clothes were all wrong. My hats were wrong; my shoes were wrong; and
every rag I had on me was in some way wrong. I was a tourist from the
provinces. And I wasn't up-to-date with either what was on me or was
_in_ me. I didn't even know the new subway routes or the telephone
rules or the proper places to go for tea. The Metropolitan looked
cramped and shoddy and _Tristan_ seemed shoddily sung to me. There was
no thrill to it. And even _The Jewels of the Madonna_ impressed me as
a bit garish and off color, with the Apache Dance of the last act
almost an affront to God and man. I even asked myself, when I found
that I had lost the trick of laughing at bridal-suite farces, if it
was the possession of children that had changed me. For when you're
with children you must in some way match their snowy innocence with a
kindred coloring of innocence, very much as the hare and the weasel
and the ptarmigan turn white to match the whiteness of our northern
winter. Yet I was able to wring pure joy out of Rachmaninoff's playing
at Carnegie Hall, with a great man making music for music's sake. I
loved the beauty and balance and splendid sanity of that playing,
without keyboard fire-works and dazzle and glare. But Rachmaninoff was
the exception. Even Central Park seemed smaller than of old, and I
couldn't remember which drives Dinky-Dunk and I had taken in the
historic old hansom-cab after our equally historic marriage by
ricochet. Fifth Avenue itself was different, the caterpillar of trade
having crawled a little farther up the stalk of fashion, for the
shops, I found, went right up to the Park, and the old W. K. house
where we once danced our long-forgotten Dresden China Quadrille, in
imitation of the equally forgotten Eighty-Three event, confronted me
as a beehive of business offices. I couldn't quite get used to the new
names and the new faces and the new shops and the side-street theaters
and the thought of really nice girls going to a prize-fight in
Madison Square Garden, and the eternal and never-ending talk about
drinks, about where and how to get them, and how to mix them, and how
much Angostura to put into 'em, and the musty ale that used to be had
at Losekam's in Washington, and the _Beaux Arts_ cocktails that used
to come with a dash of absinthe, and the shipment of pinch-neck Scotch
which somebody smuggled in on his cruiser-yacht from the east end of
Cuba, and so-forth and so-forth until I began to feel that the only
important thing in the world was the possession and dispensation of
alcohol. And out of it I got the headache without getting the fun. I
had the same dull sense of being cheated which came to me in my
flapper days when I fell asleep with a mouthful of contraband gum and
woke up in the morning with my jaw-muscles tired--I'd been facing all
the exertion without getting any of the satisfaction.
The one bright spot to me, in that lost city of my childhood, was the
part of Madison Avenue which used to be known as Murray Hill, the
right-of-way along the west sidewalk of which I once commandeered for
an afternoon's coasting. I could see again, as I glanced down the
familiar slope, the puffy figure of old Major Elmes, who in those
days was always pawing somebody, since he seemed to believe with
Novalis that he touched heaven when he placed his hand on a human
body. I could see myself sky-hooting down that icy slope on my
coaster, approaching the old Major from the rear and peremptorily
piping out: "One side, please!" For I was young then, and I expected
all life to make way for me. But the old Major betrayed no intention
of altering his solemnly determined course at any such juvenile
suggestion, with the result that he sat down on me bodily, and for the
next two blocks approached his club in Madison Square in a manner and
at a speed which he had in no wise anticipated. But, _Eheu_, how long
ago it all seemed!
_Saturday the Tenth_
Peter has written back in answer to my question as to the expediency
of sending my boy off to a boarding-school. He put all he had to say
in two lines. They were:
"_I had a mother like Dinkie's, I'd stick to her until the stars were
dust._"
That was very nice of Peter, of course, but I don't imagine he had any
idea of the peck of trouble he was going to stir up at Casa Grande.
For Dinky-Dunk picked up the sheet of paper on which that
light-hearted message had been written and perused the two lines,
perused them with a savagery which rather disturbed me. He read them
for the second time, and then he put them down. His eye, as he
confronted me, was a glacial one.
"It's too bad we can't run this show without the interference of
outsiders," he announced as he stalked out of the room.
I've been thinking the thing over, and trying to get my husband's
view-point. But I can't quite succeed. There has always been a touch
of the satyric in Dinky-Dunk's attitude toward Peter's weekly letter
to my boy. He has even intimated that they were written in a new kind
of Morse, the inference being that they were intended to carry
messages in cipher to eyes other than Dinkie's. But Peter is much too
honest a man for any such resort to subterfuge. And Dinky-Dunk has
always viewed with a hostile eye the magazines and books and toys
which big-hearted Peter has showered out on us. Peter always was
ridiculously open-handed. And he always loved my Dinkie. And it's only
natural that our thoughts should turn back to where our love has been
left. Peter, I know, gets quite as much fun out of those elaborately
playful letters to Dinkie as Dinkie does himself. And it's left the
boy more anxious to learn, to the end that he may pen a more
respectable reply to them.
Some of Peter's gifts, it is true, have been embarrassingly ornate,
but Peter, who has been given so much, must have remembered how little
has come to my kiddies. It was my intention, for a while, to talk this
over with Dinky-Dunk, to try to make him see it in a more reasonable
light. But I have now given up that intention. There's a phantasmal
something that holds me back....
I dreamt last night that my little Dinkie was a grown youth in a Greek
academy, wearing a toga and sitting on a marble bench overlooking a
sea of lovely sapphire. There both Peter and Percy, also arrayed in
togas, held solemn discourse with my offspring and finally agreed that
once they were through with him he would be the Wonder of the Age....
Dinky-Dunk asked me point-blank to-day if I'd consider the sale of
Casa Grande, provided he got the right price for the ranch. I felt,
for a moment, as though the bottom had been knocked out of my world.
But it showed me the direction in which my husband's thoughts have
been running of late. And I just as pointedly retorted that I'd never
consent to the sale of Casa Grande. It's not merely because it's our
one and only home. It's more because of the little knoll where the
four Manitoba maples have been set and the row of prairie-roses have
been planted along the little iron fence, the little iron fence which
twice a year I paint a virginal white, with my own hands. For that's
where my Pee-Wee sleeps, and that lonely little grave must never pass
out of my care, to be forgotten and neglected and tarnished with
time. It's not a place of sorrow now, but more an altar, duly tended,
the flower-covered bed of my Pee-Wee, of my poor little Pee-Wee who
was so brimming with life and love. He used to make me think of a
humming-bird in a garden--and now all I have left of him is my small
chest of toys and trinkets and baby-clothes. God, I know, will be good
to that lonely little newcomer in His world of the statelier dead, in
His gallery of whispering ghosts. Oh, be good to him, God! Be good to
him, or You shall be no God of mine! I can't think of him as dead, as
going out like a candle, as melting into nothingness as the little
bones under their six feet of earth molder away. But my laddie is
gone. And I must not be morbid. As Peter once said, misery loves
company, but the company is apt to seek more convivial quarters. Yet
something has gone out of my life, and that something drives me back
to my Dinkie and my Poppsy with a sort of fierceness in my hunger to
love them, to make the most of them.
Gershom, who has been giving Poppsy a daily lesson at home, has just
inquired why she shouldn't be sent to school along with Dinkie. And
her father has agreed. It gave me the wretched feeling, for a moment
or two, that they were conspiring to take my last baby away from me.
But I have to bow to the fact that I no longer possess one, since
Poppsy announced her preference, the other day, for a doll "with real
livings in it." She begins to show as fixed an aversion to baby-talk
as that entertained by old Doctor Johnson himself, and no longer
yearns to "do yidin on the team-tars," as she used to express it. The
word "birthday" is still "birfday" with her, and "water" is still
"wagger," but she now religiously eschews all such reiterative
diminutives as "roundy-poundy" and "Poppsy-Woppsy" and "beddy-bed."
She has even learned, after much effort, to convert her earlier "keam
of feet" into the more legitimate and mature "cream of wheat." And now
that she has a better mastery of the sibilants the charm has rather
gone out of the claim, which I so laboriously taught her, that "Daddy
is all feet," meaning, of course, that he was altogether sweet--which
he gave small sign of being when he first caught the point of my
patient schooling. She is not so quick-tongued as her brother Dinkie,
but she has a natural fastidiousness which makes her long for
alignment with the proprieties. She is, in fact, a conformist, a
sedate and dignified little lady who will never be greatly given to
the spilling of beans and the upsetting of apple-carts. She is, in
many ways, amazingly like her pater. She will, I know, be a nice girl
when she grows up, without very much of that irresponsibility which
seems to have been the bugbear of her maternal parent. I'm even
beginning to believe there's something in the old tradition about
ancestral traits so often skipping a generation. At any rate, that
crazy-hearted old Irish grandmother of mine passed on to me a muckle
o' her wildness, the mad County Clare girl who swore at the vicar and
rode to hounds and could take a seven-barred gate without turning a
hair and was apt to be always in love or in debt or in hot water. She
died too young to be tamed, I'm told, for say what you will, life
tames us all in the end. Even Lady Hamilton took to wearing
red-flannel petticoats before she died, and Buffalo Bill faded down
into plain Mr. William Cody, and the abducted Helen of Troy gave many
a day up to her needlework, we are told, and doubtlessly had trouble
with both her teeth and her waist measurement.
Dinky-Dunk is proud of his Poppsy and has announced that it's about
time we tucked the "Poppsy" away with her baby-clothes and resorted to
the use of the proper and official "Pauline Augusta." So Pauline we
shall try to have it, after this. There are several things, I think,
which draw Dinky-Dunk and his Poppsy--I mean his Pauline--together.
One is her likeness to himself. Another is her tractability, though I
hate to hitch so big a word on to so small a lady. And still another
is the fact that she is a girl. There's a subliminal play of
sex-attraction about it, I suppose, just as there probably is between
Dinkie and me. And there's something very admirable in Pauline
Augusta's staid adoration of her dad. She plays up to him, I can see,
without quite knowing she's doing it. She's hungry for his approval,
and happiest, always, in his presence. Then, too, she makes him
forget, for the time at least, his disappointment in a soul-mate who
hasn't quite measured up to expectations! And I devoutly thank the
Master of Life and Love that my solemn old Dinky-Dunk can thus care
for his one and only daughter. It softens him, and keeps the sordid
worries of the moment from vitrifying his heart. It puts a rainbow in
his sky of every-day work, and gives him something to plan and plot
and live for. And he needs it. We all do. It's our human and natural
hunger for companionship. And as he observed not long ago, if that
hunger can't be satisfied at home, we wander off and snatch what we
can on the wing. Some day when they're rich, I overheard Dinky-Dunk
announcing the other night, Pauline Augusta and her Dad are going to
make the Grand Tour of Europe. And there, undoubtedly, do their best
to pick up a Prince of the Royal Blood and have a château in Lombardy
and a villa on the Riviera and a standing invitation to all the
Embassy Balls!
Well, not if I know it. None of that penny-a-liner moonshine for my
daughter. And as she grows older, I feel sure, I'll have more
influence over her. She'll begin to realize that the battle of life
hasn't scarred up for nothing this wary-eyed old mater who's beginning
to know a hawk from a henshaw. I've learned a thing or two in my day,
and one or two of them are going to be passed on to my offspring.
_Thursday the Fifteenth_
Struthers and I have been house-cleaning, for this is the middle of
May, and our reluctant old northern spring seems to be here for good.
It has been backward, this year, but the last of the mud has gone, and
I hope to have my first setting of chicks out in a couple of days.
Dinkie wants to start riding Buntie to school, but his pater says
otherwise. Gershom goes off every morning, with Calamity Kate hitched
to the old buckboard, with my two kiddies packed in next to him and
provender enough for himself and the kiddies and Calamity Kate under
the seat. The house seems very empty when they are away. But some time
about five, every afternoon, I see them loping back along the trail.
Then comes the welcoming bark of old Bobs, and a raid on the
cooky-jar, and traces of bread-and-jelly on two hungry little faces,
and the familiar old tumult about the reanimated rooms of Casa Grande.
Then Poppsy--I beg her ladyship's pardon, for I mean, of course,
Pauline Augusta--has to duly inspect her dolls to assure herself that
they are both well-behaved and spotless as to apparel, for Pauline
Augusta is a stickler as to decorum and cleanliness; and Dinkie falls
to working on his air-ship, which he is this time making quite
independent of Whinnie, whose last creation along that line betrayed a
disheartening disability for flight. But even this second effort, I'm
afraid, is doomed to failure, for more than once I've seen Dinkie back
away and stand regarding his incompetent flier with a look of
frustration on his face. He is always working over machinery--for he
loves anything with wheels--and I'm pretty well persuaded that the
twentieth-century mania of us grown-ups for picking ourselves to
pieces is nothing more than a development of this childish hunger to
get the cover off things and see the works go round. Dinkie makes
wagons and carts and water-wheels, but some common fatality of
incompetence overtakes them all and they are cast aside for
enterprises more novel and more promising. He announces, now, that he
intends to be an engineer. And that recalls the time when I was
convinced in my own soul that he was destined for a life of art, since
he was forever asking me to draw him "a li'l' man," and later on fell
to drawing them himself. He would do his best to inscribe a circle
and then emboss it with perfectly upright hair, as though the person
in question had just been perusing the most stirring of
penny-dreadfuls. Then he would put in two dots of eyes, and one
abbreviated and vertical line for the nose, and another elongated and
horizontal line for the mouth, and arms with extended and extremely
elocutionary fingers, to say nothing of extremely attenuated legs
which invariably toed-out, to make more discernible the silhouette of
the ponderously booted feet. I have several dozen of these "li'l' men"
carefully treasured in an old cigar-box. But he soon lost interest in
these purely anthropocentric creations and broadened out into the
delineation of boats and cars and wheel-barrows and rocking-chairs and
tea-pots, lying along the floor on his stomach for an hour at a time,
his tongue moving sympathetically with every movement of his pencil.
He held the latter clutched close to the point by his stubby little
fingers.
I had to call a halt on all such artistry, however, for he startled
me, one day, by suddenly going crosseyed. It came, of course, from
working with his nose too close to the paper. I imagined, with a
sinking heart, that it was an affliction which was to stay with him
for the rest of his natural life. But a night's sleep did much to
restore the over-taxed eye-muscles and before the end of a week they
had entirely righted themselves.
To-morrow Dinkie will probably want to be an aeronaut, and the next
day a cowboy, and the next an Indian scout, for I notice that his
enthusiasms promptly conform to the stimuli with which he chances to
be confronted. Last Sunday he asked me to read Macaulay's _Horatius_
to him. I could see, after doing so, that it was going to his head
exactly as a second Clover-Club cocktail goes to the head of a
sub-deb. On Tuesday, when I went out about sun-down to get him to help
me gather the eggs, I found that he had made a sword by nailing a bit
of stick across a slat from the hen-house, and also observed that he
had possessed himself of my boiler-top. So I held back, slightly
puzzled. But later on, hearing much shouting and clouting and banging
of tin, I quietly investigated and found Dinkie in the corral-gate,
holding it against all comers. So earnest was he about it, so rapt was
he in that solemn business of warfare, that I decided to slip away
without letting him see me. He was sixteen long centuries away from
Casa Grande, at that moment. He was afar off on the banks of the
Tiber, defending the Imperial City against Lars Porsena and his
footmen. All Rome was at his back, cheering him on, and every time his
hen-coop slat thumped that shredded old poplar gate-post some proud
son of Tuscany bit the dust.
_Sunday the Twenty-Fifth_
Duncan, it's plain to see, is still in the doldrums. He is
uncommunicative and moody and goes about his work with a listlessness
which is more and more disturbing to me. He surprised his wife the
other day by addressing her as "Lady Selkirk," for the simple reason,
he later explained, that I propose to be monarch of all I survey, with
none to dispute my domain. And a little later he further intimated
that I was like a miser with a pot of gold, satisfied to live anywhere
so long as my precious family-life could go clinking through my
fingers.
That was last Sunday--a perfect prairie day--when I sat out on the end
of the wagon-box, watching Poppsy and Dinkie. I sat in the warm
sunlight, in a sort of trance, staring at those two children as they
went about their solemn business of play. They impressed me as two
husky and happy-bodied little beings and I remembered that whatever
prairie-life had cost me, it had not cost me the health of my family.
My two bairns had been free of those illnesses and infections which
come to the city child, and I was glad enough to remember it. But I
was unconscious of Dinky-Dunk's cynic eye on me as I sat there
brooding over my chicks. When he spoke to me, in fact, I was thinking
how odd it was that Josie Langdon, on the very day before her
marriage, should have carried me down to the lower end of Fifth Avenue
and led me into the schoolroom of the Church of the Ascension, and
asked me to study Sorolla's _Triste Herencia_ which hangs there.
I can still see that wonderful canvas where the foreshore of Valencia,
usually so vivacious with running figures and the brightest of
sunlight on dancing sails, had been made the wine-dark sea of the
pagan questioner with the weight of immemorial human woe to shadow it.
Josie had been asking me about marriage and children, for even she was
knowing her more solemn moments in the midst of all that feverishly
organized merriment. But I was surprised, when she slipped a hand
through my arm, to see a tear run down her nose. So I looked up again
at Sorolla's picture of the naked little cripples snatching at their
moment's joy along the water's edge, at his huddled group of maimed
and cast-off orphans trying to be happy without quite knowing how. I
can still see the stunted little bodies, naked in sunlight that
seemed revealing without being invigorating, clustered about the
guardian figure of the tall old priest in black, the somberly
benignant old figure that towered above the little wrecks on crutches
and faced, as majestic as Millet's _Sower_, as austere and unmoved as
Fate itself, a dark sea overhung by a dark sky. Sorolla was great in
that picture, to my way of thinking. He was great in the manner in
which he attunes nature to a human mood, in which he gives you the
sunlight muffled, in some way, like the sunlight during a partial
eclipse, and keys turbulence down to quietude, like the soft pedal
that falls on a noisy street when a hearse goes by.
Josie felt it, and I felt it, that wordless thinning down of radiance,
that mysterious holding back of warmth, until it seemed to strike a
chill into the bones. It was the darker wing of Destiny hovering over
man's head, deepening at the same time that it shadows the receding
sky-line, so that even the memory of it, a thousand miles away, could
drain the jocund blitheness out of the open prairie and give an air of
pathos and solitude to my own children playing about my feet. Sorolla,
I remembered, had little ones of his own. He _knew_. Life had taught
him, and in teaching, had enriched his art. For the artist, after all,
is the man who cuts up the loaf of his own heart, and butters it with
beauty, and at tuppence a slice hands it to the hungry children of the
world.
So when Dinky-Dunk laughed at me, for going into a trance over my own
children, I merely smiled condoningly back at him. I felt vaguely
sorry for him. He wasn't getting out of them what I was getting. He
was being cheated, in some way, out of the very harvest for which he
had sowed and waited. And if he had come to me, in that mood of
relapse, if he had come to me with the slightest trace of humility,
with the slightest touch of entreaty, on his face, I'd have hugged his
salt-and-peppery old head to my bosom and begged to start all over
again with a clean slate....
Gershom and I get along much better than I had expected. There's
nothing wrong with the boy except his ineradicable temptation to
impart to you his gratuitous tidbits of information. I can't object,
of course, to Gershom having a college education: what I object to is
his trying to give me one. I don't mind his wisdom, but I do hate to
see him tear the whole tree of knowledge up by the roots and floor
one with it. He has just informed me that there are estimated to be
30,000,000,000,000 red blood corpuscles in this body of mine, and I
made him blink by solemnly challenging him to prove it. Quite
frequently and quite sternly, too, he essays to correct my English. He
reproved me for saying: "Go to it, Gershom!" And he declared I was in
error in saying "The goose hangs high," as that was merely a vulgar
corruption for "The goose whangs high," the "whanging" being the call
of the wild geese high in the air when the weather is settled and
fair. We live and learn!
But I can't help liking this pedagogic old Gershom who takes himself
and me and all the rest of the world so seriously. I like him because
he shares in my love for Dinkie and stands beside Peter himself in the
fondly foolish belief that Dinkie has somewhere the hidden germ of
greatness in him. Not that my boy is one of those precocious little
bounders who are so precious in the eyes of their parents and so
odious to the eyes of the rest of the world. He is a large-boned boy,
almost a rugged-looking boy, and it is only I, knowing him as I do,
who can fathom the sensibilities housed in that husky young body.
There is a misty broodiness in his eyes which leaves them
indescribably lovely to me as I watch him in his moments of raptness.
But that look doesn't last long, for Dinkie can be rough in play and
at times rough in speech, and deep under the crust of character I
imagine I see traces of his Scottish father in him. I watch with an
eagle eye for any outcroppings of that Caledonian-granite strain in
his make-up. I inspect him as Chinkie used to inspect his fruit-trees
for San José scale, for if there is any promise of hardness or cruelty
there I want it killed in the bud.
But I don't worry as I used to, on that score. He may be rough-built,
but moods cluster thick about him, like butterflies on a shelf of
broken rock. And he is both pliable and responsive. I can shake him,
when in the humor, by the mere telling of a story. I can control his
color, I can excite him and exalt him, and bring him to the verge of
tears, if I care to, by the mere tone of my voice as I read him one of
his favorite tales out of one of Peter's books. But I shrink, in a
way, from toying with those feelings. It seems brutal, cruel,
merciless. For he is, after all, a delicate instrument, to be treated
with delicacy. The soul of him must be kept packed away, like a
violin, in its case of reserve well-padded with discretion. Two
things I see in him: tenseness and beauty. And these are things which
are lost, with rough handling. He shrinks away from brutality. Always,
when he came to the picture of Samson pulling down the pillars of the
temple, in Whinstane Sandy's big old illustrated Bible, he used to
cover with one small hand a certain child on the temple steps as
though to protect to the last that innocent one from the falling
columns and cornices.