There are ways in which he demands too much from the child. His father
is often unnecessarily rough in his play with him, seeming to take a
morose delight in goading him to the breaking point and then lamenting
his lack of grit, edging him on to the point of exasperation and then
heaping scorn on him for his weakness. More than once I've seen his
father actually hurt him, although the child was too proud to admit
it. Dinky-Dunk, I think, really wants his boy to be a bigger figure in
the world than his dad. Milord's a middle-aged man now and knows his
limitations. He has realized just how high the supremest high-water
mark of his life will stand. And being human, he must nurse his human
regrets over his failures in life. So now he wishes to see his
thwarted powers come to fuller fruit in his offspring. I'm afraid he'd
even run the risk of sacrificing the boy's happiness for the sake of
knowing Dinkie's wagon was to be hitched to the star of success. For I
know my husband well enough to realize that he has always hankered
after worldly success, that his god, if he had any, has always been
the god of Power. I, too, want to see my son a success. But I want him
to be happy first. I want to see him get some of the things I've been
cheated out of, that I've cheated myself out of. That's the only way
now I can get even with life. I can't live my own days over again. But
I can catch at the trick of living them over again in my Dinkie.
_Thursday the Twenty-Ninth_
We have arrived at an armistice, Dinky-Dunk and I. It was forced on
us, for things couldn't have gone on in the old intolerable manner.
Dinky-Dunk, I fancy, began to realize that he hadn't been quite fair,
and started making oblique but transparent enough efforts at
appeasement. When he sat down close beside me, and I moved away, he
said in a spirit of exaggerated self-accusation: "I'm afraid I've got
a peach-stain on my reputation!" I retorted, at that, that she had
never impressed me as much of a peach. Whereupon he merely laughed, as
though it were a joke out of a Midnight Revue. Then he clipped a
luridly illustrated advertisement of a nerve-medicine out of his
newspaper and pinned it on my bedroom door, after I had ignored his
tentative knock thereon the night before. The picture showed an anemic
and woebegone couple haggling and shaking their fists at each other,
while a large caption announced that "Thousands of Married Folks Lead
a Cat and Dog Life--Are Cross, Crabbed and Grumpy!"--all of which
could be obviated if they used Oxygated Iron.
What made it funny, of course, was the ridiculousness of the drawing.
Then Dinky-Dunk, right before the blushing Gershom, accused me of
being a love-piker. I could sniff which way the wind was blowing, but
I sat tight. Then, to cap the climax, my husband announced that he had
something for me which was surely going to melt my mean old prairie
heart. And late that afternoon he came trundling up to Casa Grande
with nothing more nor less than an old prairie-schooner.
It startled me, when I first caught sight of it. But its acquisition
was not so miraculous as it might have seemed. Dinky-Dunk, who is a
born dickerer, has been trading some of his ranch-stock for town-lots
on the outskirts of Buckhorn. On the back of one of these lots stood a
tumble-down wooden building, and hidden away in this building was the
prairie-schooner. Something about it had caught his fancy, so he had
insisted that it be included in the deal. And home he brought it, with
Tithonus and Tumble-Weed yoked to its antique tongue and his own
Stetsoned figure high on the driving seat. They had told Dinky-Dunk it
wasn't a really-truly authentic prairie-schooner, since practically
all of the trekking north of the Fiftieth Parallel has been done by
means of the Red River cart. But Dinky-Dunk, after looking more
carefully over the heavy-timbered running-gear and the cumbersome
iron-work, and discovering even the sturdy hooks under its belly from
which the pails and pots of earlier travelers must have hung,
concluded that it was one of the genuine old-timers, one of the
"Murphies" once driven by a "bull-whacker" and drawn by "wheelers" and
"pointers." Where it originally came from, Heaven only knows. But it
had been used, five years before, for a centenary procession in the
provincial capital and had emerged into the open again last summer for
a town-booming _Rodeo_ twenty miles down the steel from Buckhorn. It
looked like the dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History,
with every vestige of its tarpaulin top gone. But Whinnie has already
sewed together a canvas covering for its weather-beaten old roof-ribs,
and has put clean wheat-straw in its box-bottom, so that it makes a
kingly place for my two kiddies to play. I even spotted Dinkie,
enthroned high on the big driving-seat, with a broken binder-whip in
his hand, imagining he was one of the original Forty-Niners pioneering
along the unknown frontiers of an unknown land. I could see him duck
at imaginary arrows and frenziedly defend his family from imaginary
Sioux with an imaginary musket. And I stood beside it this morning,
dreaming of the adventures it must have lumbered through, of the
freight it must have carried and the hopes it must have ferried as it
once crawled westward along the floor of the world, from water-hole to
lonely water-hole. I've been wondering if certain perforations in its
side-boards can be bullet-holes and if certain dents and abrasions in
its timbers mean the hostile arrows of skulking Apaches when women and
children crouched low behind the ramparts of this tiny wooden
fortress. I can't help picturing what those women and children had to
endure, and how trivial, after all, are our puny hardships compared
with theirs.
And I don't intend to dwell on those hardships. I'm holding out the
hand of compromise to my fellow-trekker. Existence is only a
prairie-schooner, and we have to accommodate ourselves to it. And I
thank Heaven now that I can see things more clearly and accept them
more quietly. That's a lesson Time teaches us. And Father Time, after
all, has to hand us something to make up for so mercilessly
permitting us to grow old. It leaves us more tolerant. We're not
allowed to demand more life, but we can at least ask for more light.
So I intend to be cool-headedly rational about it all. I'm going to
keep Reason on her throne. I'm going to be a bitter-ender, in at least
one thing: I'm going to stick to my Dinky-Dunk to the last ditch. I'm
going to patch up the old top and forget the old scars. For we're in
the same schooner, and we must make the most of it. And if I have to
eat my pot of honey on the grave of all our older hopes, I'm at least
going to dig away at that pot until its bottom is scraped clean. I'm
going to remain the neck-or-nothing woman I once prided myself on
being. I'm even going to overlook Dinky-Dunk's casual cruelty in
announcing, when I half-jokingly inquired why he preferred other women
to his own Better-Half, that no horse eats hay after being turned out
to fresh grass. I'm going on, I repeat, no matter what happens. I'm
going on to the desperate end, like my own Dinkie with the
chocolate-cake when I warned him he'd burst if he dared to eat another
piece and he responded: "Then pass the cake, Mummy--and everybody
stand back!"
_Tuesday the Fourth_
_Sursum corda_ is the word--so here goes! I am determined to be blithe
and keep the salt of humor sprinkled thick across the butter-crock of
concession. Dinky-Dunk watches me with a guarded and wary eye and
Pauline Augusta does not always approve of me. Yesterday, when I got
on Briquette and made that fire-eater jump the two rain-barrels put
end to end Dinky-Dunk told me I was too old to be taking a chance like
that. So I promptly and deliberately turned a somersault on the
prairie-sod, just to show him I wasn't the old lady he was trying to
make me out. Gershom, who'd just got back with the children and was
unhitching Calamity Kate, retreated with his eyebrows up, toward the
stable. And on the youthful face of Pauline Augusta I saw nothing but
pained incredulity touched with reproof, for Poppsy is not a believer
in the indecorous. She has herself staidly intimated that she'd prefer
the rest of the family to address her as "Pauline Augusta" instead of
"Poppsy" which still so unwittingly creeps into our talk. So
hereafter we must be more careful. For Pauline Augusta can already sew
a fine seam and array her seven dolls with a preciseness and neatness
which is to be highly commended.
On Saturday, when we motored into Buckhorn for supplies, I escorted
Pauline Augusta to Hunk Granby, the town barber, to have her hair cut
Dutch. Her lip quivered and she gave every indication of an outbreak,
for she was mortally afraid of that strange man and his still stranger
clipping-machine. But I spotted a concert-guitar on a bench at the
back of Hunk's emporium and as it was the noon-hour and there was no
audience, I rendered a jazz _obbligato_ to the snip of the scissors.
"Say, Birdie, you'll sure have me buck and wing dancin' if you keep
that up!" remarked the man of the shears. I merely smiled and gave him
_Texas Tommy_, _cum gusto_, whereupon he acknowledged he was having
difficulty in making his feet behave. We became quite a companionable
little family, in fact, as the bobbing process went on, and when
Dinky-Dunk called for us as he'd promised he was patently scandalized
to find his superannuated old soul-mate sight-reading _When Katy
Couldn't Katy Wouldn't_--it was a new one to me--in the second ragged
plush shaving-chair of a none too clean barber-shop festooned with
lithographs which would have made old Anthony Comstock turn in his
grave. But you have to be feathered to the toes like a ptarmigan in
this northern country so that rough ways and rough winds can't strike
a chill into you. The barber, in fact, refused to take any money for
Dutching my small daughter's hair, proclaiming that the music was more
than worth it. But my husband, with a dangerous light in his eye,
insisted on leaving four bits on the edge of the shelf loaded down
with bottled beautifiers, and escorted us out to the muddy old
devil-wagon where Dinkie sat awaiting us.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said with a perfectly straight face as we climbed in,
"what is it gives me such a mysterious influence over men?"
Instead of answering me, he merely ground his gears as though they had
been his own teeth. So I repeated my question.
"Why don't you ask that school-teacher of yours?" he demanded.
"But what," I inquired, "has Gershom got to do with it?"
He turned and inspected me with such a pointed stare that we nearly
ran into a Bain wagon full of bagged grain.
"You don't suppose I can't see that that beanpole's fallen in love
with you?" he rudely and raucously challenged.
"Why, I feel exactly like a mother to that poor boy," I innocently
protested.
"Mother nothing!" snorted my lord and master. "Any fool could see he's
going mushy on you!"
I pretended to be less surprised than I really was, but it gave me
considerable to think over. My husband was wrong, in a way, but no
woman feels bad at the thought that somebody is fond of her. It's nice
to know there's a heart or two at which one can still warm one's
outstretched hands. The short-cut to ruin, with a man, is the
knowledge that women are fond of him. But let a woman know that she is
not unloved and she walks the streets of Heaven, to say nothing of
nearly breaking her neck to make herself worthy of those transporting
affections.
But I soon had other things to think of, that afternoon, for Dinkie
and I had a little secret shopping to do. And in the midst of it I
caught the familiar tawny look which occasionally comes into my
man-child's eyes. It's the look of dreaming, the look of brooding
wildness where some unknown Celtic great-great-grandfather of a
great-great-grandfather stirs in his moorland grave like a collie-dog
in his afternoon sleep. And it all arose out of nothing more than a
blind beggar sitting on an upturned nail-keg at the edge of the
sidewalk and rather miraculously playing a mouth-organ and a guitar at
one and the same time. The guitar was a dog-eared old instrument that
had most decidedly seen better days, stained and bruised and
greasy-looking along the shank. The mouth-organ was held in position
by two wires that went about the beggar's neck, to leave his hands
free for strumming on the larger instrument. The music he made was
simple enough, rudimentary old waltz-tunes and plaintive old airs that
I hadn't heard for years. But I could see it go straight to the head
of my boy. His intent young face took on the fierce emptiness of a
Barres lion overlooking some time-worn desert. He forgot me, and he
forgot the shopping that had kept him awake about half the night, and
he forgot Buckhorn and the fact that he was a small boy on the streets
of a bald little prairie town. He was thousands of years and thousands
of miles away from me. He was a king's son in Babylon, commanding the
court-musicians to make sweet discourse for him. He was Saul
harkening to David. He was a dreamy-eyed Pict listening to music
wafted at dusk from a Roman camp about which helmeted sentries paced.
He was a medieval prince, falsely imprisoned, leaning from dark and
lonely towers to catch the strains of some wandering troubadour from
his native Southlands. He was a Magyar chieftain listening to the
mountain-side music of valleyed goat-herders with a touch of madness
to it. It engulfed him and entranced him and awoke ancestral tom-toms
in his blood. And I waited beside him until the afternoon sunlight
grew thinner and paler and my legs grew tired, for I knew that his
hungry little soul was being fed. His eye met mine, when it was all
over, but he had nothing to say. I could see, however, that he had
been stirred to the depths,--and by a tin mouth-organ and a
greasy-sided guitar!
To-night I found Dinkie poring over the pictures in my Knight edition
of Shakespeare. He seemed especially impressed, as I stopped and
looked over his shoulder, by a steel engraving of Gérôme's _Death of
Cæsar_, where the murdered emperor lies stretched out on the floor of
the Forum, now all but empty, with the last of the Senators crowding
out through the door. Two of the senatorial chairs are overturned,
and Cæsar's throne lies face-down on the dais steps. So Dinkie began
asking questions about a drama which he could not quite comprehend.
But they were as nothing to the questions he asked when he turned to
another of the Gérôme pictures, this one being the familiar old
_Cleopatra and Cæsar_. He wanted to know why the lady hadn't more
clothes on, and why the big black man was hiding down behind her, and
what Cæsar was writing a letter for, and why he was looking at the
lady the way he did. So, glancing about to make sure that Dinky-Dunk
was within ear-shot, I did my best to explain the situation to little
Dinkie.
"Cæsar, my son, was a man who set out in the world to be a great
conqueror. But when he got quite bald, as you may see by the picture,
and had reached middle age, he forgot about being a great conqueror.
He even forgot about being so comfortably middle-aged and that it was
not easy for a man of his years to tumble gracefully into love, for
those romantic impulses, my son, are associated more with
irresponsible youth and are apt to be called by rather an ugly name
when they occur in advanced years. But Cæsar fell in love with the
lady you see in the picture, whose name was Cleopatra and who was one
of the greatest man-eaters that ever came out of Egypt. She had a
weakness for big strong men, and although certain authorities have
claimed that she was a small and hairy person with a very uncertain
temper, she undoubtedly set a very good table and made her gentlemen
friends very comfortable, for Cæsar stayed feasting and forgetting
himself for nearly a year with her. It must have been very pleasant,
for Cæsar loved power, and intended to be one of the big men of his
time. But the lady also loved power, and was undoubtedly glad to see
that she could make Cæsar forget about going home, though it was too
bad that he forgot, for always, even after he had lived to write about
all the great things he had done in the world, people remembered more
about his rather absurd infatuation for the lady than about all the
battles he had won and all the prizes he had captured. And the lady,
of course----"
But I was interrupted at this point. And it was by Dinky-Dunk.
"Oh, hell!" he said as he flung down his paper and strode out into the
other room. And those exits, I remembered, were getting to be a bit of
a habit with my harried old Diddums.
_Sunday the Fifth_
The Day of Rest seems to be the only day left to me now for my
writing. There are no idlers in the neighborhood of Casa Grande. The
days are becoming incredibly long, but they still seem over-short for
all there is to do. The men are much too busy on the land to give
material thought to any thing so womanish as a kitchen-garden. So I
have my own garden to see to. And sometimes I work there until I'm
almost ready to drop. On a couple of nights, recently, when it came
watering-time, even these endless evenings had slipped into such
darkness that I could scarcely see the plants I was so laboriously
irrigating by hand. It wasn't until the water turned the soil black
that the growing green stood pallidly out against the mothering dark
earth.... But it is delightful work. I really love it. And I love to
see things growing. After the bringing up of a family, the bringing up
of a garden surely comes next.
Yet too much work, I find, can make tempers a trifle short. I spoke
rather sharply to Dinky-Dunk yesterday regarding the folly of leaving
firearms about the house where children can reach them. And he was
equally snappy as he flung his ugly old Colt in its ugly old holster
up over the top corner of our book-cabinet. So, to get even with him,
when Dinkie came in with some sort of wide-petaled field-flower and
asked if I didn't want my fortune told, I announced I rather fancied
it was pretty well told already.... Scotty, by the way, now follows
Dinkie to school and waits outside and comes loping home with him
again. And my two bairns have a new and highly poetic occupation. It
is that of patiently garnering youthful potato-bugs and squashing the
accumulated harvest between two bricks.
_Sunday the Twelth_
I have been examining Gershom with a more interested eye. And when he
changed color, under that inspection, I apologized for making him
blush. And as that only added to his embarrassment, I artlessly asked
him what a blush really was. That, of course, was throwing the rabbit
straight back into the brier-patch, as far as Gershom was concerned.
For he promptly and meticulously informed me that a blush was a
miniature epilepsy, a vasomotor impulse leading to the dilation or
constriction of the facial blood-vessels, some psychologists even
claiming the blush to be a vestigial survival of the prehistoric
flight-effort of the heart, coming from the era of marriage by
capture, when to be openly admired meant imminent danger.
"That isn't a bit pretty," I told Gershom. "It's as horrid as what my
husband said about handshaking originating in man's desire to be dead
sure his gentleman friend didn't have a knife up his sleeve, for use
before the greeting was over. It would have been so much nicer,
Gershom, if you could have told me that the first blush was born on
the same day as the first kiss."
"Kissing," that youth solemnly informed me, "was quite unknown to
primitive man. It evolved, in fact, out of the entirely
self-protective practice of smelling, to determine the health of a
prospective mate, though this in turn evolved into the ceremonial
habit of the rubbing together of noses, which is still the form of
affectionate salutation largely prevalent among the natives of the
South Sea Islands."
"What a perfectly horrible origin for such a heavenly pastime," I just
as solemnly announced to Gershom, who studied me with a stern and
guarded eye, and having partaken of his eleventh flap-jack, escaped to
the stable and the matutinal task of harnessing Calamity Kate.
_Sunday the Second_
Summer is here, in earnest, and the last few days have been hot and
windless. School is over, for the next eight weeks, and I shall have
my kiddies close beside me. Gershom, after a ten-day trip down to
Minneapolis for books and clothes, is going to come back to Casa
Grande and help Dinky-Dunk on the land, as long as the holidays last.
He thinks it will build him up a bit. He is also solemnly anxious to
study music. He feels it would round out his accomplishments, which,
he acknowledged, have threatened to become overwhelmingly scientific.
So I'm to give Gershom music lessons in exchange for his tutoring
Dinkie. They will be rather awful, I'm afraid, for Gershom has about
as much music in his honest old soul as Calamity Kate. I may not teach
him much. But all the time, I know, I will be learning a great deal
from Gershom. He informed me, last night, that he had carefully
computed that the Bible mentioned nineteen different precious stones,
one hundred and four trees or plants, six metals, thirty-five
animals, thirty-nine birds, six fishes, twenty insects, and eleven
reptiles.
As I've already said, summer is here. But it doesn't seem to mean as
much to me as it used to, for my interests have been taken away from
the land and more and more walled up about my family. Dinky-Dunk's
grain, however, has come along satisfactorily, and there is every
promise of a good crop. Yet this entirely fails to elate my husband.
Every small mischance is a sort of music-cue nowadays to start him
singing about the monotony of prairie-life. Ranching, he protests,
isn't the easy game it used to be, now that cattle can't be fattened
on the open range and now that wheat itself is so much lower in price.
One has to work for one's money, and watch every dollar. And my
Diddums keeps railing about the government doing so little for the
farmer and driving the men off the land into the cities. He has fallen
into the habit of protesting he can see nothing much in life as a
back-township hay-tosser and that all the big chances are now in the
big centers. I had been hoping that this was a new form of
spring-fever which would eventually work its way out of his system.
But I can see now that the matter is something more mental than
physical. He hasn't lost his strength, but he has lost his driving
power. He is healthy enough, Heaven knows. Indeed, he impresses me as
being a bit too much that way, for he has quite lost his old-time lean
and hungry look and betrays a tendency to take on a ventral contour
unmistakably aldermanic. He may be heavy, but he is hard-muscled and
brown as an old meerschaum. There is a canker, however, somewhere
about the core of his heart. And I can see him more clearly than I
used to. He is a strong man, but he is a strong man without
earnestness. And being such, I vaguely apprehend in him some splendid
failure. For the wings that soar to success in this world are plumed
with faith and feathered with conviction.
It did not surprise me this morning when Dinky-Dunk announced that he
felt a trifle stale and suggested that the family take a holiday on
Tuesday and trek out to Dead-Horse Lake for the day. We're to hitch
Tumble-Weed and Tithonus to the old prairie-schooner--for we'll be
taking side-trails where no car could venture--and pike off for a
whole blessed day of care-free picnicking. So to-morrow Struthers and
I will be solemnly busy in the kitchen concocting suitable dishes to
be taken along in the old grub-box, and when that is over we'll patch
together something in the form of bathing-suits, for there'll be a
chance for a dip in the slough-water, and our kiddies have arrived at
an age imposing fit and proper apparel on their sadly pagan but
chastened parents.
_Wednesday the Fifth_
We have had our day at Dead-Horse Lake, but it wasn't the happy event
I had anticipated. Worldly happiness, I begin to feel, usually dies
a-borning: it makes me think of wistaria-bloom, for invariably one end
is withering away before the other end is even in flower. At any rate,
we were off early, the weather was perfect, and the sky was an
inverted tureen of lazulite blue. Dinkie drove the team part of the
way, his dad smoked beside him up on the big driving-seat, and I
raised my voice in song until Pauline Augusta fell asleep and had to
be bedded down in the wagon-straw and covered with a blanket.
Dead-Horse Lake is really a slough, dolorously named because a near-by
rancher once lost eight horses therein, the foolish animals wandering
out on ice that was too thin to hold them up.
We were hungry by the time we had hobbled out our teams and gathered
wood and made a fire. And after dinner Dinky-Dunk fell asleep and the
children and I tried to weave a willow basket, which wasn't a
success. Poppsy, in fact, cut her finger with her pater's pocket-knife
and because of this physical disability declined to don her
bathing-suit when we made ready for the water.