with Gershom. Poppsy was not in the least put out when she watched me
preparing a mustard-plaster for the invalid. My daughter, I am
persuaded, has a revived faith in the operation of retributive
justice. But I hope Susie is better by the holiday. Whinnie has the
Christmas Tree hidden away in the stable, and already a number of
mysterious parcels have arrived at Casa Grande. Bud Teetzel very
gallantly sent me over a huge turkey, an eighteen-pounder, and
to-morrow I have to go into Buckhorn for my mail-order shipments. We
have decorated the house with a whole box of holly from Victoria and
I've hung a sprig of mistletoe in the living-room doorway. The
children, of course, are on tiptoe with expectation. But I can't
escape the impression that I'm merely acting a part, that I'm a
Pagliacci in petticoats. Heaven knows I clown enough; no one can
accuse me of not going through the gestures. But it seems like
fox-trotting along the deck of a sinking ship.
I stood under the mistletoe, this morning, and dared Gershom to kiss
me. He turned quite white and made for the door. But I caught him by
the coat, like Potiphar's wife, and pulled him back to the authorizing
berry-sprig and gave him a brazen big smack on the cheek-bone. He
turned a sunset pink, at that, and marched out of the room without
saying a word. But he was shaking his head as he went, at my
shamelessness, I suppose. Poor old Gershom! I wish there were more men
in the world like him. The other day Susie intimated that he was too
homosexual and that it was the polygamous wretches who really kept the
world going. But I refuse to subscribe to that sophomoric philosophy
of hers which would divide the race into fools and knaves. "It's safer
being sane than mad; it's better being good than bad!" as Robert
remarked. And I know at least one strong man who is not bad; and one
bad man who is not strong.
_Tuesday the Twenty-Seventh_
The great Day has come and gone. And I'm not sorry. There was a cloud
over my heart that kept me from getting the happiness out of it I
ought. I hoped we would hear from Peter, but for the first time in
history he overlooked us.
Dinky-Dunk, as he had warned us, could not get home for the holidays.
But he surprised me by sending a really wonderful box for the kiddies,
and even a gorgeous silver-mounted collar for Scotty. Susie is up
again, but she is still feeling a bit listless. I heard Gershom
informing her to-night that her blood travels at the rate of seven
miles per hour and that if all the energy of Niagara Falls were
utilized it could supply the world with seven million horse-power. I
do wish Gershom would get over trying to pat the world on the head,
instead of shaking hands with it! I'm afraid I'm losing my lilt. I
can't understand why I should keep feeling as blue as indigo. I am a
well of acid and a little sister to the crab-apple. I think I'll make
Susie come down so we can humanize ourselves with a little music. For
I feel like a Marie Bashkirtseff with a bilious attack....
Whinstane Sandy has just come in with Peter's box, two days late. I
felt sure that Peter would not utterly forget us. There is still a
great deal of shouting down in the kitchen, where that most miraculous
of boxes has been unpacked. As for myself, I've had a hankering to be
alone, to think things over. But my meditations don't seem to get me
anywhere.... Dinkie has just come up to show me his brand-new bridle
for Buntie. It is a magnificent bridle, as shiny and jingly as any lad
could desire. I tried to get him to put it down, so that I could draw
him over close to me and talk to him. But Dinkie is too excited for
any such demonstration. He's beginning, I'm afraid, to consider
emotion a bit unmanly. He seems to be losing his craving to be petted
and pampered. There are times, I can see, when he desires his
fence-lines to be respected.
_Sunday the Twenty-Ninth_
Nearly six weeks, I notice, have slipped by. For a month and a half,
apparently, the impulse to air my troubles went hibernating with the
bears. Yet it has been a mild winter, so far, with very little snow
and a great deal of sunshine--a great deal of sunshine which doesn't
elate me as it ought. I can't remember who it was said a happy people
has no history. But that's not true of a happy woman. It's when her
heart is full that she makes herself heard, that she sings like a lark
to the world. When she's wretched, she retires with her grief....
I haven't been altogether wretched, it's true, just as I haven't been
altogether hilarious, but it disturbs me to find that for a month and
a half I haven't written a line in this, the mottled old book of my
life. It's not that the last month or two has been empty, for no
months are really empty. They have to be filled with something. But
there are times, I suppose, when lives lie fallow, the same as fields
lie fallow, times when the days drag like harrow-teeth across the
perplexed loam of our soul and nothing comes of it at all. Not, I
repeat, that I have been momentously unhappy. It's more that a sort of
sterilizing indifferency took possession of me and made the little ups
and downs of existence as unworthy of record as the ups and downs of
the waves on the deadest shores of the Dead Sea. It's not that I'm
idle, and it's not that I'm old, and it's not that there's anything
wrong with this disappointingly healthy body of mine. But I rather
think I need a change of some kind. I even envy Susie, who has ambled
on to the Coast and is staying with the Lougheeds in Victoria, playing
golf and picking winter roses and writing back about her trips up
Vancouver Island and her approaching journey down into California.
"What do we know of the New World," she parodied in her last letter
that came to me, "who only the old East know?" Then she goes on to
say: "I'm just back from a West Coast trip on the roly-poly _Maquinna_
and if my thoughts go wobbly and my hand goes crooked it's because my
head is so prodigiously full of
SEALS
SALMON
SUNSETS
STARS
SURF
SOLANDER ISLAND
SIWASHES
SAGHALIE LAMONTIS
SKOOKUM CHUCK
SEA-LIONS
[Transcriber's note: In original, initial "S" was one very large
decorative letter, 10 letter-heights tall.]
and alas, also _Seasickness_, that I can't think straight!"
Susie's soul, apparently, has had the dry-shampoo it was in need of.
But as for me, I'm like an old horse-shoe with its calks worn off. The
Master-Blacksmith of Life should poke me deep into His fires and fling
me on His anvil and make me over!
I've been worrying about my Dinkie. It's all so trivial, in a way, and
yet I can't persuade myself it isn't also tragic. He told Susie,
before she left, that he was quite willing to go to bed a little
earlier one night, because then "he could dream about Doreen." And I
noticed, not long ago, that instead of taking just _one_ of our Newton
Pippins to school with him, he had formed the habit of taking _two_.
On making investigation, I discovered that this second apple
ultimately and invariably found its way into the hands of Mistress
Doreen O'Lone. And last week Dinkie autocratically commanded Whinstane
Sandy to hitch Mudski up in the old cutter, to go sleigh-riding with
the lady of his favor to the Teetzels' taffy-pull. Dinkie's mother was
not consulted in the matter--and that is the disturbing feature of it
all. I can't help remembering what Duncan once said about my boy
growing out of my reach. If I ever lost my Dinkie I would indeed be
alone, terribly and hopelessly alone.
_Wednesday the Eighth_
Dinkie, who has been disturbing me the last few days by going about
with an air of suppressed excitement, brought my anxiety to a head
yesterday by staring into my face and then saying:
"Mummy, I've got a secret!"
"What secret?" I asked, doing my best to appear indifferent.
But Dinkie was not to be trapped.
"It wouldn't be a secret, if I told you," he sagaciously explained.
I studied my child with what was supposed to be a reproving eye.
"You mean you can't even tell your own Mummy?" I demanded.
He shook his head, in solemn negation.
"But can you, some day?" I pursued.
He thought this over.
"Yes, some day," he acknowledged, squeezing my knee.
"How long will I have to wait?" I asked, wondering what could bring
such a rhapsodic light into his hazel-specked eye. I thought, of
course, of Doreen O'Lone. And I wished the O'Lones would follow in the
footsteps of so many other successful ranchers and trek off to
California. Then, as I sat studying Dinkie, I countermanded that wish.
For its fulfillment would bring loneliness to the heart of my
laddie--and loneliness is hell! So, instead, I struggled as best I
could to banish all thought of the matter from my mind. But it was
only half a success. I remembered that Gershom himself had been going
about as abstracted as an ant-eater and as gloomy as a crow, during
the last week; and I kept sniffing something unpropitious up-wind. I
even hoped that Dinkie would return to the subject, as children with a
secret have the habit of doing. But he has been as tight-lipped on the
matter as his reticent old dad might have been.
_Wednesday the Fifteenth_
I got an altogether unlooked-for Valentine yesterday. It was a brief
but a significant letter from Dinky-Dunk, telling me that he had
"taken over" the Goodhue house in Mount Royal and asking me if I
intended to be its mistress. He has bought the house, apparently,
completely furnished and is getting ready to move into it the first
week in March.
The whole thing has rather taken my breath away. I don't object to an
ultimatum, but I do dislike to have it come like a bolt from the blue.
I have arrived at my Rubicon, all right, and about everything that's
left of my life, I suppose, will hang on my decision. I don't know
whether to laugh or to cry, to be horrified or hilarious. At one
moment I have a tendency to emulate Marguerite doing the Jewel-Song in
_Faust_. "This isn't _me_! This isn't _me_!" I keep protesting to
myself. But Marguerite, I know, would never be so ungrammatical. And
then I begin to foresee difficulties. The mere thought of leaving Casa
Grande tears my heart. When we go away, as that wise man of Paris
once said, we die a little. This will always seem my home. I could
never forsake it utterly. I dread to forsake it for even a portion of
each year. I am a part of the prairie, now, and I could never be
entirely happy away from it. And to accept that challenge--for however
one may look at it, it remains a challenge--and go to the new home in
Calgary would surely be another concession. And I have been conceding,
conceding, for the sake of my children. How much more can I concede?
Yet, when all is said and done, I am one of a family. I am not a free
agent. I am chained to the oar for life. When we link up with the race
we have more than the little ring of our own Ego to remember. It is
not, as Dinky-Dunk once pointed out to me, a good thing to get
"Indianized." We have our community obligations and they must be
faced. The children, undoubtedly, would have advantages in the city.
And to find my family reunited would be "_le désir de paraître_." But
I can't help remembering how much there is to remember. I'm humbler
now, it's true, than I once was. I no longer say "One side, please!"
to life, while life, like old Major Elmes on Murray Hill, declines to
vary its course for one small and piping voice. Instead of getting
gangway, I find, I'm apt to get an obliterating thump on the spine.
Heaven knows, I want to do the right thing. But the issue seems so
hopelessly tangled. I have brooded over it and I have even prayed over
it. But it all seems to come to nothing. I sometimes nurse a ghostly
sort of hope that it may be taken out of my hands, that some power
outside myself may intervene to decide. For it impresses me as ominous
that I should be able to hesitate at such a time, when a woman, for
once in her life, should know her own mind, should see her own fixed
goal and fight her way to it. I've been wondering if I haven't ebbed
away into that half-warm impersonality which used to impress me as the
last stage in moral decay.
But I'm not the fishy type of woman. I know I'm not. And I'm not a
hard-head. I've always had a horror of being hard, for fear my
hardness might in some way be passed on to my Dinkie. I want to keep
my boy kindly and considerate of others, and loyal to the people who
love him. But I balk at that word "loyal." For if I expect loyalty in
my offspring I surely must have it myself. And I stood up before a
minister of God, not so many years ago, and took an oath to prove
loyal to my husband, to cleave to him in sickness and in health. I
also took an oath to honor him. But he has made that part of the
compact almost impossible. And my children, if I go back to him, will
come under his influence. And I can't help questioning what that
influence will be. I have only one life to live. And I have a human
anxiety to get out of it all that is coming to me. I even feel that it
owes me something, that there are certain arrears of happiness to be
made up.... I wish I had a woman, older and wiser than myself, to talk
things over with. I have had the impulse to write to Peter, and tell
him everything, and ask him what I ought to do. But that doesn't
impress me as being quite fair to Peter. And, oddly enough, it doesn't
impress me as being quite fair to Dinky-Dunk. So I'm going to wait a
week or two and let the cream of conviction rise on the pan of
indecision. There's a tiny parliament of angels, in the inner chambers
of our heart, who talk these things over and decide them while we
sleep.
_Friday the Seventeenth_
We had to dig in, like bears, for two whole days while the first real
snow-storm of the winter raged outside. But the skies have cleared,
the wind has gone, and the weather is crystal-clear again. Dinkie and
Poppsy, furred to the ears, are out on the drifts learning to use the
snow-shoes which Percy and Olga sent down to them for Christmas.
Dinkie has made himself a spear by lashing his broken-bladed
jack-knife to the handle of my headless dutch-hoe and has converted
himself into a stealthy Iluit stalking a polar bear in the form of
poor old Scotty, who can't quite understand why he is being driven so
relentlessly from crevice to Arctic crevice. They have also built an
igloo, and indulged in what is apparently marriage by capture, with
the reluctant bride making her repeated escape by floundering over
drifts piled even higher than the fence-tops. It makes me hanker to
get my own snow-shoes on my moccasined feet again and go trafficking
over that undulating white world of snow, where barb-wire means no
more than a line-fence in Noah's Flood. No one could remain morose,
in weather like this. You must dress for it, of course, since that
arching blue sky has sword-blades of cold sheathed in its velvety soft
azure. But it goes to your head, like wine, and you wonder what makes
you feel that life is so well worth living.
_Tuesday, the Twenty-First_
The armistice continues. And I continue to sit on my keg of powder and
sing "_O Sole Mio_" to the northern moon.
I have had Whinstane Sandy build a toboggan-slide out of the old
binder-shed, which has been pretty well blown to pieces by last
summer's wind-storms. He picked out the soundest of the two-by-fours
and made a framework which he boarded over with the best of the
weather-bleached old siding. For when you haven't the luxury of a hill
on your landscape, you can at least make an imitation one. Whinnie
even planed the board-joints in the center of the runway and
counter-sunk every nail-head--and cussed volubly when he pounded his
heavily mittened thumb with the hammer. The finished structure could
hardly be called a thing of beauty. We have only one of the
stable-ladders to mount it from the rear, and instead of toboggans we
have only Poppsy's home-made hand-sleigh and Dinkie's somewhat
dilapidated "flexible coaster." But when water had been carried out
to that smooth runway and the boards had been coated with ice, like
brazil-nuts _glacé_, and the snow along the lower course had been well
packed down, it at least gave you a run for your money.
The tip-top point of the slide couldn't have been much more than
fourteen or fifteen feet above the prairie-floor, but it seemed
perilous enough when I tried it out--much to the perturbation of
Whinstane Sandy--by lying stomach-down on Dinkie's coaster and letting
myself shoot along that well-iced incline. It was a kingly sensation,
that of speed wedded to danger, and it took me back to Davos at a
breath. Then I tried it with Dinkie, and then with Poppsy, and then
with Poppsy and Dinkie together. We had some grand old tumbles, in the
loose snow, and some unmentionable bruises, before we became
sufficiently expert to tool our sleigh-runners along their proper
trail. But it was good fun. The excitement of the thing, in fact,
rather got into my blood. In half an hour the three of us were covered
with snow, were shouting like Comanches, and were having an altogether
wild time of it. There was climbing enough to keep us warm, for all
the sub-zero weather, and I was finally allowed to escape to the house
only on the promise that I risk my neck again on the morrow.
_Friday the Twenty-Fourth_
My Dinkie's secret is no longer a secret. It divulged itself to me
to-day with the suddenness of a thunder-clap. _Peter Ketley has been
back at Alabama Ranch for nearly three weeks._
I was out with the kiddies this afternoon, having another wild time on
the toboggan-slide, dressed in an old Mackinaw of Dinky-Dunk's buckled
in close around my waist and a pair of Whinnie's heaviest woolen socks
over my moccasins and a mangy old gray-squirrel cap on by head. The
children looked like cherubs who'd been rolled in a flour-barrel, with
their eyes shining and their cheeks glowing like Richmond roses, but I
must have looked like something that had been put out to frighten the
coyotes away. At any rate, there we were, all squealing like pigs and
all powdered from tip to toe with the dry snow and all looking like
Piutes on the war-path. And who should walk calmly about the corner of
the buildings but Peter himself!
My heart stopped beating and I had to lean against the end of the
toboggan-slide until I could catch my breath.
He called out, "Hello, youngsters!" as quietly as though he had seen
us all the day before. I said "Peter!" in a strangled sort of whisper,
and wondered what made my knees wabble as I stood staring at him as
though he had been a ghost.
But Peter was no ghost. He was there before me, in the body, still
smoking his foolish little pipe, wearing the familiar old coonskin cap
and coat that looked as though the moths had made many a Roman holiday
of their generously deforested pelt. He took the pipe out of his mouth
as he stepped over to me, and pulled off his heavy old gauntlet before
he shook hands.
"Peter!" I repeated in my ridiculous small whisper.
He didn't speak. But he smiled, a bit wistfully, as he stared down at
me. And for just a moment, I think, an odd look of longing came into
his searching honest eyes which studied my face as though he were
counting every freckle and line and eyelash there. He continued to
X-ray me with that hungry stare of his until I took my hand away and
could feel the blood surging back to my face.
"It's a long time," he said as he puffed hard on his pipe, apparently
to keep it from going out. The sound of his voice sent a little
thrill through my body. I felt as rattle-headed as a rabbit, and was
glad when Dinkie and Poppsy captured him by each knee and hung on like
catamounts.
"Where did you come from?" I finally asked, trying in vain to be as
collected as Peter himself.
Then he told me. He told me as nonchalantly as though he were giving
me a piece of news of no particular interest. He had rather a
difficult book to finish up, and he concluded the quietness of Alabama
Ranch would suit him to a T. And when spring came he wanted to have a
look about for a nest of the whooping crane. It has been rather a
rarity, for some sixteen or seventeen years, this whooping crane, and
the American Museum was offering a mighty handsome prize for a
specimen. Then he was compelled to give his attention to Dinkie and
Poppsy, and tried the slide a couple of times, and announced that our
coaster was better than the chariot of Icarius. And by this time I had
recovered my wits and my composure and got some of the snow off my
Mackinaw.
"Have I changed?" I asked Peter as he turned to study my face for the
second time.
"To me," he said as he brushed the snow from his gauntlets, "you are
always adorable!"
"_Verboten!_" I retorted to that, wondering why anything so foolish
could have the power to make my pulses sing.
"Why?" he asked, as his eyes met mine.
"For the same old reason," I told him.
"Reasons," he said, "are like shoes: Time has the trick of wearing
them out."
"When that happens, we have to get new ones," I reminded him.
"Then what is the new one?" he asked, with an unexpectedly solemn look
on his face.
"My husband has just asked me to join him in Calgary," I said,
releasing my bolt.
"Are you going to?" he asked, with his face a mask.
"I think I am," I told him. For I could see, now, how Peter's return
had simplified the situation by complicating it. Already he had made
my course plainer to me. I could foresee what this new factor would
imply. I could understand what Peter's presence at Alabama Ranch would
come to mean. And I had to shut my eyes to the prospect. I was still
the same old single-track woman with a clear-cut duty laid out before
her. There were certain luxuries, for the sake of my own soul's peace,
I could never afford.
"Why are you going back to your husband?" Peter was asking, with real
perplexity on his face.
"Because he needs me," I said as I stood watching the children go
racing down the slide.
"Why?" he asked, with what impressed me as his first touch of
harshness.
"Must I explain?" I inquired with my own first movement in
self-defense, for it had suddenly occurred to me that any such
explaining would be much more difficult than I dreamed.
"Of course not," said Peter, changing color a little. "It's only that
I'm so tremendously anxious to--to understand."
"To understand what?" I questioned, both hoping and dreading that he
would go on to the bitter end.
"That _you_ understand," was his cryptic retort. And for once in his
life Peter disappointed me.
"I can't afford to," I said with an effort at lightness which seemed
to hurt him more than it ought. Then I realized, as I stood looking up
into his face, that I was doing little to merit that humble and
magnificent loyalty of Peter's. _He_ would play fair to the end. He
was too big of heart to think first of himself. It was _me_ he was
thinking of; it was _me_ he wanted to see happy. But I had my own road
to go, and no outsider could guide me.
"It's no use, Peter," I said as I put my mittened hand on his
gauntleted arm without quite knowing I was doing it. And I went on to
warn him that he must not confront me with kindness, that I was a good
deal like an Indian's dog which neither looks for kindness nor
understands it. He laughed a trifle bitterly at that and reminded me,
as he stood staring at me, of a Pribilof seal staring into an Arctic
sun. Then he said an odd thing. "I wish I could make it a bit easier
for you," he remarked as impersonally as though he were meditating
aloud.
I asked him why he said that. He evasively explained that he thought
it was because I had what the Romans called _constantia_. So I asked
him to explain _constantia_. And he said, with a shrug, that we might
regard it as firm consideration of a question before acting on it. I
explained, at that, that it wasn't a matter of choice, but of
character. He was willing to acknowledge that I was right. But before
that altogether unsatisfactory little debate was over Peter made me
promise him one thing. He has made me promise that before I leave we
have a tramp over the prairie together. And we have agreed that Sunday
would be as good a day as any.
_Saturday the Twenty-Fifth_
I have sent word to Duncan to expect me in Calgary as soon as I can
get things ready. My decision is made. And it is final. Two ghostly
hands have reached out and turned me toward my husband. One is the
Past. The other is the Proprieties. If life out here were a little
more like the diamond-dyed Westerns, Peter Ketley and Duncan McKail
would fight with hammerless Colts, the victor would throw me over the
horn of his saddle, and vanish in a cloud of dust, while Struthers was
turning Casa Grande into a faro-hall and my two kiddies were busy
holding up the Elk Crossing stage-coach.