isn't age I dread. But I'd hate to lose that lightness with which
those blessed ones we call the young can move through the world, that
self-renewing freshness which converts every daybreak into a dewy new
world and mints every sunrise into a brand new life ... I asked
Gershom to-day if he could possibly tell me how many Parker House
rolls a square mile of wheat running forty bushels to the acre would
make. And he surprised me by inquiring how many quarts of buttermilk
it would take to shingle a cow. Gershom is widening out a bit....
Dinkie, I notice, has just compiled a list of horses. I read from his
carefully ruled half-page:
"Draght horses; carriege horses; riding horses; racing horses;
ponyies; percheron from france; Belgain from Beljium; shire clyesdale
and saffold punch from great Britain; french coach and German coach;
contucky saddle horses; through-breads; Shetland ponies; mushstand
ponies; pacers and pintoes." Thus recordeth my Toddler.
_Sunday the Ninth_
I have had Dinkie in bed for the last five days, with a bruised foot.
Duncan shortened the stirrups and put the boy on Briquette, who had
just proved a handful for even an old horse-wrangler like Cuba Sebeck.
Briquette bucked and threw the boy. And Dinkie, in the mix-up, got a
hoof-pound on the ankle. No bones were broken, luckily, but the foot
was very sore and swollen for a few days. No word about the episode
has passed between Duncan and me. But I'm glad, all things considered,
that I was not a witness of the accident. The clouds are already quite
heavy enough over Casa Grande.
Dinkie and his mater, however, have been drawn much closer together
during the last few days. I've talked to him, and read to him, and
without either of us being altogether conscious of it there has been
an opening of a closed door or two. Dinkie loves to be read to. The
new world of the imagination is just opening up to him. And I envy the
rapture of the child in books, rapture not yet spoiled by the
intellectual conceit of the grown-up.
But I'm not the only reader about this ranch. I'm afraid the copy of
Burns which Santa Claus brought to Whinstane Sandy last Christmas is
not adding to his matrimonial tendencies as love-plaints of that
nature should. At noon, as soon as dinner is over, he sits on the back
step, poring over his beloved Tammas. And at night, now that the
evenings are chillier, he retreats to the bunk-house stove, where he
smokes and reads aloud. His own mother, he tells me, used to say many
of those pieces to him when he was a wee laddie. He both outraged and
angered poor Struthers, last Sunday, by reading _Tam O'Shanter_ aloud
to her. That autumnal vestal proclaimed that it was anything but
suitable literature for an old philanderer who still saw fit to live
alone. It showed, she averred, a shocking lack of respect for
women-folk and should be taken over by the police.
Struthers even begins to suspect that this much-thumbed volume of
Burns lies at the root of Whinnie's accumulating misanthropy. She has
asked me if I thought a volume of Mrs. Hemans would be of service in
leading the deluded old misogynist back to the light. The matter has
become a more urgent one since Cuba Sebeck suffered a severe bilious
attack and a consequent sea-change in his affections. But I'm afraid
our Whinnie is too old a bird to be trapped by printer's ink. I
notice, in fact, that Struthers is once more spending her evenings in
knitting winter socks. And I have a shadow of a suspicion that they
are for the obdurate one.
My Dinkie, by the way, has written his first poem, or, rather, his
first two poems. The first one he slipped folded into my sewing-basket
and I found it when I was looking for new buttons for Pauline
Augusta's red sweater. It reads:
No more we smel the sweet clover,
Floting on the breeze all over.
But now we hear the wild geese calling;
And lissen, tis the grey owl yowling.
The second one, however, was a more ambitious effort. He worked over
it, propped up in bed, for an hour or two. Then, having looked upon
his work and having seen that it was good, he blushingly passed it
over to me. So I went to the window and read it.
O blue-bird, happy robbin--
Who teached those birds to stick theirselves together?
Who teached them how to put their tails on?
Who teached them how to hold tight on the tree tops?
Who gived them all the fetthers on their brest?
Who gived them all the eggs with little birdies in them?
Who teached them how to make the shells so blue?
Who teached them how to com home in the dark?
Twas God. Twas God. He teached him!
I read it over slowly, with a crazy fluttering of the heart which I
could never explain. They were so trivial, those little halting lines,
and yet so momentous to me! It was life seeking expression, life
groping so mysteriously toward music. It was man emerging out of the
dusk of time. It was Rodin's _Penseur_, not in grim and stately
bronze, but in a soft-eyed and white-bodied child, groping his
stumbling way toward the border-land of consciousness, staring out on
a new world and finding it wonderful. It was my Little Stumbler, my
Precious Piece-of-Life, walking with his arm first linked through the
arm of Mystery. It was my Dinkie looking over the rampart of the
home-nest and breaking lark-like into song.
I went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and took my
man-child in my arms.
"It's wonderful, Dinkie," I said, trying to hide the tears I was so
ashamed of. "It's so wonderful, my boy, that I'm going to keep it with
me, always, as long as I live. And some day, when you are a great
man, and all the world is at your feet, I'm going to bring it to you
and show it to you. For I know now that you are going to be a great
man, and that your old mother is going to live to be so proud of you
it'll make her heart ache with joy!"
He hugged me close, in a little back-wash of rapture, and then settled
down on his pillows.
"I could do better ones than that," he finally said, with a glowing
eye.
"Yes," I agreed. "They'll be better and better. And that'll make your
old Mummsy prouder and prouder!"
He lay silent for several minutes. Then he looked at the square of
paper which I held folded in my hand.
"I'd like to send it to Uncle Peter," he rather startled me by
saying.
_Saturday the Twenty-Ninth_
Once more I'm a grass widow. My Duncan is awa'. He scooted for Calgary
as soon as his threshing-work was finished up. But that tumult is over
and once more I've a chance to sit down and commune with my soul.
Everything here is over-running with wheat. Our bins are bursting. The
lord of the realm is secretly delighted, but he has said little about
it. He has a narrow course to steer. He is grateful for the money that
this wheat will bring in to him, yet he can see it would never do to
harp too loudly on the productiveness of our land--on _my_ land, I
ought to say, for Casa Grande has now been formally deeded to me. I
find no sense of triumph, however, in that transfer. I am depressed,
in fact, at the very thought of it. It seems to carry a vague air of
the valedictory. But I refuse to be intimidated by the future.
Gershom and I, indeed, have been indulging in the study of astronomy.
The air was crystal clear last night, so that solemn youth suggested
that we take out the old telescope and study the stars. Which we did.
And which was much more wonderful than I had imagined. But Gershom had
no reflector, so after getting a neck-ache trying to inspect the
heavens while on our feet we took the old buffalo-robe and a couple of
rugs out to a straw-pile that had been hauled in to protect our winter
perennials. There we indecorously reposed on our backs and went
stargazing in comfort. And Gershom even forgot that painful
bashfulness of his when he fell to talking about the planets. He
slipped out of his shell and spoke with genuine feeling.
He suggested that we begin with the Big Dipper, which I could locate
easily enough well up in the northern sky. That, Gershom told me, was
sometimes called the Great Bear, though it was only a part of the real
_Ursa Major_ of the astronomers. Then he showed me Benetnasch at the
end of the Dipper's handle, and Mizar at the bend in the handle, then
Alioth, and then Megrez, which joins the handle to the bowl. Then he
showed me Phaed and Merak, which mark the bottom of the bowl, and then
Dubhe at the bowl's outer rim.
I tried hard, but I was very stupid about getting the names right.
Then Gershom asked me to look up at Mizar, and see if I could make
out a small star quite close to it. I did so, without much trouble,
and Gershom thereupon condescended to admit that I had exceptionally
good eyes. For that star, he explained, was Alcor, and Alcor was
Arabic for "the proof," and for centuries and centuries the ability to
see that star had been accepted as the proof of good vision.
Then Gershom went on to the other constellations, and talked of suns
of the first and second magnitude, and pointed out Sirius, in whose
honor great temples had once been built in Egypt, and Arcturus, the
same old Arcturus that a Hebrew poet by the name of Job had sung
about, and Vega and Capella and Rigel, which he said sent out eight
thousand times more light than our sun, and is at least thirty-four
thousand times as big.
But it only made me dizzy and staggered my mind. I couldn't comprehend
the distances he was talking about. I just couldn't make it, any more
than a bronco that had been used to jumping a six-barred gate could
vault over a windmill tower. And I had to tell Gershom that it didn't
do a bit of good informing me that Sirius was comparatively close to
us, as it stood only nine light-years away. I remembered how he had
explained that light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles
a second, and that there are thirty million seconds in a year, so that
a light-year is about five and a half million million of miles. But
when he started to tell me that some of the so-called photographic
stars are thirty-two thousand light-years away from us my imagination
just curled up and died. It didn't mean anything to me. It couldn't. I
tried in vain to project my puny little soul through all that space.
At first it was rather bewildering. Then it grew into something
touched with grandeur. Then it took on an aspect of awfulness. And
from that it grew into a sort of ghastliness, until the machinery of
the mind choked and balked and stopped working altogether, like an
overloaded motor. I had to reach out in the cold air and catch hold of
Gershom's arm. I felt a hunger to cling to something warm and human.
"We call this world of ours a pretty big world," Gershom was saying.
"But look at Betelgeuse up there, which Michelson has been able to
measure. He has, at least, succeeded in measuring the angle at the eye
that Betelgeuse subtends, so that after estimating its parallax as
given by a heliometer, it's merely a matter of trigonometry to work
out the size of the star. And he estimated Betelgeuse to be two
hundred and sixty million miles in diameter. That means it would take
twenty-seven million of our suns to equal it in bulk. So that this big
world of ours, which takes so many weeks to crawl about on the fastest
ships and the fastest trains, is really a mote of dust, something
smaller than the smallest pin-prick, compared to that far-away sun up
there on the shoulder of Orion!"
"Stop!" I cried. "You're positively giving me a chill up my spine.
You're making me feel so lonesome, Gershom, that you're giving me
goose-flesh. You're not leaving me anything to get hold of. You
haven't even left me anything to stand on. I'm only a little speck of
Nothing on a nit of a world in a puny little universe which is only a
little freckle on the face of some greater universe which is only a
lost child in a city of bigger constellations which in turn have still
lonelier suns to swing about, until I go on and on, and wonder with a
gasp what is beyond the end of space. But I can't go on thinking about
it. I simply can't. It upsets me, the same as an earthquake would,
when you look about for something solid and find that even your solid
old earth is going back on you!"
"On the contrary," said Gershom as he put down his telescope, "I know
nothing more conducive to serenity than the study of astronomy. It has
a tendency to teach you, in the first place, just how insignificant
you are in the general scheme of things. The naked eye, in clear air
like this, can see over eight thousand stars. The larger telescopes
reveal a hundred million stars, and the photographic dry-plate has
shown that there are several thousands of millions which can be
definitely recorded. So that you and I are not altogether the whole
works. And to remember that, when we are feeling a bit important, is
good for our Ego!"
I didn't answer him, for I was busy just then studying the Milky Way.
And I couldn't help feeling that it must have been on a night like
this that a certain young shepherd watching his flocks on the uplands
of Canaan sat studying the infinite stairways of star-dust that
"sloped through darkness up to God" and was moved to say: "When I
consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, or
the son of man that Thou visitest him?"
"Yes, Gershom, it's horribly humiliating," I said as I squinted up at
those serene heavens. "They last forever. And we come and go out, and
nobody knows why!"
"Pardon me," corrected the literal-minded Gershom. "They do not last
forever. They come and go out, just as we do. Only they take longer.
Consider the Dipper up there, for instance. A hundred thousand years
from now that Dipper will be perceptibly altered, for we know the
lateral movement of Dubhe and Benetnasch will give the outer line of
the bowl a greater flare and make the crook of the handle a trifle
sharper. Even a thousand years would show change enough for
instruments to detect. And a million years will probably show the
group pretty well broken up. But the one regrettable feature, of
course, is that we will not be here to see it."
"Where will we be?" I asked Gershom.
"I don't know," he finally admitted, after an unexpectedly long
silence.
"But will it all go on, forever and forever and forever?"
"To do so is not in the nature of things," was Gershom's quiet-toned
reply. "It is the destiny of our own earth, of course, which most
interests us. And however we look at it, that destiny is a gloomy
one. Its heat may fail. Stupart, in fact, has established that its
temperature is going down one and a half degrees every thousand years.
Or its volcanic elevating forces may give out, so that the land will
subside and the water wash over it from pole to pole. Or a comet may
wipe up its atmosphere, the same as one sponge-sweep wipes up moisture
from a slate. Or the sun itself may cool, so that the last of our race
will stand huddled together in a solarium somewhere on the Equator. Or
as our sun rushes toward Lyra, it may bump into a derelict sun, just
as a ship bumps into a wreck. If that derelict were as big as our sun,
astronomers would see it at least fifteen years before the collision.
For five or six years it would even be visible to the naked eye, so
that the race, or what remained of the race, would have plenty of time
to think things over and put its house in order. Then, of course, we'd
go up like a singed feather. And there'd be no more breakfasts to
worry over, and no more wheat to thresh, and no more school fires to
start in the morning, and no more children to make think you know more
than you really do, and not even any more hearts to ache. There would
be just Emptiness, just voiceless and never-ending Nothingness!"
Gershom stopped speaking and sat staring up at Orion. Then he turned
and looked at me.
"What's the matter?" he asked, for he must have felt my shiver under
the robe.
"Nothing," I said in a thin and pallid voice. "Only I think I'll go
back to the house. And I'm going to make a pot of good hot cocoa!" ...
And that's mostly what life is: making little pots of cocoa to keep
our bodies warm in the midst of a never-ending chilliness!
_Tuesday the Eighth_
My husband is home again. He came back with the first blizzard of the
winter and had a hard time getting through to Casa Grande. This gives
him all the excuses he could desire for railing at prairie life. I
told him, after patiently listening to him cussing about everything in
sight, that it was plain to see that he belonged to the land of the
beaver. He promptly requested to know what I meant by that.
"Doesn't the beaver regard it as necessary to dam his home before he
considers it fit to live in?" I retorted. But Duncan, in that
estranging new mood of his, didn't relax a line. He even announced, a
little later on, that a quick-silver wit might be all right if it
could be kept from running over. And it was my turn to ask if he had
any particular reference to allusions.
"Well, for one thing," he told me, "there's this tiresome habit of
hitching nicknames on to everything in sight."
I asked him what names he objected to.
"To begin right at home," he retorted, "I regard 'Dinkie' as an
especially silly name for a big hulk of a boy. I think it's about time
that youngster was called by his proper name."
I'd never thought about it, to tell the truth. His real name, I
remembered, was Elmer Duncan McKail. That endearing diminutive of
"Dinkie" had stuck to him from his baby days, and in my fond and
foolish eyes, of course, had always seemed to fit him. But even
Gershom had spoken to me on the matter, months before, asking me if I
preferred the boy to be known as "Dinkie" to his school mates. And I'd
told Gershom that I didn't believe we could get rid of the "Dinkie" if
we wanted to. His father, I knew, had once objected to "Duncan," as he
had no liking to be dubbed "Old Duncan" while his offspring would
answer to "Young Duncan." And "Duncan," as a name, had never greatly
appealed to me. But it is plain now that I have been remiss in the
matter. So hereafter we'll have to make an effort to have our little
Dinkie known as Elmer. It's like bringing a new child into the family
circle, a new child we're not quite acquainted with. But these things,
I suppose, have to be faced. So hereafter my laddie shall officially
be known as "Elmer," Elmer Duncan McKail. And I have started the ball
rolling by duly inscribing in his new books "Elmer D. McKail" and
requesting Gershom to address his pupil as "Elmer."
I've been wondering, in the meantime, if Duncan is going to insist on
a revision of all our ranch names, the names so tangled up with love
and good-natured laughter and memories of the past. Take our horses
alone: Tumble-weed and timeless Tithonus, Buntie and Briquette,
Laughing-gas and Coco the Third, Mudski and Tarzanette. I'd hate now
to lose those names. They are the register of our friendly love for
our animals.
It begins to creep through this thick head of mine that my husband no
longer nurses any real love for either these animals or prairie life.
And if that is the case, he will never get anything out of prairie
living. It will be useless for him even to try. So I may as well do
what I can to reconcile myself to the inevitable. I am not without my
moments of revolt. But in those moods when I feel a bit uppish I
remember about my recent venture into astronomy. What's the use of
worrying, anyway? There was one ice age, and there is going to be
another ice age. I tell myself that my troubles are pretty trivial,
after all, since I'm only one of many millions on this earth and
since this earth is only one of many millions of other earths which
will swing about their suns billions and billions of years after I and
my children and my children's children are withered into dust.
It rather takes my breath away, at times, and I shy away from it the
same as Pauline Augusta shies away from the sight of blood. It reminds
me of Chaddie's New York lady with whom the Bishop ventured to discuss
ultimate destinies. "Yes, I suppose I shall enter into eternal bliss,"
responded this fair lady, "but would you mind not discussing such
disagreeable subjects at tea-time?"
Speaking of disagreeable subjects, we seem to have a new little
trouble-maker here at Casa Grande. It's in the form of a brindle pup
called Minty, which Dinkie--I mean, of course, which Elmer, acquired
in exchange for a jack-knife and what was left of his _Swiss Family
Robinson_. But Minty has not been well treated by the world, and was
brought home with a broken leg. So Whinnie and I made splints out of
an old cigar-box cover, and padded the fracture with cotton wool and
bound it up with tape. Minty, in the moderated spirits of invalidism,
was a meek and well behaved pup during the first few days after his
arrival, sleeping quietly at the foot of Elmer's bed and stumping
around after his new master like a war veteran awaiting his discharge.
But now that Minty's leg is getting better and he finds himself in a
world that flows with warm milk and much petting, he betrays a
tendency to use any odd article of wearing apparel as a teething-ring.
He has completely ruined one of my bedroom slippers and done
Mexican-drawn-work on the ends of the two living-room window-curtains.
But what is much more ominous, Minty yesterday got hold of
Dinky-Dunk's Stetson and made one side of its rim look as though it
had been put through a meat-chopper. So my lord and master has been
making inquiries about Minty and Minty's right of possession. And the
order has gone forth that hereafter no canines are to sleep in this
house. It impresses me as a trifle unreasonable, all things
considered, and Elmer, with a rather unsteady underlip, has asked me
if Minty must be taken away from him. But I have no intention of
countermanding Duncan's order. The crust over the volcano is quite
thin enough, as it is. And whatever happens, I am resolved to be a
meek and dutiful wife. But I've had a talk with Whinnie and he's going
to fix up a comfortable box behind the stove in the bunk-house, and
there the exiled Minty will soon learn to repose in peace. It's
marvelous, though, how that little three-legged animal loves my
Dinkie, loves my Elmer, I should say. He licks my laddie's shoes and
yelps with joy at the smell of his pillow ... Poor little
abundant-hearted mite, overflowing with love! But life, I suppose,
will see to it that he is brought to reason. We must learn not to be
too happy on this earth. And we must learn that love isn't always
given all it asks for.
_Thursday the Seventeenth_
The crust over the volcano has shown itself to be even thinner than I
imagined. The lava-shell gave way, under our very feet, and I've had a
glimpse of the molten fury that can flow about us without our knowing
it. And like so many of life's tragic moments, it began out of
something that is almost ridiculous in its triviality.
Night before last, when Struthers was rather late in setting her
bread, she heard Minty scratching and whimpering at the back door, and
without giving much thought to what she was doing, let him into the
house. Minty, of course, went scampering up to Dinkie's bed, where he
slept secretly and joyously until morning. And all might have been
well, even at this, had not Minty's return to his kingdom gone to his
head. To find some fitting way of expressing his joy must have taxed
that brindle pup's ingenuity, for, before any of us were up, he
descended to the living-room, where he delightedly and diligently
proceeded to remove the upholstery from the old Chesterfield. By the
time I came on the scene, at any rate, there was nothing but a grisly
skeleton of the Chesterfield left. Now, that particular piece of
furniture had known hard use, and there were places where the mohair
had been worn through, and I'd even discussed the expediency of having
the thing done over. But I knew that Minty's efforts to hasten this
movement would not meet with approval. So I discreetly decided to have
Whinnie and Struthers remove the tell-tale skeleton to the bunk-house.
Before that transfer could be effected, however, the Dour Man invaded
the living-room and stood with a cold and accusatory eye inspecting
that monument of destructiveness.
"Where's Elmer?" he demanded, with a grim look which started by heart
pounding.
"Elmer's dressing," I said as quietly as I could. "Do you want him?"
"I do," announced my husband, whiter in the face than I had seen him
for many a day.
"What for?" I asked.
"I think you know what for," he said, meeting my eye.
"I'm not sure that I do," I found the courage to retort. "But I'd
prefer being certain."