Chapter 6

As I've already said, summer is here. But it doesn't seem to mean as much to me as it used to, for my interests have been taken away from the land and more and more walled up about my family. Dinky-Dunk's grain, however, has come along satisfactorily, and there is every promise of a good crop. Yet this entirely fails to elate my husband. Every small mischance is a sort of music-cue nowadays to start him singing about the monotony of prairie-life. Ranching, he protests, isn't the easy game it used to be, now that cattle can't be fattened on the open range and now that wheat itself is so much lower in price. One has to work for one's money, and watch every dollar. And my Diddums keeps railing about the government doing so little for the farmer and driving the men off the land into the cities. He has fallen into the habit of protesting he can see nothing much in life as a back-township hay-tosser and that all the big chances are now in the big centers. I had been hoping that this was a new form of spring-fever which would eventually work its way out of his system. But I can see now that the matter is something more mental than physical. He hasn't lost his strength, but he has lost his driving power. He is healthy enough, Heaven knows. Indeed, he impresses me as being a bit too much that way, for he has quite lost his old-time lean and hungry look and betrays a tendency to take on a ventral contour unmistakably aldermanic. He may be heavy, but he is hard-muscled and brown as an old meerschaum. There is a canker, however, somewhere about the core of his heart. And I can see him more clearly than I used to. He is a strong man, but he is a strong man without earnestness. And being such, I vaguely apprehend in him some splendid failure. For the wings that soar to success in this world are plumed with faith and feathered with conviction.

It did not surprise me this morning when Dinky-Dunk announced that he felt a trifle stale and suggested that the family take a holiday on Tuesday and trek out to Dead-Horse Lake for the day. We're to hitch Tumble-Weed and Tithonus to the old prairie-schooner--for we'll be taking side-trails where no car could venture--and pike off for a whole blessed day of care-free picnicking. So to-morrow Struthers and I will be solemnly busy in the kitchen concocting suitable dishes to be taken along in the old grub-box, and when that is over we'll patch together something in the form of bathing-suits, for there'll be a chance for a dip in the slough-water, and our kiddies have arrived at an age imposing fit and proper apparel on their sadly pagan but chastened parents.

_Wednesday the Fifth_

We have had our day at Dead-Horse Lake, but it wasn't the happy event I had anticipated. Worldly happiness, I begin to feel, usually dies a-borning: it makes me think of wistaria-bloom, for invariably one end is withering away before the other end is even in flower. At any rate, we were off early, the weather was perfect, and the sky was an inverted tureen of lazulite blue. Dinkie drove the team part of the way, his dad smoked beside him up on the big driving-seat, and I raised my voice in song until Pauline Augusta fell asleep and had to be bedded down in the wagon-straw and covered with a blanket.

Dead-Horse Lake is really a slough, dolorously named because a near-by rancher once lost eight horses therein, the foolish animals wandering out on ice that was too thin to hold them up.

We were hungry by the time we had hobbled out our teams and gathered wood and made a fire. And after dinner Dinky-Dunk fell asleep and the children and I tried to weave a willow basket, which wasn't a success. Poppsy, in fact, cut her finger with her pater's pocket-knife and because of this physical disability declined to don her bathing-suit when we made ready for the water.

The slough-water was enticingly warm, under the hot July sun, and we ventured in at the west end where a firmer lip of sand and alkali gave us footing. And I enjoyed the swim, although Dinky-Dunk made fun of my improvised bathing-suit. It seemed like old times, to bask lazily in the sun and float about on my back with my fingers linked under my head. My lord and master even acknowledged that my figure wasn't so bad as he had expected, in a lady of my years. I splashed him for that, and he dove for my ankles, and nearly drowned me before I could get away.

It was all light-hearted enough, until Dinky-Dunk happened to notice that Dinkie wasn't enjoying the water as an able-bodied youngster ought. The child, in fact, was afraid of it--which was only natural, remembering what a land-bird he had been all his life. His father, apparently, decided to carry him out and give him a swimming-lesson.

I was on shore by this time, trying to sun out my sodden mop of hair, which I had fondly imagined I could keep dry. I heard Dinkie's cry as his father captured him, and I called out to Dinky-Dunk, through my combed out tresses, to have a heart.

Dinky-Dunk called back that the Indian way, after all, was the only way to teach a youngster. I didn't give much thought to the matter until the two of them were out in deeper water and I heard Dinkie's scream of stark terror. It came home to me then that the Indian method in such things was to toss the child into deep water and leave him there to struggle for his life.

Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, hadn't intended to do quite that. But the boy was naturally terrified at being carried out beyond his depth, and when I looked up I could see his bony little body struggling to free itself. That timidity, I take it, angered the boy's father. And he intended to cure it. He was doing his best, in fact, to fling the clutching and clawing little body away from him when I heard those repeated short screams of horror and promptly took a hand in the matter. Something snapped in my skull, and I saw red. I hated my husband for what he was doing. I hated him for the mere thought that he could do it. And I hated him for calling out that this was what people got by mollycoddling their children.

But that didn't stop me. I made for Dinky-Dunk like a hundred-weight of wildcats. I went through the water like a hell-diver, and without quite knowing what I was doing I got hold of him and tried to garrote him. I don't remember what I said, but I have a hazy idea it was not the most ladylike of language. He stared at me, as I tore Dinkie away from him, stared at me with a hard and slightly incredulous eye. For I'm afraid I was ready to fight with my teeth and nails, if need be, and I suppose my expression wasn't altogether angelic. We were both shaking, at any rate, when we got back to dry land. Dinky-Dunk stood staring at us, for a silent moment or two, with a look of black disgust on his wet face. I'm even afraid it was something more than disgust. Then he strode away and proceeded to dress on the other side of the prairie-schooner, without so much as a second look at us. And then he went off for the horses, absenting himself a quite unnecessary length of time. But I took advantage of that to have a talk with Dinkie.

"Dinkie," I said, "you and I are going to walk out into that water, and this time you're not going to be afraid!"

I could see his eye searching mine, although he did not speak.

I put one hand on the wet tangle of his hair.

"Will you come?" I asked him.

He took a deep breath. Then he looked at the slough-water. Then he looked back into my eyes.

"Yes," he said, though I noticed his lips were not so red as usual.

So side by side and hand in hand the two of us walked out into Dead-Horse Lake. His eyes questioned me, once, as the water came up about his armpits. But he shut his teeth tight and made no effort to draw back. I could see the involuntary spasms of his chest as that terrifying flood closed in about his little body, yet he was ready enough to show me he wasn't a coward. And when I saw that he had met and faced his ordeal I turned him about and led him quietly back to land. We were both prouder and happier for what had just happened. We didn't even need to talk about it, for each knew that the other understood. What still disturbs me, though, is something not in my boy's make-up, but in my own. During the long and silent drive home I noticed a mark on my husband's neck. And I was the termagant who must have put it there, though I have no memory of doing so. But from it I realize that I haven't the control over myself every civilized and self-respecting woman should have. I begin to see that I can't altogether trust myself where my female-of-the-species affections are involved. I'm no better, I'm afraid, than the Bengal tigress which Dinky-Dunk once intimated I was, the Bengal tigress who will battle so unreasoningly for her offspring. It may be natural in mothers, whether they wear fur or feathers or lisle-thread stockings--but it worries me. I was an engine running wild. And when you run wild you are apt to run into catastrophe.

_Friday the Seventh_

Dinky-Dunk is on his dignity. He has put a fence around himself to keep me at a distance, the same as he puts a fence around his haystacks to keep off the cattle. We are coolly polite to each other, but that is as far as it goes. There is something radically wrong with this home, as a home, but I seem helpless to put the matter right. It's about all I have left, in this life of mine, but I'm in some way failing in my duty as a house-wife. "Home" is a beautiful word, and home-life should be beautiful. Any sacrifice and any concession a woman is willing to make to keep that home, and to keep ugliness out of it, ought to be well considered by the judge of her final destinies. I'm ready to do my part, but I don't know where to begin. I'm depressed by a teasing sense of frustration, not quite tangible enough to fight, like cobwebs across your face. It's not easy to carry around the milk of human kindness after they've pretty well kicked the bottom out of your can!

Torrid and tiring are these almost endless summer days. But it's what the grain needs, and who am I to look this gift-horse of heat in the face. Yet there are two things, I must confess, in which the prairie is sadly lacking. One is trees; and the other is shade, the cool green sun-filtering shade of woodlands where birds can sing and mossy little brooks can babble. I've been longing all day for just an hour up in an English cherry tree, with the pectoral smell of the leaves against my face and the chance of eating at least half my own weight of fresh fruit. But even in the matter of its treelessness, I'm told, the prairie is reforming. There are men living who remember when there were no trees west of Brandon, except in the coulees and the river-bottoms. Now that fire no longer runs wild, however, the trees are creeping in, mile by mile and season by season. Already the eastern line of natural bush country reaches to about ten miles from Regina two hundred miles west. Oxbow and Estevan, Dinky-Dunk once told me, had no trees whatever when first settled, though much of that country now has a comfortable array of bluffs. And forestry, of course, is giving nature a friendly push along, in the matter. In the meantime, we have to accommodate ourselves to the conditions that prevail, just as the birds of the air must do. Here the haughty crow of the east is compelled to nest in the low willows of the coulee and raise its young within hand-reach of mother earth. Like our women, it can enjoy very little privacy of family life. The only thing that saves us and the crows, I suppose, is that the men-folks of this country are too preoccupied with their own ends to go around bird-nesting. They are too busy to break up homes, either in willow-tops or women's hearts.... I ought to be satisfied. But I've been dogged, this last day or two, by a longing to be scudding in a single-sticker off Orienta Point again or to motor-cruise once more along the Sound in a smother of spray.

_Thursday the Thirteenth_

Dinky-Dunk has been called to Calgary on business. It sounds simple enough, in these Unpretentious Annals of an Unloved Worm, but I can't help feeling that it marks a trivially significant divide in the trend of things. It depresses me more than I can explain. My depression, I imagine, comes mostly from the manner in which Duncan went. He was matter-of-fact enough about it all, but I can't get rid of the impression that he went with a feeling very much like relief. His manner, at any rate, was not one to invite cross-examination, and he insisted, to the end, on regarding his departure as an every-day incident in the life of a preoccupied rancher. So I caught my cue from him, and was as quiet about it all as he could have wished. But under the crust was the volcano....

The trouble with the tragedies of real life is that they are never clear-cut. It takes art to weave a selvage about them or fit them into a frame. But in reality they're as ragged and nebulous as wind-clouds. The days drag on into weeks, and the weeks into months, and life on the surface seems to be running on, the same as before. There's the same superficial play of all the superficial old forces, but in the depths are dangers and uglinesses and sullen bombs of emotional TNT we daren't even touch!

Heigho! I nearly forgot my _sursum-corda_ role. And didn't old Doctor Johnson say that peevishness was the vice of narrow minds? So here's where we tighten up the belt a bit. But we humans, who come into the world alone, and go out of it alone, are always hungering for companionship which we can't quite find. Our souls are islands, with a coral-reef of reserve built up about them. Last night, when I was patching some of Gershom's undies for him, I wickedly worked an arrow-pierced heart, in red yarn, on one leg of his B.V.D.'s. This morning, I noticed, his eye evaded mine and there was marked constraint in his manner. I even begin to detect unmistakable signs of nervousness in him when we happen to be alone together. And during his last music lesson there was a _vibrata_ of emotion in his voice which made me think of an April frog in a slough-end.

Even my little Dinkie, day before yesterday, asked me if I'd mind not bathing him any more. He explained that he thought he could manage very nicely by himself now. It seemed trivial enough, and yet, in a way, it was momentous. I am to be denied the luxury of tubbing my own child. I, who always loved even the smell of that earthy and soil-grubbing young body, who could love it when it wasn't any too clean and could glory in its musky and animal-like odors as well as the satin-shine of the light on its well-soaped little ribs, must now stand aside before the reservations of sex. It makes me feel that I've reached still another divide on the continent of motherhood.

This afternoon, when I wandered into the study, I observed Dinkie stooping over a Chesterfield pillow with his right hand upraised in a perplexingly dramatic manner. He turned scarlet when he saw me standing there watching him. But the question in my eyes did not escape him.

"I was pr'tendin' to be King Arthur when he found out Guinevere was in love with Launcelot," he rather lamely explained as he walked away to the window and stood staring out over the prairie. But for the life of me I can't understand what should have turned his thoughts into that particular channel of romance. Those are matters with which the young and the innocent should have nothing to do. They are matters, in fact, which it behooves even the old and the wary to eschew.

_Sunday the Sixteenth_

It seems strange, in such golden summer weather, that every man and woman and child on this sunbathed footstool of God shouldn't be sanely and supremely happy.... My husband, I am glad to say, is once more back in his home. And I have been realizing, the last few days, that home is an empty and foolish place without its man about. It's a ship without a captain, a clan without a chief. Yet I found it both depressing and humbling to be brought once more face to face with that particular fact.

Dinky-Dunk, on the other hand, has come back with both an odd sense of elation and an odd sense of estrangement. He has taken on a vague something which I find it impossible to define. He is blither and at the same time he is more solemnly abstracted. And he protests that his journey was a success.

"I'm going to ride two horses, from now on," he announced to me this morning. "I've got my chance and I'm going to grab it. I've swapped my Buckhorn lots for some inside Calgary stuff and I'm lumping everything that's left of my Coast deal for a third-interest in those Barcona coal-fields. There's a quarter of a million waiting there for the people with money enough to swing it. And I'm going to edge in while it's still open."

"But is it possible to ride two horses?" I asked, waywardly depressed by all this new-found optimism.

"It's _got_ to be possible, until we find out which horse is the better traveler," announced Dinky-Dunk. Then he added, without caring to meet my eye: "And I can't say I see much promise of action out of this particular end of the team."

I must have flamed red, at that speech, for I thought at the moment he was referring to me. It was only after I'd turned the thing over in my mind, as I helped Struthers put together our new butter-worker, that I saw he really referred to Casa Grande. But my husband knows I will never part with this ranch. He will never be so foolish as to ask me to do that. Yet one thing is plain. His heart is no longer here. He will stick to this prairie farm of ours only for what he can get out of it.

Dinkie warmed the cockles of my heart by telling me this afternoon when we were out salting the horses that he never wanted to go away from Casa Grande and his mummy. The child, I imagine, had overheard some of this morning's talk. He put his arm around my knees and hugged me tight. And I could see the tawny look come into his hazel eyes speckled with brown. My Dinkie is a prairie child. His soul is not a cramped little soul, but has depth and wideness and undiscerned mysteries.

_Sunday the Thirtieth_

Two weeks have slipped by. Two weeks have gone, and left no record of their going. But a prairie home is a terribly busy one, at times, and it's idleness that leads to the ink-pot. I'm still trying to make the best of a none too promising situation, and I'll thole through, as Whinstane Sandy puts it. After breakfast this morning, in fact, when Pauline Augusta was swept by one of those little gales of lonesomeness to which children and women are so mysteriously subjected, she climbed up into my lap and I rocked her on my shoulder as I might have rocked a baby. Dinky-Dunk wandered in and inspected that performance with a slightly satiric eye. So, resenting his expression, I promptly began to sing:

"Bye-bye, Baby Bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting, To gather up a pile of tin To wrap the Baby Bunting in!"

Dinky-Dunk, when the significance of this lilted flippancy of mine had sunk home, regarded me with a narrowed and none too friendly eye.

"Feeling a bit larkier than usual this morning, aren't you?" he inquired with what was merely a pretense at carelessness.

It was merely a pretense, I know, because we'd been over the old ground the night before, and the excursion hadn't added greatly to the happiness of either of us. Duncan, in fact, had rather horrified me by actually asking if I thought there was a chance of his borrowing eleven thousand dollars from Peter Ketley.

"We can't all trade on that man's generosity!" I cried, without giving much thought to the manner in which I was expressing myself.

"Oh, _that's_ the way you feel about it!" retorted my husband. And I could see his face harden into Scotch granite. I could also see the look of perplexity in my small son's eyes as he stood studying his father.

"Is there anything abnormal in my feeling the way I do?" I parried, resenting the beetling brow of the Dour Man.

"Not if you regard him as your personal and particular fairy god-father," retorted my husband.

"I've no more reason for regarding him as that," I said as calmly as I could, "than I have for regarding him as a professional money-lender."

Duncan must have seen from my face that it would be dangerous to go much further. So he merely shrugged a flippant shoulder.

"They tell me he's got more money than he knows what to do with," he said with a heavy jocularity which couldn't quite rise.

"Then lightening his burdens is a form of charity we can scarcely afford to indulge in," I none too graciously remarked. And I saw my husband's face harden again.

"Well, I've got to have ready money and I've got to have it before the year's out," was his retort. He told me, when the air had cleared a little, that he'd have to open an office in Calgary as soon as harvesting was over. There was already too much at stake to take chances. Then he asked me if there were any circumstances under which I'd be willing to sell Casa Grande. And I told him, quite promptly and quite definitely, that there was none.

"Then how about the old Harris Ranch?" he finally inquired.

"But why should we sell that?" I asked. Alabama Ranch, I knew, was in my name, and I had always regarded it as a sort of nest-egg for the children. It was something put by for a rainy day, something to fall back on, if ill-luck ever overtook us again.

"Because I can double and treble every dollar we get out of it, inside of a year," averred Dinky-Dunk.

"But how am I to know that?" I contended, hating to seem hard and selfish and narrow in the teeth of an ambitious man's enterprise.

"You'd have to take my word for it," retorted my husband.

"But we've more than ourselves to consider," I contended, knowing he'd merely scoff at that harping on the old string of the children.

"That's why I intend to get out of this rut!" he cried with unexpected bitterness. And a few minutes later he made the suggestion that he'd deed Casa Grande entirely over to me if I'd consent to the sale of Alabama Ranch and give him a chance to swing the bigger plans he intended to swing.

The suggestion rather took my breath away. My rustic soul, I suppose, is stupidly averse to change. But I realize that when you travel in double-harness you can't forever pull back on your team-mate. So I've asked Dinky-Dunk to give me a few days to think the thing over.

_Wednesday the Second_

Casa Grande has had an invasion of visitors. It was precious old Percy and his Olga who blew in on us, after being swallowed up by the Big Silence for almost four long years. They came without warning, which is the free and easy way of the westerner, appearing in a mud-splattered and dust-covered Ford that had carried them blithely over two hundred and thirty miles of prairie trails. And with them they brought a quartet of rampageous young buckaroos who promptly turned our sedate homestead into a rodeo.