way at my expense. He
even managed to laugh as I stood there staring at him. It was neither
an honest nor a natural laugh. It merely gave me the feeling that he
was trying to entrench himself behind a raw mound of mirth, that any
shelter was welcome until the barrage was lifted.
"And what do you intend doing about it?" I asked, more quietly than I
had imagined possible.
"What would you suggest?" he parried, as he began to feel in his
pockets for his pipe.
And I still had a sense, as I saw the barricaded look come into his
face, of entrenchments being frantically thrown up. I continued to
stare at him as he found his pipe and proceeded to fill it. I even
wrung a ghostly satisfaction out of the discovery that his fingers
weren't so steady as he might have wished them to be.
"I suppose you're trying to make me feel like the Wicked Uncle edging
away from the abandoned Babes in the Woods?" he finally demanded, as
though exasperated by my silence. He was delving for matches by this
time, and seemed disappointed that none was to be found in his
pockets. I don't know why he should seem to recede from me, for he
didn't move an inch from where he stood with that defensively mocking
smile on his face. But abysmal gulfs of space seemed to blow in like
sea-mists between him and me, desolating and lonely stretches of
emptiness which could never again be spanned by the tiny bridges of
hope. I felt alone, terribly alone, in a world over which the last
fire had swept and the last rains had fallen. My throat tightened and
my eyes smarted from the wave of self-pity which washed through my
body. It angered me, ridiculously, to think that I was going to break
down at such a time.
But the more I thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was
something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my
instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn't, like the outraged wife
of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it
epochally shut after me. But modern life never quite lives up to its
fiction. And we are never quite free, we women who have given our
hostages to fortune, to do as we wish. We have lives other than our
own to think about.
"But it's all been so--so _dishonest_!" I cried out, stopping myself
in the middle of a gesture which might have seemed like wringing my
hands.
That, apparently, gave Dinky-Dunk something to get his teeth into. The
neutral look went out of his eye, to be replaced by a fortifying stare
of enmity.
"I don't know as it's any more dishonest than the long-distance brand
of the same thing!"
I knew, at once, what he meant. He meant Peter. He meant poor old
Peter Ketley, whose weekly letter, year in and year out, came as
regular as clockwork to Casa Grande. Those letters came to my son
Dinkie, though it couldn't be denied they carried many a cheering word
and many a companionable message to Dinkie's mother. But it brought me
up short, to think that my own husband would try to play cuttle-fish
with a clean-hearted and a clean-handed man like Peter. The wave that
went through my body, on this occasion, was one of rage. I tried to
say something, but I couldn't. The lion of my anger had me down, by
this time, with his paw on my breast. The power of speech was
squeezed out of my carcass. I could only stare at my husband with a
denuding and devastating stare of incredulity touched with disgust, of
abhorrence skirting dangerously close along the margins of hate. And
he stared back, with morose and watchful defiance on his face.
Heaven only knows how it would have ended, if that tableau hadn't gone
smash, with a sudden offstage clatter and thump and cry which reminded
me there were more people in the world than Chaddie McKail and her
philandering old husband. For during that interregnum of parental
preoccupation Dinkie and Poppsy had essayed to toboggan down the lower
half of the front-stairs in an empty drawer commandeered from my
bedroom dresser. Their descent, apparently, had been about as
precipitate as that of their equally adventurous sire down the treads
of my respect, for they had landed in a heap on the hardwood floor of
the hall and I found Dinkie with an abraded shin-bone and Poppsy with
a cut lip. My Poppsy was more frightened at the sight of blood than
actually hurt by her fall, and Dinkie betrayed a not unnatural
tendency to enlarge on his injuries in extenuation of his offense. But
that suddenly imposed demand for first-aid took my mind out of the
darker waters in which it had been wallowing, and by the time I had
comforted my kiddies and completed my ministrations Dinky-Dunk had
quietly escaped from the house and my accusatory stares by clapping on
his hat and going out to the stables....
And that's the scene which keeps pacing back and forth between the
bars of my brain like a jaguar in a circus-cage. That's the scene I've
been living over, for the last few days, thinking of all the more
brilliant things I might have said and the more expedient things I
might have done. And that's the scene which has been working like
yeast at the bottom of my sodden batter of contentment, making me feel
that I'd swell up and burst, if all that crazy ferment couldn't find
some relief in expression. So after three long years and more of
silence I'm turning back to this, the journal of one irresponsible old
Chaddie McKail, who wanted so much to be happy and who has in some way
missed the pot of gold that they told her was to be found at the
rainbow's end.
It seems incredible, as I look back, that more than three, long years
should slip away without the penning of one line in this, the
safety-valve of my soul. But the impulse to write rather slipped away
from me. It wasn't that there was so little to record, for life is
always life. But when it burns clearest it seems to have the trick of
consuming its own smoke and leaving so very little ash. The crowded
even tenor of existence goes on, with its tidal ups and downs, too
listlessly busy to demand expression. Then the shock of tempest comes,
and it's only after we're driven out of them that we realize we've
been drifting so long in the doldrums of life. Then it comes home to
us that there are the Dark Ages in the history of a woman exactly as
there were the Dark Ages in the history of Europe. Life goes on in
those Dark Ages, but it doesn't feel the call to articulate itself, to
leave a record of its experiences. And that strikes me, as I sit here
and think of it, as about the deepest tragedy that can overtake
anything on this earth. Nothing, after all, is sadder than silence,
the silence of dead civilizations and dead cities and dead souls. And
nothing is more costly. For beauty itself, in actual life, passes
away, but beauty lovingly recorded by mortal hands endures and goes
down to our children. And I stop writing, at that word of "children,"
for miraculously, as I repeat it, I see it cut a window in the
unlighted house of my heart. And that window is the bright little
Gothic oriel which will always be golden and luminous with love and
will always send the last shadow scurrying away from the mustiest
corner of my tower of life. I have my Dinkie and my Poppsy, and
nothing can take them away from me. It's on them that I pin my hope.
_Sunday the Seventeenth_
I've been thinking a great deal over what's happened this last week or
so. And I've been trying to reorganize my life, the same as you put a
house to rights after a funeral. But it wasn't a well-ordered funeral,
in this case, and I was denied even the tempered satisfaction of the
bereaved after the finality of a smoothly conducted burial. For
nothing has been settled. It's merely that Time has been trying to
encyst what it can not absorb. I felt, for a day or two, that I had
nothing much to live for. I felt like a feather-weight who'd faced a
knock-out. I saw Pride go to the mat, and take the count, and if I was
dazed, for a while, I suppose it was mostly convalescence from shock.
Then I tightened my belt, and reminded myself that it wasn't the first
wallop Fate had given me, and remembered that in this life you have to
adjust yourself to your environment or be eliminated from the game.
And life, I suppose, has tamed me, as a man who once loved me said it
would do. The older I get the more tolerant I try to be, and the more
I know of this world the more I realize that Right is seldom all on
one side and Wrong on the other. It's a matter of give and take, this
problem of traveling in double-harness. I can even smile a little, as
I remember that college day in my teens when Matilda-Anne and Katrina
and Fanny-Rain-in-the-Face and myself solemnly discussed man and his
make-up, over a three-pound box of Maillard's, and resolutely agreed
that we would surrender our hearts to no suitor over twenty-six and
marry no male who'd ever loved another woman--not, at least, unless
the situation had become compensatingly romanticized by the death of
any such lady preceding us in our loved one's favor. Little we knew of
men and ourselves and the humiliations with which life breaks the
spirit of arrogant youth! For even now, knowing what I know, I've been
doing my best to cooper together a case for my unstable old
Dinky-Dunk. I've been trying to keep the thought of poor dead Lady
Alicia out of my head. I've been wondering if there's any truth in
what Dinky-Dunk said, a few weeks ago, about a mere father being like
the male of the warrior-spider whom the female of the species stands
ready to dine upon, once she's assured of her progeny.
I suppose I _have_ given most of my time and attention to my children.
And it's as perilous, I suppose, to give your heart to a man and then
take it even partly away again as it is to give a trellis to a
rose-bush and then expect it to stand alone. My husband, too, has been
restless and dissatisfied with prairie life during the last year or
so, has been rocking in his own doldrums of inertia where the sight of
even the humblest ship--and the Wandering Sail in this case always
seemed to me as soft and shapeless as a boned squab-pigeon!--could
promptly elicit an answering signal.
But I strike a snag there, for Alsina has not been so boneless as I
anticipated. There was an unlooked-for intensity in her eyes and a
mild sort of tragedy in her voice when she came and told me that she
was going to another school in the Knee-Hill country and asked if I
could have her taken in to Buckhorn the next morning. Some one, of
course, had to go. There was one too many in this prairie home that
must always remain so like an island dotting the lonely wastes of a
lonely sea. And triangles, oddly enough, seem to flourish best in city
squares. But much as I wanted to talk to Alsina, I was compelled to
respect her reserve. I even told her that Dinkie would miss her a
great deal. She replied, with a choke in her voice, that he was a
wonderful child. That, of course, was music to the ears of his mother,
and my respect for the tremulous Miss Teeswater went up at least ten
degrees. But when she added, without meeting my eye, that she was
really fond of the boy, I couldn't escape the impression that she was
edging out on very thin ice. It was, I think, only the silent misery
in her half-averted face which kept me from inquiring if she hadn't
rather made it a family affair. But that, second thought promptly told
me, would seem too much like striking the fallen. And we both seemed
to feel, thereafter, that silence was best.
Practically nothing passed between us, in fact, until we reached the
station. I could see that she was dreading the ordeal of saying
good-by. That unnamed sixth sense peculiar to cab-drivers and waiters
and married women told me that every moment on the bald little
platform was being a torture to her. As the big engine came lumbering
up to a standstill she gave me one quick and searching look. It was a
look I shall never forget. For, in it was a question and something
more than a question. An unworded appeal was there, and also an
unworded protest. It got past my outposts of reason, in some way. It
came to me in my bitterness like the smell of lilacs into a sick-room.
I couldn't be cruel to that poor crushed outcast who had suffered
quite as much from the whole ignoble affair as I had suffered. I
suddenly held out my hand to her, and she took it, with that hungry
questioning look still on her face.
"It's all right," I started to say. But her head suddenly went down
between her hunched-up shoulders. Her body began to shake and tears
gushed from her eyes. I had to help her to the car steps.
"It was all my fault," she said in a strangled voice, between her
helpless little sobs.
It was brave of her, of course, and she meant it for the best. But I
wish she hadn't said it. Instead of making everything easier for me,
as she intended, she only made it harder. She left me disturbingly
conscious of ghostly heroisms which transposed what I had tried to
regard as essentially ignoble into some higher and purer key. And she
made it harder for me to look at my husband, when I got home, with a
calm and collected eye. I felt suspiciously like Lady Macbeth after
the second murder. I felt that we were fellow-sharers of a guilty
secret it would never do to drag too often into the light of
every-day life.
But it will no more stay under cover, I find, than a dab-chick will
stay under water. It bobs up in the most unexpected places, as it did
last night, when Dinkie publicly proclaimed that he was going to marry
his Mummy when he got big.
"It would be well, my son, not to repeat the mistakes of your father!"
observed Dinky-Dunk. And having said it, he relighted his quarantining
pipe and refused to meet my eye. But it didn't take a surgical
operation to get what he meant into my head. It hurt, in more ways
than one, for it struck me as suspiciously like a stone embodied in a
snowball--and even our offspring recognized this as no fair manner of
fighting.
"Then it impresses you as a mistake?" I demanded, seeing red, for the
coyote in me, I'm afraid, will never entirely become house-dog.
"Isn't that the way you regard it?" he asked, inspecting me with a
non-committal eye.
I had to bite my lip, to keep from flinging out at him the things that
were huddled back in my heart. But it was no time for making big war
medicine. So I got the lid on, and held it there.
"My dear Dinky-Dunk," I said with an effort at a gesture of weariness,
"I've long since learned that life can't be made clean, like a cat's
body, by the use of the tongue alone!"
Dinky-Dunk did not look at me. Instead, he turned to the boy who was
watching that scene with a small frown of perplexity on his none too
approving face.
"You go up to the nursery," commanded my husband, with more curtness
than usual.
But before Dinkie went he slowly crossed the room and kissed me. He
did so with a quiet resoluteness which was not without its tacit touch
of challenge.
"You may feel that way about the use of the tongue," said my husband
as soon as we were alone, "but I'm going to unload a few things I've
been keeping under cover."
He waited for me to say something. But I preferred remaining silent.
"Of course," he floundered on, "I don't want to stop you martyrizing
yourself in making a mountain out of a mole-hill. But I'm getting a
trifle tired of this holier-than-thou attitude. And----"
"And?" I prompted, when he came to a stop and sat pushing up his
brindled front-hair until it made me think of the Corean lion on the
library mantel, the lion in pottery which we invariably spoke of as
the Dog of Fo. My wintry smile at that resemblance seemed to
exasperate him.
"What were you going to say?" I quietly inquired.
"Oh, hell!" he exclaimed, with quite unexpected vigor.
"I hope the children are out of hearing," I reminded him,
solemn-eyed.
"Yes, the children!" he cried, catching at the word exactly as a
drowning man catches at a lifebelt. "The children! That's just the
root of the whole intolerable situation. This hasn't been a home for
the last three or four years; it's been nothing but a nursery. And
about all I've been is a retriever for a _crèche_, a clod-hopper to
tiptoe about the sacred circle and see to it there's enough flannel to
cover their backs and enough food to put into their stomachs. I'm an
accident, of course, an intruder to be faced with fortitude and borne
with patience."
"This sounds quite disturbing," I interrupted. "It almost leaves me
suspicious that you are about to emulate the rabbit and devour your
young."
Dinky-Dunk fixed me with an accusatory finger.
"And the fact that you can get humor out of it shows me just how far
it has gone," he cried with a bitterness which quickly enough made me
sober again. "And I could stand being deliberately shut out of your
life, and shut out of their lives as far as you can manage it, but I
can't see that it's doing either them or you any particular good."
"But I am responsible for the way in which those children grow up," I
said, quite innocent of the _double entendre_ which brought a dark
flush to my husband's none too happy face.
"And I suppose I'm not to contaminate them?" he demanded.
"Haven't you done enough along that line?" I asked.
He swung about, at that, with something dangerously like hate on his
face.
"Whose children are they?" he challenged.
"You are their father," I quietly acknowledged. It rather startled me
to find Dinky-Dunk regarding himself as a fur coat and my offspring as
moth-eggs which I had laid deep in the pelt of his life, where we were
slowly but surely eating the glory out of that garment and leaving it
as bald as a prairie dog's belly.
"Well, you give very little evidence of it!"
"You can't expect me to turn a cart-wheel, surely, every time I
remember it?" was my none too gracious inquiry. Then I sat down. "But
what is it you want me to do?" I asked, as I sat studying his face,
and I felt sorriest for him because he felt sorry for himself.
"That's exactly the point," he averred. "There doesn't seem anything
to do. But this can't go on forever."
"No," I acknowledged. "It seems too much like history repeating
itself."
His head went down, at that, and it was quite a long time before he
looked up at me again.
"I don't suppose you can see it from my side of the fence?" he asked
with a disturbing new note of humility in his voice.
"Not when you force me to stay on the fence," I told him. He seemed to
realize, as he sat there slowly moving his head up and down, that no
further advance was to be made along that line. So he took a deep
breath and sat up.
"Something will have to be done about getting a new teacher for that
school," he said with an appositeness which was only too painfully
apparent.
"I've already spoken to two of the trustees," I told him. "They're
getting a teacher from the Peg. It's to be a man this time."
Instead of meeting my eye, he merely remarked: "That'll be better for
the boy!"
"In what way?" I inquired.
"Because I don't think too much petticoat is good for any boy,"
responded my lord and master.
"Big or little!" I couldn't help amending, in spite of all my good
intentions.
Dinky-Dunk ignored the thrust, though it plainly took an effort.
"There are times when even kindness can be a sort of cruelty," he
patiently and somewhat platitudinously pursued.
"Then I wish somebody would ill-treat me along that line," I
interjected. And this time he smiled, though it was only for a
moment.
"Supposing we stick to the children," he suggested.
"Of course," I agreed. "And since you've brought the matter up I can't
help telling you that I always felt that my love for my children is
the one redeeming thing in my life."
"Thanks," said my husband, with a wince.
"Please don't misunderstand me. I'm merely trying to say that a
mother's love for her children has to be one of the strongest and
holiest things in this hard old world of ours. And it seems only
natural to me that a woman should consider her children first, and
plan for them, and make sacrifices for them, and fight for them if she
has to."
"It's so natural, in fact," remarked Dinky-Dunk, "that it has been
observed in even the Bengal tigress."
"It is my turn to thank you," I acknowledged, after giving his
statement a moment or two of thought.
"But we're getting away from the point again," proclaimed my husband.
"I've been trying to tell you that children are like rabbits: It's
only fit and proper they should be cared for, but they can't thrive,
and they can't even live, if they're handled too much."
"I haven't observed any alarming absence of health in my children," I
found the courage to say. But a tightness gathered about my heart, for
I could sniff what was coming.
"They may be all right, as far as that goes," persisted their lordly
parent. "But what I say is, too much cuddling and mollycoddling isn't
good for that boy of yours, or anybody else's boy." And he proceeded
to explain that my Dinkie was an ordinary, every-day, normal child
and should be accepted and treated as such or we'd have a
temperamental little bounder on our hands.
I knew that my boy wasn't abnormal. But I knew, on the other hand,
that he was an exceptionally impressionable and sensitive child. And I
couldn't be sorry for that, for if there's anything I abhor in this
world it's torpor. And whatever he may have been, nothing could shake
me in my firm conviction that a child's own mother is the best person
to watch over his growth and shape his character.
"But what is all this leading up to?" I asked, steeling myself for the
unwelcome.
"Simply to what I've already told you on several occasions," was my
husband's answer. "That it's about time this boy of ours was bundled
off to a boarding-school."
I sat back, trying to picture my home and my life without Dinkie. But
it was unbearable. It was unthinkable.
"I shall never agree to that," I quietly retorted.
"Why?" asked my husband, with a note of triumph which I resented.
"For one thing, because he is still a child, because he is too young,"
I contended, knowing that I could never agree with Dinky-Dunk in his
thoroughly English ideas of education even while I remembered how he
had once said that the greatness of England depended on her
public-schools, such as Harrow and Eton and Rugby and Winchester, and
that she had been the best colonizer in the world because her boys had
been taken young and taught not to overvalue home ties, had been made
manlier by getting off with their own kind instead of remaining
hitched to an apron-string.
"And you prefer keeping him stuck out here on the prairie?" demanded
Dinky-Dunk.
"The prairie has been good enough for his parents, this last seven or
eight years," I contended.
"It hasn't been good enough for me," my husband cried out with quite
unlooked-for passion. "And I've about had my fill of it!"
"Where would you prefer going?" I asked, trying to speak as quietly as
I could.
"That's something I'm going to find out as soon as the chance comes,"
he retorted with a slow and embittered emphasis which didn't add any
to my peace of mind.
"Then why cross our bridges," I suggested, "until we come to them?"
"But you're not looking for bridges," he challenged. "You don't want
to see anything beyond living like Doukhobours out here on the edge of
Nowhere and remembering that you've got your precious offspring here
under your wing and wondering how many bushels of Number-One-Hard it
will take to buy your Dinkie a riding pinto!"
"Aren't you rather tired to-night?" I asked with all the patience I
could command.
"Yes, and I'm talking about the thing that makes me tired. For you
know as well as I do that you've made that boy of yours a sort of
anesthetic. You put him on like a nose-cap, and forget the world. He's
about all you remember to think about. Why, when you look at the
clock, nowadays, it isn't ten minutes to twelve. It's always Dinkie
minutes to Dink. When you read a book you're only reading about what
your Dinkie might have done or what your Dinkie is some day to write.
When you picture the Prime Minister it's merely your Dinkie grown big,
laying down the law to a House of Parliament made up of other Dinkies,
rows and rows of 'em. When the sun shines you're wondering whether
it's warm enough for your Dinkie to walk in, and when the snow begins
to melt you're wondering whether it's soft enough for the beloved
Dinkie to mold into snowballs. When you see a girl you at once get
busy speculating over whether or not she'll ever be beautiful enough
for your Dinkie, and when one of the Crowned Heads of Europe announces
the alliance of its youngest princess you fall to pondering if Dinkie
wouldn't have made her a better husband. And when the flowers come out
in your window-box you wonder if they're fair enough to bloom beside
your Dinkie. I don't suppose I ever made a haystack that you didn't
wonder whether it wasn't going to be a grand place for Dinkie to slide
down. And when Dinkie draws a goggle-eyed man on his scribbler you see
Michael Angelo totter and Titian turn in his grave. And when Dinkie
writes a composition of thirty crooked lines on the landing of Hengist
you feel that fate did Hume a mean trick in letting him pass away
before inspecting that final word in historical record. And heaven's
just a row of Dinkies with little gold harps tucked under their wings.
And you think you're breathing air, but all you're breathing is
Dinkies, millions and millions of etherealized Dinkies. And when you
read about the famine in China you inevitably and adroitly hitch the
death of seven thousand Chinks in Yangchow on to the interests of
your immortal offspring. And I suppose Rome really came into being for
the one ultimate end that an immortal young Dinkie might possess his
full degree of Dinkiness and the glory that was Greece must have been
merely the tom-toms tuning up for the finished dance of our Dinkie's
grandeur. Day and night, it's Dinkie, just Dinkie!"
I waited until he was through. I waited, heavy of heart, until his
foolish fires of revolt had burned themselves out. And it didn't seem
to add to his satisfaction to find that I could inspect him with a
quiet and slightly commiserative eye.
"You are accusing me," I finally told him, "of something I'm proud of.
And I'm afraid I'll always be guilty of caring for my own son."
He turned on me with a sort of heavy triumph.
"Well, it's something that you'll jolly well pay the piper for, some
day," he announced.
"What do you mean by that?" I demanded.
"I mean that nothing much is ever gained by letting the maternal
instinct run over. And that's exactly what you're doing. You're trying
to tie Dinkie to your side, when you can no more tie him up than you
can tie up a sunbeam. You could keep him close enough to you, of
course, when he was small. But he's bound to grow away from you as he
gets bigger, just as I grew away from my mother and you once grew away
from yours. It's a natural law, and there's no use crocking your knees
on it. The boy's got his own life to live, and you can't live it for
him. It won't be long, now, before you begin to notice those quiet
withdrawals, those slippings-back into his own shell of self-interest.
And unless you realize what it means, it's going to hurt. And unless
you reckon on that in the way you order your life you're not only
going to be a very lonely old lady but you're going to bump into a big
hole where you thought the going was smoothest!"
I sat thinking this over, with a ton of lead where my heart should
have been.
"I've already bumped into a big hole where I thought the going was
smoothest," I finally observed.
My husband looked at me and then looked away again.
"I was hoping we could fill that up and forget it," he ventured in a
valorously timid tone which made it hard, for reasons I couldn't quite
fathom, to keep my throat from tightening. But I sat there, shaking my
head from side to side.
"I've got to love something," I found myself protesting. "And the
children seem all that is left."
"How about me?" asked my husband, with his acidulated and slightly
one-sided smile.
"You've changed, Dinky-Dunk," was all I could say.
"But some day," he contended, "you may wake up to the fact that I'm
still a human being."
"I've wakened up to the fact that you're a different sort of human
being than I had thought."
"Oh, we're all very much alike, once you get our number," asserted my
husband.
"You mean men are," I amended.
"I mean that if men can't get a little warmth and color and sympathy
in the home-circle they're going to edge about until they find a
substitute for it, no matter how shoddy it may be," contended
Dinky-Dunk.
"But isn't that a hard and bitter way of writing life down to one's
own level?" I asked, trying to swallow the choke that wouldn't stay
down in my throat.
"Well, I can't see that we get much ahead by trying to sentimentalize
the situation," he said, with a gesture that seemed one of
frustration.
We sat staring at each other, and again I had the feeling of abysmal
gulfs of space intervening between us.
"Is that all you can say about it?" I asked, with a foolish little
gulp I couldn't control.
"Isn't it enough?" demanded Dinky-Dunk. And I knew that nothing was to
be gained, that night, by the foolish and futile clash of words.
_Tuesday the Twenty-Third_
I've been doing a good deal of thinking over what Dinky-Dunk said. I
have been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of
mental ju-jutsu I've even been trying to justify what I can't quite
understand in him. But it's no use. There's one bald, hard fact I
can't escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct
under the sands of self-deception. There's one cold-blooded truth that
will have to be faced. _My husband is no longer in love with me._
Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan
Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes of the law, and the
mother of his children. We still live together, and, from force of
habit, if from nothing else, go through the familiar old rites of
daily communion. He sits across the table from me when I eat, and
talks casually enough of the trivially momentous problems of the
minute, or he reads in his slippers before the fire while I do my
sewing within a spool-toss of him. But a row of invisible assegais
stand leveled between his heart and mine. A slow glacier of
green-iced indifferency shoulders in between us; and gone forever is
the wild-flower aroma of youth, the singing spirit of April, the
mysterious light that touched our world with wonder. He is merely a
man, drawing on to middle age, and I am a woman, no longer young. Gone
now are the spring floods that once swept us together. Gone now is the
flame of adoration that burned clean our altar of daily intercourse
and left us blind to the weaknesses we were too happy to remember. For
there was a time when we loved each other. I know that as well as
Duncan does. But it died away, that ghostly flame. It went out like a
neglected fire. And blowing on dead ashes can never revive the
old-time glow.
"So they were married and lived happy ever afterward!" That is the
familiar ending to the fairy-tales I read over and over again to my
Dinkie and Poppsy. But they are fairy-tales. For who lives happy ever
afterward? First love chloroforms us, for a time, and we try to hug to
our bosoms the illusion that Heaven itself is only a sort of endless
honeymoon presided over by Lohengrin marches. But the anesthetic wears
away and we find that life isn't a bed of roses but a rough field that
rewards us as we till it, with here and there the cornflower of
happiness laughing unexpectedly up at us out of our sober acres of
sober wheat. And often enough we don't know happiness when we see it.
We assuredly find it least where we look for it most. I can't even
understand why we're equipped with such a hunger for it. But I find
myself trending more and more to that cynic philosophy which defines
happiness as the absence of pain. The absence of pain--that is a lot
to ask for, in this life!
I wonder if Dinky-Dunk is right in his implication that I am getting
hard? There are times, I know, when I grate on him, when he would
probably give anything to get away from me. Yet here we are, linked
together like two convicts. And I don't believe I'm as hard as my
husband accuses me of being. However macadamized they may have made
life for me, there's at least one soft spot in my heart, one garden
under the walls of granite. And that's the spot which my two children
fill, which my children keep green, which my children keep holy. It's
them I think of, when I think of the future--when I should at least be
thinking a little of my grammar and remembering that the verb "to be"
takes the nominative, just as discontented husbands seem to take the
initiative! That's why I can't quite find the courage to ask for
freedom. I have seen enough of life to know what the smash-up of a
family means to its toddlers. And I want my children to have a chance.
They can't have that chance without at least two things. One is the
guardianship of home life, and the other is that curse of modern times
known as money. We haven't prospered as we had hoped to, but heaven
knows I've kept an eagle eye on that savings-account of mine, in that
absurdly new and resplendent red-brick bank in Buckhorn. Patiently
I've fed it with my butter and egg money, joyfully I've seen it grow
with my meager Nitrate dividends, and grimly I've made it bigger with
every loose dollar I could lay my hands on. There's no heroism in my
going without things I may have thought I needed, just as there can be
little nobility in my sticking to a husband who no longer loves me.
For it's not Chaddie McKail who counts now, but her chicks. And I'll
have to look for my reward through them, for I'm like Romanes' rat
now, too big to get into the bottle of cream, but wary enough to know
I can dine from a tail still small enough for insertion. I'm merely a
submerged prairie-hen with the best part of her life behind her.
But it bothers me, what Duncan says about my always thinking of little
Dinkie first. And I'm afraid I do, though it seems neither right nor
fair. I suppose it's because he was my first-born--and having come
first in my life he must come first in my thoughts. I was made to love
somebody--and my husband doesn't seem to want me to love him. So he
has driven me to centering my thoughts on the child. I've got to have
something to warm up to. And any love I may lavish on this
prairie-chick of mine, who has to face life with the lack of so many
things, will not only be a help to the boy, but will be a help to me,
the part of Me that I'm sometimes so terribly afraid of.
Yet I can't help wondering if Duncan has any excuses for claiming that
it's personal selfishness which prompts me to keep my boy close to my
side. And am I harming him, without knowing it, in keeping him here
under my wing? Schools are all right, in a way, but surely a good
mother can do as much in the molding of a boy's mind as a
boarding-school with a file of Ph.D.'s on its staff. But am I a good
mother? And should I trust myself, in a matter like this, to my own
feelings? Men, in so many things, are better judges than women. Yet it
has just occurred to me that all men do not think alike. I've been
sitting back and wondering what kindly old Peter would say about it.
And I've decided to write Peter and ask what he advises. He'll tell
the truth, I know, for Peter is as honest as the day is long....
I've just been up to make sure the children were properly covered in
bed. And it disturbed me a little to find that without even thinking
about it I went to Dinkie first. It seemed like accidental
corroboration of all that Duncan has been saying. But I stood studying
him as he lay there asleep. It frightened me a little, to find him so
big. If it's true, as Duncan threatens, that time will tend to turn
him away from me, it's something that I'm going to fight tooth and
nail. And I've seen no sign of it, as yet. With every month and every
year that's added to his age he grows more companionable, more able to
bridge the chasm between two human souls. We have more interests in
common, more things to talk about. And day by day Dinkie is reaching
up to my clumsily mature way of looking at life. He can come to me
with his problems, knowing I'll always give him a hearing, just as he
used to come to me with his baby cuts and bruises, knowing they would
be duly kissed and cared for. Yet some day, I have just remembered,
he may have problems that can't be brought to me. But that day, please
God, I shall defer as long as possible. Already we have our own little
secrets and private compacts and understandings. I don't want my boy
to be a mollycoddle. But I want him to have his chance in the world. I
want him to be somebody. I can't reconcile myself to the thought of
him growing up to wear moose-mittens and shoe-packs and stretching
barb-wire in blue-jeans and riding a tractor across a prairie
back-township. I refuse to picture him getting bent and gray wringing
a livelihood out of an over-cropped ranch fourteen miles away from a
post-office and a world away from the things that make life most worth
living. If he were an ordinary boy, I might be led to think
differently. But my Dinkie is not an ordinary boy. There's a spark of
the unusual, of the exceptional, in that laddie. And I intend to fan
that spark, whatever the cost may be, until it breaks out into
genius.
_Sunday the Twenty-Eighth_
I've had scant time for introspection during the last five days, for
Struthers has been in bed with lumbago, and the weight of the
housework reverted to me. But Whinstane Sandy brought his precious
bottle of Universal Ointment in from the bunk-house, and while that
fiery mixture warmed her lame back, the thought of its origin probably
warmed her lonely heart. I have suddenly wakened up to the fact that
Struthers is getting on a bit. She is still the same efficient and
self-obliterating mainstay of the kitchen that she ever was, but she
grows more "sot" in her ways, more averse to any change in her daily
routine, and more despairing of ever finally and completely capturing
that canny old Scotsman whom we still so affectionately designate as
Whinnie, in short for Whinstane Sandy. Whinnie, I'm afraid, still
nurses the fixed idea that everything in petticoats and as yet
unwedded is after him. And it is only by walking with the utmost
circumspection that he escapes their wiles and by maintaining an
unbroken front withstands their unseemly advances.
The new school-teacher has arrived, and is to live with us here at
Casa Grande. I have my reasons for this. In the first place, it will
be a help to Dinkie in his studies. In the second place, it means that
the teacher can pack my boy back and forth to school, in bad weather,
and next month when Poppsy joins the ranks of the learners, can keep a
more personal eye on that little tot's movements. And in the third
place the mere presence of another male at Casa Grande seems to dilute
the acids of home life.
Gershom Binks is the name of this new teacher, and I have just learned
that in the original Hebrew "Gershom" not inappropriately means "a
stranger there." He is a sophomore (a most excellent word, that, when
you come to inquire into its etymology!) from the University of
Minnesota and is compelled to teach the young idea, for a time, to
accumulate sufficient funds to complete his course, which he wants to
do at Ann Arbor. And Gershom is a very tall and very thin and very
short-sighted young man, with an Adam's apple that works up and down
with a two-inch plunge over the edge of his collar when he
talks--which he does somewhat extensively. He wears glasses with big
bulging lenses, glasses which tend to hide a pair of timid and
brown-October-aleish eyes with real kindliness in them. He looks
ill-nourished, but I can detect nothing radically wrong with his
appetite. It's merely that, like Cassius, he thinks too much. And I'm
going to fatten that boy up a bit, before the year is out, or know the
reason why. He may be a trifle self-conscious and awkward, but he's
also amazingly clean of both body and mind, and it will be no
hardship, I know, to have him under our roof. And for all his devotion
to Science, he reads his Bible every night--which is more than Chaddie
McKail does! He rather took the wind out of my sails by demanding, the
first morning at breakfast, if I knew that one half-ounce of the web
of the spider--the arachnid of the order _Araneida_, he explained--if
stretched out in a straight line would reach from the city of Chicago
to the city of Paris. I told him that this was a most wonderful and a
most interesting piece of information and hoped that some day we could
verify it by actual test. Yet when I inquired whether he meant merely
the environs of the city of Paris, or the very heart of the city such
as the Place de l'Opéra, he studied me with the meditative eye with
which Huxley must have once studied beetles.
Dinky-Dunk, I notice, is as restive as a bull-moose in black-fly
season. He's doing his work on the land, as about every ranch-owner
has to, whether he's happily married or not, but he's doing it without
any undue impression of its epical importance. I heard him observe,
yesterday, that if he could only get his hands on enough ready money
he'd like to swing into land business in a live center like Calgary.
He has a friend there, apparently, who has just made a clean-up in
city real estate and bought his wife a Detroit Electric and built a
home for himself that cost forty thousand dollars. I reminded
Dinky-Dunk, when he had finished, that we really must have a new
straining-mesh in the milk-separator. He merely looked at me with a
sour and morose eye as he got up and went out to his team.
Surely these men-folks are a dissatisfied lot! Gershom to-night
complained that his own name of "Gershom Binks" impressed him as about
the ugliest name that was ever hitched on to a scholar and a
gentlemen. And later on, after I'd opened my piano and tried to
console myself with a tu'penny draught of Grieg, he inspected the
instrument and informed me that it was really evolved from the
six-stringed harps of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, which in the fifth
dynasty was made with a greatly enlarged base, thus giving the
rudimentary beginning of a soundboard.
I am learning a lot from Gershom! And so are my kiddies, for that
matter. I begin, in fact, to feel like royalty with a private tutor,
for every night now Dinkie and Poppsy and Gershom sit about the
living-room table and drink of the founts of wisdom. But we have a
teacher here who loves to teach. And he is infinitely patient and kind
with my little toddlers. Dinkie already asks him questions without
number, while Poppsy gratefully but decorously vamps him with her
infantine gazes. Then Gershom--Heaven bless his scholastic old
high-browed solemnity--has just assured me that Dinkie betrays many
evidences of an exceptionally bright mind.
_Friday the Second_
My husband yesterday accused me of getting moss-backed. He had been
harping on the city string again and asked me if I intended to live
and die a withered beauty on a back-trail ranch.
That "withered beauty" hurt, though I did my best to ignore it, for
the time at least. And Dinky-Dunk went on to say that it struck him as
one of life's little ironies that _I_ should want to stick to the sort
of life we were leading, remembering what I'd come from.