ventured in at the west end where a firmer lip of sand and alkali gave
us footing. And I enjoyed the swim, although Dinky-Dunk made fun of my
improvised bathing-suit. It seemed like old times, to bask lazily in
the sun and float about on my back with my fingers linked under my
head. My lord and master even acknowledged that my figure wasn't so
bad as he had expected, in a lady of my years. I splashed him for
that, and he dove for my ankles, and nearly drowned me before I could
get away.
It was all light-hearted enough, until Dinky-Dunk happened to notice
that Dinkie wasn't enjoying the water as an able-bodied youngster
ought. The child, in fact, was afraid of it--which was only natural,
remembering what a land-bird he had been all his life. His father,
apparently, decided to carry him out and give him a swimming-lesson.
I was on shore by this time, trying to sun out my sodden mop of hair,
which I had fondly imagined I could keep dry. I heard Dinkie's cry as
his father captured him, and I called out to Dinky-Dunk, through my
combed out tresses, to have a heart.
Dinky-Dunk called back that the Indian way, after all, was the only
way to teach a youngster. I didn't give much thought to the matter
until the two of them were out in deeper water and I heard Dinkie's
scream of stark terror. It came home to me then that the Indian method
in such things was to toss the child into deep water and leave him
there to struggle for his life.
Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, hadn't intended to do quite that. But the boy
was naturally terrified at being carried out beyond his depth, and
when I looked up I could see his bony little body struggling to free
itself. That timidity, I take it, angered the boy's father. And he
intended to cure it. He was doing his best, in fact, to fling the
clutching and clawing little body away from him when I heard those
repeated short screams of horror and promptly took a hand in the
matter. Something snapped in my skull, and I saw red. I hated my
husband for what he was doing. I hated him for the mere thought that
he could do it. And I hated him for calling out that this was what
people got by mollycoddling their children.
But that didn't stop me. I made for Dinky-Dunk like a hundred-weight
of wildcats. I went through the water like a hell-diver, and without
quite knowing what I was doing I got hold of him and tried to garrote
him. I don't remember what I said, but I have a hazy idea it was not
the most ladylike of language. He stared at me, as I tore Dinkie away
from him, stared at me with a hard and slightly incredulous eye. For
I'm afraid I was ready to fight with my teeth and nails, if need be,
and I suppose my expression wasn't altogether angelic. We were both
shaking, at any rate, when we got back to dry land. Dinky-Dunk stood
staring at us, for a silent moment or two, with a look of black
disgust on his wet face. I'm even afraid it was something more than
disgust. Then he strode away and proceeded to dress on the other side
of the prairie-schooner, without so much as a second look at us. And
then he went off for the horses, absenting himself a quite unnecessary
length of time. But I took advantage of that to have a talk with
Dinkie.
"Dinkie," I said, "you and I are going to walk out into that water,
and this time you're not going to be afraid!"
I could see his eye searching mine, although he did not speak.
I put one hand on the wet tangle of his hair.
"Will you come?" I asked him.
He took a deep breath. Then he looked at the slough-water. Then he
looked back into my eyes.
"Yes," he said, though I noticed his lips were not so red as usual.
So side by side and hand in hand the two of us walked out into
Dead-Horse Lake. His eyes questioned me, once, as the water came up
about his armpits. But he shut his teeth tight and made no effort to
draw back. I could see the involuntary spasms of his chest as that
terrifying flood closed in about his little body, yet he was ready
enough to show me he wasn't a coward. And when I saw that he had met
and faced his ordeal I turned him about and led him quietly back to
land. We were both prouder and happier for what had just happened. We
didn't even need to talk about it, for each knew that the other
understood. What still disturbs me, though, is something not in my
boy's make-up, but in my own. During the long and silent drive home I
noticed a mark on my husband's neck. And I was the termagant who must
have put it there, though I have no memory of doing so. But from it I
realize that I haven't the control over myself every civilized and
self-respecting woman should have. I begin to see that I can't
altogether trust myself where my female-of-the-species affections are
involved. I'm no better, I'm afraid, than the Bengal tigress which
Dinky-Dunk once intimated I was, the Bengal tigress who will battle so
unreasoningly for her offspring. It may be natural in mothers, whether
they wear fur or feathers or lisle-thread stockings--but it worries
me. I was an engine running wild. And when you run wild you are apt to
run into catastrophe.
_Friday the Seventh_
Dinky-Dunk is on his dignity. He has put a fence around himself to
keep me at a distance, the same as he puts a fence around his
haystacks to keep off the cattle. We are coolly polite to each other,
but that is as far as it goes. There is something radically wrong with
this home, as a home, but I seem helpless to put the matter right.
It's about all I have left, in this life of mine, but I'm in some way
failing in my duty as a house-wife. "Home" is a beautiful word, and
home-life should be beautiful. Any sacrifice and any concession a
woman is willing to make to keep that home, and to keep ugliness out
of it, ought to be well considered by the judge of her final
destinies. I'm ready to do my part, but I don't know where to begin.
I'm depressed by a teasing sense of frustration, not quite tangible
enough to fight, like cobwebs across your face. It's not easy to carry
around the milk of human kindness after they've pretty well kicked the
bottom out of your can!
Torrid and tiring are these almost endless summer days. But it's what
the grain needs, and who am I to look this gift-horse of heat in the
face. Yet there are two things, I must confess, in which the prairie
is sadly lacking. One is trees; and the other is shade, the cool green
sun-filtering shade of woodlands where birds can sing and mossy little
brooks can babble. I've been longing all day for just an hour up in an
English cherry tree, with the pectoral smell of the leaves against my
face and the chance of eating at least half my own weight of fresh
fruit. But even in the matter of its treelessness, I'm told, the
prairie is reforming. There are men living who remember when there
were no trees west of Brandon, except in the coulées and the
river-bottoms. Now that fire no longer runs wild, however, the trees
are creeping in, mile by mile and season by season. Already the
eastern line of natural bush country reaches to about ten miles from
Regina two hundred miles west. Oxbow and Estevan, Dinky-Dunk once told
me, had no trees whatever when first settled, though much of that
country now has a comfortable array of bluffs. And forestry, of
course, is giving nature a friendly push along, in the matter. In the
meantime, we have to accommodate ourselves to the conditions that
prevail, just as the birds of the air must do. Here the haughty crow
of the east is compelled to nest in the low willows of the coulée and
raise its young within hand-reach of mother earth. Like our women, it
can enjoy very little privacy of family life. The only thing that
saves us and the crows, I suppose, is that the men-folks of this
country are too preoccupied with their own ends to go around
bird-nesting. They are too busy to break up homes, either in
willow-tops or women's hearts.... I ought to be satisfied. But I've
been dogged, this last day or two, by a longing to be scudding in a
single-sticker off Orienta Point again or to motor-cruise once more
along the Sound in a smother of spray.
_Thursday the Thirteenth_
Dinky-Dunk has been called to Calgary on business. It sounds simple
enough, in these Unpretentious Annals of an Unloved Worm, but I can't
help feeling that it marks a trivially significant divide in the trend
of things. It depresses me more than I can explain. My depression, I
imagine, comes mostly from the manner in which Duncan went. He was
matter-of-fact enough about it all, but I can't get rid of the
impression that he went with a feeling very much like relief. His
manner, at any rate, was not one to invite cross-examination, and he
insisted, to the end, on regarding his departure as an every-day
incident in the life of a preoccupied rancher. So I caught my cue from
him, and was as quiet about it all as he could have wished. But under
the crust was the volcano....
The trouble with the tragedies of real life is that they are never
clear-cut. It takes art to weave a selvage about them or fit them into
a frame. But in reality they're as ragged and nebulous as
wind-clouds. The days drag on into weeks, and the weeks into months,
and life on the surface seems to be running on, the same as before.
There's the same superficial play of all the superficial old forces,
but in the depths are dangers and uglinesses and sullen bombs of
emotional TNT we daren't even touch!
Heigho! I nearly forgot my _sursum-corda_ rôle. And didn't old Doctor
Johnson say that peevishness was the vice of narrow minds? So here's
where we tighten up the belt a bit. But we humans, who come into the
world alone, and go out of it alone, are always hungering for
companionship which we can't quite find. Our souls are islands, with a
coral-reef of reserve built up about them. Last night, when I was
patching some of Gershom's undies for him, I wickedly worked an
arrow-pierced heart, in red yarn, on one leg of his B.V.D.'s. This
morning, I noticed, his eye evaded mine and there was marked
constraint in his manner. I even begin to detect unmistakable signs of
nervousness in him when we happen to be alone together. And during his
last music lesson there was a _vibrata_ of emotion in his voice which
made me think of an April frog in a slough-end.
Even my little Dinkie, day before yesterday, asked me if I'd mind not
bathing him any more. He explained that he thought he could manage
very nicely by himself now. It seemed trivial enough, and yet, in a
way, it was momentous. I am to be denied the luxury of tubbing my own
child. I, who always loved even the smell of that earthy and
soil-grubbing young body, who could love it when it wasn't any too
clean and could glory in its musky and animal-like odors as well as
the satin-shine of the light on its well-soaped little ribs, must now
stand aside before the reservations of sex. It makes me feel that I've
reached still another divide on the continent of motherhood.
This afternoon, when I wandered into the study, I observed Dinkie
stooping over a Chesterfield pillow with his right hand upraised in a
perplexingly dramatic manner. He turned scarlet when he saw me
standing there watching him. But the question in my eyes did not
escape him.
"I was pr'tendin' to be King Arthur when he found out Guinevere was in
love with Launcelot," he rather lamely explained as he walked away to
the window and stood staring out over the prairie. But for the life of
me I can't understand what should have turned his thoughts into that
particular channel of romance. Those are matters with which the young
and the innocent should have nothing to do. They are matters, in fact,
which it behooves even the old and the wary to eschew.
_Sunday the Sixteenth_
It seems strange, in such golden summer weather, that every man and
woman and child on this sunbathed footstool of God shouldn't be sanely
and supremely happy.... My husband, I am glad to say, is once more
back in his home. And I have been realizing, the last few days, that
home is an empty and foolish place without its man about. It's a ship
without a captain, a clan without a chief. Yet I found it both
depressing and humbling to be brought once more face to face with that
particular fact.
Dinky-Dunk, on the other hand, has come back with both an odd sense of
elation and an odd sense of estrangement. He has taken on a vague
something which I find it impossible to define. He is blither and at
the same time he is more solemnly abstracted. And he protests that his
journey was a success.
"I'm going to ride two horses, from now on," he announced to me this
morning. "I've got my chance and I'm going to grab it. I've swapped
my Buckhorn lots for some inside Calgary stuff and I'm lumping
everything that's left of my Coast deal for a third-interest in those
Barcona coal-fields. There's a quarter of a million waiting there for
the people with money enough to swing it. And I'm going to edge in
while it's still open."
"But is it possible to ride two horses?" I asked, waywardly depressed
by all this new-found optimism.
"It's _got_ to be possible, until we find out which horse is the
better traveler," announced Dinky-Dunk. Then he added, without caring
to meet my eye: "And I can't say I see much promise of action out of
this particular end of the team."
I must have flamed red, at that speech, for I thought at the moment he
was referring to me. It was only after I'd turned the thing over in my
mind, as I helped Struthers put together our new butter-worker, that I
saw he really referred to Casa Grande. But my husband knows I will
never part with this ranch. He will never be so foolish as to ask me
to do that. Yet one thing is plain. His heart is no longer here. He
will stick to this prairie farm of ours only for what he can get out
of it.
Dinkie warmed the cockles of my heart by telling me this afternoon
when we were out salting the horses that he never wanted to go away
from Casa Grande and his mummy. The child, I imagine, had overheard
some of this morning's talk. He put his arm around my knees and hugged
me tight. And I could see the tawny look come into his hazel eyes
speckled with brown. My Dinkie is a prairie child. His soul is not a
cramped little soul, but has depth and wideness and undiscerned
mysteries.
_Sunday the Thirtieth_
Two weeks have slipped by. Two weeks have gone, and left no record of
their going. But a prairie home is a terribly busy one, at times, and
it's idleness that leads to the ink-pot. I'm still trying to make the
best of a none too promising situation, and I'll thole through, as
Whinstane Sandy puts it. After breakfast this morning, in fact, when
Pauline Augusta was swept by one of those little gales of lonesomeness
to which children and women are so mysteriously subjected, she climbed
up into my lap and I rocked her on my shoulder as I might have rocked
a baby. Dinky-Dunk wandered in and inspected that performance with a
slightly satiric eye. So, resenting his expression, I promptly began
to sing:
"Bye-bye, Baby Bunting,
Daddy's gone a-hunting,
To gather up a pile of tin
To wrap the Baby Bunting in!"
Dinky-Dunk, when the significance of this lilted flippancy of mine
had sunk home, regarded me with a narrowed and none too friendly eye.
"Feeling a bit larkier than usual this morning, aren't you?" he
inquired with what was merely a pretense at carelessness.
It was merely a pretense, I know, because we'd been over the old
ground the night before, and the excursion hadn't added greatly to the
happiness of either of us. Duncan, in fact, had rather horrified me by
actually asking if I thought there was a chance of his borrowing
eleven thousand dollars from Peter Ketley.
"We can't all trade on that man's generosity!" I cried, without giving
much thought to the manner in which I was expressing myself.
"Oh, _that's_ the way you feel about it!" retorted my husband. And I
could see his face harden into Scotch granite. I could also see the
look of perplexity in my small son's eyes as he stood studying his
father.
"Is there anything abnormal in my feeling the way I do?" I parried,
resenting the beetling brow of the Dour Man.
"Not if you regard him as your personal and particular fairy
god-father," retorted my husband.
"I've no more reason for regarding him as that," I said as calmly as
I could, "than I have for regarding him as a professional
money-lender."
Duncan must have seen from my face that it would be dangerous to go
much further. So he merely shrugged a flippant shoulder.
"They tell me he's got more money than he knows what to do with," he
said with a heavy jocularity which couldn't quite rise.
"Then lightening his burdens is a form of charity we can scarcely
afford to indulge in," I none too graciously remarked. And I saw my
husband's face harden again.
"Well, I've got to have ready money and I've got to have it before the
year's out," was his retort. He told me, when the air had cleared a
little, that he'd have to open an office in Calgary as soon as
harvesting was over. There was already too much at stake to take
chances. Then he asked me if there were any circumstances under which
I'd be willing to sell Casa Grande. And I told him, quite promptly and
quite definitely, that there was none.
"Then how about the old Harris Ranch?" he finally inquired.
"But why should we sell that?" I asked. Alabama Ranch, I knew, was in
my name, and I had always regarded it as a sort of nest-egg for the
children. It was something put by for a rainy day, something to fall
back on, if ill-luck ever overtook us again.
"Because I can double and treble every dollar we get out of it, inside
of a year," averred Dinky-Dunk.
"But how am I to know that?" I contended, hating to seem hard and
selfish and narrow in the teeth of an ambitious man's enterprise.
"You'd have to take my word for it," retorted my husband.
"But we've more than ourselves to consider," I contended, knowing he'd
merely scoff at that harping on the old string of the children.
"That's why I intend to get out of this rut!" he cried with unexpected
bitterness. And a few minutes later he made the suggestion that he'd
deed Casa Grande entirely over to me if I'd consent to the sale of
Alabama Ranch and give him a chance to swing the bigger plans he
intended to swing.
The suggestion rather took my breath away. My rustic soul, I suppose,
is stupidly averse to change. But I realize that when you travel in
double-harness you can't forever pull back on your team-mate. So I've
asked Dinky-Dunk to give me a few days to think the thing over.
_Wednesday the Second_
Casa Grande has had an invasion of visitors. It was precious old Percy
and his Olga who blew in on us, after being swallowed up by the Big
Silence for almost four long years. They came without warning, which
is the free and easy way of the westerner, appearing in a
mud-splattered and dust-covered Ford that had carried them blithely
over two hundred and thirty miles of prairie trails. And with them
they brought a quartet of rampageous young buckaroos who promptly
turned our sedate homestead into a rodeo.
Percy himself is browner and stouter and more rubicund than I might
have expected, with just a sprinkling of gray under his lopsided
Stetson to announce that Time hasn't been standing still for any of
us. But one would never have taken him for an ex-lunger. And there is
a wholesomeness about the man, for all his quietness, which draws one
to him. Olga herself still again impressed me as a Zorn etching come
to life, as a Norse myth in petticoats, with the same old largeness of
limb and the same old suggestion of sky-line vastnesses about her. She
still looks as though the Lord had made her when the world was young
and the women of Homer did their spinning in the sunlight. Some
earlier touch of morning freshness is gone from her, it's true, for
you can't move about with four little toddlers in your wake and still
suggest the budding vine. But that morning freshness has been
supplanted by a full and mellow noonday contentedness which is not
without its placid appeal. To her husband, at any rate, she seems
mysteriously perfect. He can still sit and stare at her with a
startlingly uxorious eye. And she, in turn, bathes him in that pale
lunar stare of meditative approval which says plainer than words just
how much her "man" means to her.
Percy and his family stayed overnight with us and hit the trail again
yesterday morning. An old friend of Percy's from Brasenose has taken a
parish some forty odd miles south of Buckhorn--a parish, by the way,
which ought to shake a little of the Oxford dreaminess out of his
system--and Olga and her husband are "packing" their newly-arrived
Toddler Number Four down to the new curate to have him christened.
We were all a bit shy and constrained, during our first hour together
but this soon wore away. It wasn't long before Olga's offspring and
mine were fraternizing together, over-running the bathroom tub and
emptying our water-tank, and making a concerted attack on one of
Dinky-Dunk's self-binders, which would have been dismantled in short
order, if Percy hadn't gone out to investigate the cause of the sudden
quiet.
"My boy loves everything with wheels," explained the proud Olga, in
extenuation of her Junior's oil-blackened fingers.
That brought me up short, for I was on the point of making the same
statement about my Dinkie. After thinking it over, in fact, I realized
that _every_ normal boy loves everything with wheels. And it began to
dawn on me that there was nothing so extraordinary, after all, in my
son's fondness for machinery. I began to see that he was merely one of
a very wide-spread clan, when, an hour later, the entire excited six
united in playing Indian about the haystacks, and kept it up until
even the docile Pauline Augusta was driven to revolt against so
persistently being the Pale-face captive. She announced that she was
tired of being scalped. So, for variety's sake, the boys turned to
riding and roping and hog-tying one another like the true little
westerners they were, and many an imaginary brand was planted on many
a bleating set of ribs.
But now they are gone, and I've been thinking a great deal about Olga.
I fancy I have even been envying her a little. She's of that annealing
softness which can rivet and hold a family together. I've even been
trying to solace myself with the claim that she's a trifle ox-like in
her make-up. But that is not being just to Olga. She makes a perfect
wife. She is as tranquil-minded as summer moonlight on a convent-roof.
She is as soft-spoken as a wind-harp swinging in an abbey door. She
surrenders to the will of her husband and neither frets nor questions
nor walks with discontent. I suppose she has a will of her own, packed
somewhere away in that benignant big body of hers, but she never
obtrudes it. She placidly awaits her time, as the bosom of the prairie
awaits its harvesting. And I've been wondering if that really isn't
the best type of woman for married life, the autumnally contented and
pensively quiet woman who can remain unruffled by man and his
meanderings.
I wasn't built according to that plan, and I suppose I've had to pay
for it. I've just about concluded, in fact, that I would have been a
hard nut for any man to crack. I've never been conspicuous for my
efforts at self-obliteration. I've a temper that's as brittle as a
squirrel bone. I'm too febrile and flightly, too chameleon-mooded and
critical. The modern wife should be always a conservative. She should
hold back her husband's impulses of nervous expenditure, conserving
his tranquil-mindedness about the same as cotton-waste in a
journal-box conserves oil. Heaven knows I started with theories
enough--but I must be a good deal like old Schramm, that teacher of
Heine's who was so busy inditing a study of Universal Peace that his
boys had all the chance they could wish for pummeling one another. But
I've been thinking, Reuben. And I'm going to see if I can't save
what's left of the ship. I'm no Renaissance cherub on a cloudlet, but
I'm going to knuckle down and see if I can't jibe along a little
better with my old Dinky-Dunk. I've decided to back off and give him
his chance. If he's set on selling Alabama Ranch, on the terms he's
mentioned, I'm not going to object. He's determined to make money, to
advance. And I don't want to see him accusing me of lying down in the
shafts!... What is more, I'm going out in the fields, when the push is
on, to help stook the wheat. That may wear me down and make me a
little more like Olga.
_Thursday the Tenth_