and hog-ties us and leaves us afraid of our own wilted impulses. I
have a terror of failure. And it's plain enough I have only one
mission on God's green footstool. I'm a home-maker, and nothing more.
I'm a home-maker confronted by the last chance to make good at my one
and only calling. And whatever it costs, I'm going to make my husband
recognize me as a patient and long-suffering Penelope....
But enough of the rue! To-morrow I'm going snow-shoeing with Peter.
I'm praying that the weather will be propitious. I want one of our
sparkling-burgundy days with the sun shining bright and a nip in the
air like a stiletto buried in rose leaves. For it may be the last time
in all my life I shall walk on the prairie with my friend, Peter
Ketley. The page is going to be turned over, the candle snuffed out,
and the singing birds of my freedom silenced. I have met my Rubicon,
and it must be crossed. But last night, for the first time in a month,
I plastered enough cold cream on my nose to make me look like a
buttered muffin, and rubbed enough almond-oil meal on my arms to make
them look like a miller's. And I've been asking myself if I'm the
sedate old lady life has been trying to make me. There are certain
Pacific Islands, Gershom tells me, where the climate is so stable that
the matter of weather is never even mentioned, where the people who
bathe in that eternal calm are never conscious of the conditions
surrounding them. That's the penalty, I suppose, that humanity pays
for constancy. There are no lapses to record, no deviations to be
accounted for, no tempests to send us tingling into the shelters of
wonder. And I can't yet be quite sure whether this rebellious old
heart of mine wants to be a Pacific Islander or not.
_Monday the Twenty-Seventh_
Peter and I have had our tramp in the snow. It wasn't a sunny day, as
I had hoped. It was one of those intensely cold northern days without
wind or sun, one of those misted days which Balzac somewhere describes
as a beautiful woman born blind. It was fifty-three below zero when we
left the house, with the smoke going up in the gray air as straight
and undisturbed as a pine-tree and the drifts crunching like dry
charcoal under our snow-shoes. We were woolened and mittened and
capped and furred up to the eyes, however, and I was warmer than I've
been many a time on Boston Common in March, even though we did look
like a couple of deep-sea divers and steamed like fire-engines when we
breathed.
We tramped until we were tired, swung back to Casa Grande, and Peter
came in for a cup of tea and then trudged off to Alabama Ranch again.
And that was the lee and the long of it, as the Irish say. What did we
talk about? Heaven knows what we didn't talk about! Peter told me
about a rancher named Bidwell, north of The Crossing, being found
frozen to death in a snow-drift, frozen stiff, with the horse still
standing and the rider still sitting upright in the saddle. He said
there was a lot of rot talked about the great clean outdoors. The
sentimentalists found that they naturally felt a bit niftier in fresh
air, but the great outdoors, according to Peter, is an arena of
endless murder and rapine and warfare, and the cleanest acre of forest
or prairie under the sun somewhere has its stains of blood and its
record of cruelty. We talked about Susie and the negative phrasing of
the ten moral laws and the Horned Dinosaur from Sand Hill Creek (whose
bones Peter reckoned to be at least three million years old) and the
marriage customs of the Innuits. And we talked about Matzenauer and
Kreisler and the best cure for chilblains and about Gershom and Poppsy
and Dinkie--but most of all about Dinkie.
Peter asked me if I'd seen Dinkie's school essays on _The Flag_ and
_The Capture of Quebec_, and rather surprised me by handing over
crumpled copies of the same, Dinkie having proudly despatched these
masterpieces all the way to Philadelphia for his "Uncle Peter's"
approval. It hurt me, for just one foolish fraction of a second, to
think my boy had confidences with an outsider which he could not have
with his own mother. And then I remembered that Peter wasn't an
outsider. I realized how much he had brought into my laddie's life,
how much, in a different way, he had brought into my own. I even tried
to tell him about this. But he stopped me short by saying something in
Latin which he later explained meant "by taking the middle course we
shall not go amiss." So I came back to Casa Grande, not exactly with a
feeling of frustration, but with a feeling of possibilities withheld
and issues deferred. It was a companionable enough tramp, I suppose.
But I'm afraid I was a disappointment to Peter. His gaiety impressed
me as a bit forced. I am slightly mystified by his refusal, while
taking serious things seriously, to take anything tragically. Even at
tea, with all its air of the valedictory hanging over us, he was nice
and gay, like the Christmas beeves the city butchers stick paper
rosettes into, or the circus-band playing like mad while the tumbler
who has had a fall is being carried out to the dressing-tent. Peter
even offhandedly inquired, as he was going, if he might have Scotty to
take care of, provided it was not expedient to take Dinkie's dog
along to Calgary with us.... I'm not quite certain--I may be wrong,
but there are moments, odd earthquakey moments, when I have a
suspicion that Peter will be keeping more than Scotty after we've
trekked off to Calgary!
_Saturday the Fourth_
This tearing up of roots is a much sorrier business than I had
imagined. And more difficult. I find it hard to know what to take and
what to leave behind. And there is so much to be thought of, so much
to be arranged for, so much to be done. I have had to write Duncan and
tell him I'll be a few days later than I intended. My biggest problem
has been with Whinstane Sandy and Struthers. I called them in and had
a talk with them and told them I wanted them to keep Casa Grande going
the same as ever. Then I made myself into the god from the machine by
calmly announcing the only way things could be arranged would be for
the two of them to get married.
Struthers, at this suggestion, promptly became as coy as a
partridge-hen. Whinnie, of course, remained Scottish and canny. He
became more shrewdly magnanimous, however, after we'd had a bit of
talk by ourselves. "Weel, I'll tak' the woman, rather than see her
frettin' hersel' to death!" he finally conceded, knowing only too
well he'd nest warm and live well for the rest of his days. He'd been
hoping, he confessed to me, that some day he'd get back to that claim
of his up in the Klondike. But he wasn't so young as he once was. And
perhaps Dinkie, when he was grown to a man, could go up and look after
his rights. 'Twould be a grand journey, he averred with a sigh, for a
high-spirited lad turned twenty.
"I'll be stayin' with Pee-Wee and the old place here," concluded
Whinstane Sandy, giving me his rough old hand as a pledge. And with
tears in my eyes I lifted that faithful old hand up to my lips and
kissed it. Whinnie, I knew, would die for me. But he would pass away
before he'd be willing to put his loyalty and his courage and his
kind-heartedness into pretty speeches. Struthers, on the other hand,
has become too flighty to be of much use to me in my packing. She has
plunged headlong into a riot of baking, has sent for a fresh supply of
sage tea, and is secretly perusing a dog-eared volume which I have
reason to know is _The Marriage Guide_.
Gershom, all things considered, is the most dolorous member of our
home circle. He says little, but inspects me with the wounded eyes of
a neglected spaniel. He will stay on at Casa Grande until the Easter
holidays, and then migrate to the Teetzels'. As for Dinkie and Poppsy,
they are too young to understand. The thought of change excites them,
but they have no idea of what they are leaving behind.
Last night, when I was dog-tired after my long day's work, I
remembered about Dinkie's school-essays and took them out to read. And
having done so, I realized there was something sacred about them. They
gave me a glimpse of a groping young soul reaching up toward the
light.
"We have a Flag," I read, "to thrill our bones and be prod of and no
man boy woman or girl" (and the not altogether artless _diminuendo_
did not escape me!) "should never let it drag in the dust. It flotes
at the bow of our ships and waves from the top of most post offices
etc. And now we have a flag and a flag staf in front of our school and
on holdays and when every grate man dies we put said flag up at haf
mast.... It is the flag of the rich and the poor, the flag of our
country which all of whose citizens have a right to fly, the hig"
(obviously meant for _high_) "and the low, the rich and the poor. And
we must not only keep our flag but blazen it still further with deeds
nobely done. If ever you have to shed your blood for your country
remeber its for the nobelest flag that flies the same being an emblen
of our native land to which it represens and stands in high esteem by
the whole people of a country." ... God bless his patriotic little
bones! My bairn knew what he was trying to get at, but it's plain he
didn't quite know how to get there.
But the drama of the Capture of Quebec plainly put him on easier
ground. For here was a story worth the telling. And what could be more
glorious than the death of Wolfe as I see it through my little
Dinkie's eyes?
For I read: "The french said Wolfe" (_can_ has first been written and
then scratched out and _would_ substituted) "never get up that rivver
but Wolfe fooled them with a trick by running the french flag up on
his shipps so the french pilots without fear padled out and come abord
when Wolfe took them prissoners and made them pilot the english ships
safe to the iland of Orlens. He wanted to capsture the city of Quebec
without distroiting it. But the clifs were to high and the brave
Montcalm dified Wolfe who lost 400 men and got word Amherst could not
come and so himself took sick and went to bed. But a desserter from
the french gave Wolfe the pass word and when his ships crept further
up the rivver in the dark a french senntry called out qui vive and one
of Wolfe's men who spoke french well ansered la france and the senntry
said to himself they was french ships and let them go on. Next day
Wolfe was better and saw a goat clime up the clifs near the plains of
Abraham and said where a goat could go he could go to. So he forgot
being sick and desided to clime up Wolfe's cove which was not then
called that until later. It was a dark night and they went in row
boats with all the oars mufled. It was a formadible sight that would
have made even bolder men shrink with fear. But it was the brave
Higlanders who lead with their muskits straped to their sholdiers
climing up the steep rock by grabbing at roots of trees and shrubbs
and not a word was wispered but the french senntrys saw the tree
moving and asked qui vive again. The same sholdier who once studdied
hard and lernt french said la france as he had done before and they
got safe to the top and faced the city. At brake of day they stood
face to face, french and english. But Montcalm marched out to cut them
off there and Wolfe lined his men up in a line and said hold your fire
until they are within forty paces away from us. The french caused
many causilties but the english never wavered. Montcalm still on horse
back reseaved a mortal wound, he would of fell off if two of his tall
granadeers hadn't held him up and Wolfe too was shot on the wirst but
went right on. Again he was shot this time more fataly and as they
were laying him down one of the men exclaimed See how they run. Who
run murmurred the dieing Wolfe. The enemy sir replied the man. Then I
die happy said Generral Wolfe and with a great sigh rolled over on his
side and died.... And when the doctor told Montcalm he could only live
a few hours he said God be prased I shall not live to see Quebec fall.
Brave words like those should not be forgoten and what Wolfe said was
just as brave. No more fiting words could be said by anybody than
those he said in the boats with the mufled oars that night that the
paths of glory leed but to the grave." ...
I have folded up the carefully written pages, reverently, remembering
my promise to return them to Peter. But for a while at least I shall
keep them with me. They have set me thinking, reminding me how time
flies. Here is my little boy, grown into an historian, sagely
philosophizing over the tragedies of life. My wee laddie, expressing
himself through the recorded word.... It seems such a short time ago
that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of
language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly
after his birth and kept up for so long, the naïve journal of a young
mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It
became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped
past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a
bit hurried and often incoherent. But I have dutifully noted how my
Dinkie first said "Ah goom" for "All gone," just as I have fondly
remarked his persistent use of the reiterative intensive, with careful
citations of his "da-da" and his "choo-choo car," and a "bow-wow" as
applied to any living animal, and "wa-wa" for water, and "me-me" for
milk, and "din-din" for dinner, and going "bye-bye" for going to sleep
on his little "tum-tum." I even solemnly ask, forgetting my Max
Müller, what lies at the root of this strange reduplicative process.
Then I come to where I have set down for future generations the
momentous fact that my Dinkie first said "let's playtend" for "let's
pretend," and spoke of "nasturtiums" as "excursions," and announced
that he could bark loud enough to make Baby Poppsy's eyes "bug out"
instead of "bulge out." And I come again to where I have
affectionately registered the fact that my son says "set-sun" for
"sunset" and speaks of his "rumpers" instead of his "rompers," and
coins the very appropriate word "downer" to go with its sister word of
"upper" and describes his Mummy as "_wearing_ Daddy's coffee-cup" when
he really meant _using_ Daddy's coffee-cup.
It all seems very fond and foolish now, just as at one time it all
seemed very big and wonderful. And I remember schooling my Poppsy to
say "Daddy's all sweet" and how her little tongue, stumbling over the
sibilant, converted it into the non-complimentary "Daddy's all feet,"
which my Dinky-Dunk so scowlingly resented. And I have even compiled a
list of Dinkie's earliest "howlers," from the time he was first
interested in Adam and Eve and asked to be told about "The Garden of
Sweden" until he later explained one of Poppsy's crying-spells by
announcing she had dug a hole out by the corral and wanted to bring it
into the house. I used to smile a bit skeptically over these
tongue-twists of children, but now I know they are re-born with each
new generation, the same old turns of thought and the same old kinks
of utterance. I don't know why, but there is even a touch of sadness
about the old jokes now. The patina of time gathers upon them and
mellows them and makes me realize they belong to the past--the past
with its pain and its joy, that can never come back to mortal mothers
again.
_Monday the Thirtieth_
"We die a little, when we go away." How true it is! By to-morrow we
will be gone. My heart is heavy as lead. I go about, doing things for
the last time, looking at things for the last time, and pretending to
be as matter-of-fact as a tripper breaking camp. But there's a
laryngitis lump in my throat and there are times when I'm glad I'm
almost too busy to think.
I was hoping that the weather would be bad, as it ought to at this
time of the year, so that I might leave my prairie with some lessened
pang of regret. But the last two days have been miraculously mild. A
Chinook has been blowing, the sky has been a palpitating soft dome of
azure, and a winey smell of spring has crept over the earth....
To-night, knowing it was the last night, I crept out to say good-by to
my little Pee-Wee asleep in his lonely little bed. It was a perfect
night. The Lights were playing low in the north, weaving together in a
tangle of green and ruby and amethyst. The prairie was very still.
The moonlight lay on everything, thick and golden and soft with
mystery. I knelt beside Pee-Wee's grave, not in bitterness, but bathed
in peace. I knelt there and prayed.
It frightened me a little, when I looked up, to see Peter standing
beside the little white fence. I thought, at first, that he was a
ghost, he stood so still and he seemed so tall in the moonlight.
"I'll watch your boy," he said very quietly, "until you come back."
He made me think of the Old Priest in _The Sorrowful Inheritance_. He
seemed so calmly benignant, so dependable, so safe in his simple
other-worldliness.
"Oh, Peter!" was all I could say as I moved toward him in the
moonlight. He nodded, as much to himself as to me, as he took my hand
in his. I felt a great ache, which was not really an ache, and a new
kind of longing which never before, in all my life, I had nursed or
known. I must have moved closer to Peter, though I could feel his hand
pull itself away from mine. It made me feel terribly alone in the
world.
"Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?" I cried out, with my hand on
his shoulder.
Peter shook his head from side to side, very slowly.
"_Verboten!_" he said as he put his hand over the hand which I had put
on his shoulder.
"But I may never come back. Peter!" I whispered, feeling the tears go
slowly down my wet cheek.
Peter took my unsteady fingers and placed them on the white pickets of
the little rectangular fence.
"You'll come back," he said very quietly. And when I looked up he had
turned away.
I could see him walking off in the yellow moonlight with his shoulders
back and his head up. He walked slowly, with an odd wading movement,
like a man walking through water. I was tempted, for a moment, to call
after him. But some power that was not of me or any part of me
prompted me to silence. I stood watching him until he seemed a moving
shadow along the level floor of the world flooded with
primrose-yellow, until he became a shifting stroke of umber on a
background of misty gold. I stood looking after him as he passed away,
out of my sight, and far, far off to the north a coyote howled and
over Casa Grande I could see a thin pennon of chimney-smoke going up
toward Arcturus.... Good-by, Peter, and God bless you....
Unlimited, indeed, is the power of Eros. For when I went to slip
quietly into the house, I found Whinnie and Struthers seated together
beside the kitchen range. And Struthers was reading _Tam O'Shanter_
aloud to her laird.
"Read slow, noo, lassie, an' tak' it a' in," said the placidly
triumphant voice of Whinstane Sandy, "for it'll be lang before ye ken
its like!"
_Thursday the Seventeenth_
The migration has been effected ... I am alone in my room, I have two
and three-quarters trunks unpacked, and I feel like a President's wife
the night after Inauguration. It is well past midnight, but I am too
tired and too unsettled to sleep. Things turn out so differently to
what one expects! And all change, to the home-staying heart, can be so
abysmally upsetting!...
We were a somewhat disheveled and intimidated flock when we emerged
from our train and found Duncan awaiting us with an amazingly big
touring-car which, as he explained with a short laugh at my gape of
wonder, the Barcona Mines would pay for in a week.
"It's no piker you're pulling with now," he exclaimed as we climbed
stiff and awkward into that deep-upholstered grandeur on wheels. He
said that the children had grown but would have to be togged out with
some new duds--little knowing how I had stayed up until long past
midnight mending and pressing and doing my best to make my bucolic
offspring presentable. And he told me it was _some_ city I had come
to, as I'd very soon see for myself. And it was _some_ shack he'd
corralled for his family, he added with a chuckle of pride.
I tried to be interested in the skyscrapers he showed me along Eighth
Avenue, and the Palliser, and the concreted subway, and the Rockies,
in the distance, with the wine-glow on their snow-clad peaks. And
while I did my best to shake off the Maud-Muller feeling which was
creeping over me, by studying the tranquillizingly remote
mountain-tops, Duncan confided to me that he had first said: "Fifty
thousand or bu'st!" But two months ago he had amended that to "A
hundred thousand or bu'st!" and now he had his reasons for saying,
with his jaw set: "Just a cool quarter of a million, before I quit
this game!"
It was for us, I told myself as I looked down at my kiddies, that the
Dour Man behind the big mahogany wheel was fighting. This, I felt,
should bring me happiness, and a new sense of security. And it was
only because my stomach was empty, I tried to assure myself, that my
poor old prairie heart felt that way. I should have been happy, for I
was going to a brand-new home--and it was one of those foot-hill late
afternoons that make you think of the same old razor-blade muffled up
in the same old panne-velvet, an evening of softness shot through with
a steely sharpness. There was a Chinook arch of Irish point-lace still
in the sky, very much like the one I had left behind me, and the sky
itself was a canopy of robin-egg blue _crêpe de chine_ hemmed with
salmon pink.
But as we whirled up out of the city into the higher ground of some
boulevarded and terraced residential district the evening air seemed
colder and the solemn old Rockies toward the west took on an air of
lonesomeness. It made the thought of home and open fires and quiet
rooms very welcome. The lights came out along the asphalted streets,
spangling the slopes of that sedate new suburb with rectangular lines
of brilliants. Duncan, in answer to the questions of the children,
explained that he was taking the longer way round, so as to give us
the best view of the house as we drove in.
"Here we are!" he exulted as we slowed down and turned into a crescent
lined with baby poplar and Manitoba maple.
I leaned out and saw a big new house of tapestry brick, looking oddly
palatial on its imposing slope of rising ground. My husband stopped,
in fact, midway in a foolishly pillared gate that bisected a long
array of cobble-stone walls, so that we might get a look at the
gardens. They seemed very new gardens, but much of their newness was
lost in that mercifully subduing light in which I saw trim-painted
trellises and sepulchral white flower-urns and pergolas not yet
softened with creepers. There was also a large iron fountain, painted
white, which Duncan apparently liked very much, from the way he looked
at it. From two of the chimneys I could see smoke going up in the
quiet air. In the windows I could see lights, rose-shaded and warm,
and beyond the shrubbery somewhere back in the garden a workman was
driving nails. His hammer fell and echoed like a series of
rifle-shots. From the garage chimney, too, came smoke, and it was
plain from the sounds that somebody inside was busy tuning up a
car-engine.
I sat staring at the grounds, at the cobble-stone walls, at the
tapestry-brick house with the high-shouldered French cornices. It
began to creep over me how it meant service, how it meant protection,
how it meant guarded lives for me and mine, how it stood an amazingly
complicated piece of machinery which took much thought to organize and
much money to maintain. And the mainspring behind it all, I
remembered, was the man sitting at the mahogany wheel so close to me.
Light and warmth and comfort and safety--they were all to come from
the conceiting and the struggling of my Dour Man, fighting for an
empty-headed family who were scarcely worth it. He was, after all, the
stoker down in the hole, and without him everything would stop. So
when I saw that he was studying my face with that intent sidelong
glance of his, I reached over and put my hand on his knee, as I had
done so often, in the old days.
He looked down, at that, with what was almost an appearance of
embarrassment.
"I want to play my part," I said with all the earnestness of my
earnest old heart, as he let in his clutch and we started up the
winding drive.
"It ought to be a considerable part," he said as we drew up under a
bone-white porte-cochère where a small-bodied Jap stood respectfully
impassive and waiting to open the door for us.