strongly disapproving of my conduct. He even claims that I've
humiliated him. I never dreamed, when that movie-man with the camera
followed me about at the plowing-match, that my husband would wander
into a Calgary picture-house and behold his wife in driving gauntlets
and Stetson mounted on a tractor and twiddling her fingers at the
camera-operator, just to show how much at home she felt! Dinky-Dunk
must have experienced a distinctly new thrill when he saw his own wife
come riding through that pictorial news weekly. He would have
preferred not recognizing me, I suppose. But there I was, duly named
and labeled--and hence the ponderous little note of disapproval.
But I'm not going to let Duncan start a quarrel over trivialities like
this. I intend to sit tight. There'd be little use in argument,
anyway, for Duncan would only ignore me as the predatory tom-cat
ignores the foolishly scolding robin. I'm going to be a regular
mallard, and stick to these home regions until the ice forms. And our
most mountainous troubles, after all, can't quite survive being
exteriorated through the ink-well. It relieves me to write about them.
But I wish I had a woman of my own age to talk to. I get a bit lonely,
now that winter is slipping down out of the North again. And I find
that I'm not so companionable as I ought to be. It comes home to me,
now and then, how far away from the world we are, how remote from
everything that counts. The tragedy of life with Chaddie McKail, I
suppose, is that she's let existence narrow down to just one thing, to
her family. Other women seem to have substitutes. But I've about
forgotten how to be a social animal. I seem to grow as segregative as
the timber-wolf. There's nothing for me in the woman's club life one
gets out here. I can't force myself into church work, and the rural
reading-club is something beyond me. I simply couldn't endure those
Women's Institute meetings which open with a hymn and end up with
sponge-cake and green tea, after a platitudinous paper on the Beauty
of Prairie Life. It has its beauties, God knows, or we'd all go mad.
We women, in this brand-new land, try to bolster ourselves up with the
belief that we have greatnesses which the rest of the world must get
along without. But that is only the flaunting of _La Panache_, the
feather of courage in our cap of discouragement. There is so much, so
much, we are denied! So much we must do without! So much we must see
go to others! So much we must never even hope for! Oh, pioneers, great
you are and great you must be, to endure what you have endured! You
must be strong in your hours of secret questioning and you must be
strong in your quest for consolation. If nothing else, you must at
least be strong. And these western men of ours should all be strong
men, should all be great men, because they must have been the children
of great mothers. A prairie mother _has_ to be a great woman. She must
be great to survive, to endure, to leave her progeny behind her. I've
heard the Wise Men talk about nature looking after her own. I've heard
sentimentalists sing about the strength that lies in the soil. But,
oh, pioneers, you know what you know! In your secret heart of hearts
you remember the lonely hours, the lonely years, the lonely graves!
For in the matter of infant mortality alone, prairie life shows a
record shocking to read. We are making that better, it is true, with
our district nursing and our motherhood clubs and our rural phones
and our organized letting in of light and passing on of knowledge. We
are not so overburdened as those nobler women who went before us. But,
oh, pioneers along these lonely northern trails, I salute you and
honor you for your courage! Your greatness will never be known. It
will be seen only in the great country which you gave up your lives to
bring to birth!
_Wednesday the Twenty-Seventh_
What weather-cocks we are! My blue Monday is over and done with, this
is a crystalline winter day with all the earth at peace with itself,
and I've just had a letter from Peter asking if I could take care of
his sister's girl, Susie Mumford, until after Christmas. The Mumfords,
it seems, are going through the divorce-mill, and Susie's mother is
anxious that her one and only child should be afar from the scene when
the grist of liberty is a-grinding.
I know nothing of Susie except what Peter has told me, that she is not
yet nineteen, that she is intelligent, but obstreperous, and much
wiser than she pretends to be, that the machinery of life has always
run much too smoothly about her for her own good, and that a couple of
months of prairie life might be the means of introducing her to her
own soul.
That's all I know of Susie, but I shall welcome her to Casa Grande.
I'll be glad to see a city girl again, to talk over face-creams and
the _Follies_ and Tchaikowsky and brassieres and Strindberg with. And
I'll be glad to do a little toward repaying big-hearted old Peter for
all his kindnesses of the past. Susie may be both sophisticated and
intractable, but I await her with joy. She seems almost the answer to
my one big want.
But Casa Grande, I have been realizing, will have to be refurbished
for its coming guest. We have grown a bit shoddy about the edges here.
It's hard to keep a house spick and span, with two active-bodied
children running about it. And my heart, I suppose, has not been in
that work of late. But I've been on a tour of inspection, and I
realize it's time to reform. So Struthers and I are about to doll up
these dilapidated quarters of ours. And I intend to have my dolorously
neglected Guest Room (for such I used to call it) done over before the
arrival of Susie....
I rode over to the Teetzels' this afternoon, to explain about our
cattle getting through on their land. It was the road-workers who
broke down the Teetzel fence, to squat on a coulée-corner for their
camp. And they hadn't the decency to restore what they had wrecked. So
Bud Teetzel and I rode seven miles up the new turn-pike and overtook
those road-workers and I harangued their foreman for a full fifteen
minutes. But it made little impression on him. He merely grinned and
stared at me with a sort of insolent admiration on his face. And when
I had finished he audibly remarked to one of his teamsters that I made
a fine figure of a woman on horseback.
Bud says they're thinking of selling out if they can get their price.
The old folks want to move to Victoria, and Bud and his brother have a
hankering to try their luck up in the Peace River District. I asked
Bud if he wouldn't rather settle down in one of the big cities. He
merely laughed at me. "No thank you, lady! This old prair-ee is
comp'ny enough for me!" he said as he loped, brown as a nut, along the
trail as tawny as a lion's mane, with a sky of steel-cold blue smiling
down on his lopsided old sombrero. I studied him with a less
impersonal eye. He was a handsome and husky young giant, with the joy
of life still frankly imprinted on his face.
"Bud," I said as I loped along beside him, "why haven't you ever
married?"
That made him laugh again. Then he turned russet as he showed me the
white of an eye.
"All the peaches seemed picked, in this district," he found the
courage to proclaim.
This made me trot out the old platitude about the fish in the sea
being as good as any ever caught--and there really ought to be an
excise tax on platitudes, for being addicted to them is quite as bad
as being addicted to alcohol, and quite as benumbing to the brain.
But Bud, with his next speech, brought me up short.
"Say, lady, if _you_ was still in the runnin' I'd give 'em a race
that'd make a coyote look like a caterpillar on crutches!"
He said it solemnly, and his solemnity kept it respectful. But it was
my turn to laugh. And ridiculous as it may sound, this doesn't impress
me as such a dark world as I had imagined! A woman, after all, is a
good deal like mother earth: each has to be cultivated a little to
keep it mellow.
... Where the Female is, there also is the Unexpected. For when I got
home I found that my decorous Poppsy, my irreproachable Poppsy, had
succumbed before the temptation to investigate my new sewing-machine.
And once having nibbled at the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she
went rampaging through the whole garden. She made a stubborn effort to
exhaust the possibilities of all the little hemmers, and tried the
shirrer and the fire-stitch ruffler, and obviously had a fling at the
binder and a turn at the tucker. What she did to the tension-spring
heaven only knows. And my brand-new machine is on the blink. And my
meek-eyed little Poppsy isn't as impeccable as the world about her
imagined!
_Wednesday the Third_
Susie Mumford arrived yesterday. The weather, heaven be thanked, was
perfect, an opal day with the earth as fresh-smelling as Poppsy just
out of her bath. There was just enough chill in the air to make one's
blood tingle and just enough warmth in the sunlight to make it feel
like a benediction. Whinstane Sandy, in fact, avers that we're in for
a spell of Indian Summer.
I motored in to Buckhorn and met Susie, who wasn't in the least what I
expected. I was looking for a high-spirited and insolent-eyed young
lady who'd probably be traveling with a French maid and a van-load of
trunks, after the manner of Lady Alicia. But the Susie I met was a
tired and listless and rather white-faced girl who reminds me just
enough of her Uncle Peter to make me like her. The poor child knows
next to nothing of the continent on which she was born, and the
immensity of our West has rather appalled her. She told me, driving
home, that she had never before been this side of the Adirondacks.
Yet she has crossed the Atlantic eight times and knows western Europe
about as well as she knows Long Island itself. There is a
matter-of-factness about Susie which makes her easy to get along with.
Poppsy took to her at once and was a garrulous and happy witness of
Susie's unpacking. Dinkie, on the other hand, developed an altogether
unlooked-for shyness and turned red when Susie kissed him. There was
no melting of the ice until the strange lady produced a very wonderful
toy air-ship, which you wind up and which soars right over the
haystacks, if you start it right. This was a present which Peter sent
out. Dinkie, in fact, spent most of his spare time last night writing
a letter to his Uncle Peter, a letter which he intimated he had no
wish for the rest of the family to read. He was willing to
acknowledge, this morning, that since he and Susie both had the same
Uncle Peter, they really ought to be cousins....
Susie has not been sleeping well, and for all her weariness last night
had to take five grains of veronal before she could settle down. The
result is that she looks whiter than ever this morning and ate very
little of Struthers' really splendiferous breakfast. But she made a
valorous enough effort to be blithe and has rambled about Casa Grande
with the febrile, quick curiosity of a young setter, making friends
with the animals and for the first time in her life picking an egg out
of a nest. I was afraid, at first, that she was going to complain
about the quietness of existence out here, for our pace must seem a
slow one, after New York. But Susie says the one thing she wants is
peace. It's not often a girl not yet out of her teens makes any such
qualified demand on life. I can't help feeling that the break-up of
her family must be depressing her more than she pretends. She speaks
about it in a half-joking way, however, and said this morning: "Dad
certainly deserves a little freedom!" We sat for an hour at the
breakfast-table, pow-wowing about everything under the blessed sun.
In some ways Susie is a very mature woman, for nineteen and
three-quarters. She is also an exceptionally companionable one. She
has a sort of lapis-lazuli eye with paler streaks in the iris, like
banded agate. It is a brooding eye, with a great deal of beauty in it.
And she has a magnolia-white skin which one doesn't often see on the
prairie. It's not the sort of skin, in fact, which could last very
long on the open range. It's the sort that's had too much bevel plate
between it and the buffeting winds of the world. But it's lovely to
look upon, especially when it's touched with its almost imperceptible
shell-pink of excitement as it was this afternoon when Susie climbed
on Buntie and tried a canter or two about the corrals. Susie, I
noticed, rode well. I couldn't quite make out why her riding made me
at once think of Theobald Gustav. But she explained, later, that she
had been taught by a German riding-master--and then I understood.
But I must not overlook Gershom, who duly donned his Sunday best in
honor of Susie's arrival and who is already undertaking to educate the
brooding-eyed young lady from the East. He explained to her that there
were eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of Canada still
unexplored, and Susie said: "Then lead me into the most far-away part
of it!" And when he told her, during their first meal together, that
the human brain was estimated to contain half a billion cells and that
the number of brain impressions collected by an average person during
fifty years of life aggregated three billion, one hundred and
fifty-five million, seven hundred and sixty thousand, Susie sighed and
said it was no wonder women were so contradictory. Which impressed me
as very like one of my own retorts to Gershom. I saw Susie studying
him, studying him with a quiet and meditative eye. "I believe your
Gershom is one of the few good men in the world," she afterward
acknowledged to me. And I've been wondering why one so young should be
saturated with cynicism.
A small incident occurred to-night which disturbed me more than I can
explain to myself. Susie, who had been looking through one of Dinkie's
school scribblers, guardedly passed the book over to me where I sat
sewing in front of the fire. For, whatever may happen, a prairie
mother can always find plenty of sewing to do. I looked at the bottom
of the page which Susie pointed out to me. There I saw two names, one
above the other, with certain of the letters stricken out, two names
written like this:
[E][l]m[e][r] McKai[l]----love
Do[r][e][e]n O'[L]on[e]----friendship
[Transcriber's note: In original, letters in brackets are struck out,
each with a diagonal slash.]
And that set me off in a brown study which even Susie seemed to
fathom. She smiled understandingly and turned and inspected Dinkie,
bent over his arithmetic, with an entirely new curiosity.
"I suppose that's what every mother has to face, some day," she said
as she sat down beside me in front of the fire.
But it seemed a fire without warmth. Life, apparently, had brought me
to another of its Great Divides. My boy had a secret apart from his
mother. My son was no longer all mine.
_Friday the Fifth_
This morning at breakfast, when Dinkie and I were alone at the table,
I crossed over to him and sat down beside him.
"Dinkie," I said, with my hand on his tousled young head, "whom do you
love best in all the world?"
"Mummy!" he said, looking me straight in the eye. And at that I drank
in a deep breath.
"Are you sure?" I demanded.
"As sure as death and taxes," he said with his one-sided little smile.
It was a phrase which his father used to use, on similar occasions, in
the long, long ago. And it didn't quite drive the mists out of my
heart.
"And who comes next?" I asked, with my hand still on his head.
"Buntie," he replied, with what I suspected to be a barricaded look on
his face.
"No, no," I told him. "It has to be a human being."
"Then Poppsy," he admitted.
"And who next?" I persisted.
"Whinnie!" exclaimed my son.
But I had to shake my head at that.
"Aren't you forgetting somebody very important?" I hinted.
"Who?" he asked, deepening just a trifle in color.
"How about daddy?" I asked. "Isn't it about time for him there?"
"Yes, daddy," he dutifully repeated. But his face cleared, and my own
heart clouded, as he went through the empty rite.
Dinkie was studying that clouded face of mine, by this time, and I
began to feel embarrassed. But I was determined to see the thing
through. It was hard, though, for me to say what I wanted to.
"Isn't there somebody, somebody else you are especially fond of?" I
inquired, as artlessly as I could. And it hurt like cold steel to
think that I had to fence with my own boy in such a fashion.
Dinkie looked at me and then he looked out of the window.
"I think I like Susie," he finally admitted.
"But in your own life, Dinkie, in your work and your play, in your
school, isn't--isn't there _somebody_?" I found the courage to ask.
Dinkie's face grew thoughtful. For just a moment, I thought I caught a
touch of the Holbein Astronomer in it.
"There's lots of boys and girls I like," he noncommittally asserted.
And I began to see that it was hopeless. My boy had reservations from
his own mother, reservations which I would be compelled to respect. He
was no longer entirely and unequivocally mine. There was a wild-bird
part of him which had escaped, which I could never recapture and cage
again. The thing that his father had foretold was really coming about.
My laddie would some day grow out of my reach. I would lose him. And
my happiness, which had been trying its wings for the last few days,
came down out of the sky like a shot duck. All day long, for Susie's
sake, I've tried to be light-hearted. But my efforts make me think of
a poor old worn-out movie-hall piano doing its pathetic level best to
be magnificently blithe. It's a meaningless clatter in a meaningless
world.
_Thursday the Eleventh_
It ought to be winter, according to the almanac, but our wonderful
Indian Summer weather continues. Susie and I have been "blue-doming"
to-day. We converted ourselves into a mounted escort for Gershom and
the kiddies as far as the schoolhouse, and then rode on to Dead Horse
Lake, in the hope of getting a few duck. But the weather was too fine,
though I managed to bring down a couple of mallard, after one of which
Susie, having removed her shoes and stockings, waded knee-deep in the
slough. She enjoys that sort of thing: it's something so entirely new
to the child of the city. And Susie, I might add, is already looking
much better. She is sleeping soundly, at last, and has promised me
there shall be no more night-caps of veronal. What is more, I am
getting to know her better--and I have several revisions to make.
In the first place, it is not the family divorce cloud that has been
darkening Susie's soul. She let the cat out of the bag, on the way
home this afternoon. Susie has been in love with a man who didn't come
up to expectations. She was very much in love, apparently, and
disregarded what people said about him. Then, much to her surprise,
her Uncle Peter took a hand in the game. It must have been rather a
violent hand, for a person so habitually placid. But Peter,
apparently, wasn't altogether ignorant of the club-talk about the
young rake in question. At any rate, he decided it was about time to
act. Susie declined to explain in just what way he acted. Yet she
admits now that Peter was entirely in the right and she, for a time,
was entirely in the wrong. But it is rather like having one's appendix
cut out, she protests, without an anesthetic. It takes time to heal
such wounds. Susie obviously was bowled over. She is still suffering
from shock. But I like the spirit of the girl. She's not the kind that
one disappointment is going to kill. And prairie life is already doing
her good. For she announced this morning that her clothes were
positively getting tight for her. And such clothes they are! Such
delicate silks and cobwebs of lace and pale-pink contraptions of
satin! Such neatly tailored skirts and short-vamped shoes and
thing-a-ma-jigs of Irish linen and platinum and gold trinkets to deck
out her contemptuous little body with. For Susie takes them all with a
shrug of indifference. She loves to slip on my oil-stained old
hunting-jacket and my weather-beaten old golf-boots and go meandering
about the range.
Another revision which I am compelled to make is that while I expected
to be the means of cheering Susie up, Susie has quite unconsciously
been the means of rejuvenating _me_. I think I've been able to catch
at least a hollow echo of her youth from her. I _know_ I have. Two
days ago, when we motored in to Buckhorn with my precious marketing of
butter and eggs--and Susie never before quite realized how butter and
eggs reached the ultimate consumer--a visiting Odd-Fellows' band was
playing a two-step on the balcony of the Commercial Hotel. Susie and I
stopped the car, and while Struthers stared at us aghast from the back
seat, we two-stepped together on the main street of Buckhorn. We just
let the music go to our heads and danced there until the crowd in
front of the band began to right-about-face and a cowboy in chaps
brazenly announced that he was Susie's next partner. So we danced to
our running-board, stepped into our devil-wagon, and headed for home,
in the icy aura of Struthers' sustained indignation.
I begin to get terribly tired of propriety. I don't know whether it's
Struthers, or Struthers and Gershom combined, or having to watch one's
step so when there are children about one. But I'm tired of being
respectable. I'm tired of holding myself in. I warn the world that I'm
about ready for anything, anything from horse-stealing to putting a
dummy-lady in Whinstane Sandy's bed. I don't believe there's any
wickedness that's beyond me. I'm a reckless and abandoned woman. And
if that cold-blooded old Covenanter doesn't get home from Calgary
pretty soon I'm going buckboard riding with Bud Teetzel!
I've been asking Susie if we measure up to her expectations. She said,
in reply, that we fitted in to a T. For her Uncle Peter, she
acknowledged, had already done us in oils on the canvas of her
curiosity. She accused me, however, of reveling in that primitiveness
which is the last resort of the sophisticated--like the log cabins the
city folk fashion for themselves when they get up in the Adirondacks.
And Casa Grande, she further amended, impressed her as being almost
disappointingly comfortable.
After that Susie fell to talking about Peter. She is affectionately
contemptuous toward her uncle, protesting that he's forever throwing
away his chances and letting other people impose on his good nature.
It was lucky, averred Susie, that he was born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. For he was a hopeless espouser of Lost Causes. She inclined
to the belief that he should have married young, should have married
young and had a flock of children, for he was crazy about kiddies.
I asked Susie what sort of wife Peter should have chosen. And Susie
said Peter should have hitched up with a good, capable,
practical-minded woman who could manage him without letting him know
he was being managed. There was a widow in the East, acknowledged his
niece, who had been angling for poor Peter for years. And Peter was
still free, Susie suspected, because in the presence of that widow he
emulated Hamlet and always put an antic disposition on. Did the most
absurd things, and appeared to be little more than half-witted. The
widow in question had even spoken to Susie about her uncle's
eccentricities and intimated that his segregative manner of life might
in the end affect his intellect!