Chapter 15

It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. It was a trivial misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended to be.

"I'm afraid I've rather outlived that period of Bashi-Bazookism," I coolly and quietly explained to my lord and master. "You may have the good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than the loss of a crop."

"Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked Dinky-Dunk, with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.

"If the shoe fits, put it on," I observed.

"But there are certain things I want to explain," he tried to argue, with the look of a man confronted by an overdraft on his patience.

"Somebody has said that a friend," I reminded him, "is a person to whom one need never explain. And any necessity for explanation, you see, removes us even from the realm of friendship."

"But, hang it all, I'm your husband," protested my obtuse and somewhat indignant interlocutor.

"We all have our misfortunes," I found the heart, or rather the absence of heart, to remark.

"I'm afraid this isn't a very good beginning," said Dinky-Dunk, his dignity more ruffled than ever.

"It's not a beginning at all," I reminded him. "It's more like an ending."

That kept him silent for quite a long while.

"I suppose you despise me," he finally remarked.

"It's scarcely so active an emotion," I tried to punish him by retorting.

"But I at least insist on explaining what took me to the Coast," he contended.

"That is scarcely necessary," I told him.

"Then you know?" he asked.

"I imagine the whole country-side does," I observed.

He made a movement of mixed anger and protest.

"I went to Vancouver because the government had agreed to take over my Vancouver Island water-front for their new shipbuilding yards. If you've forgotten just what that means, I'd like to remind you that there's----"

"I don't happen to have forgotten," I interrupted, wondering why news which at one time would have set me on fire could now leave me quite cold. "But what caused the government to change its mind?"

"Allie!" he said, after a moment's hesitation, fixing a slightly combative eye on mine.

"She seems to have almost unlimited powers," I observed as coolly as I could, making an effort to get my scattered thoughts into line again.

"On the contrary," Dinky-Dunk explained with quite painful politeness, "it was merely the accident that she happened to know the naval officer on the Imperial Board. She was at Banff the week the board was there, and she was able to put in a good word for the Vancouver Island site. And the Imperial verdict swung our own government officials over."

"You were lucky to have such an attractive wirepuller," I frigidly announced.

"The luck wasn't altogether on my side," Dinky-Dunk almost as frigidly retorted, "when you remember that it was giving her a chance to get rid of a ranch she was tired of!"

I did my best to hide my surprise, but it wasn't altogether a success. The dimensions of the movement, apparently, were much greater than my poor little brain had been able to grasp.

"Do you mean it's going to let you take Casa Grande off her ladyship's hands?" I diffidently inquired.

"That's already arranged for," Dinky-Dunk quite casually informed me. We were a couple of play-actors, I felt, each deep in a role of his own, each stirred much deeper than he was ready to admit, and each a little afraid of the other.

"You are to be congratulated," I told Dinky-Dunk, chilled in spite of myself, never for a moment quite able to forget the sinister shadow of Lady Alicia which lay across our trodden little path of everyday life.

"It was you and the kiddies I was thinking of," said my husband, in a slightly remote voice. And the mockery of that statement, knowing what I knew, was too much for me.

"I'm sorry you didn't think of us a little sooner," I observed. And I had the bitter-sweet reward of seeing a stricken light creep up into Dinky-Dunk's eyes.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

But I didn't answer that question of his. Instead, I asked him another.

"Did you know that Lady Alicia came here and announced that she was in love with you?" I demanded, resolved to let the light in to that tangled mess which was fermenting in the silo of my soul.

"Yes, I know," he quietly affirmed, as he hung his head. "She told me about it. And it was _awful_. It should never have happened. It made me ashamed even--even to face you!"

"That was natural," I agreed, with my heart still steeled against him.

"It makes a fool of a man," he protested, "a situation like that."

"Then the right sort of man wouldn't encourage it," I reminded him, "wouldn't even permit it." And still again I caught that quick movement of impatience from him.

"What's that sort of thing to a man of my age?" he demanded. "When you get to where I am you don't find love looming so large on the horizon. What--"

"No, it clearly doesn't loom so large," I interrupted.

"What you want then," went on Dinky-Dunk, ignoring me, "is power, success, the consolation of knowing you're not a failure in life. _That's_ the big issue, and that's the stake men play big for, and play hard for."

It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what I myself had been playing hard for--but I had lost. And it had left my heart dry. It had left my heart so dry that my own Dinky-Dunk, standing there before me in the open sunlight, seemed millions of miles removed from me, mysteriously depersonalized, as remote in spirit as a stranger from Mars come to converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system.

"Then you've really achieved your ambition," I reminded my husband, as he stood studying a face which I tried to keep tranquil under his inspection.

"Oh, no," he corrected, "only a small part of it."

"What's the rest?" I indifferently inquired, wondering why most of life's victories, after all, were mere Pyrrhic victories.

"You," declared Dinky-Dunk, with a reckless light in his eyes, "You, and the children, now that I'm in a position to give them what they want."

"But _are_ you?" I queried.

"Well, that's what I'm coming back to demonstrate," he found the courage to assert.

"To them?" I asked.

"To all of you!" he said with a valiant air of finality.

I told him it was useless, but he retorted that he didn't propose to have that stop him. I explained to him that it would be embarrassing, but he parried that claim by protesting that sacrifice was good for the soul. I asserted that it would be a good deal of a theatricality, under the circumstances, but he attempted to brush this aside by stating that what he had endured for years might be repeated by patience.

So Dinky-Dunk is coming back to Alabama Ranch! It sounds momentous, and yet, I know in my heart, that it doesn't mean so very much. He will sleep under the same roof with me as remote as though he were reposing a thousand miles away. He will breakfast and go forth to his work, and my thoughts will not be able to go with him. He will return with the day's weariness in his bones, but a weariness which I can neither fathom nor explain in my own will keep my blood from warming at the sound of his voice through the door. Being still his wife, I shall have to sew and mend and cook for him. _That_ is the penalty of prairie life; there is no escape from propinquity.

But that life can go on in this way, indefinitely, is unthinkable. What will happen, I don't know. But there will have to be a change, somewhere. There will have to be a change, but I am too tired to worry over what it will be. I'm too tired even to think of it. That's something which lies in the lap of Time.

_Saturday the Twenty-fifth_

Dinky-Dunk is back. At least he sleeps and breakfasts at home, but the rest of the time he is over at Casa Grande getting his crop cut. He's too busy, I fancy, to pay much attention to our mutual lack of attention. But the compact was made, and he seems willing to comply with it. The only ones who fail to regard it are the children. I hadn't counted on them. There are times, accordingly, when they somewhat complicate the situation. It didn't take them long to get re-acquainted with their daddy. I could see, from the first, that he intended to be very considerate and kind with them, for I'm beginning to realize that he gets a lot of fun out of the kiddies. Pee-Wee will go to him, now, from anybody. He goes with an unmistakable expression of "Us-men-have-got-to-stick-together" satisfaction on his little face.

But Dinky-Dunk's intimacies, I'm glad to say, do not extend beyond the children. Three days ago, though, he asked me about turning his hogs in on my land. It doesn't sound disturbingly emotional. But if what's left of my crop, of course, is any use to Duncan, he's welcome to it....

I looked for that letter which I wrote to Dinky-Dunk several weeks ago, looked for it for an hour and more this morning, but haven't succeeded in finding it. I was sure that I'd put it between the pages of the old ranch journal. But it's not there.

Last night before I turned in I read all of Meredith's _Modern Love_. It was nice to remember that once, at Box Hill, I'd felt the living clasp of the hand which had written that wonderful series of poems. But never before did I quite understand that elaborated essay in love-moods. It came like a friendly voice, like an understanding comrade who knows the world better than I do, and brought me comfort, even though the sweetness of it was slightly acidulated, like a lemon-drop. And as for myself, I suppose I'll continue to

"............sit contentedly And eat my pot of honey on the grave."

_Sunday the Second_

I have written to Uncle Carlton again, asking him about my Chilean Nitrate shares. If the company's reorganized and the mines opened again, surely my stock ought to be worth something.

The days are getting shorter, and the hot weather is over for good, I hope. I usually like autumn on the prairie, but the thought of fall, this year, doesn't fill me with any inordinate joy. I'm unsettled and atonic, and it's just as well, I fancy, that I'm weaning the Twins.

It's not the simple operation I'd expected, but the worst is already over. Pee-Wee is betraying unmistakable serpentine powers, and it's no longer safe to leave him on a bed. Poppsy is a fastidious little lady, and apparently a bit of a philosopher. She is her father's favorite. Whinstane Sandy is loyal to little Dinkie, and, now that the evenings are longer, regales him on stories, stories which the little tot can only half understand. But they must always be about animals, and Whinnie seems to run to wolves. He's told the story of the skater and the wolves, with personal embellishments, and Little Red Riding-Hood in a version all his own, and last night, I noticed, he recounted the tale of the woman in the sleigh with her children when the pack of wolves pursued her. And first, to save herself and her family, she threw her little baby out to the brutes. And when they had gained on her once more, she threw out her little girl, and then her little boy, and then her biggest boy of ten. And when she reached a settlement and told of her deliverance, the Oldest Settler took a wood-ax and clove her head clear down to the shoulder-blades--the same, of course, being a punishment for saving herself at the expense of her little ones.

My Dinkie sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his _Ivan Ivanovitch_.

Dinky-Dunk, wandering in on the tail end of it, remarked: "That's a fine story, that is, with all those coyotes singing out there!"

"The chief objection to it," I added, "is that the lady didn't drop her husband over first."

Dinky-Dunk looked down at me as he filled his pipe.

"But the husband, as I remember the story, had been left behind to do what a mere husband could to save their home," my spouse quietly reminded me.

_Monday the Tenth_

There was a heavy frost last night. It makes me feel that summer is over. Dinky-Dunk asked me yesterday why I disliked Casa Grande and never ventured over into that neighborhood. I evaded any answer by announcing that there were very few things I liked nowadays....

Only once, lately, have we spoken of Lady Allie. It was Dinky-Dunk, in fact, who first brought up her name in speaking of the signing of the transfer-papers.

"Is it true," I found the courage to ask, "that you knew your cousin quite intimately as a girl?"

Dinky-Dunk laughed as he tamped down his pipe.

"Yes, it _must_ have been quite intimately," he acknowledged. "For when she was seven and I was nine we went all the way down Teignmouth Hill together in an empty apple-barrel--than which nothing that I know of could possibly be more intimate!"

I couldn't join him in his mirth over that incident, for I happened to remember the look on Lady Alicia's face when she once watched Dinky-Dunk mount his mustang and ride away. "Aren't men lawds of creation?" she had dreamily inquired. "Not after you've lived with them for a couple of years," I had been heartless enough to retort, just to let her know that I didn't happen to have a skin like a Douglas pine.

_Sunday the Sixteenth_

I've just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It's a very long and businesslike letter, in which he goes into details as to how our company has been incorporated in _La Association de Productores de Salitre de Chile_, with headquarters at Valparaiso. It's a new and rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies that with nitrate at ten shillings per Spanish quintal the returns on the investment, under the newer conditions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only, involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent. Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, once the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America--and much more along the same lines.

That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have made me happy. But it didn't. I couldn't quite react to it. As usual, I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that, whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn't come with sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence. I've even been wondering if there's any news that could. For the one thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it's youth, golden youth, that is slipping away from me?

It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow myself to become antiquated. I'm on the wrong track, in some way, but before I dry up into a winter apple I'm going to find out where the trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want life, Life--and oodles of it....

Among other things, by the way, which I've been missing are books. They at least are to be had for the buying, and I've decided there's no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I've had a "serious but not fatal wound," as the newspapers say, to my personal vanity, but there's no use in letting go of things, at my time of life. Pee-Wee, I'm sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that are slightly disturbing. Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked at me with widening eyes. "Mummy," he called out, "I've got a m'sheen inside me!" And Whinnie's explorations are surely worth emulating. I too have a machine inside me which some day I'll be compelled to rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump, though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the emotions.

_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_

Dinky-Dunk is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, as a modern army of assault ignores a fortress by simply circling about its forbidding walls and leaving it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliberately and patiently making love to my children. He is entrenching himself in their affection.

He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me to interfere. Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old Dinky-Dunk's face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me, in turn, of what a difference there is between your first child and the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year, but by the month.

It's not that I love the Twins less. It's only that the novelty has passed. And in one way it's a good thing, for over your second and third baby you worry less. You know what is needed, and how to do it. You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. You know the way you have to go, henceforth, and you follow it. It is less a Great Adventure, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double-pointed tooth of Anxiety does not rowel quite so often at the core of your heart.... I've been wondering if, with the coming of the children, there is not something which slips away from the relationship between husband and wife. That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn't big enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And it _was_ Nature, you have to admit when you come to look it honestly in the face, Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I hadn't loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. They would have been left to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that lonely and twilit No-Man's Land of barren love and unwanted babes. And the only thing that keeps me human, nowadays, that keeps me from being a woman with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and bones and dehydrated ham-strings, is my kiddies. The thought of them, at any time of the day, can put a cedilla under my heart to soften it....

Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the children when they have their picture taken, is already deep in elaborating preparations for that expedition. She is improvising an English nurse's uniform and has asked if there might be one picture of her and the children.

_Tuesday the Fifteenth_

The children have been away for a whole day, the first time in family history. And oh, what a difference it makes in this lonely little prairie home of ours! The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of it all was something quite beyond my imagination. I know now that I could never live apart from them. Whatever happens, I shall not be separated from my kiddies....

I spent my idle time in getting Peter's music-box in working order. Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, thoughtlessly sat on the package of records and broke three of them. I've been trying over the others. They sound tinny and flat, and I'm beginning to suspect I haven't my sound-box adjusted right. I've a hunger to hear good music. And without quite knowing it, I've been craving for city life again, for at least a taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a cloudy creature, and accused me of having a mutinous mouth. Men seem to think that love should be like an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of industrious winding-up rewarded by a long week of undeviating devotion.

_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_

The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and my being a mere spectator of the big and busy final act of the season's drama reminds me of three years ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however, is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only woman in a circle of nine active-bodied men.

I begin to see that it's true what Dinky-Dunk said about business looming bigger in men's lives than women are apt to remember. He's working hard, and his neck's so thin that his Adam's apple sticks out like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running much higher than he had figured. He's as keen as ever he was for power and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he's scheming for it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't deliberately _use_ his cousin Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. Yet Dinky-Dunk, with all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous. I feel sure of that.

He became philosophical, the other day when I complained about the howling of the coyotes, and protested it was these horizon-singers that kept the prairie clean. He even argued that the flies which seem such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing in disguise, since the unmolested animals over-eat when feed is plentiful and get black-rot. So out of suffering comes wisdom and out of endurance comes fortitude!

_Thursday the Sixth_

On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the season, or, rather, before the season. It wasn't much of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was greatly worked up at the sight of it and I finally put on his little reefer and his waders and let him go out in it. But the weather had moderated, the snow turned to slush, and when I rescued Dinkie from rolling in what looked to him like a world of ice-cream he was a very wet boy.

On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and strong, woke up with a tight little chest-cough that rather frightened me. I went over to his crib and covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a couple of hours later, the cough had grown tighter. It turned into a sort of sharp bark. And this time I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got busy, rubbing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the skin was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry pectoral which I still had on the upper shelf of the cupboard.

When morning came he was no better. He seemed in a stupor, rousing only to bark into his pillow. I called Dinky-Dunk in, before he left in the pouring rain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indifferently, "Yes, the boy's got a cold all right." But that was all.

When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot gruel, but he declined it. He refused to eat, in fact, and remembering what Peter had once said about my first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect that I had a very sick boy on my hands.