_Sunday the Fifteenth_
I opened my eyes and saw a pea-green world all around me. Then I heard
the doctor say: "Give 'er another whiff or two." His voice sounded
far-away, as though he were speaking through the Simplon Tunnel, and
not merely through his teeth, within twelve inches of my nose.
I took my whiff or two. I gulped at that chloroform like a thirsty
Bedouin at a wadi-spring. I went down into the pea-green emptiness
again, and forgot about the Kelly pad and the recurring waves of pain
that came bigger and bigger and tried to sweep through my racked old
body like breakers through the ribs of a stranded schooner. I forgot
about the hateful metallic clink of steel things against an
instrument-tray, and about the loganberry pimple on the nose of the
red-headed surgical nurse who'd been sent into the labor room to help.
I went wafting off into a feather-pillowy pit of infinitude. I even
forgot to preach to myself, as I'd been doing for the last month or
two. I knew that my time was upon me, as the Good Book says. There are
a lot of things in this life, I remembered, which woman is able to
squirm out of. But here, Mistress Tabbie, was one you couldn't escape.
Here was a situation that _had_ to be faced. Here was a time I had to
knuckle down, had to grin and bear it, had to go through with it to
the bitter end. For other folks, whatever they may be able to do for
you, aren't able to have your babies for you.
Then I ebbed up out of the pea-green depths again, and was troubled by
the sound of voices, so thin and far-away I couldn't make out what
they were saying. Then came the beating of a tom-tom, so loud that it
hurt. When that died away for a minute or two I caught the sound of
the sharp and quavery squall of something, of something which had
never squalled before, a squall of protest and injured pride, of
maltreated youth resenting the ignominious way it must enter the
world. Then the tom-tom beating started up again, and I opened my eyes
to make sure it wasn't the Grenadiers' Band going by.
I saw a face bending over mine, seeming to float in space. It was the
color of a half-grown cucumber, and it made me think of a tropical
fish in an aquarium when the water needed changing.
"She's coming out, Doctor," I heard a woman's voice say. It was a
voice as calm as God's and slightly nasal. For a moment I thought I'd
died and gone to Heaven. But I finally observed and identified the
loganberry pimple, and realized that the tom-tom beating was merely
the pounding of the steam-pipes in that jerry-built western hospital,
and remembered that I was still in the land of the living and that the
red-headed surgical nurse was holding my wrist. I felt infinitely hurt
and abused, and wondered why my husband wasn't there to help me with
that comforting brown gaze of his. And I wanted to cry, but didn't
seem to have the strength, and then I wanted to say something, but
found myself too weak.
It was the doctor's voice that roused me again. He was standing beside
my narrow iron bed with his sleeves still rolled up, wiping his arms
with a big white towel. He was smiling as he scrubbed at the corners
of his nails, as though to make sure they were clean. The nurse on the
other side of the bed was also smiling. So was the carrot-top with the
loganberry beauty-spot. All I could see, in fact, was smiling faces.
But it didn't seem a laughing matter to me. I wanted to rest, to
sleep, to get another gulp or two of that God-given smelly stuff out
of the little round tin can.
"How're you feeling?" asked the doctor indifferently. He nodded down
at me as he proceeded to manicure those precious nails of his. They
were laughing, the whole four of them. I began to suspect that I
wasn't going to die, after all.
"Everything's fine and dandy," announced the barearmed farrier as he
snapped his little pen-knife shut. But that triumphant grin of his
only made me more tired than ever, and I turned away to the tall young
nurse on the other side of my bed.
There was perspiration on her forehead, under the eaves of the pale
hair crowned with its pointed little cap. She was still smiling, but
she looked human and tired and a little fussed.
"Is it a girl?" I asked her. I had intended to make that query a
crushingly imperious one. I wanted it to stand as a reproof to them,
as a mark of disapproval for all such untimely merriment. But my
voice, I found, was amazingly weak and thin. And I wanted to know.
"_It's both_," said the tired-eyed girl in the blue and white uniform.
And she, too, nodded her head in a triumphant sort of way, as though
the credit for some vast and recent victory lay entirely in her own
narrow lap.
"It's both?" I repeated, wondering why she too should fail to give a
simple answer to a simple question.
"It's twins!" she said, with a little chirrup of laughter.
"Twins?" I gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the last of the
pea-green mist out of that room with the dead white walls.
"Twins," proclaimed the doctor, "_twins_!" He repeated the monosyllable,
converting it into a clarion-call that made me think of a rooster
crowing.
"A lovely boy and girl," cooed the third nurse with a bottle of
olive-oil in her hand. And by twisting my head a little I was able to
see the two wire bassinets, side by side, each holding a little mound
of something wrapped in a flannelette blanket.
I shut my eyes, for I seemed to have a great deal to think over.
Twins! A boy and girl! Two little new lives in the world! Two warm and
cuddling little bairns to nest close against my mother-breast.
"I see _your_ troubles cut out for you," said the doctor as he rolled
down his shirt-sleeves.
They were all laughing again. But to me it didn't seem quite such a
laughing matter. I was thinking of my layette, and trying to count
over my supply of binders and slips and shirts and nighties and
wondering how I could out-Solomon Solomon and divide the little dotted
Swiss dress edged with the French Val lace of which I'd been so proud.
Then I fell to pondering over other problems, equally prodigious, so
that it was quite a long time before my mind had a chance to meander
on to Dinky-Dunk himself.
And when I did think of Dinky-Dunk I had to laugh. It seemed a joke on
him, in some way. He was the father of twins. Instead of one little
snoozer to carry on his name and perpetuate his race in the land, he
now had _two_. Fate, without consulting him, had flung him double
measure. No wonder, for the moment, those midnight toilers in that
white-walled house of pain were wearing the smile that refused to come
off! That's the way, I suppose, that all life ought to be welcomed
into this old world of ours. And now, I suddenly remembered, I could
speak of _my children_--and that means so much more than talking about
one's child. Now I was indeed a mother, a prairie mother with three
young chicks of her own to scratch for.
I forgot my anxieties and my months of waiting. I forgot those weeks
of long mute protest, of revolt against wily old Nature, who so
cleverly tricks us into the ways she has chosen. A glow of glory went
through my tired body--it was hysteria, I suppose, in the basic
meaning of the word--and I had to shut my eyes tight to keep the tears
from showing.
But that great wave of happiness which had washed up the shore of my
soul receded as it came. By the time I was transferred to the
rubber-wheeled stretcher they called "the Wagon" and trundled off to a
bed and room of my own, the reaction set in. I could think more
clearly. My Dinky-Dunk didn't love me, or he'd never have left me at
such a time, no matter what his business calls may have been. The
Twins weren't quite so humorous as they seemed. There was even
something disturbingly animal-like in the birth of more offspring than
one at a time, something almost revolting in this approach to the
littering of one's young. They all tried to unedge that animality by
treating it as a joke, by confronting it with their conspiracies of
jocularity. But it would be no joke to a nursing mother in the middle
of a winter prairie with the nearest doctor twenty long miles away.
I countermanded my telegram to Dinky-Dunk at Vancouver, and cried
myself to sleep in a nice relaxing tempest of self-pity which my
"special" accepted as calmly as a tulip-bed accepts a shower. But
lawdy, lawdy, how I slept! And when I woke up and sniffed warm air and
that painty smell peculiar to new buildings, and heard the radiators
sing with steam and the windows rattle in the northeast blizzard that
was blowing, I slipped into a truer realization of the intricate
machinery of protection all about me, and thanked my lucky stars that
I wasn't in a lonely prairie shack, as I'd been when my almost
three-year-old Dinkie was born. I remembered, with little tidal waves
of contentment, that my ordeal was a thing of the past, and that I was
a mother twice over, and rather hungry, and rather impatient to get a
peek at my God-given little babes.
Then I fell to thinking rather pityingly of my forsaken little Dinkie
and wondering if Mrs. Teetzel would keep his feet dry and cook his
cream-of-wheat properly, and if Iroquois Annie would have brains
enough not to overheat the furnace and burn Casa Grande down to the
ground. Then I decided to send the wire to Dinky-Dunk, after all, for
it isn't every day in the year a man can be told he's the father of
twins....
I sent the wire, in the secret hope that it would bring my lord and
master on the run. But it was eight days later, when I was up on a
back-rest and having my hair braided, that Dinky-Dunk put in an
appearance. And when he did come he chilled me. I can't just say why.
He seemed tired and preoccupied and unnecessarily self-conscious
before the nurses when I made him hold Pee-Wee on one arm and Poppsy
on the other.
"Now kiss 'em, Daddy," I commanded. And he had to kiss them both on
their red and puckered little faces. Then he handed them over with all
too apparent relief, and fell into a brown study.
"What are you worrying over?" I asked him.
"I'm wondering how in the world you'll ever manage," he solemnly
acknowledged. I was able to laugh, though it took an effort.
"For every little foot God sends a little shoe," I told him,
remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. "And the sooner you
get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the happier I'll be. For I'm tired of this
place and the smell of the formalin and ether and I'm nearly worried
to death about Dinkie. And in all the wide world, O Kaikobad, there's
no place like one's own home!"
Dinky-Dunk didn't answer me, but I thought he looked a little wan and
limp as he sat down in one of the stiff-backed chairs. I inspected him
with a calmer and clearer eye.
"Was that sleeper too hot last night?" I asked, remembering what a bad
night could do to a big man.
"I don't seem to sleep on a train the way I used to," he said, but his
eye evaded mine. And I suspected something.
"Dinky-Dunk," I demanded, "did you have a berth last night?"
He flushed up rather guiltily. He even seemed to resent my questioning
him. But I insisted on an answer.
"No, I sat up," he finally confessed.
"Why?" I demanded.
And still again his eye tried to evade mine.
"We're a bit short of ready cash." He tried to say it indifferently,
but the effort was a failure.
"Then why didn't you tell me that before?" I asked, sitting up and
spurning the back-rest.
"You had worries enough of your own," proclaimed my weary-eyed lord
and master. It gave me a squeezy feeling about the heart to see him
looking so much like an unkempt and overworked and altogether
neglected husband. And there I'd been lying in the lap of luxury, with
quick-footed ladies in uniform to answer my bell and fly at my
bidding.
"But I've a right, Dunkie, to know your worries, and stand my share of
'em," I promptly told him. "And that's why I want to get out of this
smelly old hole and back to my home again. I may be the mother of
twins, and only too often reminded that I'm one of the Mammalia, but
I'm still your cave-mate and life-partner, and I don't think children
ought to come between a man and wife. I don't intend to allow _my_
children to do anything like that."
I said it quite bravely, but there was a little cloud of doubt
drifting across the sky of my heart. Marriage is so different from
what the romance-fiddlers try to make it. Even Dinky-Dunk doesn't
approve of my mammalogical allusions. Yet milk, I find, is one of the
most important issues of motherhood--only it's impolite to mention the
fact. What makes me so impatient of life as I see it reflected in
fiction is its trick of overlooking the important things and
over-accentuating the trifles. It primps and tries to be genteel--for
Biology doth make cowards of us all.
I was going to say, very sagely, that life isn't so mysterious after
you've been the mother of three children. But that wouldn't be quite
right. It's mysterious in an entirely different way. Even love itself
is different, I concluded, after lying there in bed day after day and
thinking the thing over. For there are so many different ways, I find,
of loving a man. You are fond of him, at first, for what you consider
his perfections, the same as you are fond of a brand-new traveling
bag. There isn't a scratch on his polish or a flaw in his make-up.
Then you live with him for a few years. You live with him and find
that life is making a few dents in his loveliness of character, that
the edges are worn away, that there's a weakness or two where you
imagined only strength to be, and that instead of standing a saint and
hero all in one, he's merely an unruly and unreliable human being with
his ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. But, bless his
battered old soul, you love him none the less for all that. You no
longer fret about him being unco guid, and you comfortably give up
trying to match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still love
him, but you love him differently. There's a touch of pity in your
respect for him, a mellowing compassion, a little of the eternal
mother mixed up with the eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you
will no longer demand the impossible of him. Being a woman, you will
still want to be loved. But being a woman of discernment, you will
remember that in some way and by some means, if you want to be loved,
you must remain lovable.
_Thursday the Nineteenth_
I had to stay in that smelly old hole of a hospital and in that bald
little prairie city fully a week longer than I wanted to. I tried to
rebel against being bullied, even though the hand of iron was padded
with velvet. But the powers that be were too used to handling perverse
and fretful women. They thwarted my purpose and broke my will and kept
me in bed until I began to think I'd take root there.
But once I and my bairns were back here at Casa Grande I could see
that they were right. In the first place the trip was tiring, too
tiring to rehearse in detail. Then a vague feeling of neglect and
desolation took possession of me, for I missed the cool-handed
efficiency of that ever-dependable "special." I almost surrendered to
funk, in fact, when both Poppsy and Pee-Wee started up a steady duet
of crying. I sat down and began to sniffle myself, but my sense of
humor, thank the Lord, came back and saved the day. There was
something so utterly ridiculous in that briny circle, soon augmented
and completed by the addition of Dinkie, who apparently felt as lonely
and overlooked as did his spineless and sniffling mother.
So I had to tighten the girths of my soul. I took a fresh grip on
myself and said: "Look here, Tabbie, this is never going to do. This
is not the way Horatius held the bridge. This is not the spirit that
built Rome. So, up, Guards, and at 'em! Excelsior! _Audaces fortuna
juvat!_"
So I mopped my eyes, and readjusted the Twins, and did what I could to
placate Dinkie, who continues to regard his little brother and sister
with a somewhat hostile eye. One of my most depressing discoveries on
getting back home, in fact, was to find that Dinkie has grown away
from me in my absence. At first he even resented my approaches, and he
still stares at me, now and then, across a gulf of perplexity. But the
ice is melting. He's beginning to understand, after all, that I'm his
really truly mother and that he can come to me with his troubles. He's
lost a good deal of his color, and I'm beginning to suspect that his
food hasn't been properly looked after during the last few weeks. It's
a patent fact, at any rate, that my house hasn't been properly looked
after. Iroquois Annie, that sullen-eyed breed servant of ours, will
never have any medals pinned on her pinny for neatness. I'd love to
ship her, but heaven only knows where we'd find any one to take her
place. And I simply _must_ have help, during the next few months.
Casa Grande, by the way, looked such a little dot on the wilderness,
as we drove back to it, that a spear of terror pushed its way through
my breast as I realized that I had my babies to bring up away out here
on the edge of this half-settled no-man's land. If only our dreams had
come true! If only the plans of mice and men didn't go so aft agley!
If only the railway had come through to link us up with civilization,
and the once promised town had sprung up like a mushroom-bed about our
still sad and solitary Casa Grande! But what's the use of repining,
Tabbie McKail? You've the second-best house within thirty miles of
Buckhorn, with glass door-knobs and a laundry-chute, and a brood to
rear, and a hard-working husband to cook for. And as the kiddies get
older, I imagine, I'll not be troubled by this terrible feeling of
loneliness which has been weighing like a plumb-bob on my heart for
the last few days. I wish Dinky-Dunk didn't have to be so much away
from home....
Old Whinstane Sandy, our hired man, has presented me with a hand-made
swing-box for Poppsy and Pee-Wee, a sort of suspended basket-bed that
can be hung up in the porch as soon as my two little snoozers are able
to sleep outdoors. Old Whinnie, by the way, was very funny when I
showed him the Twins. He solemnly acknowledged that they were nae sae
bad, conseederin'. I suppose he thought it would be treason to Dinkie
to praise the newcomers who threatened to put little Dinkie's nose out
of joint. And Whinnie, I imagine, will always be loyal to Dinkie. He
says little about it, but I know he loves that child. He loves him in
very much the same way that Bobs, our collie dog, loves me. It was
really Bobs' welcome, I think, across the cold prairie air, that took
the tragedy out of my homecoming. There were gladness and trust in
those deep-throated howls of greetings. He even licked the snow off my
overshoes and nested his head between my knees, with his bob-tail
thumping the floor like a flicker's beak. He sniffed at the Twins
rather disgustedly. But he'll learn to love them, I feel sure, as time
goes on. He's too intelligent a dog to do otherwise....
I'll be glad when spring comes, and takes the razor-edge out of this
northern air. We'll have half a month of mud first, I suppose. But
"there's never anything without something," as Mrs. Teetzel very
sagely announced the other day. That sour-apple philosopher, by the
way, is taking her departure to-morrow. And I'm not half so sorry as I
pretend to be. She's made me feel like an intruder in my own home. And
she's a soured and venomous old ignoramus, for she sneered openly at
my bath-thermometer and defies Poppsy and Pee-Wee to survive the
winter without a "comfort." After I'd announced my intention of
putting them outdoors to sleep, when they were four weeks old, she
lugubriously acknowledged that there were more ways than one of
murderin' infant children. _Her_ ideal along this line, I've
discovered, is slow asphyxiation in a sort of Dutch-oven made of an
eider-down comforter, with as much air as possible shut off from their
uncomfortable little bodies. But the Oracle is going, and I intend to
bring up my babies in my own way. For I know a little more about the
game now than I did when little Dinkie made his appearance in this
vale of tears. And whatever my babies may or may not be, they are at
least healthy little tikes.
_Sunday the Twenty-second_
I seem to be fitting into things again, here at Casa Grande. I've got
my strength back, and an appetite like a Cree pony, and the day's work
is no longer a terror to me. I'm back in the same old rut, I was going
to say--but it is not the same. There is a spirit of unsettledness
about it all which I find impossible to define, an air of something
impending, of something that should be shunned as long as possible.
Perhaps it's merely a flare-back from my own shaken nerves. Or perhaps
it's because I haven't been able to get out in the open air as much as
I used to. I am missing my riding. And Paddy, my pinto, will give us a
morning of it, when we try to get a saddle on his scarred little back,
for it's half a year now since he has had a bit between his teeth.
It's Dinky-Dunk that I'm really worrying over, though I don't know
why. I heard him come in very quietly last night as I was tucking
little Dinkie up in his crib. I went to the nursery door, half hoping
to hear my lord and master sing out his old-time "Hello, Lady-Bird!"
or "Are you there, Babushka?" But instead of that he climbed the
stairs, rather heavily, and passed on down the hall to the little room
he calls his study, his sanctum-sanctorum where he keeps his desk and
papers and books--and the duck-guns, so that Dinkie can't get at them.
I could hear him open the desk-top and sit down in the squeaky Bank of
England chair.
When I was sure that Dinkie was off, for good, I tiptoed out and shut
the nursery door. Even big houses, I began to realize as I stood there
in the hall, could have their drawbacks. In the two-by-four shack
where we'd lived and worked and been happy before Casa Grande was
built there was no chance for one's husband to shut himself up in his
private boudoir and barricade himself away from his better-half. So I
decided, all of a sudden, to beard the lion in his den. There was such
a thing as too much formality in a family circle. Yet I felt a bit
audacious as I quietly pushed open that study door. I even weakened in
my decision about pouncing on Dinky-Dunk from behind, like a
leopardess on a helpless stag. Something in his pose, in fact, brought
me up short.
Dinky-Dunk was sitting with his head on his hand, staring at the
wall-paper. And it wasn't especially interesting wall-paper. He was
sitting there in a trance, with a peculiar line of dejection about his
forward-fallen shoulders. I couldn't see his face, but I felt sure it
was not a happy face.
I even came to a stop, without speaking a word, and shrank rather
guiltily back through the doorway. It was a relief, in fact, to find
that I was able to close the door without making a sound.
When Dinky-Dunk came down-stairs, half an hour later, he seemed his
same old self. He talked and laughed and inquired if Nip and
Tuck--those are the names he sometimes takes from his team and pins on
Poppsy and Pee-Wee--had given me a hard day of it and explained that
Francois--our man on the Harris Ranch--had sent down a robe of plaited
rabbit-skin for them.
I did my best, all the time, to keep my inquisitorial eye from
fastening itself on Dunkie's face, for I knew that he was playing up
to me, that he was acting a part which wasn't coming any too easy. But
he stuck to his role. When I put down my sewing, because my eyes were
tired, he even inquired if I hadn't done about enough for one day.
"I've done about half what I ought to do," I told him. "The trouble
is, Dinky-Dunk, I'm getting old. I'm losing my bounce!"
That made him laugh a little, though it was rather a wistful laugh.
"Oh, no, Gee-Gee," he announced, momentarily like his old self,
"whatever you lose, you'll never lose that undying girlishness of
yours!"
It was not so much what he said, as the mere fact that he could say
it, which sent a wave of happiness through my maternal old body. So I
made for him with my Australian crawl-stroke, and kissed him on both
sides of his stubbly old face, and rumpled him up, and went to bed
with a touch of silver about the edges of the thunder-cloud still
hanging away off somewhere on the sky-line.
_Wednesday the Twenty-fifth_
There was indeed something wrong. I knew that the moment I heard
Dinky-Dunk come into the house. I knew it by the way he let the
storm-door swing shut, by the way he crossed the hall as far as the
living-room door and then turned back, by the way he slowly mounted
the stairs and passed leaden-footed on to his study. And I knew that
this time there'd be no "Are you there, Little Mother?" or "Where
beest thou, _Boca Chica_?"
I'd Poppsy and Pee-Wee safe and sound asleep in the swing-box that
dour old Whinstane Sandy had manufactured out of a packing-case, with
Francois' robe of plaited rabbit-skin to keep their tootsies warm. I'd
finished my ironing and bathed little Dinkie and buttoned him up in
his sleepers and made him hold his little hands together while I said
his "Now-I-lay-me" and tucked him up in his crib with his broken
mouth-organ and his beloved red-topped shoes under the pillow, so that
he could find them there first thing in the morning and bestow on them
his customary matutinal kiss of adoration. And I was standing at the
nursery window, pretty tired in body but foolishly happy and serene in
spirit, staring out across the leagues of open prairie at the last of
the sunset.
It was one of those wonderful sunsets of the winter-end that throw
wine-stains back across this bald old earth and make you remember that
although the green hasn't yet awakened into life there's release on
the way. It was a sunset with an infinite depth to its opal and gold
and rose and a whisper of spring in its softly prolonged afterglow. It
made me glad and sad all at once, for while there was a hint of vast
re-awakenings in the riotous wine-glow that merged off into pale green
to the north, there was also a touch of loneliness in the flat and
far-flung sky-line. It seemed to recede so bewilderingly and so
oppressively into a silence and into an emptiness which the lonely
plume of smoke from one lonely shack-chimney both crowned and
accentuated with a wordless touch of poignancy.
That pennon of shack-smoke, dotting the northern horizon, seemed to
become something valorous and fine. It seemed to me to typify the
spirit of man pioneering along the fringes of desolation, adventuring
into the unknown, conquering the untamed realms of his world. And it
was a good old world, I suddenly felt, a patient and bountiful old
world with its Browningesque old bones set out in the last of the
sun--until I heard my Dinky-Dunk go lumbering up to his study and
quietly yet deliberately shut himself in, as I gave one last look at
Poppsy and Pee-Wee to make sure they were safely covered. Then I stood
stock-still in the center of the nursery, wondering whether, at such a
time, I ought to go to my husband or keep away from him.
I decided, after a minute or two of thought, to bide a wee. So I
slipped quietly down-stairs and stowed Dinkie's overturned kiddie-car
away in the cloak-room and warned Iroquois Annie--the meekest-looking
Redskin ever togged out in the cap and apron of domestic servitude--not
to burn my fricassee of frozen prairie-chicken and not to scorch the
scones so beloved by my Scotch-Canadian lord and master. Then I
inspected the supper table and lighted the lamp with the Ruskin-green
shade and supplanted Dinky-Dunk's napkin that had a coffee-stain along
its edge with a fresh one from the linen-drawer. Then, after airing the
house to rid it of the fumes from Iroquois Annie's intemperate griddle
and carrying Dinkie's muddied overshoes back to the kitchen and
lighting the Chinese hall-lamp, I went to the bottom of the stairs to
call my husband down to supper.
But still again that wordless feeling of something amiss prompted me
to hesitate. So instead of calling blithely out of him, as I had
intended, I went silently up the stairs. Then I slipped along the hall
and just as silently opened his study door.
My husband was sitting at his desk, confronted by a litter of papers
and letters, which I knew to be the mail he had just brought home and
flung there. But he wasn't looking at anything on his desk. He was
merely sitting there staring vacantly out of the window at the paling
light. His elbows were on the arms of his Bank of England swivel-chair
for which I'd made the green baize seat-pad, and as I stared in at
him, half in shadow, I had an odd impression of history repeating
itself. This puzzled me, for a moment, until I remembered having
caught sight of him in much the same attitude, only a few days before.
But this time he looked so tired and drawn and spineless that a
fish-hook of sudden pity tugged at my throat. For my Dinky-Dunk sat
there without moving, with the hope and the joy of life drawn utterly
out of his bony big body. The heavy emptiness of his face, as rugged
as a relief-map in the side-light, even made me forget the smell of
the scones Iroquois Annie was vindictively scorching down in the
kitchen. He didn't know, of course, that I was watching him, for he
jumped as I signaled my presence by slamming the door after stepping
in through it. That jump, I knew, wasn't altogether due to edgy
nerves. It was also an effort at dissimulation, for his sudden
struggle to get his scattered lines of manhood together still carried
a touch of the heroic. But I'd caught a glimpse of his soul when it
wasn't on parade. And I knew what I knew. He tried to work his poor
old harried face into a smile as I crossed over to his side. But, like
Topsy's kindred, it died a-borning.
[Illustration: "What's happened?" I asked]
"What's happened?" I asked, dropping on my knees close beside him.
Instead of answering me, he swung about in the swivel-chair so that he
more directly faced the window. The movement also served to pull away
the hand which I had almost succeeded in capturing. Nothing, I've
found, can wound a real man more than pity.
"What's happened?" I repeated. For I knew, now, that something was
really and truly and tragically wrong, as plainly as though Dinky-Dunk
had up and told me so by word of mouth. You can't live with a man for
nearly four years without growing into a sort of clairvoyant knowledge
of those subterranean little currents that feed the wells of mood and
temper and character. He pushed the papers on the desk away from him
without looking at me.
"Oh, it's nothing much," he said. But he said it so listlessly I knew
he was merely trying to lie like a gentleman.
"If it's bad news, I want to know it, right slam-bang out," I told
him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a
meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook
tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part
of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be
confronted by a woman in tears. Then a touch of cool desperation crept
up into his eyes.
"Our whole apple-cart's gone over," he slowly and quietly announced,
with those coldly narrowed eyes still intent on my face, as though
very little and yet a very great deal depended on just how I was going
to accept that slightly enigmatic remark. And he must have noticed the
quick frown of perplexity which probably came to my face, for that
right hand of his resting on the table opened and then closed again,
as though it were squeezing a sponge very dry. "They've got me," he
said. "They've got me--to the last dollar!"
I stood up in the uncertain light, for it takes time to digest strong
words, the same as it takes time to digest strong meat.
I remembered how, during the last half-year, Dinky-Dunk had been on the
wing, hurrying over to Calgary, and Edmonton, flying east to Winnipeg,
scurrying off to the Coast, poring over township maps and blue-prints
and official-looking letters from land associations and banks and loan
companies. I had been called in to sign papers, with bread-dough on my
arms, and asked to witness signatures, with Dinkie on my hip, and
commanded by my absent hearth-mate to send on certain documents by the
next mail. I had also gathered up scattered sheets of paper covered
with close-penciled rows of figures, and had felt that Dinky-Dunk for a
year back had been giving more time to his speculations than to his
home and his ranch. I had seen the lines deepen a little on that lean
and bony face of his and the pepper-and-salt above his ears turning
into almost pure salt. And I'd missed, this many a day, the old boyish
note in his laughter and the old careless intimacies in his talk. And
being a woman of almost ordinary intelligence--preoccupied as I was
with those three precious babies of mine--I had arrived at the not
unnatural conclusion that my spouse was surrendering more and more to
that passion of his for wealth and power.
Wealth and power, of course, are big words in the language of any man.
But I had more than an inkling that my husband had been taking a
gambler's chance to reach the end in view. And now, in that twilit
shadow-huddled cubby-hole of a room, it came over me, all of a heap,
that having taken the gambler's chance, we had met a fate not uncommon
to gamblers, and had lost.
"So we're bust!" I remarked, without any great show of emotion,
feeling, I suppose, that without worldly goods we might consistently
be without elegance. And in the back of my brain I was silently
revising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into
In land-booms we trusted
And in land-booms we busted.
But it wasn't a joke. You can't have the bottom knocked out of your
world, naturally, and find an invisible Nero blithely fiddling on your
heart-strings. And I hated to see Dinky-Dunk sitting there with that
dead look in his eyes. I hated to see him with his spirit broken, with
that hollow and haggard misery about the jowls, which made me think of
a hound-dog mourning for a dead master.
But I knew better than to show any pity for Dinky-Dunk at such a time.
It would have been effective as a stage-picture, I know, my reaching
out and pressing his tired head against a breast sobbing with
comprehension and shaking with compassion. But pity, with real
men-folks in real life, is perilous stuff to deal in. I was equally
afraid to feel sorry for myself, even though my body chilled with the
sudden suspicion that Casa Grande and all it held might be taken away
from me, that my bairns might be turned out of their warm and
comfortable beds, overnight, that the consoling sense of security
which those years of labor had builded up about us might vanish in a
breath. And I needed new flannelette for the Twins' nighties, and a
reefer for little Dinky-Dunk, and an aluminum double-boiler that
didn't leak for me maun's porritch. There were rafts of things I
needed, rafts and rafts of them. But here we were bust, so far as I
could tell, on the rocks, swamped, stranded and wrecked.
I held myself in, however, even if it _did_ take an effort. I crossed
casually over to the door, and opened it to sniff at the smell of
supper.
"Whatever happens, Dinky-Dunk," I very calmly announced, "we've got to
eat. And if that she-Indian scorches another scone I'll go down there
and scalp her."
My husband got slowly and heavily up out of the chair, which gave out
a squeak or two even when relieved of his weight. I knew by his face
in the half-light that he was going to say that he didn't care to eat.
But, instead of saying that, he stood looking at me, with a tragically
humble sort of contriteness. Then, without quite knowing he was doing
it, he brought his hands together in a sort of clinch, with his face
twisted up in an odd little grimace of revolt, as though he stood
ashamed to let me see that his lip was quivering.
"It's such a rotten deal," he almost moaned, "to you and the kiddies."
"Oh, we'll survive it," I said with a grin that was plainly forced.
"But you don't seem to understand what it means," he protested. His
impatience, I could see, was simply that of a man overtaxed. And I
could afford to make allowance for it.
"I understand that it's almost an hour past supper-time, my Lord, and
that if you don't give me a chance to stoke up I'll bite the edges off
the lamp-shade!"
I was rewarded by just the ghost of a smile, a smile that was much too
wan and sickly to live long.
"All right," announced Dinky-Dunk, "I'll be down in a minute or two."
There was courage in that, I saw, for all the listlessness of the tone
in which it had been uttered. So I went skipping down-stairs and
closed my baby grand and inspected the table and twisted the glass
bowl that held my nasturtium-buds about, to the end that the telltale
word of "Salt" embossed on its side would not betray the fact that it
had been commandeered from the kitchen-cabinet. Then I turned up the
lamp and smilingly waited until my lord and master seated himself at
the other side of the table, grateful beyond words that we had at
least that evening alone and were not compelled to act up to a part
before the eyes of strangers.
Yet it was anything but a successful meal. Dinky-Dunk's pretense at
eating was about as hollow as my pretense at light-heartedness. We
each knew that the other was playing a part, and the time came when to
keep it up was altogether too much of a mockery.
"Dinky-Dunk," I said after a silence that was too abysmal to be
ignored, "let's look this thing squarely in the face."
"I can't!"
"Why not?"
"I haven't the courage."
"Then we've got to get it," I insisted. "I'm ready to face the music,
if you are. So let's get right down to hard-pan. Have they--have they
really cleaned you out?"
"To the last dollar," he replied, without looking up.
"What did it?" I asked, remaining stubbornly and persistently ox-like
in my placidity.
"No one thing did it, Chaddie, except that I tried to bite off too
much. And for the last two years, of course, the boom's been
flattening out. If our Associated Land Corporation hadn't gone
under--"
"Then it _has_ gone under?" I interrupted, with a catch of the breath,
for I knew just how much had been staked on that venture.
Dinky-Dunk nodded his head. "And carried me with it," he grimly
announced. "But even that wouldn't have meant a knock-out, if the
government had only kept its promise and taken over my Vancouver
Island water-front."
That, I remembered, was to have been some sort of a shipyard. Then I
remembered something else.
"When the Twins were born," I reminded Dunkie, "you put the ranch here
at Casa Grande in my name. Does that mean we lose our home?"
I was able to speak quietly, but I could hear the thud of my own
heart-beats.
"That's for you to decide," he none too happily acknowledged. Then he
added, with sudden decisiveness: "No, they can't touch anything of
_yours_! Not a thing!"
"But won't that hold good with the Harris Ranch, as well?" I further
inquired. "That was actually bought in my name. It was deeded to me
from the first, and always has been in my name."
"Of course it's yours," he said with a hesitation that was slightly
puzzling to me.
"Then how about the cattle and things?"
"What cattle?"
"The cattle we've kept on it to escape the wild land tax? Aren't those
all legally mine?"
It sounded rapacious, I suppose, under the circumstances. It must have
seemed like looting on a battlefield. But I wasn't thinking entirely
about myself, even though poor old Dinky-Dunk evidently assumed so,
from the look of sudden questioning that came into his stricken eyes.
"Yes, they're yours," he almost listlessly responded.
"Then, as I've already said, let's look this thing fairly and squarely
in the face. We've taken a gambler's chance on a big thing, and we've
lost. We've lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what you
say is true, we haven't lost our home, and what is still more
important, we haven't lost our pride."
My husband looked down at his plate.
"That's gone, too," he slowly admitted.
"It doesn't sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like that," I promptly
admonished. But I'd spoken before I caught sight of the tragic look in
his eyes as he once more looked up at me.
"If those politicians had only kept their word, we'd have had our
shipyard deal to save us," he said, more to himself than to me. Yet
that, I knew, was more an excuse than a reason.
"And if the rabbit-dog hadn't stopped to scratch, he might have caught
the hare!" I none too mercifully quoted. My husband's face hardened as
he sat staring across the table at me.
"I'm glad you can take it lightly enough to joke over," he remarked,
as he got up from his chair. There was a ponderous sort of bitterness
in his voice, a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight
back the surge of pity which was threatening to strangle my voice,
pity for a man, once so proud of his power, standing stripped and
naked in his weakness.
"Heaven knows I don't want to joke, Honey-Chile," I told him. "But
we're not the first of these wild-catting westerners who've come a
cropper. And since we haven't robbed a bank, or--"
"It's just a little worse than that," cut in Dinky-Dunk, meeting my
astonished gaze with a sort of Job-like exultation in his own misery.
I promptly asked him what he meant. He sat down again, before
speaking.
"I mean that I've lost Allie's money along with my own," he very
slowly and distinctly said to me. And we sat there, staring at each
other, for all the world like a couple of penguins on a sub-Arctic
shingle.
Allie, I remembered, was Dinky-Dunk's English cousin, Lady Alicia
Elizabeth Newland, who'd made the Channel flight in a navy plane and
the year before had figured in a Devonshire motor-car accident.
Dinky-Dunk had a picture of her, from _The Queen_, up in his study
somewhere, the picture of a very debonair and slender young woman on
an Irish hunter. He had a still younger picture of her in a tweed
skirt and spats and golf-boots, on the brick steps of a Sussex
country-house, with the jaw of a bull-dog resting across her knee. It
was signed and dated and in a silver frame and every time I'd found
myself polishing that oblong of silver I'd done so with a wifely
ruffle of temper.
"How much was it?" I finally asked, still adhering to my role of the
imperturbable chorus.
"She sent out over seven thousand pounds. She wanted it invested out
here."
"Why?"
"Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. She said she wanted a
ranch, but she left everything to me."
"Then it was a trust fund!"
Dinky-Dunk bowed his head, in assent.
"It practically amounted to that," he acknowledged.
"And it's gone?"
"Every penny of it."
"But, Dinky-Dunk," I began. I didn't need to continue, for he seemed
able to read my thoughts.
"I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond's Valley
tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any
time. But the bank's swept that into the bag, of course, along with
the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins--when one
tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save
that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was
petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city
block--and that sent the whole card-house down."