"But this, Dinky-Dunk, isn't being quite fair to either of us," I
protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see
the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and
illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old
Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave
me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession
Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words
that I'd waited for, this many a month. I was at last facing the scene
I'd again and again dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman's
imagination. But instead of bringing me release, it brought me
heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came involved with the
thin humiliations of compromise. For things could never be the same
again. The blot was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued
away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the bearings of his
soul, had let that grit grind away life's delicate surfaces without
even knowing the wine of abandoned speed. He had been nothing better
than the passive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the cheated
one without even the glory of conquest or the tang of triumph. But he
had been saved for me. He was there within arm's reach of me,
battered, but with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face.
"Take me back, _Babushka_," I could hear his shaken voice imploring.
"I don't deserve it--but I can't go on without you. I can't! I've had
enough of hell. And I need you more than anything else in this world!"
That, I had intended telling him, wasn't playing quite fair. But when
he reached out his hands toward me, exactly as I've seen his own Dinky
do at nightfall when a darkening room left his little spirit hungry
for companionship, something melted like an overlooked chocolate
_mousse_ in my crazy old maternal heart, and before I was altogether
aware of it I'd let my hands slip over his shoulders as he knelt with
his bowed head in my lap. The sight of his colorless and unhappy face
with that indescribable homeless-dog look in his eyes was too much for
me. I gave up. I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were
my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped
when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn't keep a
collection of several big tears from tickling.
"I'm a fool, Dinky-Dunk, a most awful fool," I tried to tell him, when
he gave me a chance to breathe again. "And I've got a temper like a
bob-cat!"
"No, no, Beloved," he protested, "it's not foolishness--it's
nobility!"
I couldn't answer him, for his arms had closed about me again. "And I
love you, Tabbie, I love you with every inch of my body!"
Women are weak. And there is no such thing, so far as I know, as an
altogether and utterly perfect man. So we must winnow strength out of
our weakness, make the best of a bad bargain, and over-scroll the
walls of our life-cell with the illusions which may come to mean as
much as the stone and iron that imprison us. All we can do, we who are
older and wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the meshed
perfection of youth has been bruised and abused and loosened, tighten
up the bearings, and keep as blithely as we can to the worn old road.
For life, after all, is a turn-pike of concession deep-bedded with
compromise. And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So
Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he
can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the
old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm
blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose,
comfortable but not showy. Yet it's the children we really have to
think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may be our own, but the
Future belongs to them. There's a heap of good, though, in my
humble-eyed old Dinky-Dunk, too much good ever to lose him, whatever
may have happened in the days that are over.
_Sunday the Twenty-fourth_
Dinky-Dunk, whom I actually heard singing as he took his bath this
morning, is exercising his paternal prerogative of training little
Dinkie to go to bed without a light. He has peremptorily taken the
matter out of my hands, and is, of course, prodigiously solemn about
it all.
"I'll show that young Turk who's boss around this house!" he
magisterially proclaims almost every night when the youthful wails of
protest start to come from the Blue Room in the East Wing.
And off he goes, with his Holbein's Astronomer mouth set firm and the
fiercest of frowns on his face.
It had a tendency to terrify me, at first. But now I know what a
colossal old fraud and humbug this same soft-hearted and granite-crusted
specimen of humanity can be. For last night, after the usual
demonstration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found big Dunkie
kneeling down beside little Dinkie's bed, with Dinkie's small hand
softly enclosed in his dad's big paw, and Dinkie's yellow head nestled
close against his dad's salt-and-peppery pate.
It made me gulp a little, for some reason or other. So I tiptoed away,
without letting my lord and master know I'd discovered the secret of
that stern mastery of his. And later on Dinky-Dunk himself tiptoed
into Peter's study, farther down the same wing, so that he could, with
a shadow of truth, explain that he'd been looking over some of the
Spanish manuscripts there, when I happened to ask him, on his return,
just what had kept him away so long!