once remarked. Men are without those confounding emotions which women
seem to be both cursed with and blessed with. When I announced to
Dinky-Dunk my willingness to part with Alabama Ranch, he took it quite
as a matter of course. He betrayed no tendency to praise me for my
sacrifices, for my willingness to surrender to strangers the land
which had once been our home, the acres on which we'd once been happy
and heavy-hearted. He merely remarked that under the circumstances it
seemed the most sensible thing to do. There's a one-horse lawyer in
Buckhorn who has been asking about the Harris Ranch and Dinky-Dunk
says he suspects this inquiring one has a client up his sleeve.
What I had looked forward to as a talk which might possibly beat down
a few of the barriers of reserve between us proved a bit of a
disappointment. My husband refused to accept me as a heroine. And on
his way out, as ill-luck would have it, he stopped to observe Pauline
Augusta struggling over a letter to her "Uncle Peter." It was a maiden
effort along that line and she was dictating her messages to Dinkie,
who, in turn, was laboriously and carefully inscribing them on my
writing-pad, with a nose and a sympathetically working tongue not more
than ten inches away from the paper. Pauline Augusta, in fact, had
just proclaimed to her amanuensis that "we had a geese for dinner
to-day" when her father stopped to size up the situation.
"To whom are you describing the home circle?" questioned Pauline
Augusta's parent, with an intonation that didn't escape me.
"It's a letter to Uncle Peter," explained Dinkie's little sister. And
I could see Duncan's face harden.
"It's funny my whole family should fall for that damned Quaker!" were
the words he flung over his shoulder at me as he walked out of the
room.
_Tuesday the Fifth_
School has started again. And it's a solemn business, this matter of
planting wisdom in little prairie heads. Dinky-Dunk, who has been up
to his ears in haying and is now watching his grain with a nervous
eye, remarked that our offspring would be once more mingling with
Mennonites and Swedes and Galicians and Ukrainians. I resented that
speech, though I said nothing in reply to it. But I decided to
investigate Gershom's school.
So yesterday afternoon I drove over in the car. I had a blow-out on
the way, a blow-out which I had to patch up with my own hands, so I
arrived too late to inspect Gershom conducting his classes. It was
almost four, in fact, before I got there, so I pulled up beside the
school-gate and sat waiting for the children to come out. And as I sat
there in the car-seat, under a sky of unimaginable blue, with the
prairie wind whipping my face, I couldn't help studying that bald
little temple of learning which stood out so clear-cut in the sharp
northern sunlight. It was a plain little frame building set in one
corner of a rancher's half-section, an acre of land marked off by a
wire fence where the two trails crossed, the two long trails that
melted away in the interminable distance. It seemed a lonely little
house of scholarship, with its playground worn so bare that even two
months of idleness had given scant harborage for the seeds that wind
and bird must have brought there. But as I stared at it it seemed to
take on a dignity all its own, the dignity of a fixed and far-off
purpose. It was the nest of a nation's greatness. It was the outpost
of civilization. It was the advance-guard of pioneering man, driving
the wilderness deeper and deeper into the North. It was life preparing
wistfully for the future.
From it I heard a sudden shrill chorus of voices and the clatter of
feet, and I knew that the day's work was over. I saw the children
emerge, like bees out of a beehive, and loneliness no longer reigned
over that bald yard in the betraying northern sunlight. Yet they were
not riotous, those children confronting the wine-like air of the open.
They were more subdued than I had looked for, since I could only too
easily remember one of my earlier calls for Dinkie at noon, when I
found the entire class turned out and riding a rancher's pig, a heavy
brood-sow that had in some luckless moment wandered into the
school-yard and had been chased and raced until it was too weary to
resent a young barbarian mounting its broad back and riding thereon,
to the shouts of the other boys and the shrill cries of the girls. But
now, from my car-seat, I could see Gershom surrounded by a
multi-colored group of little figures, as he stopped to fix a
strap-buckle on the school-bag of one of his pupils. And as he stood
there in the slanting afternoon sunlight surrounded by his charges he
suddenly made me think of the tall old priest in Sorolla's _Triste
Herencia_ surrounded by his waifs. I caught the echo of something
benignant and Lincoln-like from that raw-boned figure in the
big-lensed eye-glasses and the clothes that didn't quite fit him. And
my respect for Gershom went up like a Chinook-fanned thermometer. He
took those children of his seriously. He liked them. He was trying to
give them the best that was in him. And that solemn purpose saved him,
redeemed him, ennobled his baldness just as it ennobled the baldness
of the four-square little frame building behind him. I don't know why
it was, but for some reason or other that picture of the northern
prairie and the gaunt school-teacher surrounded by his pupils in the
thinning afternoon sunlight became memorable to me. It photographed
itself on my mind, not sharply, but softened with a fringing prism of
feeling, like a picture taken with what camera-men call a
"soft-focus." It touched my heart, in some way, and threatened to
bring a choke up into my foolish old throat.
It was Pauline Augusta who saw me first. She came toward the car with
her strapped school-books and her lunch-box in her hand and a prim
little smile on her slightly freckled face. She impressed me as a
startingly shabby figure, in the old sealskin coat which I had made
over for her, worn clean to the hide along the front, for even those
early autumn days found a chill in the air when the sun began to get
low. She had just climbed in beside me when I caught sight of Dinkie.
I saw him come down the school-steps, stuffing something into the
pocket of his reefer-jacket as he came. He looked startlingly tall,
for a boy of his years. He seemed deep in thought. There was, indeed,
an air of remoteness about him which for a moment rather startled me,
an air of belonging, not to me, but to the world into which he was
peering with such ardent young eyes. Then he caught sight of me, and
at the same moment his face both lightened and brightened. He came
toward the car quietly, none the less, and with that slightly sidewise
twist of the body which overtakes him in his occasional moments of
embarrassment, for it was plain that he stood averse to any undue
display of emotion before his playmates. He merely said, "Hello,
Mummy" and smiled awkwardly. But after he had climbed up into the car
and wormed down between Pauline Augusta and me, and after I had tucked
the old bear-robe about them and called out to Gershom that I'd carry
my kiddies home, I could feel Dinkie's arm push shyly in behind my
back and work its way as far around my waist as it was able to reach.
He didn't speak. But his solemn little face gazed up at me, with its
habitual hungry look, and I could see the hazel specks in the brown
iris of the upturned eye as the arm tightened its hold on me. It made
me ridiculously happy. For I knew that my boy loved me. And I love
him. I love him so much that it brings a tapering spear-head of pain
into my heart, and at the very moment I'm so happy I feel a tear just
under the surface.
_Sunday the Tenth_
I have been reading Peter's latest letter to Dinkie, reading it for
the second time. It is not so frolicsome as many of its fellows, but
it impresses me as typical of its sender.
"I've to-day told fourteen cents' worth of postage-stamps to carry
out to you, dear Dinkie, a copy of my own _Tales from Homer_,
which may be muddy with a few big words but which the next year or
two will surely see tramped down into easier going. You may not
like it now, but later on, I know, you will like it better. For it
tells of heroes and battles and travels which only a boy can
really understand. It tells of the wanderings and adventures of
strong and simple-hearted men, men who are as scarce, nowadays, as
the shining helmets they used to wear. It tells of women superb
and simple and lovely as goddesses, such as your own prairie might
give birth to, such as your own mother must always seem to us. It
tells of flashing temples and cities of marble overlooking singing
seas of sapphire, of stately ships venturing over dark waters and
landing on unknown islands, of siege and sword-fights and caves
and giants and sea-goddesses and magic songs, and all that
sunnier and simpler life which the world, as a prosaic old
grown-up, has left behind....
"But I'm wrong in this, perhaps, for out in the land where you
live there is still largeness and the gold-green ache of wonder
beyond every sky-line. And I can't help envying you, Dinkie, for
being a part of that world which is so much more heroic than mine.
I live where a very shabby line of horse-cars used to run; and you
live where the buffaloes used to run. I hear the rattle of the
ash-cans in the morning; and you hear the song of the wind playing
on the harp of summer. I pay five hundred dollars a year to wander
about a smoky club no bigger than your corral; you wander about a
Big Outdoors that rambles off up to the Arctic Circle itself. And
you open a window at night and see the Aurora Borealis in all its
beauty; and I open mine and observe an electric roof-sign
announcing that Somebody's Tonic will take away my tired feeling.
You put up your blind and see God's footstool bright with dew and
dizzy with distance; I put up mine and overlook a wall of brick
and mortar with one window wherein a fat man shaves himself. And
you can go out in the morning and pick yellow crowfoot and range
lilies; and all we can pick about this place of ours are
milk-bottles and morning-papers packed full of murder and theft
and tax-notices!"
Much of that letter, I know, was over Dinkie's head. But it carried a
message or two to Dinkie's mother which in some way threw her heart
into high. It was different from the letter that came the week
before, the one arriving two days ahead of Kingsley's _Water Babies_
with six lines of Hagedorn inscribed on its fly-leaf:
"And here you are to live, and help us live.
Bend close and listen, bird with folded wings.
Here is life's secret: Keep the upward glance;
Remember Aries is your relative,
The Moon's your uncle, and those twinkling things
Your sisters and your cousins and your aunts!"
This letter seemed like the Peter Ketley we knew best, the sad-eyed
Peter with the feather of courage in his cap, the Peter who could
caper and make you forget that his heart had ever been heavy. For he
wrote:
"This time, Dinkie-Boy, I'm going to tell you about the sea. For
the water-tank, as I remember it, is the biggest sea you have at
Casa Grande--unless you count the mud when winter breaks up! And
your prairie, with its long waves of green, is, I suppose, really
a sea that has gone to sleep. But I mean the truly
honest-to-goodness sea which has tides and baby-whales and
steamers and cramps and sea-serpents in it. You saw it once at
Santa Monica, I know, though you may have been too small to
remember. But yesterday, I motored to a place called Atlantic City
where they sell picture post-cards and push you in a wheeled chair
and let you sit on the sand and watch the Water Babies, whom the
policemen send to jail if they so much as walk along the beach
without their stockings on. These Water Babies were not in a
bottle--like the ones you'll read about in the book--but I think
there was a bottle or two in some of them, from the way they
acted. But one of them was in a pickle, for Father Neptune caught
her in his under-tow--which you must not mix up with his
under-toe, something with which only the mermaids are
familiar--and a life-guard had to swim out and bring her in. And a
few minutes after that I saw a real beach-comber. I had read about
them in the South Sea Islands, but had never seen one before. This
one sat under a striped parasol, with a mirror between her knees,
and combed and combed her hair until it was quite dry again. I was
disappointed in her knees, because I was hoping, at first, she
wouldn't have any, but would be a mermaid who had come up on the
sand to sun herself and would have a long and tapering tail
covered with scales like a tarpon's. But all she had was
beach-shoes tied with silk ribbons, and I preferred watching the
water. For when I watch the ocean I always feel like Mr. Hood and
wish I was at least three small boys, so that I could pull off my
three pairs of shoes and stockings and go paddling up to my six
bare knees and let the rollers slap against my three startled
little tummies and have thirty toes to step on the squids and
star-fish with. And when I went back to the board-walk and watched
all the gulls (I don't think I ever saw so many of 'em in one
place at once) I couldn't help thinking it was too bad the Pilgrim
Fathers didn't wait for three centuries and land at a bright and
lively place like this, since it would have made them so much
jollier and fizzier. They'd probably have turned the _Mayflower_
into a diving-float and we'd never have had any Blue Laws to break
and that curious thing known as The New England Conscience to keep
us from being as happy as we feel we ought to be."
_Sunday the Twenty-Fourth_
Harvest is on us, and Casa Grande hums like a beehive. There are three
extra "hands" to feed, and Whinnie is going about with a moody eye
because Struthers is directing more attention than necessary toward
one of the smooth-spoken cutthroats now nesting in our bunk-house. His
name is Cuba Sebeck and in times of peace he professes to be a
horse-wrangler. Struthers, intent on showing Whinnie that he is not
the only man in her world, is placidly but patiently showering the
lanky Cuba with a barrage of her fluffiest pastries. She has also
given her hair an extra strong wash of sage-tea, which is Struthers'
pet and particular way of putting on war-paint. Whinnie, I notice,
shuts himself up after supper with that copy of Burns' poems we gave
him last Christmas, morosely exiling himself from all the laughing and
gaming and pow-wowing which takes place in the long cool twilights,
just outside the bunk-house. Cuba undertook to serenade the dour one
by donning certain portions of Struthers' apparel and playing my old
banjo under his window. Whinnie quietly retaliated by emptying his
bath-water on the musician's head--and the language was indescribable.
I have been forced to speak to Dinky-Dunk, in fact, about the men's
profanity before my children. It is something I will not endure. My
husband, on the other hand, refuses to take the matter very seriously.
But I have been keeping a close eye over my kiddies--and woe betide
the horse-wrangler who uses unseemly language within their hearing. So
far they seem to have gone through it unscathed, about the same as a
child can go through the indecorous moments of _The Arabian Nights_,
which stands profoundly wicked to only Arabs and old gentlemen.
_Wednesday the Twenty-Eighth_
Summer is slipping away. The days are shortening and there have been
light frosts at night, but not enough to hurt Dinky-Dunk's late oats,
which he has been watching with a worried eye. There is a saber-blade
edge to the evening air now and we have been having some glorious
displays of Northern Lights. I can't help feeling that these Merry
Dancers of the Pole, as some one has called them, make up for what the
prairie may lack in diversity. Dusk by dusk they drown our world in
color, they smother our skies in glory. They are terrifying,
sometimes, to the tenderfoot, giving him the feeling that his world is
on fire. Poor old Struthers, during an especially active display,
invariably gets out her Bible. Used to them as I am, I find they can
still touch me with awe. They make me lonesome. They seem like the
search-lights of God, showing up my human littlenesses of soul. They
are Armadas of floating glory reminding me there are seas I can never
traverse. And the farther north one goes, of course, the more
magnificent the displays.
Last night we watched the auroral bands gather and grow in a cold
green sky, straight to the north of us, and then waver and deepen
until they reached the very zenith, where they hung, swaying curtains
of fire. No wonder the redskins call that wild pageantry of color the
ghost-dance of their gods. Even as we watched them, opal and gold and
rose and orange and green, we could see them come wheeling down on our
little world like an army of angels with incandescent swords. It made
one imagine that the very heavens were aflame, going up in quivering
veils of white and red and green. And when it was over I listened to a
long argument about the Aurora Borealis, or the Aurora Polaris, as
Gershom insisted it should be called.
Dinky-Dunk contended that one could _hear_ these Northern Lights
overhead, on a clear night. He described the sound as sometimes a
faint crackling, like that of a comb drawn through your hair, and
sometimes as a soft rustling noise, like the rustling of a silk
petticoat heard through a closed door, coming closer and closer as the
display wavered farther and farther toward the south.
Gershom was disposed to dispute this, so our old Klondiker, Whinstane
Sandy, was called in to give evidence. He did so promptly and
positively, saying he'd heard the Lights many a night in the Far
North. Gershom is still unconvinced, but intends to look up his
authorities on the matter. He attributes them to sun-spots and asserts
it's a well-known fact they often put the telephone and telegraph
wires out of commission. He has proposed that we sit up and study them
some night, through his telescope, which he is disinterring from the
bottom of his trunk....
My lord and master is going about with a less clouded eye, for he has
succeeded in selling the Harris Ranch, and selling it for thirty-five
hundred dollars more than he had expected. It is to go, eventually, to
some tenderfoot out of the East, to some tenderfoot who can have very
little definite knowledge of land-values in this jumping-off place on
the edge of the world. But may that tenderfoot, whoever he is, be
happy in his new home! Dinky-Dunk is now forever figuring up what he
will get for his grain. He's preoccupied with his plans for branching
out in the business world. His heart is no longer in his work here. I
sometimes feel that we're all merely accidents in his life. And that
feeling leaves me with a heart so heavy that I have to keep busy, or
I'd fall to luxuriating in that self-pity which is good for neither
man nor beast.
Yet Dinky-Dunk is not all hardness. He surprises me, now and then, by
disturbing little gestures of boyishness. He announced to me the other
night that the only way to get any use out of a worn-out husband was
to revamp him, with the accent on the vamp. I understood what he
meant, and I think I actually changed color a trifle. But I know of
nothing more desolating than trying to make love to a man either
against his will or against your own will. It would be a terrible
thing to have him tell you there was no longer any kick in your
kisses. So I remain on my dignity. I am companionable, and nothing
more. When we were saying good-by, the last time he went off to the
city, and he looked up at my perfunctory and quite meaningless peck on
his cheek, I felt myself blushing before his quiet and half-quizzical
stare. Then he laughed a little as he turned away and pulled on his
gauntlets. "The sweeter the champagne, I suppose, the colder it should
be served!" he rather cryptically remarked as he climbed into the
waiting car. And yesterday he let his soul emerge from its tent of
reticence when he climbed up on the wagon-box to stare out over his
sea of all but ripened wheat. "Come, money!" he said, with his arms
stretched out before him. Now, that was a trick which he had caught
from my little Dinkie. I don't know how or where the boy first picked
up the habit, but when he particularly wants something he stands
solemnly out in the open, with his two little arms outstretched, as
though he were supplicating Heaven itself, and says "Come,
jack-knife!" or "Come, jelly-roll!" or "Come, rain!" according to his
particular desires of the particular moment. I think he really caught
it from an illustration in _The Arabian Nights_, from the picture of
Cassim grandiloquently proclaiming "Open Sesame!" He is an imaginative
little beggar. "Mummy," he said to me the other night, "see all the
moonlight that's been spilled on the grass!" But children are made
that way. Even my sage little Poppsy, when a marigold-leaf fell in the
bowl of our solitary gold-fish, cried out to me: "See, Mummy, our fish
has had a baby!" Sex is still an enigma to her, as much an enigma as
it was away last spring when, not being quite sure whether her new
kitten was a little boy-cat or a little girl-cat, she sagaciously
christened it "Willie-Alice." And a few weeks later, when the
unmistakable appearance of tail-feathers finally persuaded even her
optimistic young heart that the two chicks which had been bequeathed
to her were dishearteningly masculine in their tendencies, she
officially re-christened the apostate "Elaine" and "Rowena," and
thereafter solemnly accepted them as "Archie" and "Albert." And while
speaking of this mysteriously ramifying factor of sex, I am compelled
to acknowledge that I encountered a rather disturbing little
back-flare of Freudian hell-fire only a couple of evenings ago. It
took my thoughts galloping back to the time in our post-nuptial era
when Dinky-Dunk went Berserker and chased me around the haystacks with
my hair flying. I'd taken Dinkie upon my lap, and, without quite
knowing it, sat stroking his frowsy young head. My thoughts, in fact,
were a thousand miles away. Then, still without giving much attention
to what I was doing, I squeezed that warm little body up close against
my own. I was astounded, the next moment, to see my small offspring
turn on me with all the lusty fierceness of the cave man. He got his
arms about me and buried his face in my neck and kissed me as no
gentleman, big or little, should ever kiss a lady. His small body was
shaken with a subliminal and quite unexpected gust of feeling, just
as I've seen a June-time garden shaken by an unexpected gust of wind.
It passed away, of course, about as quickly as it came--but with it
went a scattering of the white petals of childhood unconcern.
I don't suppose my poor little Dinkie has yet awakened to the fact
that his body is a worn river-bed down which must race the freshets of
far-off racial instincts. But the thing disturbed me more than I'd be
willing to admit. There are murky corridors in the house of life. They
stand there, and they must be faced. There are rooms where the air
must be kept stirring, corners into which the clear sanity of sunlight
must be thrown. Dinkie, since he has stepped into his first experience
in the keeping of rabbits, has been asking me a number of rather
disconcerting questions. His father, I notice, has the habit of
half-diffidently referring the boy to me, just as I nursed the earlier
habit of referring him to his father. But some time soon Dinkie and I
will have to have a serious talk about this thing called Life, this
Life which is so much more uncompromisingly brutal than the child-mind
can conceive....
By the way, there's a lot of nonsense talked about motherhood
softening women. It may soften them in some ways, but there are many
others in which it hardens them. It draws their power of love together
into a fixed point, just as the lens of a burning-glass concentrates
the vague warmth of the sun into one small and fiercely illuminated
area. It is a form of selfishness, I suppose, but it is a selfishness
nature imposes upon us. And it is sanctified by the end it serves. At
every turn, now, I find that I am thinking of my children. I seem to
have my eyes set steadily on something far, far ahead. I'm not quite
certain just what this something is. It's a sort of secret between me
and the Master of Life. But the memory of it makes my days more
endurable. It allows me to face the future without a quaver of regret.
I am a woman, and I am no longer young. But it gives me courage to
laugh in the teeth of Time.