The Prairie Child Part 13

"No, no," I told him. "It has to be a human being."

"Then Poppsy," he admitted.

"And who next?" I persisted.

"Whinnie!" exclaimed my son.

But I had to shake my head at that.

"Aren't you forgetting somebody very important?" I hinted.

"Who?" he asked, deepening just a trifle in color.

"How about daddy?" I asked. "Isn't it about time for him there?"

"Yes, daddy," he dutifully repeated. But his face cleared, and my own heart clouded, as he went through the empty rite.

d.i.n.kie was studying that clouded face of mine, by this time, and I began to feel embarra.s.sed. But I was determined to see the thing through. It was hard, though, for me to say what I wanted to.

"Isn't there somebody, somebody else you are especially fond of?" I inquired, as artlessly as I could. And it hurt like cold steel to think that I had to fence with my own boy in such a fashion.

d.i.n.kie looked at me and then he looked out of the window.

"I think I like Susie," he finally admitted.

"But in your own life, d.i.n.kie, in your work and your play, in your school, isn't--isn't there _somebody_?" I found the courage to ask.

d.i.n.kie's face grew thoughtful. For just a moment, I thought I caught a touch of the Holbein Astronomer in it.

"There's lots of boys and girls I like," he noncommittally a.s.serted.

And I began to see that it was hopeless. My boy had reservations from his own mother, reservations which I would be compelled to respect. He was no longer entirely and unequivocally mine. There was a wild-bird part of him which had escaped, which I could never recapture and cage again. The thing that his father had foretold was really coming about.

My laddie would some day grow out of my reach. I would lose him. And my happiness, which had been trying its wings for the last few days, came down out of the sky like a shot duck. All day long, for Susie's sake, I've tried to be light-hearted. But my efforts make me think of a poor old worn-out movie-hall piano doing its pathetic level best to be magnificently blithe. It's a meaningless clatter in a meaningless world.

_Thursday the Eleventh_

It ought to be winter, according to the almanac, but our wonderful Indian Summer weather continues. Susie and I have been "blue-doming"

to-day. We converted ourselves into a mounted escort for Gershom and the kiddies as far as the schoolhouse, and then rode on to Dead Horse Lake, in the hope of getting a few duck. But the weather was too fine, though I managed to bring down a couple of mallard, after one of which Susie, having removed her shoes and stockings, waded knee-deep in the slough. She enjoys that sort of thing: it's something so entirely new to the child of the city. And Susie, I might add, is already looking much better. She is sleeping soundly, at last, and has promised me there shall be no more night-caps of veronal. What is more, I am getting to know her better--and I have several revisions to make.

In the first place, it is not the family divorce cloud that has been darkening Susie's soul. She let the cat out of the bag, on the way home this afternoon. Susie has been in love with a man who didn't come up to expectations. She was very much in love, apparently, and disregarded what people said about him. Then, much to her surprise, her Uncle Peter took a hand in the game. It must have been rather a violent hand, for a person so habitually placid. But Peter, apparently, wasn't altogether ignorant of the club-talk about the young rake in question. At any rate, he decided it was about time to act. Susie declined to explain in just what way he acted. Yet she admits now that Peter was entirely in the right and she, for a time, was entirely in the wrong. But it is rather like having one's appendix cut out, she protests, without an anesthetic. It takes time to heal such wounds. Susie obviously was bowled over. She is still suffering from shock. But I like the spirit of the girl. She's not the kind that one disappointment is going to kill. And prairie life is already doing her good. For she announced this morning that her clothes were positively getting tight for her. And such clothes they are! Such delicate silks and cobwebs of lace and pale-pink contraptions of satin! Such neatly tailored skirts and short-vamped shoes and thing-a-ma-jigs of Irish linen and platinum and gold trinkets to deck out her contemptuous little body with. For Susie takes them all with a shrug of indifference. She loves to slip on my oil-stained old hunting-jacket and my weather-beaten old golf-boots and go meandering about the range.

Another revision which I am compelled to make is that while I expected to be the means of cheering Susie up, Susie has quite unconsciously been the means of rejuvenating _me_. I think I've been able to catch at least a hollow echo of her youth from her. I _know_ I have. Two days ago, when we motored in to Buckhorn with my precious marketing of b.u.t.ter and eggs--and Susie never before quite realized how b.u.t.ter and eggs reached the ultimate consumer--a visiting Odd-Fellows' band was playing a two-step on the balcony of the Commercial Hotel. Susie and I stopped the car, and while Struthers stared at us aghast from the back seat, we two-stepped together on the main street of Buckhorn. We just let the music go to our heads and danced there until the crowd in front of the band began to right-about-face and a cowboy in chaps brazenly announced that he was Susie's next partner. So we danced to our running-board, stepped into our devil-wagon, and headed for home, in the icy aura of Struthers' sustained indignation.

I begin to get terribly tired of propriety. I don't know whether it's Struthers, or Struthers and Gershom combined, or having to watch one's step so when there are children about one. But I'm tired of being respectable. I'm tired of holding myself in. I warn the world that I'm about ready for anything, anything from horse-stealing to putting a dummy-lady in Whinstane Sandy's bed. I don't believe there's any wickedness that's beyond me. I'm a reckless and abandoned woman. And if that cold-blooded old Covenanter doesn't get home from Calgary pretty soon I'm going buckboard riding with Bud Teetzel!

I've been asking Susie if we measure up to her expectations. She said, in reply, that we fitted in to a T. For her Uncle Peter, she acknowledged, had already done us in oils on the canvas of her curiosity. She accused me, however, of reveling in that primitiveness which is the last resort of the sophisticated--like the log cabins the city folk fashion for themselves when they get up in the Adirondacks.

And Casa Grande, she further amended, impressed her as being almost disappointingly comfortable.

After that Susie fell to talking about Peter. She is affectionately contemptuous toward her uncle, protesting that he's forever throwing away his chances and letting other people impose on his good nature.

It was lucky, averred Susie, that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. For he was a hopeless espouser of Lost Causes. She inclined to the belief that he should have married young, should have married young and had a flock of children, for he was crazy about kiddies.

I asked Susie what sort of wife Peter should have chosen. And Susie said Peter should have hitched up with a good, capable, practical-minded woman who could manage him without letting him know he was being managed. There was a widow in the East, acknowledged his niece, who had been angling for poor Peter for years. And Peter was still free, Susie suspected, because in the presence of that widow he emulated Hamlet and always put an antic disposition on. Did the most absurd things, and appeared to be little more than half-witted. The widow in question had even spoken to Susie about her uncle's eccentricities and intimated that his segregative manner of life might in the end affect his intellect!

The thought of Peter marrying rather gave me a shock. It was like being told by some authority in astronomy that your earth was about to collide with Wernecke's Comet. And, vain peac.o.c.k that I was, I rather liked to think of Peter going through life mourning for me, alone and melancholy and misogynistic for the rest of his days! Yet there must be dozens, there must be hundreds, of attractive girls along the paths which he travels. I found the courage to mention this fact to Susie, who merely laughed and said her Uncle Peter would probably be saved by his homeliness. But I can't say that I ever regarded Peter Ketley as homely. He may never carry off a blue ribbon from a beauty show, but he has the sort of face that a woman of sense can find tremendous appeal in. Your flapper type, I suppose, will always succ.u.mb to the curled Romeo, but it's the ruggeder and stronger man with the bright mind and the kindly heart who will always appeal to the clearer-eyed woman who has come to know life.... Susie has told me, by the way, that Josie Langdon and her husband quarreled on their honeymoon, quarreled the first week in Paris and right across the Continent for the momentous reason that Josie _insisted on putting sugar in her claret_!

I've been doing a good deal of thinking, the last few hours. I've been wondering if I'm a Lost Cause. And I've been wondering why women should want to put sugar in their claret. If it's made to be bitter, why not accept the bitterness, and let it go at that?

_Friday the Twelfth_

d.i.n.ky-Dunk has just sent word that he will be home to-morrow night and asks if I'll mind motoring in to Buckhorn for him.

It impresses me as a non-committal little message, yet it means more to me than I imagined. _My husband is coming home._

Susie has been eying me all afternoon, with a pucker of perplexity about her lapis-lazuli eyes. We are busy, getting things to rights.

And I've made an appallingly long list of what I must buy in Buckhorn to-morrow. Even Struthers has perked up a bit, and is making furtive preparations for a sage-tea wash in the morning.

_Tuesday the Sixteenth_

Why is life so tangled up? Why can't we be either completely happy or completely the other way? Why must wretchedness come sandwiched in between slices of hope and contentment, and why must happiness be haunted by some ghostly echo of pain? And why can't people be all good or all bad, so that the tares and the wheat never get mixed up together and make a dismal mess of our harvest of Expectation?

These are some of the questions I've been asking myself since Duncan went back to Calgary last night. He stayed only two days. And they were days of terribly complicated emotions. I went to the station for him, on Sat.u.r.day, and in my impatience to be there on time found myself with an hour and a half of waiting, an hour and a half of wandering up and down that ugly open platform in the clear cool light of evening. There was a hint of winter in the air, an intimidating northern nip which made the thought of a warm home and an open fire a consolation to the chilled heart. And I felt depressed, in spite of everything I could do to bolster up my courage. In the first place, I couldn't keep from thinking of Alsina Teeswater. And in the second place, never, never on the prairie, have I watched a railway-train come in or a railway-train pa.s.s away without feeling lonesome. It reminds me how big is the outside world, how infinitesimal is Chaddie McKail and her unremembered existence up here a thousand miles from Nowhere! It humbles me. It reminds me that I have in some way failed to mesh in with the bigger machinery of life.

I had a lump in my throat, by the time d.i.n.ky-Dunk's train pulled in and I saw him swing down from the car-steps. I made for him through the crowd, in fact, with my all but forgotten Australian crawl-stroke, and accosted him with rather a briny kiss and so tight a hug that he stood back and studied my face. He wanted to ask, I know, if anything had happened. He was obviously startled, and just a trifle embarra.s.sed. My lump, by this time, was bigger than ever, but I had to swallow it in secret. d.i.n.ky-Dunk, I found, was changed in many ways.

He was tired, and he seemed older. But he was prosperous-looking, in brand-new raiment, and reported that luck was still with him and everything was flourishing. Give him one year, he protested, and he'd show them he wasn't a piker.

I waited for him to ask about the children, but his mind seemed full of his Barcona coal business. The railway was learning to treat them half decently and the coal was coming out better than they'd hoped for. They'd a franchise to light the town, developing their power from the mine screenings, and what they got from this would be so much velvet. And he had a chance to take over one of the finest houses in Mount Royal, if he had a family along with him to excuse such magnificence.

That final speech of his brought me up short. It was dark along the trail, and dark in my heart. And more things than one had happened that day to humble me. So I took one hand off the wheel and put it on his knee.

"Do you want me to go to Calgary?" I asked him.

"That's up to you," he said, without budging an inch. He said it, in fact, with a steel-cold finality which sent my soul cringing back into its kennel. And the trail ahead of me seemed blacker than ever.

"I'll have to have time to think it over," I said with a composure which was nine-tenths pretense.

"Some wives," he remarked, "are willing to help their husbands."