so much like a Lady Jane Grey approaching the headsman's _makura_.
"Come on, kids!" Duncan called out with a parade of joviality, like a
cheer-leader who realized that things weren't going just right. For
Dinkie, I could see, was shrinking back in the padded seat. His
underlip was trembling a trifle as he sat staring at the strange new
house. But Poppsy, true little woman that she was, smiled
appreciatively about at the material grandeurs which confronted her.
If she'd had a tail, I'm sure, she'd have been wagging it. And this so
tickled her dad that he lifted her out of the car and carried her
bodily and triumphantly up the steps.
I waited for Dinkie, whose eye met mine. I did my best to show my
teeth, that he might understand how everything was eventually to be
for the best. But his face was still clouded as we climbed the steps
and passed under the yoke.
The little Jap, whose name, I have since found out, is Tokudo, bowed a
jack-knife bow and said "_Irashai_" as I passed him. And "_Irashai_" I
have also discovered, is perfectly good Japanese for "Welcome."
We had dinner at seven. It was a well-ordered meal, but it went off
rather dismally. I was depressed, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom,
and the children were tired, and Duncan, I'm afraid, was a bit
disappointed in us all. Tokudo had brought cocktails for us, and
Duncan, seeing I wasn't drinking mine, stowed both away in his
honorable stomach. He ate heartily, I noticed, and gave scant
appearance of a man pining away with a broken heart. After dinner he
sat back and bit off the end of a cigar.
"This is my idea of living," he proclaimed as he sent a blue cloud up
toward the rather awful dome-light above the big table. "There's stir
and movement here, all day long. Something more than sunsets to look
at! You'll see--something to fill up your day! Why, night seems to
come before I even know it. And before I'm out of bed I'm brooding
over what's ahead of me for that particular date and day--Say, that
girl of ours is falling asleep in her chair there!"
So I escaped and put the children to bed. And while thus engaged I
discovered that some of Duncan's new friends were dropping in on him.
I wanted to stay up-stairs, for my head was aching a lot and my heart
just a little, but Duncan called to me from the bottom of the stairs.
So down I went, like a dutiful wife, to the room full of smoke and
talk, where two big men and one very thin woman in a baby-bear motor
coat were drinking Scotch highballs with my lord and master. They were
genial and jolly enough, but I couldn't understand their allusions and
I couldn't see the points to their jokes. And they seemed to stay an
interminable length of time. I was secretly uncomfortable, until they
went, but I became still more uncomfortable after they had gone.
For as we sat there together, in that oppressive big room, I made
rather an awful discovery. I found that my husband and I had scarcely
anything we could talk about together. So I sat there, like an
alligator in a bayou, wondering why his rather flushed face should be
turned toward me every now and then.
My heart beat a little faster as I saw him take out his watch and wind
it up.
"Let's go to bed," he said as he pushed it back in his waistcoat
pocket. My heart stopped beating altogether, for a moment or two. I
felt like a slave-girl in a sheik's tent, like a desert-woman just
sold into bondage.
It was the smoky air and the highballs, I suppose, which left his eyes
a little bloodshot as he turned slowly about and studied my face. Then
he repeated what he had said before.
"_I can't!_" I told him, with a foolish surge of terror.
He sat quite a long time without speaking. I could see the corners of
the Holbein-Astronomer mouth go down.
"As you say," he finally remarked, with a grim sort of quietness. But
every bit of color had gone from his face. I was glad when Tokudo came
in to take away the glasses.
Duncan stood up, after the servant had gone again, and bowed to me
very solemnly.
"_Oyasumi nasi_," he said with a stabilizing ironic smile.
"What does that mean?" I asked, doing my best to smile back at him.
"That means 'sleep well,'" explained my husband. "But Tokudo would
probably translate it into 'Condescend to enjoy honorable
tranquillity.'"
Instead of enjoying honorable tranquillity, however, I am sitting up
into the wee sma' hours of the night, patrolling the gloomy ramparts
of my soul's unrest.
_Wednesday the Twenty-Third_
This change to the city means a new life to my children. But I can
also see it means new dangers and new influences. The simplicity of
ranch life has vanished. And Dinkie and Poppsy are already getting
acquainted with their neighbors. A Ford truck came within an inch of
running over Poppsy this morning. She has announced a curiosity to
investigate ice-cream sodas, and Dinkie has proclaimed his intention
of going to the movies Saturday afternoon with Benny McArthur, the
banker's son in the next block. On Monday I'm to take my children to
school. "One of the finest school-buildings in all the West," Duncan
has proudly explained. I can't help thinking of Gershom and his little
cubby-hole of a wooden building where he is even now so solemnly and
yet so kind-heartedly teaching the three R's to a gathering of little
prairie outlaws.
I shall have time on my hands, I see, for Hilton and his wife, our
English gardener-chauffeur and our portly maid-of-all-work, pretty
well cover what the wonderful Tokudo overlooks. And Tokudo _is_ a
wonder. That cat-footed little Jap does the ordering and cooking and
serving; he answers the door and the telephone; he attends to the rugs
and the hardwood floors; he rules over the butler's pantry and
polishes the silver and inspects the linen, and even keeps the keys to
Duncan's carefully guarded wine-cellar, which the mistress of the
house herself has not yet dared to invade.
My husband seems to be very busy with his coal-mines and his other
interests. He said last night that his idea of happiness is to be so
immersed in his work as to be unconscious of time and undisturbed by
its passing. And he _has_ been happy, in that way. But Time, that
patient remodeler of all things mortal, can still work while we sleep.
And something has been happening, without Duncan quite knowing it. He
has changed. He is older, for one thing. I don't mean that my husband
is an old man. But I can see a number of early-autumnal alterations in
him. He's a trifle heavier and stiffer. He's lost a bit of his
springiness. And he seems to know it, in his secret heart of hearts,
for he tries to make up for that loss with a sort of coerced
blitheness which doesn't always carry. He affects a sort of creaking
jauntiness which sometimes falls short of its aim. When he can't
clear the hurdle, I notice, he has the habit of whipping up his tired
spirits with a cocktail or a highball or a silver-fizz. But he is
preoccupied, at times. And at other times he is disturbingly
short-tempered. He announced this morning, almost gruffly, that we'd
had about enough of this "Dinkie and Poppsy business," and the
children might as well be called by their real names. So I shall make
another effort to get back to "Elmer" and "Pauline Augusta." But I
feel, in my bones, that those pompous appellatives will not be always
remembered. It has just occurred to me that my old habit of calling my
husband "Dinky-Dunk" has slipped away from me. Endearing diminutives,
I suppose, are not elicited by polar bears.
_Thursday the Thirty-First_
I don't quite know what's the matter with me. I'm like a cat in a
strange garret. I don't seem to be fitting in. I sat at the piano last
night playing "What's this dull town to me, Robin Adair?" And Duncan,
with the fit and natural spirit of the home-booster, actively resented
that oblique disparagement of his new business-center. He believes
implicitly in Calgary and its future.
As for myself, I am rigidly suspending all judgments. I'm at least
trying to play my part, even though my spirit isn't in it. There are
times when I'm tempted to feel that a foot-hill city of this size is
neither fish nor fowl. It impresses me as a frontier cow-town grown
out of its knickers and still ungainly in its first long trousers. But
I can't help being struck by people's incorruptible pride in their own
community. It's a sort of religious faith, a fixed belief in the
future, a stubborn optimism that is surely something more than
self-interest. It's the Dutch courage that makes deprivation and long
waiting endurable.
It's the women, and the women alone, who seem left out of the
procession. They impress me as having no big interests of their own,
so they are compelled to _playtend_ with make-believe interests. They
race like mad in the social squirrel-cage, or drug themselves with
bridge and golf and the country club, or take to culture with a
capital C and read papers culled from the Encyclopedias; or spend
their husbands' money on year-old Paris gowns and make love to other
women's mates. The altitude, I imagine, has quite a little to do with
the febrile pace of things here. Or perhaps it's merely because I'm an
old frump from a back-township ranch!
But I have no intention of trying to keep up with them, for I have a
constitutional liking for quietness in my old age. And I can't engross
myself in their social aspirations, for I've seen a bit too much of
the world to be greatly taken with the internecine jealousies of a
twenty-year-old foot-hill town. My "day" in this aristocratic section
is Thursday, and Tokudo this afternoon admitted callers from seven
closed cars, two landaulets, three Detroit electrics and one hired
taxi. I know, because I counted 'em. The children and I posed like a
Raeburn group and did our best to be respectable, for Duncan's sake.
But he seems to have taken up with some queer people here, people who
drop in at any time of the evening and smoke and drink and solemnly
discuss how a shandygaff should be mixed and tell stories I wouldn't
care to have the children hear.
There's one couple Duncan asked me to be especially nice to, a Mr. and
Mrs. Murchison. The latter, I find, is usually addressed as "Slinkie"
by her friends, and the former is known as "Cattalo Charley" because
he once formed a joint-stock company which was to make a fortune
interbreeding buffalo and range-cattle, the product of that happy
union being known, I believe, as "cattalo." Duncan calls him a
"promoter," but my earlier impression of him as a born gambler has
been confirmed by the report that he's interested in a lignite
briquetting company, that he's fathering a scheme, not only to raise
stock-yard reindeer in the sub-Arctics but also to grow karakule sheep
in the valleylands of the Coast, that he once sold mummy wheat at
forty dollars a bushel, and that in the old boom days he promoted no
less than three oil companies. And the time will come, Duncan avers,
when that man will be a millionaire.
As for "Slinkie," his wife, I can't be quite sure whether I like her
or not. I at least admire her audacity and her steel-trap quickness of
mind. She has a dead white skin, green eyes, and most wonderful hair,
hair the color of a well-polished copper samovar. She is an extremely
thin woman who affects sheathe skirts and rather reminds me of a
boa-constrictor. She always reeks of _Apres londre_ and uses a
lip-stick as freely before the world as an orchestra conductor uses a
baton or a street-sweeper a broom. She is nervous and sharp-tongued
and fearless and I thought, at first, that she was making a dead set
at my Duncan. But I can now see how she confronts all men with that
same dangerous note of intimacy. Her real name is Lois. She talks
about her convent days in Belgium, sings _risque_ songs in very bad
French, and smokes and drinks a great deal more than is good for her.
In Vancouver, when informed that she was waiting for a street-car on a
non-stop corner, she sat down between the tracks, with her back to the
approaching car. The motorman, of course, had to come to a
stop--whereupon she arose with dignity and stepped aboard. Duncan has
told me this story twice, and tends to consider Lois a really
wonderful character. I am a little afraid of her. She asked me the
other day how I liked Calgary. I responded, according to Hoyle, that
I liked the clear air and the clean streets and the Rockies looking so
companionably down over one's shoulder. Lois hooted as she tapped a
cigarette end against her hennaed thumb-nail.
"Just wait until the sand-storms, my dear!" she said as she struck a
match on her slipper-heel.
_Saturday the Second_
My old friend Gershom has very slyly written a _rondeau_ to me. I have
just found it enclosed in my _Golden Treasury_, which he handed back
to me that last night at Casa Grande. It's the first actual _rondeau_
I ever had indited to my humble self, and while I'm a bit set up about
it, I can't quite detach from Gershom's lines a vaguely obituarial
atmosphere which tends to depress me.
I can see that it may not be the best _rondeau_ in the world, but I'm
going to keep it until my bones are dust, for good old Gershom's sake.
And some day, when he marries the nice girl he deserves to marry, and
has a kiddy or two of his own, I'll shame his gray hairs by parading
it before his offspring! I have just been re-reading the lines, in
Gershom's copperplate script. They are as follows:
_To C. McK._
_On Returning Her Copy of the Golden Treasury_
This golden book, dear friend, wherein each line
Holds close a charm for knowing eyes to meet,
Holds doubly mystical and doubly sweet
An inner charm no language may define:
For o'er each page a woman's soul divine
Bent low a space for kindred souls to greet,
And here her eyes were lit with gladness fleet
Because of songs that graced with rare design
This book of thine!
And now I give back into Beauty's hand
Her borrowed songs, but I shall hold always
Secret and safe from every care's demand,
A flame of light to fill my emptier days,
That quieter fellowship, which made a shrine
This book of thine!
G. B.
_Tuesday the Fifth_
The weather is balmier, and just a tinge of green is creeping into the
tan of the foot-hill slopes. Spring is coming again.
I went shopping in the Hudson Bay Store yesterday and found it much
more metropolitan than I had expected. And I find I am three whole
laps behind in that steeplechase known as Style. But I got a raft of
things for Pauline Augusta, and a Boy Scout outfit for my laddie.
One of the few women I like in Calgary is Dinkie's--I mean
Elmer's--new school-teacher. Her name is Lossie Brown and she is an
earnest-eyed girl who's saving up to go to Europe some day and study
art. She's a trifle shy, and unmistakably moody, but her mind is as
bright as a new pin. And some bright morning, when the rose of
womanhood has really opened, she's going to wake up a howling beauty.
I love her, too, for the interest she has taken in my boy, whom she
reports as getting along much better than she had expected. So I have
asked her to write a little note to Gershom Binks, advising him of
his ex-pupil's advance. For Lossie is a girl I'd like Gershom to know.
And she has done this for me. I ask her over to the house as often as
I can and yesterday I had Dinkie slip a little platinum-banded
fountain-pen, with a card, into the pocket of her rather threadbare
ulster. Duncan, however, is not in the least interested in Lossie. He
despises what he calls insignificant people.
On my way home from shopping I had Hilton drive me about some of the
less-known parts of the city. And I have been compelled to recast some
of my earlier impressions of Calgary. It is wonderful, in many ways,
and some day, I can see, it will be beautiful, just as Lossie Brown
will some day be beautiful.
In the first place, it is so happily situated, lying as it does
half-way between the mountains and the plain. And the blue Bow comes
dancing so joyously down from the Rockies and the older city sleeps so
happily in the sunny crook of its valley-arm, while the newer suburbs
seem to boil up and run over the surrounding hills like champagne
bubbling over the rim of a glass. There are raw edges, of course, but
time will eventually attend to these. Now and then, between the
motor-cars, you will see a creaking Red River cart. Next to an
office-building of gray sandstone you're likely to spot what looks
like a squatter's wickyup of rusty galvanized iron. Yesterday, on our
main street where the electric-cars were clanging and the limousines
were throwing their exhaust incense to the gods of the future, I
caught sight of a lonely and motionless figure, isolated in the midst
of a newer world. It was the figure of a Cree squaw, blanketed and
many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and
the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized,
as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that
stolid old lady in the blanket.
I'm even beginning to find that one can get tired of optimism,
especially when it is being so plainly converted from a psychic
abstraction into a municipal asset. There's a sort of communal
Christian Science in this place which ordains that thought shall not
dwell on such transient evils as drought or black rust or early frost
or hail-storms or money stringencies. And there's a sort of youthful
greediness in people's longing to live all there is of life to live
and to know all there is of life to know. For there is a limit to the
sensations we can digest, just as there is a limit to the meat we can
digest. And out here we have a tendency to bolt more than is good for
us, to bolt it without pausing to get the true taste of it. The women
of this town remind me more and more of mice in an oxygen bell; they
race round and round, drunk with an excitement they can't quite
understand, until they burn up their little lives the same as the mice
burn up their little lungs.
... I've had a letter from Whinstane Sandy to-day, writing about
seed-wheat and the repairs for the tractor. It seems like a message
from another world. He reports that poor old Scotty is eating again
and no longer mourns day in and day out for his lost master. And Mr.
Ketley has very kindly brought over the liniment for Mudski's
shoulder. ... Whatever I may be, or whatever I may have done, I feel
that I can still cleanse my heart by sacrifice.
_Friday the Ninth_
One can get out of the habit, apparently, of having children about. My
kiddies, I begin to see, occasionally grate on Duncan. He brought
tears to the eyes of Pauline Augusta yesterday by the way he scolded
her for using a lead-pencil on the living-room woodwork. And the night
before he shouted much strong language at Elmer for breaking a
window-pane in the garage with Benny McArthur's new air-gun.
Elmer and his father, I'm afraid, have rather grown away from each
other. More than once I've caught Duncan staring at his son and heir
in a puzzled and a slightly frustrated sort of way. And Elmer's soul
promptly becomes _incommunicado_ when his iron-browed pater is in the
neighborhood.
Duncan is very proud of his grand new house. He is anxious to build a
conservatory out along the southwest wing. But he has asked how long a
conservatory would last with two young mountain-goats gamboling along
its leads.... Lossie, little suspecting the pang she was giving me,
laughingly showed me a manuscript which she found by accident in my
Dinkie's reader. It was a poem, dedicated to "D. O'L." And written in
a stiff little hand I read:
"Your lips are lined with roses,
Your eyes they shinne like gold
If you call me from the sunlight,
I'll answer from the cold.
But I wonder why, Oh, why,
You stay so far from me?
If you whisper from the prarrie,
I'll call from Calgary."
"Won't it be wonderful," said Lossie as I sat pondering over those
foolish little lines, "won't it be wonderful, if Dinkie grows up to be
a great poet?"
_Monday the Eleventh_
Elmer, _alias_ Dinkie, after many days' mourning for his lost Scotty,
is consoling himself, as other men do, with a substitute. Last Friday
he Brought home a flop-eared pup with a drooping tail and an
indefinite ancestry, explaining that he had come into possession of
the aforementioned animal by the duly delivered purchase-price of
thirty-seven cents.
Remembering Minty and certain matters of the past, I was troubled in
spirit. But I couldn't see why my son shouldn't have an animal to
love. And I have had Hilton fix a little box in one corner of the
garage for Dinkie's new pet, which he has christened Rowdy.
Rowdy, I now see, is a canine of limited spirit and is not likely to
repeat the offenses of Minty. But Dinkie really loves his new pup,
despite the latter's indubitably democratic ancestry. And I begin to
suspect that my laddie's weakness for mongrels may arise from his
earlier experience with Duncan's blooded bulldog, which he struggled
with for three whole days, fondly and foolishly trying to teach that
stolid animal the art of "pointing."
On Saturday Dinkie smuggled the verminous Rowdy to the upper
bathroom and gave him a thorough but quite unrelished soaping ...
Dinkie, by the way, is now a "cub" in the Boy Scouts and after
adorning himself in khaki goes off on hikes and takes lessons in
woodcraft. Saturday the Scouts of his school marched behind a real
band and Lossie and I sat in the car waiting for my laddie to appear.
He wiggled one hand, and smiled sheepishly, as he caught sight of us.
But he kept "eyes front" and refused to give any further sign as he
marched bravely on behind that brave music. He is learning the law
of the pack. For some first frail ideas of service are beginning
to incubate in that egoistic little bean of his. And he's suffering,
I suppose, the old contest between the ancestral lust to kill and
the new-born inclination to succor and preserve. That means he may
some day be "a gentleman." And I've a weakness for that old Newman
definition of a gentleman as one who never inflicts pain--"tender
towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful
towards the absurd"--conducting himself toward his enemy as if he
were some day to be his friend. And I also wish there were a few
more of them in this hard old world of ours!
Speaking of gentlemen, there's a Captain Goodhue here whom I rather
like. Lois Murchison brought us together in the tea-room of the
Palliser. In more ways than one he reminds me of Peter. But Captain
Goodhue is a much older man, and is English, coming from a very
excellent family in Sussex. He's one of those iron-gray ex-Army men
who still believe in a monocle and can be loyal to a queen even though
she wears a basque with darts in it. And he doesn't talk to a woman
with that ragging air of condescension which seems to be peculiar to
western American civilization. He is courteous and thoughtful and
sincere, though I noticed that he winced a trifle when I suddenly
remembered, as he was taking his departure, that the McKails were
living in what must have once been his house. He blinked, like a
well-groomed old eagle, when I reminded him of this. I never dreamed,
of course, that the subject would be painful to him. But it was an
honor, he acknowledged with a bow, to pass his household gods on to a
lady to whom so much had already been given.
When I asked Lois about it, later on, she rather indifferently
acknowledged that the old gentleman had been making a mess of his
different business ventures. He was much better at golf than getting
in on the ground-floor of a land deal. He was too old fogy, said
Slinkie, to make good in the West. He still kept his head up, but
they'd pretty well picked him to the bones.... Lois, by the way,
describes me as something new in her menagerie and drops in to see me
at the most unexpected moments. Then her tongue goes like a
mower-knife. She is persuaded that I should permanent-wave my hair,
lower my waist-line, and go in for amethysts. "And interest yourself,
my dear, in an outside man or two," she has sagely advised me. "For
husbands, you'll find, always accept you at the other mutt's
valuation!"