being told by some authority in astronomy that your earth was about to
collide with Wernecke's Comet. And, vain peacock that I was, I rather
liked to think of Peter going through life mourning for me, alone and
melancholy and misogynistic for the rest of his days! Yet there must
be dozens, there must be hundreds, of attractive girls along the paths
which he travels. I found the courage to mention this fact to Susie,
who merely laughed and said her Uncle Peter would probably be saved by
his homeliness. But I can't say that I ever regarded Peter Ketley as
homely. He may never carry off a blue ribbon from a beauty show, but
he has the sort of face that a woman of sense can find tremendous
appeal in. Your flapper type, I suppose, will always succumb to the
curled Romeo, but it's the ruggeder and stronger man with the bright
mind and the kindly heart who will always appeal to the clearer-eyed
woman who has come to know life.... Susie has told me, by the way,
that Josie Langdon and her husband quarreled on their honeymoon,
quarreled the first week in Paris and right across the Continent for
the momentous reason that Josie _insisted on putting sugar in her
claret_!
I've been doing a good deal of thinking, the last few hours. I've been
wondering if I'm a Lost Cause. And I've been wondering why women
should want to put sugar in their claret. If it's made to be bitter,
why not accept the bitterness, and let it go at that?
_Friday the Twelfth_
Dinky-Dunk has just sent word that he will be home to-morrow night and
asks if I'll mind motoring in to Buckhorn for him.
It impresses me as a non-committal little message, yet it means more
to me than I imagined. _My husband is coming home._
Susie has been eying me all afternoon, with a pucker of perplexity
about her lapis-lazuli eyes. We are busy, getting things to rights.
And I've made an appallingly long list of what I must buy in Buckhorn
to-morrow. Even Struthers has perked up a bit, and is making furtive
preparations for a sage-tea wash in the morning.
_Tuesday the Sixteenth_
Why is life so tangled up? Why can't we be either completely happy or
completely the other way? Why must wretchedness come sandwiched in
between slices of hope and contentment, and why must happiness be
haunted by some ghostly echo of pain? And why can't people be all good
or all bad, so that the tares and the wheat never get mixed up
together and make a dismal mess of our harvest of Expectation?
These are some of the questions I've been asking myself since Duncan
went back to Calgary last night. He stayed only two days. And they
were days of terribly complicated emotions. I went to the station for
him, on Saturday, and in my impatience to be there on time found
myself with an hour and a half of waiting, an hour and a half of
wandering up and down that ugly open platform in the clear cool light
of evening. There was a hint of winter in the air, an intimidating
northern nip which made the thought of a warm home and an open fire a
consolation to the chilled heart. And I felt depressed, in spite of
everything I could do to bolster up my courage. In the first place, I
couldn't keep from thinking of Alsina Teeswater. And in the second
place, never, never on the prairie, have I watched a railway-train
come in or a railway-train pass away without feeling lonesome. It
reminds me how big is the outside world, how infinitesimal is Chaddie
McKail and her unremembered existence up here a thousand miles from
Nowhere! It humbles me. It reminds me that I have in some way failed
to mesh in with the bigger machinery of life.
I had a lump in my throat, by the time Dinky-Dunk's train pulled in
and I saw him swing down from the car-steps. I made for him through
the crowd, in fact, with my all but forgotten Australian crawl-stroke,
and accosted him with rather a briny kiss and so tight a hug that he
stood back and studied my face. He wanted to ask, I know, if anything
had happened. He was obviously startled, and just a trifle
embarrassed. My lump, by this time, was bigger than ever, but I had to
swallow it in secret. Dinky-Dunk, I found, was changed in many ways.
He was tired, and he seemed older. But he was prosperous-looking, in
brand-new raiment, and reported that luck was still with him and
everything was flourishing. Give him one year, he protested, and he'd
show them he wasn't a piker.
I waited for him to ask about the children, but his mind seemed full
of his Barcona coal business. The railway was learning to treat them
half decently and the coal was coming out better than they'd hoped
for. They'd a franchise to light the town, developing their power from
the mine screenings, and what they got from this would be so much
velvet. And he had a chance to take over one of the finest houses in
Mount Royal, if he had a family along with him to excuse such
magnificence.
That final speech of his brought me up short. It was dark along the
trail, and dark in my heart. And more things than one had happened
that day to humble me. So I took one hand off the wheel and put it on
his knee.
"Do you want me to go to Calgary?" I asked him.
"That's up to you," he said, without budging an inch. He said it, in
fact, with a steel-cold finality which sent my soul cringing back into
its kennel. And the trail ahead of me seemed blacker than ever.
"I'll have to have time to think it over," I said with a composure
which was nine-tenths pretense.
"Some wives," he remarked, "are willing to help their husbands."
"I know it, Dinky-Dunk," I acknowledged, hoping against hope he'd give
me the opening I was looking for. "And I want to help, if you'll only
let me."
"I think I'm doing my part," he rather solemnly asserted. I couldn't
see his face, in the dark, but there was little hope to be wrung from
the tone of his voice. So I knew it would be best to hold my peace.
Casa Grande blazed a welcome to us, as we drove up to it, and the
children, thank heaven, were relievingly boisterous over the adventure
of their dad's return. He seemed genuinely amazed at their growth,
seemed slightly irritated at Dinkie's long stares of appraisal, and
feigned an interest in the paraded new possessions of Poppsy and her
brother--until it came to Peter's toy air-ship, which was thrust
almost bruskly aside.
And that reminds me of one thing which I am reluctant to acknowledge.
Dinky-Dunk was anything but nice to Susie. He may have his perverse
reasons for disliking everything in any way connected with Peter
Ketley, but I at least expected my husband to be agreeable to the
casual guest under his roof. Through it all, I must confess, Susie
was wonderful. She made no effort to ignore Duncan, as his ignoring of
her only too plainly merited. She remained, not only poised and
imperturbable, but impersonal and impenetrable. She found herself, I
think, driven just a tiny bit closer to Gershom, who still shows a
placid exterior to Duncan's slightly contemptuous indifference.
My husband, I'm afraid, was not altogether happy in his own home. In
one way, of course, I can not altogether blame him for that, since his
bigger interests now are outside that home. But I begin to see how
dangerous these long separations can be. Somewhere and at some time,
before too much water runs under the bridges, there will have to be a
readjustment.
I realized that, in fact, as I drove Duncan back to the station last
night, after I'd duly signed the different papers he'd brought for
that purpose. I had a feeling that every chug of the motor was
carrying him further and further out of my life. Heaven knows, I was
willing enough to eat crow. I was ready to bury the hatchet, and bury
it in my own bosom, if need be, rather than see it swinging free to
strike some deeper blow.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said after a particularly long silence between us,
"what is it you want me to do?"
My heart was beating much faster than he could have imagined and I was
grateful for the chance to pretend the road was taking up most of my
attention.
"Do about what?" he none too encouragingly inquired.
"We don't seem to be hitting it off the way we should be," I went on,
speaking as quietly as I was able. "And I want you to tell me where
I'm failing to do my share."
That note of humility from me must have surprised him a little, for we
rode quite a distance without a word.
"What makes you feel that way?" he finally asked.
I found it hard to answer that question. It would never be easy, at
any rate, to answer it as I wanted to.
"Because things can't go on this way forever," I found the courage to
tell him.
"Why not?" he asked. He seemed indifferent again.
"Because they're all wrong," I rather tremulously replied. "Can't you
see they're all wrong?"
"But why do you want them changed?" he asked with a disheartening sort
of impersonality.
"For the sake of the children," I told him. And I could feel the
impatient movement of his body on the car seat beside me.
"The children!" he repeated with acid-drop deliberation. "The
children, of course! It's always the children!"
"You're still their father," I reminded him.
"A sort of honorary president of the family," he amended.
Hope ebbed out of my heart, like air out of a punctured tire.
"Aren't you making it rather hard for me?" I demanded, trying to hold
myself in, but feeling the bob-cat getting the better of the purring
tabby.
"I've rather concluded that was the way you made it for _me_,"
countered Duncan, with a coolness of manner which I came more and more
to resent.
"In what way?" I asked.
"In shutting up shop," he rather listlessly responded.
"I don't think I quite understand," I told him.
"Well, in crowbarring me out of your scheme of life, if you insist on
knowing," were the words that came from the husband sitting so close
beside me. "You had your other interests, of course. But you also
seem to have had the idea that you could turn me loose like a range
horse. I could paw for my fodder and eat snow when I got thirsty. You
didn't even care to give me a wind-break to keep a forty-mile blizzard
out of my bones. You didn't know where I was browsing, and didn't much
care. It was up to me to rustle for myself and be rounded up when the
winter was over and there was another spell of work on hand!"
We rode on in silence, for almost a mile, with the cold air beating
against my body and a colder numbness creeping about the corner of my
heart.
"Do you mean, Dinky-Dunk," I finally asked, "that you want your
freedom?"
"I'm not saying that," he said, after another short silence.
"Then what is it you want?" I asked, wondering why the windshield
should look so blurred in the half-light.
"I want to get something out of life," was his embittered retort.
It was a retort that I thought over, thought over with an oddly
settling mind, like a stirred pool that has been left to clear itself.
For that grown man sitting there beside me seemed ridiculously like a
spoiled child, an indulged child forlornly alone in the fogs of his
own arrogance. He made me think of a black bear which bites at the
bullet wound in his own body. I felt suddenly sorry for him, in a
maternal sort of way. I felt sorry for him at the same time that I
remained a trifle afraid of him, for he still possessed, I knew, his
black-bear power of inflicting unlooked-for and ursine blows. I simply
ached to swing about on him and say: "Dinky-Dunk, what you need is a
good spanking!" But I didn't have the courage. I had to keep my sense
of humor under cover, just as you have to blanket garden-geraniums
before the threat of a black frost. Yet, oddly enough, I felt
fortified by that sense of pity. It seemed to bring with it the
impression that Duncan was still a small boy who might some day grow
out of his badness. It made me feel suddenly older and wiser than this
overgrown child who was still crying for the moon. And with that
feeling came a wave of tolerance, followed by a smaller wave of faith,
of faith that everything might yet come out right, if only I could
learn to be patient, as mothers are patient with children.
"And I, on my part, Dinky-Dunk, want to see you get the very best out
of life," I found myself saying to him. My intentions were good, but I
suppose I made my speech in a very superior and school-teachery sort
of way.
"I guess I've got about all that's coming to me," he retorted, with
the note of bitterness still in his voice.
And again I had the feeling of sitting mother-wise and mother-patient
beside an unruly small boy.
"There's much more, Dinky-Dunk, if you only ask for it," I said as
gently as I was able.
He turned, at that, and studied me in the failing light, studied me
with a sharp look of interrogation on his face. I had the feeling, as
he did so, of something epochal in the air, as though the drama of
life were narrowing up to its climactic last moment. Yet I felt
helpless to direct the course of that drama. I nursed the impression
that we stood at the parting of the ways, that we stood hesitating at
the fork of two long and lonely trails which struck off across an
illimitable world, farther and farther apart. I vaguely regretted that
we were already in the streets of Buckhorn, for I was half hoping that
Duncan would tell me to stop the car. Then I vaguely regretted that I
was busy driving that car, as otherwise I might have been free to get
my arms about that granitic Dour Man of mine and strangle him into
submitting to that momentary mood of softness which seems to come less
and less to the male as he grows older.
But Duncan merely laughed, a bit uneasily, and just as suddenly grew
silent again. I had a sense of asbestos curtains coming down between
us, coming down before the climax was reached or the drama was ended.
I couldn't help wondering, as we drove into the cindered station-yard
where the lights were already twinkling, if Dinky-Dunk, like myself,
sat waiting for something which failed to manifest itself, if he too
had held back before the promise of some decisive word which I was
without the power to utter. For we were only half-warm, the two of us,
toying with the ghosts of the dead past and childishly afraid of the
future. We were Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, without the primal
hunger to reach out and possess what we too timidly desired. We were
more neutral even than Ferdinand and the Lady of the Bust, for we no
longer cared sufficiently to let the other know we cared, but waited
and waited in that twilight where all cats are gray.
There was, mercifully, very little time left for us before the train
came in. We kept our masks on, and talked only of every-day things,
about the receipt for the ranch taxes and what steers Whinnie should
"finish" and the new granary roof and the fire-lines about the
haystacks. Without quite knowing it, when the train pulled in, I put
my arm through my husband's--and for the second time that evening he
turned sharply and inspected my face. I felt as though I wanted to
hold him back, to hold him back from something unescapable but
tragically momentous. I think he felt sorry for me. At any rate, after
he had swung his suit-case up on the car-platform, he turned and
kissed me good-by. But it was the sort of kiss one gets at funerals.
It left me standing there watching the tail-lights blink off down the
track, as desolate as though I had been left alone on the deadest
promontory of the deadest planet lost in space. I stood there until
the lights were gone. I stood there until the platform was empty again
and my car was the only car left along the hard-packed cinders. So I
climbed into the driving-seat, and pulled on my gauntlets, and headed
for home....
Back at Casa Grande I found Dinkie and Whinnie beside the bunk-house
stove, struggling companionably through the opening chapters of
_Treasure Island_. My boy smiled up at me, for a moment, but his
mind, I could see, was intent on the page along which Whinnie's
stubbled finger was crawling like a plowshare beside each furrow of
text. He was in the South Pacific, a thousand miles away from me. In
my own house Struthers was putting a petulant-voiced Poppsy to bed,
and Gershom, up in his room, was making extraordinary smells at his
chemistry experiments. Susie I found curled comfortably up in front of
the fire, idling over my first volume of _Jean Christophe_.
She read three sentences aloud as I sat down beside her. "How happy he
is! He is made to be happy!...Life will soon see to it that he is
brought to reason."
She seemed to expect some comment from me, but I found myself with
nothing to say. In fact, we both sat there for a long time, staring in
silence at the fire.
"Why do you live with a man you don't love?" she suddenly asked out of
the utter stillness.
It startled me, that question. It also embarrassed me, for I could
feel my color mount as Susie's lapis-lazuli eyes rested on my face.
"What makes you think I don't love him?" I countered, reminding myself
that Susie, after all, was still a girl in her teens.
"It's not a matter of thinking," was Susie's quiet retort. "I _know_
you don't."
"Then I wish I could be equally certain," I said with a defensive
stiffening of the lines of dignity.
But Susie smiled rather wearily at my forlorn little parade of
_hauteur_. Then she looked at the fire.
"It's hell, isn't it, being a woman?" she finally observed,
unconsciously paraphrasing a much older philosopher.
"Sometimes," I admitted.
"I don't see why you stand it," was her next meditative shaft in my
direction.
"What would you do about it?" I guardedly inquired.
Susie's face took on one of its intent looks. She was only in her
teens, but life, after all, hadn't dealt over-lightly with her. She
impressed me, at the moment, as a secretly ardent young person whose
hard-glazed little body might be a crucible of incandescent though
invisible emotions.
"What would you do about it?" I repeated, wondering what gave some
persons the royal right of doing the questionable and making it seem
unquestionable.
"_Live!_" said Susie with quite unlooked-for emphasis.
"_Live_--whatever it costs!"
"Wouldn't you regard this as living?" I asked, after a moment of
thought.
"Not as you ought to be," averred Susie.
"Why not?" I parried.
Susie sighed. She began to see that it was beyond argument, I suppose.
Then she too had her period of silence.
"But what are you getting out of it?" she finally demanded. "What is
going to happen? What ever _has_ happened?"
"To whom?" I asked, resenting the unconscious cruelty of her
questioning.
"To you," was the reply of the hard-glazed young hedonist confronting
me.
"Are you flattering me with the inference that I was cut out for
better things?" I interrogated as my gaze met Susie's. It was her turn
to color up a bit. Then she sighed again, and shook her head.
"I don't suppose it's doing either of us one earthly bit of good," she
said with a listless small smile of atonement. "And I'm sorry."
So we let the skeletons stalk away from our pleasant fireside and
secrete themselves in their customary closets of silence.
But I've been thinking a good deal about that question of Susie's.
What _has_ happened to me, out here on the prairie? What has indeed
come into my life?...
I married young and put a stop to those romantic adventurings which
enrich the lives of most girls and enlighten the days of many women. I
married a man and lived with him in a prairie shack, and sewed and
baked for him, and built a new home and lost it, and began over again.
I had children, and saw one of them die, and felt my girlhood slip
away, and sold butter and eggs, and loved the man of my choice and
cleaved to him and planned for my children, until I saw the man of my
choice love another woman. And still I clung to my sparless hulk of a
home, hoping to hold close about me the children I had brought into
the world and would some day lose again to the world. And that was
all. That was everything. It is true, nothing much has ever happened
to me....
But I stop, to think this over. If these are the small things, then
what are the big things of life? What is it that other women get? I
have sung and been happy; I have known great joy and walked big with
Hope. I have loved and been loved. I have known sorrow, and I have
known birth, and I have sat face to face with death. I have, after
all, pretty well run the whole gamut, without perhaps realizing it.
For these, after all, are the big things, the elemental things, of
life. They are the basic things which leave scant room for the
momentary fripperies and the hand-made ornaments of existence....
Heigho! I seem to grow into a melancholy Jacques with the advancing
years. That's the way of life, I suppose. But I've no intention of
throwing up the sponge. If I can no longer get as much fun out of the
game as I want, I can at least watch my offspring taking their joy out
of it. God be thanked for giving us our children! We can still rest
our tired old eyes on them, just as the polisher of precious stones
used to keep an emerald in front of him, to relieve his strained
vision by gazing at its soft and soothing greenness.
I have just crept in to take a look at my precious Dinkie, fast asleep
in the old cast-iron crib that is growing so small for him he has to
lie catercornered on his mattress. He seemed so big, stretched out
there, that he frightened me with the thought he couldn't be a child
much longer. There are no babies left now in my home circle. And I
still have a shamefaced sort of hankering to hold a baby in my arms
again!
_Wednesday the Thirty-First_
Susie has promised to stay with us until after Christmas. And the
holidays, I realize, are only a few weeks away. Struthers is knitting
a sweater of flaming red and rather grimly acknowledged, when I pinned
her down, that it was for Whinstane Sandy. There was a snow-flurry
Sunday, and Gershom took Susie riding in the old cutter, scratching
grittily along the half-covered trails but apparently enjoying it. My
poor little Poppsy, who rather idolizes Gershom, is transparently
jealous of his attentions to Susie. Yet Gershom, I know, is nice to
Susie and nothing more. He is still my loyal but carefully restrained
knight. It's a shame, I suppose, to bobweasel him the way I
occasionally do. But I can't quite help it. His goody-goodiness is as
provocative to my baser nature as a red flag to an Andulasian bull.
And a woman who was once reckoned as a heart-breaker has to keep her
hand in with _something_. I've got to convince myself that the last
shot hasn't gone from the locker which Duncan Argyll McKail once
rifled. I spoiled Gershom's supper for him the other night by asking
what it was made some people have such a mysterious influence over
other people. And I caught him up short, last Sunday morning, when he
tried to argue that I was a sort of paragon in petticoats.
"Don't you run away with the idea I'm that kind of an angel," I
promptly assured him. "I'm an outlaw, from saddle to sougan, and I can
buck like a bear fightin' bees. I'm a she-devil crow-hopping around in
skirts. And I could bu'st every commandment slap-bang across my knee,
once I got started, and leave a trail of crime across the fair face of
nature that would make an old Bow-Gun vaquero's back-hair stand up.
I'm just a woman, Gershom, a little lonely and a little loony, and
there's so much backed-up bad in me that once the dam gives way
there'll be a hell-roaring old whoop-up along these dusty old
trails!"
Gershom turned white.
"But there's your little ones to think of," he quaveringly reminded
me.
"Yes, there's my little ones to think of," I echoed, wondering where
I'd heard that familiar old refrain before. My bark, after all, is
much worse than my bite. About all I can do is take things out in
talk. I'm only a faded beauty, brooding over my antique adventures as
a heart-breaker. But I know of one heart I'd still like to break--if I
had the power. No; not break; but bend up to the cracking point!
_Monday the Nineteenth_
How Time takes wing for the busy! It's only six days to Christmas and
I've still my box to get off for Olga and her children. We've sent to
Peter some really charming snap-shots of the children, which Susie
took. The general effect of one, I must acknowledge, is seriously
damaged by the presence of their Mummy.
Dinky-Dunk doubts if he'll be able to get home for the holidays. But I
sent him a box, on Saturday, made up of those things which he likes
best to eat and a set of the children's pictures, nicely mounted. I've
also had Dinkie and Poppsy write a long letter to their dad, a task
which they performed with more constraint than I had anticipated. I
had my own difficulties, along the same line, for I had taken a
photograph of poor little Pee-Wee's grave with a snow-drift across one
end of it, and had written on the bottom of the mounting-card: "_We
must remember._" But as I stood studying this, before putting it in
next to Poppsy's huge Christmas-card gay with powdered mica I felt a
foolish tear or two run down my cheek. And I realized it would never
do to cloud my Dinky-Dunk's day with memories which might not be
altogether happy. So I've kept the picture of the little white-fenced
bed with the white snow-drift across its foot....