Then the prairie seemed to reach out its hand to me and give me peace.
We camped, that first night, in the sheltering arm of a little coulée
threaded by a tiny stream. We cooked bacon and eggs and coffee while
Whinnie out-spanned his team and put up his tent.
I sat on an oat-sack, after supper, with Poppsy between my knees,
watching the evening stars come out. They were worlds, I remembered,
some of them worlds perhaps with sorrowing men and women on them. And
they seemed very lonely and far-away worlds, until I heard the drowsy
voice of my Poppsy say up through the dusk: "In two days more, Mummy,
we'll be back to Dinkie, won't we?"
And there was much, I remembered, for which a mother should be
thankful.
_Sunday the Fourteenth_
_Dark, and true, and tender is the North._ Heaven bless the rhymster
who first penned those words. Spring is stealing hack to the prairie,
and our world is a world of beauty. The sky to-day is windrowed with
flat-bottomed cumulus-clouds, tier beyond tier above a level plane of
light, marking off the infinite distance like receding mile-stones on
a world turned over on its back. Occasionally the outstretched head of
a wild duck, pumping north with a black throb of wings, melts away to
a speck in the opaline air. Back among the muskeg reeds the waders are
courting and chattering, and early this morning I heard the plaintive
winnowing call-note of the Wilson snipe, and later the _punk-e-lunk_
love-cry of a bittern to his mate. There's an eagle planing in lazy
circles high in the air, even now, putting a soft-pedal on the noise
of the coots and grebes as he circles over their rush-lined cabarets.
And somewhere out on the range a bull is lowing. It is the season of
love and the season of happiness. Dinkie and Poppsy and I are going
out to gather prairie-crocuses. They are thick now in the prairie-sod,
soft blue and lavender and sometimes mauve. We must dance to the
vernal saraband while we can: Spring is so short in this norland
country of ours. It comes late. But as Peter says, A late spring never
deceives....
I thought I had offended Peter for life. But when he appeared late
this afternoon and I asked him why he had kept away from me, he said
these first few days naturally belonged to Dinkie and he'd been busy
studying marsh-birds. He looked rather rumpled and muddy, and
impressed me as a man sadly in need of a woman to look after his
things.
"Let's ride," said Peter. "I want to talk to you."
I was afraid of that talk, but I was more afraid something might
happen to interfere with it. So I changed into my old riding-duds and
put on my weather-stained old sombrero and we saddled Buntie and
Laughing-Gas and went loping off over the sun-washed prairie with our
shadows behind us.
We rode a long way before Peter said anything. I wanted to be happy,
but I wasn't quite able to be. I tried to think of neither the past
nor the future, but there were too many ghosts of other days loping
along the trail beside us.
"What are you going to do?" Peter finally inquired.
"About what?" I temporized as he pulled up beside me.
"About everything," he ungenerously responded.
"I don't know what to do, Peter," I had to acknowledge. "I'm like a
barrel without hoops. I want to stick together, but one more thump
will surely send me to pieces!"
"Then why not get the hoops around?" suggested Peter.
"But where will I get the hoops?" I asked.
"Here," he said. He was, I noticed, holding out his arms. And I
laughed, even though my heart was heavy.
"Men have been a great disappointment to me, Peter," I said with a
shake of my sombrero.
"Try me," suggested Peter.
But still again I had to shake my head.
"That wouldn't be fair, Peter," I told him. "I can't spoil your life
to see what's left of my own patched up."
"Then you're going to spoil two of 'em!" he promptly asserted.
"But I don't believe in that sort of thing," I did my best to explain
to him. "I've had my innings, and _I'm out_. I've a one-way heart, the
same as a one-way street. I don't think there's anything in the world
more odious than promiscuity. That's a big word, but it stands for an
even bigger offense against God. I've always said I intended to be a
single-track woman."
"But your track's blown up," contended Peter.
"Then I'll have to lay me a new one," I said with a fine show of
assurance.
"And do you know where it will lead?" he demanded,
"Where?" I asked.
"Straight to me," he said as he studied me with eyes that were so
quiet and kind I could feel a flutter of my heart-wings.
But still again I shook my head.
"That would be bringing you nothing but a withered up old has-been," I
said with a mock-wail of misery.
And Peter actually laughed at that.
"It'll be a good ten years before you've even grown up," he retorted.
"And another twenty years before you've really settled down!"
"You're saying I'll never have sense," I objected. "And I know you're
right."
"That's what I love about you," averred Peter.
"What you love about me?" I demanded.
"Yes," he said with his patient old smile, "your imperishable
youthfulness, your eternal never-ending eternity-defying golden-tinted
girlishness!"
A flute began to play in my heart. And I knew that like Ulysses's men
I would have to close my ears to it. But it's easier to row past an
island than to run away from your own heart.
"I know it's a lie, Peter, but I love you for saying it. It makes me
want to hug you, and it makes me want to pirouette, if I wasn't on
horseback. It makes my heart sing. But it's only the singing of one
lonely little chickadee in the middle of a terribly big pile of ruins.
For that's all my life can be now, just a hopeless smash-up. And
you're cut out for something better than a wrecking-car for the rest
of your days."
"No, no," protested Peter. "It's _you_ who've got to save _me_."
"Save you?" I echoed.
"You've got to give me something to live for, or I'll just rust away
in the ditch and never get back to the rails again."
"Peter!" I cried.
"What?" he asked.
"You're not playing fair. You're trying to make me pity you."
"Well, don't you?" demanded Peter.
"I would if I saw you sacrificing your life for a woman with a
crazy-quilt past."
"I'm not thinking of the past," asserted Peter, "I'm thinking of the
future."
"That's just it," I tried to explain. "I'll have to face that future
with a clouded name. I'll be a divorced woman. Ugh! I always thought
of divorced women as something you wouldn't quite care to sit next to
at table. I hate divorce."
"I'm a Quaker myself," acknowledged Peter. "But I occasionally think
of what Cobbett once said: 'I don't much like weasels. Yet I hate
rats. Therefore I say success to the weasels!'"
"I don't see what weasels have to do with it," I complained.
"Putting one's house in order again may sometimes be as beneficent as
surgery," contended Peter.
"And sometimes as painful," I added.
"Yet there's no mistake like not cleaning up old mistakes."
"But I hate it," I told him. "It all seems so--so cheap."
"On the contrary," corrected Peter, "it's rather costly." He pulled up
across my path and made me come to a stop. "My dear," he said, very
solemn again, "I know the stuff you're made of. I know you've got to
climb to the light by a path of your own choosing. And you have to see
the light with your own eyes. But I'm willing to wait. I _have_
waited, a very long time. But there's one fact you've got to face: I
love you too much ever to dream of giving you up."
I don't think either of us moved for a full moment. The flute was
singing so loud in my heart that I was afraid of myself. And,
woman-like, I backed away from the thing I wanted.
"It's not _me_, Peter, I must remember now. It's my bairns. I've two
bairns to bring up."
"I've got the three of you to bring up," maintained Peter. And that
made us both sit silent for another moment or two.
"It's not that simple," I finally said, though Peter smiled guardedly
at my ghost of a smile.
"It would be if you cared for me as much as Dinkie does," he said with
quite unnecessary solemnity.
"Oh, Peter, I do, I do," I cried out as the memory of all I owed him
surged mistily through my mind. "But a gray hair is something you
can't joke away. And I've got five of them, right here over my left
ear. I found them, months ago. And they're there to stay!"
"How about my bald spot?" demanded my oppressor and my deliverer
rolled into one.
"What's a bald spot compared to a bob-cat of a temper like mine?" I
challenged, remembering how I'd once heard a revolver-hammer snap in
my husband's face.
"But it's your spirit I like," maintained the unruffled Peter.
"You wouldn't always," I reminded him.
Yet he merely looked at me with his trust-me-and-test-me expression.
"I'll chance it!" he said, after a quite contented moment or two of
meditative silence.
"But don't you see," I went forlornly arguing on, "it mustn't be a
chance. That's something people of our age can never afford to take."
And Peter, at that, for some reason I couldn't fathom, began to wag
his head. He did it slowly and lugubriously, like a man who inspects a
road he has no liking for. But at the same time, apparently, he was
finding it hard to tuck away a small smile of triumph.
"Then we must never see each other again," he solemnly asserted.
"Peter!" I cried.
"I must go away, at once," he meditatively observed.
"_Peter!_" I said again, with the flute turning into a pair of
ice-tongs that clamped into the corners of my heart.
"Far, far away," he continued as he studiously avoided my eye. "For
there will be safety now only in flight."
"Safety from what?" I demanded.
"From you," retorted Peter.
"But what will happen to _me_, if you do that?" I heard my own voice
asking as Buntie started to paw the prairie-floor and I did my level
best to fight down the black waves of desolation that were
half-drowning me. "What'll there be to hold me up, when you're the
only man in all this world who can keep my barrel of happiness from
going slap-bang to pieces? What----?"
"_Verboten!_" interrupted Peter. But that solemn-soft smile of his
gathered me in and covered me, very much as the rumpled feathers of a
mother-bird cover her young, her crazily twittering and crazily
wandering young who never know their own mind.
"What'll happen to me," I went desperately on, "when you're the only
man alive who understands this crazy old heart of mine, when you've
taught me to hitch the last of my hope on the one unselfish man I've
ever known?"
This seemed to trouble Peter. But only remotely, as the lack of
grammar in the Lord's Prayer might affect a Holy Roller. He insisted,
above all things, on being judicial.
"Then I'll have to come back, I suppose," he finally admitted, "for
Dinkie's sake."
"Why for Dinkie's sake?" I asked.
"Because some day, my dear, our Dinkie is going to be a great man. And
I want to have a hand in fashioning that greatness."
I sat looking at the red ball of the sun slipping down behind the
shoulder of the world. A wind came out of the North, cool and sweet
and balsamic with hope. I heard a loon cry. And then the earth was
still again.
"_We'll be waiting_," I said, with a tear of happiness tickling the
bridge of my nose. And then, so that Peter might not see still another
loon crying, I swung Buntie sharply about on the trail. And we rode
home, side by side, through the twilight.
THE END