"Then isn't it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky-Dunk, and make good on
that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can--"
But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. "A thousand bushels an acre couldn't
get me out of this mess," he maintained.
"Why not?"
"Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in
Montreal," he quietly announced.
"How do you know that?"
"She wrote to me from New York. She's had influenza, and it left her
with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor
told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt's impossible, just now,
and if she doesn't like our West she says she'll amble on to Arizona,
or try California for the winter." He looked away, and smiled rather
wanly. "She's counting on the big game shooting we can give her!"
"Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?"
"I suppose so!"
"And she's on her way out here?"
"She's on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn't exist!"
I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Dunk's woebegone face. And
still again I had considerable thinking to do.
"Then we'll _make_ it exist," I finally announced. But Dinky-Dunk,
staring gloomily off into space, wasn't even interested. They had
stunned the spirit out of him. He wasn't himself. They'd put him where
even a well-turned Scotch scone couldn't appeal to him.
"Listen," I solemnly admonished. "If this Cousin Allie of yours is
coming out here for a ranch, she's got to be presented with one."
"It sounds easy!" he said, not without mockery.
"And apparently the only way we can see that she's given her money's
worth is to hand Casa Grande over to her. Surely if she takes this,
bag and baggage, she ought to be half-satisfied."
Dinky-Dunk looked up at me as though I were assailing him with the
ravings of a mad-woman. He knew how proud I had always been of that
prairie home of ours.
"Casa Grande is yours--yours and the kiddies," he reminded me. "You've
at least got that, and God knows you'll need it now, more than ever,
God knows I've at least kept my hands off _that_!"
"But don't you see it can't be ours, it can't be a home, when there's
a debt of honor between us and every acre of it."
"You're in no way involved in that debt," cried out my lord and
master, with a trace of the old battling light in his eyes.
"I'm so involved in it that I'm going to give up the glory of a
two-story house with hardwood floors and a windmill and a laundry
chute and a real bathroom, before that English cousin of yours can
find out the difference between a spring-lamb and a jack-rabbit!" I
resolutely informed him. "And I'm going to do it without a whimper. Do
you know what we're going to do, O lord and master? We're going to
take our kiddies and our chattels and our precious selves over to that
Harris Ranch, and there we're going to begin over again just as we did
nearly four years ago!" Dinky-Dunk tried to stop me, but I warned him
aside. "Don't think I'm doing anything romantic. I'm doing something
so practical that the more I think of it the more I see it's the only
thing possible."
He sat looking at me as though he had forgotten what my features were
like and was, just discovering that my nose, after all, hadn't really
been put on straight. Then the old battling light grew stronger than
ever in his eyes.
"It's _not_ going to be the only thing possible," he declared. "And
I'm not going to make _you_ pay for my mistakes. Not on your life! I
could have swung the farm lands, all right, even though they did have
me with my back to the wall, if only the city stuff hadn't gone
dead--so dead that to-day you couldn't even give it away. I'm not an
embezzler. Allie sent me out that money to take a chance with, and by
taking a double chance I honestly thought I could get her double
returns. As you say, it was a gambler's chance. But the cards broke
against me. The thing that hurts is that I've probably just about
cleaned the girl out."
"How do you know that?" I asked, wondering why I was finding it so
hard to sympathize with that denuded and deluded English cousin.
"Because I know what's happened to about all of the older families and
estates over there," retorted Dinky-Dunk. "The government has pretty
well picked them clean."
"Could I see your Cousin Allie's letters?"
"What good would it do?" asked the dour man across the table from me.
"The fat's in the fire, and we've got to face the consequences."
"And that's exactly what I've been trying to tell you, you foolish old
calvanistic autocrat! We've got to face the consequences, and the only
way to do it is to do it the way I've said."
Dinky-Dunk's face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to
smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart
clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it,
that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I'd acted on
impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in
Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was
even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let
Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through
the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing
the right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even though at first
sight it seemed too prodigious a sacrifice, just as I'd done the right
thing when in the face of tribal reasoning and logic I'd gone kiting
off to a prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It was a
tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that
luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded,
like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this
newer change would mean to me and mine.
"You're not going to face another three years of drudgery and
shack-dirt," declared Dinky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line
of thought. "You went through that once, and once was enough. It's not
fair. It's not reasonable. It's not even thinkable. You weren't made
for that sort of thing, and--"
"Listen to me," I broke in, doing my best to speak calmly and quietly.
"Those three years were really the happiest three years of all my life.
I love to remember them, for they mean so much more than all the others.
There were a lot of the frills and fixin's of life that we had to do
without. But those three years brought us closer together, Dinky-Dunk,
than we have ever been since we moved into this big house and got on
bowing terms again with luxury. I don't know whether you've given it
much thought or not, husband o' mine, but during the last year or two
there's been a change taking place in us. You've been worried and busy
and forever on the wing, and there have been days when I've felt you
were almost a stranger to me, as though I'd got to be a sort of accident
in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I'm not blaming you; I'm only
pointing out certain obvious truths, now the time for a little honest
talk seems to have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, in a
tremendously big fight, for success and money; and you were doing it
more for me and Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You
couldn't help remembering that I'd been a city girl and imagining that
prairie-life was a sort of penance I was undergoing before passing on to
the joys of paradise in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the
door and the sound of the Elevated outside the windows. And you were
terribly wrong in all that, for there have been days and days,
Dinky-Dunk, when I've been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack
and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hungry and happy for the
ham and eggs and bread I'd cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring
us so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and happy-go-lucky
and soul-satisfying in its completeness, and we weren't forever fretting
about bank-balances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a rancher's
wife then--and I can't help feeling that all along there was something
in that simple life we didn't value enough. We were just rubes and hicks
and clodhoppers and hay-tossers in those days, and we weren't staying
awake nights worrying about land-speculations and water-fronts and
trying to make ourselves millionaires when we might have been making
ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now that our card-house
of high finance has gone to smash, I realize more than ever that I've
got to be at peace with my own soul and on speaking terms with my own
husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally long-winded sermon,
my beloved, it's merely to make plain to you that I haven't surrendered
to any sudden wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating over to
that Harris Ranch. It's nothing more than good old hard-headed,
practical self-preservation, for I wouldn't care to live without you,
Dinky-Dunk, any more than I imagine you'd care to live without your own
self-respect."
I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in
my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map
to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even
in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces.
And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of
my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the
antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with
the wonder was a slightly perplexed brand of contrition, and
interwoven with that again was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as
though he had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a heart and
mind of her own, who was even worth sticking to when the rest of the
world was threatening to give him the cold shoulder. He felt
abstractedly down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always a
helpful sign.
"It's big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that way," he began,
rather awkwardly, and with just a touch of color coming to his rather
gray-looking cheek-bones. "But can't you see that now it's the
children we've got to think of?"
"I _have_ thought of them," I quietly announced. As though any mother,
on prairie or in metropolis, didn't think of them first and last and
in-between-whiles! "And that's what simplifies the situation. I want
them to have a fair chance. I'd rather they--"
"It's not quite that criminal," cut in Dinky-Dunk, with almost an
angry flush creeping up toward his forehead.
"I'm only taking your own word for that," I reminded him, deliberately
steeling my heart against the tides of compassion that were trying to
dissolve it. "And I'm only taking what is, after all, the easiest
course out of the situation."
Dinky-Dunk's color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the
color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily
tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.
"But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this,"
he reminded me.
"Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good," I
retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the
situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland
with bated breath, just because she had a title. I'd scratched dances
with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see
myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a
hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.
"You're missing the point," began Dinky-Dunk.
"Listen!" I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a
young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from
above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was
promptly augmented into a duet.
"Poppsy's got Pee-Wee awake," I announced as I rose from my chair. It
seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune,
before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies
safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the
swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer
in spirit by the time I'd crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And
I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old
Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the
table to resume my seat opposite him.
"You don't despise me, do you?" he demanded, holding me by the sleeve
and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as
wistful as an old hound's in winter, an eye with a hunger I'd not seen
there this many a day.
"Despise you, Acushla?" I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my
arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of
desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had
gathered and swung between us for so many months. I'd worried, in
secret, about that fog. I'd tried to tell myself that it was the
coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big
strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless
little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no
snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my
mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as
I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the
last acre of land.
"My dear, my dear," I tried to tell him, "I was never hungry for
money. The one thing I've always been hungry for is love. What'd be
the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a
hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time?
And what's the good of life if you can't crowd a little affection into
it? I was just thinking we're all terribly like children in a Maypole
dance. We're so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about
a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a
mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We
don't remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in
our ends. So _carpe diem_, say I. And perhaps you remember that
sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and
pinned to my bedroom door: 'Better it is that great souls should live
in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great
houses!'"
Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a
sad and slightly acidulated smile.
"You'd need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you'd
lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack," he warned me.
"Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad," I very promptly informed
him.
"But you do know that," he contended, man-like. I was glad to find,
though, that a little of the bitterness had gone out of his eyes.
"Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger to hear that sort of
thing, hunger to hear it all the time. On that theme they want their
husbands to be like those little Japanese wind-harps that don't even
know how to be silent."
"Then why did you say, about a month ago, that marriage was like
Hogan's Alley, the deeper one got into it the tougher it was?"
"Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole days without kissing
me good-by?" I countered. I tried to speak lightly, but it took an
effort. For my husband's neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the
first intimation that the glory was over and done with. It had given
me about the same feeling that we used to have as flapperettes when
the circus-manager mounted the tub and began to announce the
after-concert, all for the price of ten cents, one dime!
"I wanted to, Tabbie, but you impressed me as looking rather
unapproachable that day."
"When the honey is scarce, my dear, even bees are said to be cross," I
reminded him. "And that's the thing that disturbs me, Dinky-Dunk. It
must disturb any woman to remember that she's left her happiness in
one man's hand. And it's more than one's mere happiness, for mixed up
with that is one's sense of humor and one's sense of proportion. They
all go, when you make me miserable. And the Lord knows, my dear, that
a woman without a sense of humor is worse than a dipper without a
handle."
Dinky-Dunk sat studying me.
"I guess it was my own sense of proportion that got out of kilter,
Gee-Gee," he finally said. "But there's one thing I want you to
remember. If I got deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn't
for what money meant to me. I've never been able to forget what I took
you away from. I took you away from luxury and carted you out here to
the end of Nowhere and had you leave behind about everything that made
life decent. And the one thing I've always wanted to do is make good
on that over-draft on your bank-account of happiness. I've wanted to
give back to you the things you sacrificed. I knew I owed you that,
all along. And when the children came I saw that I owed it to you more
than ever. I want to give Dinky-Dink and Poppsy and Pee-Wee a fair
chance in life. I want to be able to start them right, just as much as
you do. And you can't be dumped back into a three-roomed wickiup, with
three children to bring up, and feel that you're doing the right thing
by your family."
It wasn't altogether happy talk, but deep down in my heart I was glad
we were having it. It seemed to clear the air, very much as a good
old-fashioned thunder-storm can. It left us stumbling back to the
essentials of existence. It showed us where we stood, and what we
meant to each other, what we must mean to each other. And now that the
chance had come, I intended to have my say out.
"The things that make life decent, Dinky-Dunk, are the things that we
carry packed away in our own immortal soul, the homely old things like
honesty and self-respect and contentment of mind. And if we've got to
cut close to the bone before we can square up our ledger of life,
let's start the carving while we have the chance. Let's get our
conscience clear and know we're playing the game."
I was dreadfully afraid he was going to laugh at me, it sounded so
much like pulpiteering. But I was in earnest, passionately in earnest,
and my lord and master seemed to realize it.
"Have you thought about the kiddies?" he asked me, for the second
time.
"I'm always thinking about the kiddies," I told him, a trifle puzzled by
the wince which so simple a statement could bring to his face. His
wondering eye, staring through the open French doors of the living-room,
rested on my baby grand.
"How about _that_?" he demanded, with a grim head-nod toward the
piano.
"That may help to amuse Lady Alicia," I just as grimly retorted.
He stared about that comfortable home which we had builded up out of
our toil, stared about at it as I've seen emigrants stare back at the
receding shores of the land they loved. Then he sat studying my face.
"How long is it since you've seen the inside of the Harris shack?" he
suddenly asked me.
"Last Friday when I took the bacon and oatmeal over to Soapy and
Francois and Whinstane Sandy," I told him.
"And what did you think of that shack?"
"It impressed me as being sadly in need of soap and water," I calmly
admitted. "It's like any other shack where two or three men have been
batching--no better and no worse than the wickiup I came to here on my
honeymoon."
Dinky-Dunk looked about at me quickly, as though in search of some
touch of malice in that statement. He seemed bewildered, in fact, to
find that I was able to smile at him.
"But that, Chaddie, was nearly four long years ago," he reminded me,
with a morose and meditative clouding of the brow. And I knew exactly
what he was thinking about.
"I'll know better how to go about it this time," I announced with my
stubbornest Doctor Pangless grin.
"But there are two things you haven't taken into consideration,"
Dinky-Dunk reminded me.
"What are they?" I demanded.
"One is the matter of ready money."
"I've that six hundred dollars from my Chilean nitrate shares," I
proudly announced. "And Uncle Carlton said that if the Company ever
gets reorganized it ought to be a paying concern."
Dinky-Dunk, however, didn't seem greatly impressed with either the
parade of my secret nest-egg or the promise of my solitary plunge into
finance. "What's the other?" I asked as he still sat frowning over his
empty pipe.
"The other is Lady Alicia herself," he finally explained.
"What can she do?"
"She may cause complications."
"What kind of complications?"
"I can't tell until I've seen her," was Dinky-Dunk's none too definite
reply.
"Then we needn't cross that bridge until we come to it," I announced
as I sat watching Dinky-Dunk pack the bowl of his pipe and strike a
match. It seemed a trivial enough movement. Yet it was monumental in
its homeliness. It was poignant with a power to transport me back to
earlier and happier days, to the days when one never thought of
feathering the nest of existence with the illusions of old age. A
vague loneliness ate at my heart, the same as a rat eats at a cellar
beam.
I crossed over to my husband's side and stood with one hand on his
shoulder as he sat there smoking. I waited for him to reach out for my
other hand. But the burden of his troubles seemed too heavy to let him
remember. He smoked morosely on. He sat in a sort of self-immuring
torpor, staring out over what he still regarded as the wreck of his
career. So I stooped down and helped myself to a very smoky kiss
before I went off up-stairs to bed. For the children, I knew, would
have me awake early enough--and nursing mothers needs must sleep!
_Thursday the Second_
I have won my point. Dinky-Dunk has succumbed. The migration is under
way. The great trek has begun. In plain English, we're moving.
I rather hate to think about it. We seem so like the Children of Israel
bundled out of a Promised Land, or old Adam and Eve turned out of the
Garden with their little Cains and Abels. "We're up against it,
Gee-Gee," as Dinky-Dunk grimly observed. I could see that we were,
without his telling me. But I refused to acknowledge it, even to
myself. And it wasn't the first occasion. This time, thank heaven, I
can at least face it with fortitude, if not with relish. I don't like
poverty. And I don't intend to like it. And I'm not such a hypocrite as
to make a pretense of liking it. But I do intend to show my Dinky-Dunk
that I'm something more than a household ornament, just as I intend to
show myself that I can be something more than a breeder of children. I
have given my three "hostages to fortune"--and during the last few days
when we've been living, like the infant Moses, in a series of rushes, I
have awakened to the fact that they are indeed hostages. For the little
tikes, no matter how you maneuver, still demand a big share of your
time and energy. But one finally manages, in some way or another.
Dinky-Dunk threatens to expel me from the Mothers' Union when I work
over time, and Poppsy and Pee-Wee unite in letting me know when I've
been foolish enough to pass my fatigue-point. Yet I've been sloughing
off some of my old-time finicky ideas about child-raising and reverting
to the peasant-type of conduct which I once so abhorred in my Finnish
Olga. And I can't say that either I or my family seem to have suffered
much in the process. I feel almost uncannily well and strong now, and
am a wolf for work. If nothing else happened when our apple-cart went
over, it at least broke the monotony of life. I'm able to wring, in
fact, just a touch of relish out of all this migrational movement and
stir, and Casa Grande itself is already beginning to remind me of a
liner's stateroom about the time the pilot comes aboard and the
donkey-engines start to clatter up with the trunk-nets.
For three whole days I simply ached to get at the Harris Ranch shack,
just to show what I could do with it. And I realized when Dinky-Dunk
and I drove over to it in the buckboard, on a rather nippy morning
when it was a joy to go spanking along the prairie trail with the cold
air etching rosettes on your cheek-bones, that it was a foeman well
worthy of my steel. At a first inspection, indeed, it didn't look any
too promising. It didn't exactly stand up on the prairie-floor and
shout "Welcome" into your ears. There was an overturned windmill and a
broken-down stable that needed a new roof, and a well that had a pump
which wouldn't work without priming. There was an untidy-looking
corral, and a reel for stringing up slaughtered beeves, and an
overturned Red River cart bleached as white as a buffalo skeleton. As
for the wickiup itself, it was well-enough built, but lacking in
windows and quite unfinished as to the interior.
I told Dinky-Dunk I wanted two new window-frames, beaverboard for
inside lining, and two gallons of paint. I have also demanded a
lean-to, to serve as an extra bedroom and nursery, and a brand-new
bunk-house for the hired "hands" when they happen to come along. I
have also insisted on a covered veranda and sleeping porch on the
south side of the shack, and fly-screens, and repairs to the chimney
to stop the range from smoking. And since the cellar, which is merely
timbered, will have to be both my coal-hole and my storage-room, it
most assuredly will have to be cemented. I explained to Dinky-Dunk
that I wanted eave-troughs on both the shack and the stable, for the
sake of the soft-water, and proceeded to point out the need of a new
washing-machine, and a kiddie-coop for Poppsy and Pee-Wee as soon as
the weather got warm, and a fence, hog-tight and horse-high, about my
half-acre of kitchen garden.
Dinky-Dunk sat staring at me with a wry though slightly woebegone
face.
"Look here, Lady-Bird, all this sort of thing takes 'rhino,' which
means ready money. And where's it going to come from?"
"I'll use that six hundred, as long as it lasts," I blithely retorted.
"And then we'll get credit."
"But my credit is gone," Dinky-Dunk dolorously acknowledged.
"Then what's the matter with mine?" I demanded. I hadn't meant to hurt
him, when I said that. But I refused to be downed. And I intended to
make my ranch a success.
"It's still quite unimpaired, I suppose," he said in a thirty-below-zero
sort of voice.
"Goose!" I said, with a brotherly pat on his drooping shoulder. But my
lord and master refused to be cheered up.
"It's going to take more than optimism to carry us through this first
season," he explained to me. "And the only way that I can see is for
me to get out and rustle for work."
"What kind of work?" I demanded.
"The kind there's a famine for, at this very moment," was Dinky-Dunk's
reply.
"You don't mean being somebody else's hired man?" I said, aghast.
"A hired man can get four dollars a day and board," retorted my
husband. "And a man and team can get nine dollars a day. We can't keep
things going without ready money. And there's only one way, out here,
of getting it."
Dinky-Dunk was able to laugh at the look of dismay that came into my
face. I hadn't stopped to picture myself as the wife of a hired
"hand." I hadn't quite realized just what we'd descended to. I hadn't
imagined just how much one needed working capital, even out here on
the edge of Nowhere.
"But never that way, Diddums!" I cried out in dismay, as I pictured my
husband bunking with a sweaty-smelling plowing-gang of Swedes and
Finns and hoboing about the prairie with a thrashing outfit of the
Great Unwashed. He'd get cooties, or rheumatism, or a sunstroke, or a
knife between his ribs some fine night--and then where'd I be? I
couldn't think of it. I couldn't think of Duncan Argyll McKail, the
descendant of Scottish kings and second-cousin to a title, hiring out
to some old skinflint of a farmer who'd have him up at four in the
morning and keep him on the go until eight at night.
"Then what other way?" asked Dinky-Dunk.
"You leave it to me," I retorted. I made a bluff of saying it bravely
enough, but I inwardly decided that instead of sixteen yards of fresh
chintz I'd have to be satisfied with five yards. Poverty, after all,
is not a picturesque thing. But I didn't intend to be poor, I
protested to my troubled soul, as I went at that Harris Ranch wickiup,
tooth and nail, while Iroquois Annie kept an eye on Dinkie and the
Twins.
These same Twins, I can more than ever see, are going to be somewhat
of a brake on the wheels of industry. I have even been feeding on
"slops," of late, to the end that Poppsy and Pee-Wee may thrive. And
already I see sex-differences asserting themselves. Pee-Wee is a bit
of a stoic, while his sister shows a tendency to prove a bit of a
squealer. But Poppsy is much the daintier feeder of the two. I'll
probably have to wean them both, however, before many more weeks slip
by. As soon as we get settled in our new shack and I can be sure of a
one-cow supply of milk I'll begin a bottle-feed once in every
twenty-four hours. Dinky-Dunk says I ought to take a tip from the
Indian mother, who sometimes nurses her babe until he's two and three
years old. I asked Ikkie--as Dinkie calls Iroquois Annie--about this
and Ikkie says the teepee squaw has no cow's milk and has to keep on
the move, so she feeds him breast-milk until he's able to eat meat.
Ikkie informs me that she has seen a papoose turn away from its
mother's breast to take a puff or two at a pipe. From which I assume
that the noble Red Man learns to smoke quite early in life.
Ikkie has also been enlightening me on other baby-customs of her
ancestors, explaining that it was once the habit for a mother to name
her baby for the first thing seen after its birth. That, I told
Dinky-Dunk, was probably why there were so many "Running Rabbits," and
"White Pups" and "Black Calfs" over on the Reservation. And that
started me maun enlarging on the names of Indians he'd known, the most
elongated of which, he acknowledged, was probably "The-Man-Who-Gets-Up-
In-The-Middle-Of-The-Night-To-Feed-Oats-To-His-Pony," while the most
descriptive was "Slow-To-Come-Over-The-Hill," though "Shot-At-Many-Times"
was not without value, and "Long-Time-No-See-Him," as the appellative for
a disconsolate young squaw, carried a slight hint of the Indian's genius
for nomenclature. Another thing mentioned by Dunkie, which has stuck in
my memory, was his running across a papoose's grave in an Indian
burying-ground at Pincer Creek, when he was surveying, where the Indian
baby had been buried--above-ground, of course--_in an old Saratoga
trunk_. That served to remind me of Francois' story about "Old Sun," who
preceded "Running Rabbit"--note the name--as chief of the Alberta
Blackfoot tribe, and always carried among his souvenirs of conquest a
beautiful white scalp, with hair of the purest gold, very long and fine,
but would never reveal how or where he got it. Many a night, when I
couldn't sleep, I've worried about that white scalp, and dramatized
the circumstances of its gathering. Who was the girl with the long and
lovely tresses of purest gold? And did she die bravely? And did she
meet death honorably and decently, or after the manner of certain of
the Jesuits' _Relations_?...
I have had a talk with Whinnie, otherwise Whinstane Sandy, who has
been ditching at the far end of our half-section. I explained the
situation to him quite openly, acknowledging that we were on the rocks
but not yet wrecked, and pointing out that there might be a few months
before the ghost could walk again. And Whinstane Sandy has promised to
stick. Poor old Whinnie not only promised to stick, but volunteered
that if he could get over to Seattle or 'Frisco and raise some money
on his Klondike claim our troubles would be a thing of the past. For
Whinnie, who is an old-time miner and stampeder, is, I'm afraid, a wee
bit gone in the upper story. He dreams he has a claim up North where
there's millions and millions in gold to be dug out. On his moose-hide
watch-guard he wears a nugget almost half as big as a praline, a
nugget he found himself in ninety-nine, and he'd part with his life, I
believe, before he'd part with that bangle of shiny yellow metal. In
his chest of black-oak, too, he keeps a package of greasy and
dog-eared documents, and some day, he proclaims, those papers will
bring him into millions of money.
I asked Dinky-Dunk about the nugget, and he says it's genuine gold,
without a doubt. He also says there's one chance in a hundred of
Whinnie actually having a claim up in the gold country, but doubts if
the poor old fellow will ever get up to it again. It's about on the
same footing, apparently, as Uncle Carlton's Chilean nitrate mines. For
Whinnie had a foot frozen, his third winter on the Yukon, and this, of
course, has left him lame. It means that he's not a great deal of good
when it comes to working the land, but he's a clever carpenter, and a
good cement-worker, and can chore about milking the cows and looking
after the stock and repairing the farm implements. Many a night, after
supper, he tells us about the Klondike in the old days, about the
stampedes of ninety-eight and ninety-nine, and the dance-halls and
hardships and gamblers and claim-jumpers. I have always had a weakness
for him because of his blind and unshakable love for my little Dinkie,
for whom he whittles out ships and windmills and decoy-ducks. But when
I explained things to simple-minded old Whinnie, and he offered to hand
over the last of his ready money--the money he was hoarding dollar by
dollar to get back to his hidden _El Dorado_--it brought a lump up into
my throat.
I couldn't accept his offer, of course, but I loved him for making it.
And whatever happens, I'm going to see that Whinnie has patches on his
panties and no holes in his socks as long as he abides beneath our
humble roof-tree. I intend to make the new bunk-house just as homy and
comfortable as I can, so that Whinnie, under that new roof, won't feel
that he's been thrust out in the cold. But I must have my own house
for myself and my babes. Soapy Stennet, by the way, has been paid off
by Dinky-Dunk and is moving on to the Knee-Hill country, where he says
he can get good wages breaking and seeding. Soapy, of course, was a
good man on the land, but I never took a shine to that hard-eyed
Canuck, and we'll get along, in some way or other, without him. For,
in the language of the noble Horatius, "I'll find a way, or make it!"
On the way back to Casa Grande to-night, after a hard day's work, I
asked Dinky-Dunk if we wouldn't need some sort of garage over at the
Harris Ranch, to house our automobile. He said he'd probably put doors
on the end of one of the portable granaries and use that. When I
questioned if a car of that size would ever fit into a granary he
informed me that we couldn't keep our big car.
"I can get seventeen hundred dollars for that boat," he explained.
"We'll have to be satisfied with a tin Lizzie, and squander less on
gasoline."
So once again am I reminded that the unpardonable crime of poverty is
not always picturesque. But I wrestled with my soul then and there,
and put my pride in my pocket and told Dinky-Dunk I didn't give a rip
what kind of a car I rode in so long as I had such a handsome
_chauffeur_. And I reached out and patted him on the knee, but he was
too deep in his worries about business matters, I suppose, to pay any
attention to that unseemly advance.
To-night after supper, when the bairns were safely in bed, I opened up
the baby grand, intent on dying game, whatever happened or was to
happen. But my concert wasn't much of a success. When you do a thing
for the last time, and know it's to be the last time, it gives you a
graveyardy sort of feeling, no matter how you may struggle against it.
And the blither the tune the heavier it seemed to make my heart. So I
swung back to the statelier things that have come down to us out of
the cool and quiet of Time. I eased my soul with the _Sonata
Appassionata_ and lost myself in the _Moonlight_ and pounded out the
_Eroica_. But my fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden--so it was
small wonder my poor lord and master tried to bury himself in his
four-day-old newspaper. Then I tried Schubert's _Rosamonde_, though
that wasn't much of a success. So I wandered on through Liszt to
Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too soft and sugary and far-away
for a homesteader's wife, so I sang
"In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still,"--
to see if it would shake any sign of recognition out of my harried old
Dinky-Dunk.
As I beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown over the tip-top edge
of his paper, I defiantly swung into _The Humming Coon_, which
apparently had no more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice
aforethought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the Beethoven Funeral
March. I lost myself, in fact, in that glorious and melodic wail of
sorrow, merged my own puny troubles in its god-like immensities, and was
brought down to earth by a sudden movement from Dinky-Dunk.
"Why rub it in?" he almost angrily demanded as he got up and left the
room....
But that stammering little soul-flight has done me good. It has given
me back my perspective. I refuse to be downed. I'm still the captain
of my soul. I'm still at the wheel, no matter if we are rolling a bit.
And life, in some way, is still going to be good, still well worth the
living!
_Wednesday the Eighth_
Dinky-Dunk has had word that Lady Alicia is on her way west. He seems
to regard that event as something very solemn, but I refuse to take
seriously either her ladyship or her arrival. To-night, I'm more
worried about Dinkie, who got at the floor-shellac with which I'd been
furbishing up the bathroom at Casa Grande. He succeeded in giving his
face and hair a very generous coat of it--and I'm hoping against hope
he didn't get too much of it in his little stomach. He seems normal
enough, and in fairly good spirits, but I had to scrub his face with
coal-oil, to get it clean, and his poor little baby-skin is burnt
rather pink.
The winter has broken, the frost is coming out of the ground and the
mud is not adding to our joy in life. Our last load over to the Harris
shack was ferried and tooled through a batter. On the top of it (the
_load_, and not the batter!) I placed Olie's old banjo, for whatever
happens, we mustn't be entirely without music.
Yesterday Dinky-Dunk got Paddy saddled and bridled for me. Paddy
bucked and bit and bolted and sulked and tried to brush his rider off
against the corral posts. But Dinky-Dunk fought it out with him, and
winded him, and mastered him, and made him meek enough for me to slip
up into the saddle. My riding muscles, however, have gone flabby, and
two or three miles, for the first venture, was all I cared to stand.
But I'm glad to know that Paddy can be pressed into service again,
whenever the occasion arises. Poor old Bobs, by the way, keeps looking
at me with a troubled and questioning eye. He seems to know that some
unsettling and untoward event is on the way. When a coyote howled last
night, far off on the sky-line, Bobs poured out his soul in an
answering solo of misery. This morning, when I was pretty busy, he
poked his head between my knees. I had a dozen things calling me, but
I took the time to rub his nose and brush back his ears and tell him
he was the grandest old dog on all God's green earth. And he repaid me
with a look of adoration that put springs under my heels for the rest
of the morning, and came and licked Pee-Wee's bare heels, and later
Poppsy's, when I was giving them their bath.
_Friday the Tenth_
Lady Alicia has arrived. So have her trunks, eleven in number--count
'em!--trunks of queer sizes and shapes, of pigskin and patent leather
and canvas, with gigantic buckles and straps, and all gaudily
initialed and plastered with foreign labels. Her ladyship had to come,
of course, at the very worst time of year, when the mud was at its
muckiest and the prairie was at its worst. The trails were simply
awful, with the last of the frost coming out of the ground and mother
earth a foot-deep sponge of engulfing stickiness. All the world seemed
turned to mud. I couldn't go along, of course, when Dinky-Dunk started
off in the Teetzels' borrowed spring "democrat" to meet his English
cousin at the Buckhorn station, with Whinstane Sandy and the wagon
trailing behind for the luggage.
We expected a lady in somewhat delicate health, so I sent along plenty
of rugs and a foot-warmer, and saw that the house was well heated, and
the west room bed turned down. Even a hot-water bottle stood ready and
waiting to be filled.
But Lady Alicia, when she arrived with Dinky-Dunk just before
nightfall, didn't impress me as very much of an invalid. She struck me
more as a very vital and audacious woman, neither young nor old, with
an odd quietness of manner to give a saber-edge to her audacity. I
could hear her laughing, musically and not unpleasantly, at the
mud-coated "democrat," which on its return looked a good deal like a
'dobe hut mounted on four chariot wheels. But _everything_, for that
matter, was covered with mud, horses and harness and robes and even
the blanket in which Lady Alicia had wrapped herself. She had done
this, I could see, to give decent protection to a Redfern coat of
plucked beaver with immense reveres, though there was mud enough on
her stout tan shoes, so unmistakably English in their common-sense
solidity, and some on her fur turban and even a splash or two on her
face. That face, by the way, has an apple-blossom skin of which I can
see she is justly proud. And she has tourmaline eyes, with reddish
hazel specks in an iris of opaque blue, and small white teeth and lips
with a telltale curve of wilfulness about them. She isn't exactly
girlish, but with all her worldly wisdom she has a touch of the
clinging-ivy type which must make her inordinately appealing to men.
Her voice is soft and full-voweled, with that habitual rising
inflection characteristic of the English, and that rather insolent
drawl which in her native land seems the final flower of unchallenged
privilege. Her hands are very white and fastidious looking, and most
carefully manicured. She is, in fact, wonderful in many ways, but I
haven't yet decided whether I'm going to like her or not. Her smile
strikes me as having more glitter than warmth, and although she is
neither tall nor full-bodied, she seems to have the power of making
point take the place of weight. Yet, oddly enough, there is an
occasional air of masculine loose-jointedness about her movements, a
half-defiant sort of slouch and swagger which would probably carry
much farther in her Old World than in our easier-moving New World,
where disdain of decorum can not be regarded as quite such a novelty.
It wasn't until she was within the protecting door of Casa Grande that
I woke up to the fact of how incongruous she stood on a northwest
ranch. She struck me, then, as distinctly an urban product, as one of
those lazy and silk-lined and limousiny sort of women who could face
an upholstery endurance-test without any apparent signs of
heart-failure, but might be apt to fall down on engine-performance.
Yet I was determined to suspend all judgment, even after I could see
that she was making no particular effort to meet me half-way, though
she did acknowledge that Dinkie, in his best bib and tucker, was a
"dawling" and even proclaimed that his complexion--due, of course, to
the floor-shellac and coal-oil--reminded her very much of the
higher-colored English children. She also dutifully asked about Poppsy
and Pee-Wee, after announcing that she found the house uncomfortably
hot, and seemed surprised that Dinky-Dunk should descend to the
stabling and feeding and watering of his own horses.
She appeared rather constrained and ill-at-ease, in fact, until
Dinky-Dunk had washed up and joined us. Yet I saw, when we sat down to
our belated supper, that the fair Allie had the abundant and honest
appetite of a healthy boy. She also asked if she might smoke between
courses--which same worried the unhappy Dinky-Dunk much more than it
did me. My risibilities remained untouched until she languidly
remarked that any woman who had twins on the prairie ought to get a
V.C.
But she automatically became, I retorted, a K.C.B. This seemed to
puzzle the cool-eyed Lady Alicia.
"That means a Knight Commander of the Bath," she said with her English
literalness.
"Exactly," I agreed. And Dinky-Dunk had to come to her rescue and
explain the joke, like a court-interpreter translating Cree to the
circuit judge, so that by the time he got through it didn't seem a
joke at all and his eyes were flashing me a code-signal not to be too
hard on a tenderfoot. When, later on, Lady Alicia looked about Casa
Grande, which we'd toiled and moiled and slaved to make like the
homestead prints in the immigration pamphlets, she languidly
acknowledged that it was rather ducky, whatever that may mean, and
asked Dinky-Dunk if there'd be any deer-shooting this spring. I
notice, by the way, that she calls him "Dooncan" and sometimes "Cousin
Doonk," which strikes me as being over-intimate, seeing he's really
her second cousin. It seems suggestive of some hidden joke between
them. And Duncan addresses her quite openly as "Allie."
This same Allie has brought a lady's maid with her whom she addresses,
_more Anglico_, simply by her surname of "Struthers." Struthers is a
submerged and self-obliterating and patient-eyed woman of nearly
forty, I should say, with a face that would be both intelligent and
attractive, if it weren't so subservient. But I've a floaty sort of
feeling that this same maid knows a little more than she lets on to
know, and I'm wondering what western life will do to her. In one
year's time, I'll wager a plugged nickel against an English sovereign,
she'll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and
murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it
fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which
Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and
warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's
rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two
shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser
tops, and even a nickel alcohol-lamp set up for brewing the apparently
essential cup of tea. It made me wish that I had a Struthers or two of
my own on the string. And that made my thoughts go hurtling back to my
old Hortense and how we had parted at the Hotel de L'Athenee, and to
Theobald Gustav and his aunt the Baroness, and the old lost life that
seemed such years and years away....
But I promptly put the lid down on those over-disturbing reminiscences.
There should be no _post-mortems_ in this family circle, no jeremiads
over what has gone before. This is the New World and the new age where
life is too crowded for regrets. I am a woman twenty-seven years old,
married and the mother of three children. I am the wife of a rancher
who went bust in a land-boom and is compelled to start life over again.
I must stand beside him, and start from the bottom. I must also carry
along with me all the hopes and prospects of three small lives. This,
however, is something which I refuse to accept as a burden and a
handicap. It is a weight attached to me, of course, but it's only the
stabilizing weight which the tail contributes to the kite, allowing it,
in the end, to fly higher and keep steadier. It won't seem hard to do
without things, when I think of those kiddies of mine, and hard work
should be a great and glorious gift, if it is to give them the start in
life which they deserve. We'll no longer quarrel, Diddums and I, about
whether Dinkie shall go to Harvard or McGill. There'll be much closer
problems than that, I imagine, before Dinkie is out of his knickers.
Fate has shaken us down to realities--and my present perplexity is to
get possession of six new milk-pans and that new barrel-churn, not to
mention the flannelette I simply must have for the Twins' new
nighties!...
_Saturday the Eleventh_
These imperturbable English! I didn't know whether I should take off
my hat to 'em or despise 'em. They seem to come out of a different
mold to what we Americans do. Lady Alicia takes everything as a matter
of course. She seems to have accepted one of the finest ranches west
of the Peg as impassively as an old work-horse accepts a new shoe.
Even the immensity of our western prairie-land hasn't quite stumped
her. She acknowledged that Casa Grande was "quaint," and is obviously
much more interested in Iroquois Annie, the latter being partly a
Redskin, than in my humble self. I went up in her estimation a little,
however, when I coolly accepted one of her cigarettes, of which she
has brought enough to asphyxiate an army. I managed it all right,
though it was nearly four long years since I'd flicked the ash off the
end of one--in Chinkie's yacht going up to Monte Carlo. But I was glad
enough to drop the bigger half of it quietly into my nasturtium
window-box, when the lady wasn't looking.
The lady in question, by the way, seems rather disappointed to find
that Casa Grande has what she called "central heating." About the
middle of next February, when the thermometer is flirting with the
forty-below mark, she may change her mind. I suppose the lady expected
to get a lodge and a deer-park along with her new home, to say nothing
of a picture 'all--open to the public on Fridays, admission one
shilling--and a family ghost, and, of course, a terrace for the
aforesaid ghost to ambulate along on moonlight nights.
But the thing that's been troubling me, all day long, is: Now that
Lady Alicia has got her hand-made ranch, what's she going to do with
it? I scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on the
matter, since she seems intent on regarding me as merely a bit of the
landscape. The disturbing part of it all is that her aloofness is so
unstudied, so indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me
feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn't so much mind being actively and
martially snubbed, for that would give me something definite and
tangible to grow combative over. But you can't cross swords with a
Scotch mist.
With Dinky-Dunk her ladyship is quite different. I never see that look
of mild impatience in her opaque blue eyes when he is talking. She
flatters him openly, in fact, and a man takes to flattery, of course,
as a kitten takes to cream. Yet with all her outspokenness I am
conscious of a tremendous sense of reservation. Already, more than
once, she has given me a feeling which I'd find it very hard to
describe, a feeling as though we were being suspended over peril by
something very fragile. It's the feeling you have when you stand on
one of those frail little Alpine bridges that can sway so forebodingly
with your own weight and remind you that nothing but a rustic paling
or two separates you from the thousand-footed abysses below your
heels.
But I mustn't paint the new mistress of Casa Grande all in dark
colors. She has her good points, and a mind of her own, and a thought
or two of her own. Dinky-Dunk was asking her about Egypt. That
country, she retorted, was too dead for her. She couldn't wipe out of
her heart the memory of what man had suffered along the banks of the
Nile, during the last four thousand years, what millions of men had
suffered there because of religion and war and caste.
"I could never be happy in a country of dead races and dead creeds and
dead cities," protested Lady Alicia, with more emotion than I had
expected. "And those are the things that always stare me in the face
out there."
This brought the talk around to the New World.
"I rather fancy that a climate like yours up here," she coolly
observed, "would make luxuries of furniture and dress, and convert
what should be the accidents of life into essentials. You will always
have to fight against nature, you know, and that makes man attach more
importance to the quest of comfort. But when he lives in the tropics,
in a surrounding that leaves him with few desires, he has time to sit
down and think about his soul. That's why you can never have a great
musician or a great poet in your land of blizzards, Cousin Dooncan.
You are all kept too busy laying up nuts for the winter. You can't
afford to turn gipsy and go off star-gazing."
"You can if you join the I. W. W.," I retorted. But the allusion was
lost on her.
"I can't imagine a Shelley or a Theocritus up here on your prairie,"
she went on, "or a Marcus Aurelius in the real-estate business in
Winnipeg."
Dinky-Dunk was able to smile at this, though I wasn't.
"But we have the glory of doing things," I contended, "and somebody, I
believe, has summed up your Marcus Aurelius by saying he left behind
him a couple of beautiful books, an execrable son, and a decaying
nation. And we don't intend to decay! We don't live for the moment,
it's true. But we live for To-morrow. We write epics in railway lines,
and instead of working out sonnets we build new cities, and instead of
sitting down under a palm-tree and twiddling our thumbs we turn a
wilderness into a new nation, and grow grain and give bread to the
hungry world where the gipsies don't seem quite able to make both ends
meet!"
I had my say out, and Lady Alicia sat looking at me with a sort of
mild and impersonal surprise. But she declined to argue about it all.
And it was just as well she didn't, I suppose, for I had my Irish up
and didn't intend to sit back and see my country maligned.
But on the way home to the Harris Ranch last night, with Dinky-Dunk
silent and thoughtful, and a cold star or two in the high-arching
heavens over us, I found that my little fire of enthusiasm had burnt
itself out and those crazy lines of John Davidson kept returning to my
mind:
"After the end of all things,
After the years are spent,
After the loom is broken,
After the robe is rent,
Will there be hearts a-beating,
Will friend converse with friend,
Will men and women be lovers,
After the end?"
I felt very much alone in the world, and about as cheerful as a
moonstruck coyote, after those lines had rattled in my empty brain like
a skeleton in the wind. It wasn't until I saw the light in our wickiup
window and heard Bobs' bay of welcome through the crystal-clear
twilight that the leaden weight of desolation slipped off the ledge of
my heart. But as I heard that deep-noted bark of gladness, that
friendly intimation of guardianship unrelaxed and untiring, I
remembered that I had one faithful and unexacting friend, even though
it was nothing better than a dog.
_Sunday the Twelfth_
Dinky-Dunk rather surprised me to-day by asking why I was so
stand-offish with his Cousin Allie. I told him that I wasn't in the
habit of curling up like a kitten on a slab of Polar ice.
"But she really likes you, Tabbie," my husband protested. "She wants
to know you and understand you. Only you keep intimidating her, and
placing her at a disadvantage."
This was news to me. Lady Alicia, I'd imagined, stood in awe of
nothing on the earth beneath nor the heavens above. She can speak very
sharply, I've already noticed, to Struthers, when the occasion arises.
And she's been very calm and deliberate, as I've already observed, in
her manner of taking over Casa Grande. For she _has_ formally taken it
over, Dinky-Dunk tells me, and in a day or two we all have to trek to
town for the signing of the papers. She is, apparently, going to run
the ranch on her own hook, and in her own way. It will be well worth
watching.
I was rather anxious to hear the particulars of the transfer to Lady
Allie, but Dinky-Dunk seemed a little reluctant to go into details,
and I didn't intend to make a parade of my curiosity. I can bide my
time.... Yesterday I put on my old riding-suit, saddled Paddy, fed the
Twins to their last mouthful, and went galloping off through the mud
to help bring the cattle over to the Harris Ranch. I was a sight, in
that weather-stained old suit and ragged toppers, even before I got
freckled and splashed with prairie-mud. I was standing up in the
stirrups laughing at Francois, who'd had a bad slip and fallen in a
puddle just back of our old corral, when her Ladyship came out. She
must have taken me for a drunken cowboy who'd rolled into a sheep-dip,
for my nose was red and my old Stetson sombrero was crooked on the
back of my head and even my hair was caked with mud. She called to me,
rather imperiously, so I went stampeding up to her, and let Paddy
indulge in that theatrical stop-slide of his, on his haunches, so that
it wasn't until his nose was within two feet of her own that she could
be quite sure she wasn't about to be run down.
Her eyes popped a little when she saw it was a woman on Paddy, though
she'd refused to show a trace of fear when we went avalanching down on
her. Then she studied my get-up.
"I should rather like to ride that way," she coolly announced.
"It's the only way," I told her, making Paddy pirouette by pressing a
heel against his short-ribs. She meant, of course, riding astride,
which must have struck her as the final word in audacity.
"I like your pony," next remarked Lady Alicia, with a somewhat wistful
intonation in her voice.
"He's a brick," I acknowledged. Then I swung about to help Francois
head off a bunch of rampaging steers. "Come and see us," I called back
over my shoulder. If Lady Alicia answered, I didn't have time to catch
what she said.
But that romp on Paddy has done me good. It shook the solemnity out of
me. I've just decided that I'm not going to surrender to this
middle-aged Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire stuff before my time. I'm going to
refuse to grow old and poky. I'm going to keep the spark alive, the
sacred spark of youth, even though folks write me down as the biggest
loon west of the Dirt Hills. So dear Lord--this is my prayer--whatever
You do to me, keep me _alive_. O God, don't let me, in Thy divine mercy,
be a Dead One. Don't let me be a soured woman with a self-murdered soul.
Keep the wine of youth in my body and the hope of happiness in my heart.
Yea, permit me deeply to live and love and laugh, so that youth may
abide in my bones, even as it did in that once-renowned Duchess of
Lienster,
Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
To die of a fall from a cherry-tree then!
My poor old Dinky-Dunk, by the way, meanders about these days so moody
and morose it's beginning to disturb me. He's at the end of his
string, and picked clean to the bone, and I'm beginning to see that
it's my duty to buoy that man up, to nurse him back into a respectable
belief in himself. His nerves are a bit raw, and he's not always
responsible for his manners. The other night he came in tired, and
tried to read, when Poppsy and Pee-Wee were both going it like the
Russian Balalaika. To tell the truth, their little tummies were a bit
upset, because the food purveyor had had too strenuous a day to be
regular in her rounds.
"Can't you keep those squalling brats quiet?" Dinky-Dunk called out to
me. It came like a thunder clap. It left me gasping, to think that he
could call his own flesh and blood "squalling brats." And I was
shocked and hurt, but I decided not to show it.
"Will somebody kindly page Lord Chesterfield?" I quietly remarked as I
went to the Twins and wheeled them out to the kitchen, where I gave
them hot peppermint and rubbed their backs and quieted them down
again.
I suppose there's no such thing as a perfect husband. That's a lesson
we've all got to learn, the same as all children, apparently, have to
find out that acorns and horse-chestnuts aren't edible. For the nap
wears off men the same as it does off clothes. I dread to have to
write it down, but I begin to detect thinnesses in Dinky-Dunk, and a
disturbing little run or two in the even web of his character. But he
knows when he's played Indian and attempts oblique and rather
shamefaced efforts to make amends, later on, when it won't be too
noticeable. Last night, as I sat sewing, our little Dinkie must have
had a bad dream, for he wakened from a sound sleep with a scream of
terror. Dinky-Dunk went to him first, and took him up and sang to him,
and when I glanced in I saw a rumply and tumbly and sleepy-eyed tot
with his kinky head against his father's shoulder. As I took up my
sewing again and heard Dinky-Dunk singing to his son, it seemed a
proud and happy and contented sort of voice. It rose and fell in that
next room, in a sort of droning bass, and for the life of me I can't
tell why, but as I stopped in my sewing and sat listening to that
father singing to his sleepy-eyed first-born, it brought the sudden
tears to my eyes. It has been a considerable length of time, _en
passant_, since I found myself sitting down and pumping the brine. I
must be getting hardened in my old age.
_Tuesday the Fourteenth_
Lady Allie sent over for Dinky-Dunk yesterday morning, to fix the
windmill at Casa Grande. They'd put it out of commission in the first
week, and emptied the pressure-tank, and were without water, and were
as helpless as a couple of canaries. We have a broken windmill of our
own, right here at home, but Diddums went meekly enough, although he
was in the midst of his morning work--and work is about to loom big
over this ranch, for we're at last able to get on the land. And the
sooner you get on the land, in this latitude, the surer you are of
your crop. We daren't shave down any margins of chance. We need that
crop....
I am really beginning to despair of Iroquois Annie. She is the only
thing I can get in the way of hired help out here, and yet she is
hopeless. She is sullen and wasteful, and she has never yet learned to
be patient with the children. I try to soften and placate her with the
gift of trinkets, for there is enough Redskin in her to make her
inordinately proud of anything with a bit of flash and glitter to it.
But she is about as responsive to actual kindness as a diamond-back
rattler would be, and some day, if she drives me too far, I'm going
off at half-cock and blow that breed into mince-meat.
By the way, I can see myself writ small in little Dinkie, my moods and
waywardnesses and wicked impulses, and sudden chinooks of tenderness
alternating with a perverse sort of shrinking away from love itself,
even when I'm hungering for it. I can also catch signs of his pater's
masterfulness cropping out in him. Small as he is, he disturbs me by
that combative stare of his. It's almost a silent challenge I see in
his eyes as he coolly studies me, after a proclamation that he will be
spanked if he repeats a given misdeed.