The Prairie Child Part 5

My two bairns had been free of those illnesses and infections which come to the city child, and I was glad enough to remember it. But I was unconscious of d.i.n.ky-Dunk's cynic eye on me as I sat there brooding over my chicks. When he spoke to me, in fact, I was thinking how odd it was that Josie Langdon, on the very day before her marriage, should have carried me down to the lower end of Fifth Avenue and led me into the schoolroom of the Church of the Ascension, and asked me to study Sorolla's _Triste Herencia_ which hangs there.

I can still see that wonderful canvas where the foresh.o.r.e of Valencia, usually so vivacious with running figures and the brightest of sunlight on dancing sails, had been made the wine-dark sea of the pagan questioner with the weight of immemorial human woe to shadow it.

Josie had been asking me about marriage and children, for even she was knowing her more solemn moments in the midst of all that feverishly organized merriment. But I was surprised, when she slipped a hand through my arm, to see a tear run down her nose. So I looked up again at Sorolla's picture of the naked little cripples s.n.a.t.c.hing at their moment's joy along the water's edge, at his huddled group of maimed and cast-off orphans trying to be happy without quite knowing how. I can still see the stunted little bodies, naked in sunlight that seemed revealing without being invigorating, cl.u.s.tered about the guardian figure of the tall old priest in black, the somberly benignant old figure that towered above the little wrecks on crutches and faced, as majestic as Millet's _Sower_, as austere and unmoved as Fate itself, a dark sea overhung by a dark sky. Sorolla was great in that picture, to my way of thinking. He was great in the manner in which he attunes nature to a human mood, in which he gives you the sunlight m.u.f.fled, in some way, like the sunlight during a partial eclipse, and keys turbulence down to quietude, like the soft pedal that falls on a noisy street when a hea.r.s.e goes by.

Josie felt it, and I felt it, that wordless thinning down of radiance, that mysterious holding back of warmth, until it seemed to strike a chill into the bones. It was the darker wing of Destiny hovering over man's head, deepening at the same time that it shadows the receding sky-line, so that even the memory of it, a thousand miles away, could drain the jocund blitheness out of the open prairie and give an air of pathos and solitude to my own children playing about my feet. Sorolla, I remembered, had little ones of his own. He _knew_. Life had taught him, and in teaching, had enriched his art. For the artist, after all, is the man who cuts up the loaf of his own heart, and b.u.t.ters it with beauty, and at tuppence a slice hands it to the hungry children of the world.

So when d.i.n.ky-Dunk laughed at me, for going into a trance over my own children, I merely smiled condoningly back at him. I felt vaguely sorry for him. He wasn't getting out of them what I was getting. He was being cheated, in some way, out of the very harvest for which he had sowed and waited. And if he had come to me, in that mood of relapse, if he had come to me with the slightest trace of humility, with the slightest touch of entreaty, on his face, I'd have hugged his salt-and-peppery old head to my bosom and begged to start all over again with a clean slate....

Gershom and I get along much better than I had expected. There's nothing wrong with the boy except his ineradicable temptation to impart to you his gratuitous tidbits of information. I can't object, of course, to Gershom having a college education: what I object to is his trying to give me one. I don't mind his wisdom, but I do hate to see him tear the whole tree of knowledge up by the roots and floor one with it. He has just informed me that there are estimated to be 30,000,000,000,000 red blood corpuscles in this body of mine, and I made him blink by solemnly challenging him to prove it. Quite frequently and quite sternly, too, he essays to correct my English. He reproved me for saying: "Go to it, Gershom!" And he declared I was in error in saying "The goose hangs high," as that was merely a vulgar corruption for "The goose whangs high," the "whanging" being the call of the wild geese high in the air when the weather is settled and fair. We live and learn!

But I can't help liking this pedagogic old Gershom who takes himself and me and all the rest of the world so seriously. I like him because he shares in my love for d.i.n.kie and stands beside Peter himself in the fondly foolish belief that d.i.n.kie has somewhere the hidden germ of greatness in him. Not that my boy is one of those precocious little bounders who are so precious in the eyes of their parents and so odious to the eyes of the rest of the world. He is a large-boned boy, almost a rugged-looking boy, and it is only I, knowing him as I do, who can fathom the sensibilities housed in that husky young body.

There is a misty broodiness in his eyes which leaves them indescribably lovely to me as I watch him in his moments of raptness.

But that look doesn't last long, for d.i.n.kie can be rough in play and at times rough in speech, and deep under the crust of character I imagine I see traces of his Scottish father in him. I watch with an eagle eye for any outcroppings of that Caledonian-granite strain in his make-up. I inspect him as c.h.i.n.kie used to inspect his fruit-trees for San Jose scale, for if there is any promise of hardness or cruelty there I want it killed in the bud.

But I don't worry as I used to, on that score. He may be rough-built, but moods cl.u.s.ter thick about him, like b.u.t.terflies on a shelf of broken rock. And he is both pliable and responsive. I can shake him, when in the humor, by the mere telling of a story. I can control his color, I can excite him and exalt him, and bring him to the verge of tears, if I care to, by the mere tone of my voice as I read him one of his favorite tales out of one of Peter's books. But I shrink, in a way, from toying with those feelings. It seems brutal, cruel, merciless. For he is, after all, a delicate instrument, to be treated with delicacy. The soul of him must be kept packed away, like a violin, in its case of reserve well-padded with discretion. Two things I see in him: tenseness and beauty. And these are things which are lost, with rough handling. He shrinks away from brutality. Always, when he came to the picture of Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple, in Whinstane Sandy's big old ill.u.s.trated Bible, he used to cover with one small hand a certain child on the temple steps as though to protect to the last that innocent one from the falling columns and cornices.

But I'm worried, at times, about d.i.n.ky-Dunk's att.i.tude toward the boy.

There are ways in which he demands too much from the child. His father is often unnecessarily rough in his play with him, seeming to take a morose delight in goading him to the breaking point and then lamenting his lack of grit, edging him on to the point of exasperation and then heaping scorn on him for his weakness. More than once I've seen his father actually hurt him, although the child was too proud to admit it. d.i.n.ky-Dunk, I think, really wants his boy to be a bigger figure in the world than his dad. Milord's a middle-aged man now and knows his limitations. He has realized just how high the supremest high-water mark of his life will stand. And being human, he must nurse his human regrets over his failures in life. So now he wishes to see his thwarted powers come to fuller fruit in his offspring. I'm afraid he'd even run the risk of sacrificing the boy's happiness for the sake of knowing d.i.n.kie's wagon was to be hitched to the star of success. For I know my husband well enough to realize that he has always hankered after worldly success, that his G.o.d, if he had any, has always been the G.o.d of Power. I, too, want to see my son a success. But I want him to be happy first. I want to see him get some of the things I've been cheated out of, that I've cheated myself out of. That's the only way now I can get even with life. I can't live my own days over again. But I can catch at the trick of living them over again in my d.i.n.kie.

_Thursday the Twenty-Ninth_

We have arrived at an armistice, d.i.n.ky-Dunk and I. It was forced on us, for things couldn't have gone on in the old intolerable manner.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, I fancy, began to realize that he hadn't been quite fair, and started making oblique but transparent enough efforts at appeas.e.m.e.nt. When he sat down close beside me, and I moved away, he said in a spirit of exaggerated self-accusation: "I'm afraid I've got a peach-stain on my reputation!" I retorted, at that, that she had never impressed me as much of a peach. Whereupon he merely laughed, as though it were a joke out of a Midnight Revue. Then he clipped a luridly ill.u.s.trated advertis.e.m.e.nt of a nerve-medicine out of his newspaper and pinned it on my bedroom door, after I had ignored his tentative knock thereon the night before. The picture showed an anemic and woebegone couple haggling and shaking their fists at each other, while a large caption announced that "Thousands of Married Folks Lead a Cat and Dog Life--Are Cross, Crabbed and Grumpy!"--all of which could be obviated if they used Oxygated Iron.

What made it funny, of course, was the ridiculousness of the drawing.

Then d.i.n.ky-Dunk, right before the blushing Gershom, accused me of being a love-piker. I could sniff which way the wind was blowing, but I sat tight. Then, to cap the climax, my husband announced that he had something for me which was surely going to melt my mean old prairie heart. And late that afternoon he came trundling up to Casa Grande with nothing more nor less than an old prairie-schooner.

It startled me, when I first caught sight of it. But its acquisition was not so miraculous as it might have seemed. d.i.n.ky-Dunk, who is a born d.i.c.kerer, has been trading some of his ranch-stock for town-lots on the outskirts of Buckhorn. On the back of one of these lots stood a tumble-down wooden building, and hidden away in this building was the prairie-schooner. Something about it had caught his fancy, so he had insisted that it be included in the deal. And home he brought it, with t.i.thonus and Tumble-Weed yoked to its antique tongue and his own Stetsoned figure high on the driving seat. They had told d.i.n.ky-Dunk it wasn't a really-truly authentic prairie-schooner, since practically all of the trekking north of the Fiftieth Parallel has been done by means of the Red River cart. But d.i.n.ky-Dunk, after looking more carefully over the heavy-timbered running-gear and the c.u.mbersome iron-work, and discovering even the st.u.r.dy hooks under its belly from which the pails and pots of earlier travelers must have hung, concluded that it was one of the genuine old-timers, one of the "Murphies" once driven by a "bull-whacker" and drawn by "wheelers" and "pointers." Where it originally came from, Heaven only knows. But it had been used, five years before, for a centenary procession in the provincial capital and had emerged into the open again last summer for a town-booming _Rodeo_ twenty miles down the steel from Buckhorn. It looked like the dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History, with every vestige of its tarpaulin top gone. But Whinnie has already sewed together a canvas covering for its weather-beaten old roof-ribs, and has put clean wheat-straw in its box-bottom, so that it makes a kingly place for my two kiddies to play. I even spotted d.i.n.kie, enthroned high on the big driving-seat, with a broken binder-whip in his hand, imagining he was one of the original Forty-Niners pioneering along the unknown frontiers of an unknown land. I could see him duck at imaginary arrows and frenziedly defend his family from imaginary Sioux with an imaginary musket. And I stood beside it this morning, dreaming of the adventures it must have lumbered through, of the freight it must have carried and the hopes it must have ferried as it once crawled westward along the floor of the world, from water-hole to lonely water-hole. I've been wondering if certain perforations in its side-boards can be bullet-holes and if certain dents and abrasions in its timbers mean the hostile arrows of skulking Apaches when women and children crouched low behind the ramparts of this tiny wooden fortress. I can't help picturing what those women and children had to endure, and how trivial, after all, are our puny hardships compared with theirs.

And I don't intend to dwell on those hardships. I'm holding out the hand of compromise to my fellow-trekker. Existence is only a prairie-schooner, and we have to accommodate ourselves to it. And I thank Heaven now that I can see things more clearly and accept them more quietly. That's a lesson Time teaches us. And Father Time, after all, has to hand us something to make up for so mercilessly permitting us to grow old. It leaves us more tolerant. We're not allowed to demand more life, but we can at least ask for more light.

So I intend to be cool-headedly rational about it all. I'm going to keep Reason on her throne. I'm going to be a bitter-ender, in at least one thing: I'm going to stick to my d.i.n.ky-Dunk to the last ditch. I'm going to patch up the old top and forget the old scars. For we're in the same schooner, and we must make the most of it. And if I have to eat my pot of honey on the grave of all our older hopes, I'm at least going to dig away at that pot until its bottom is sc.r.a.ped clean. I'm going to remain the neck-or-nothing woman I once prided myself on being. I'm even going to overlook d.i.n.ky-Dunk's casual cruelty in announcing, when I half-jokingly inquired why he preferred other women to his own Better-Half, that no horse eats hay after being turned out to fresh gra.s.s. I'm going on, I repeat, no matter what happens. I'm going on to the desperate end, like my own d.i.n.kie with the chocolate-cake when I warned him he'd burst if he dared to eat another piece and he responded: "Then pa.s.s the cake, Mummy--and everybody stand back!"

_Tuesday the Fourth_

_Sursum corda_ is the word--so here goes! I am determined to be blithe and keep the salt of humor sprinkled thick across the b.u.t.ter-crock of concession. d.i.n.ky-Dunk watches me with a guarded and wary eye and Pauline Augusta does not always approve of me. Yesterday, when I got on Briquette and made that fire-eater jump the two rain-barrels put end to end d.i.n.ky-Dunk told me I was too old to be taking a chance like that. So I promptly and deliberately turned a somersault on the prairie-sod, just to show him I wasn't the old lady he was trying to make me out. Gershom, who'd just got back with the children and was unhitching Calamity Kate, retreated with his eyebrows up, toward the stable. And on the youthful face of Pauline Augusta I saw nothing but pained incredulity touched with reproof, for Poppsy is not a believer in the indecorous. She has herself staidly intimated that she'd prefer the rest of the family to address her as "Pauline Augusta" instead of "Poppsy" which still so unwittingly creeps into our talk. So hereafter we must be more careful. For Pauline Augusta can already sew a fine seam and array her seven dolls with a preciseness and neatness which is to be highly commended.

On Sat.u.r.day, when we motored into Buckhorn for supplies, I escorted Pauline Augusta to Hunk Granby, the town barber, to have her hair cut Dutch. Her lip quivered and she gave every indication of an outbreak, for she was mortally afraid of that strange man and his still stranger clipping-machine. But I spotted a concert-guitar on a bench at the back of Hunk's emporium and as it was the noon-hour and there was no audience, I rendered a jazz _obbligato_ to the snip of the scissors.

"Say, Birdie, you'll sure have me buck and wing dancin' if you keep that up!" remarked the man of the shears. I merely smiled and gave him _Texas Tommy_, _c.u.m gusto_, whereupon he acknowledged he was having difficulty in making his feet behave. We became quite a companionable little family, in fact, as the bobbing process went on, and when d.i.n.ky-Dunk called for us as he'd promised he was patently scandalized to find his superannuated old soul-mate sight-reading _When Katy Couldn't Katy Wouldn't_--it was a new one to me--in the second ragged plush shaving-chair of a none too clean barber-shop festooned with lithographs which would have made old Anthony Comstock turn in his grave. But you have to be feathered to the toes like a ptarmigan in this northern country so that rough ways and rough winds can't strike a chill into you. The barber, in fact, refused to take any money for Dutching my small daughter's hair, proclaiming that the music was more than worth it. But my husband, with a dangerous light in his eye, insisted on leaving four bits on the edge of the shelf loaded down with bottled beautifiers, and escorted us out to the muddy old devil-wagon where d.i.n.kie sat awaiting us.

"d.i.n.ky-Dunk," I said with a perfectly straight face as we climbed in, "what is it gives me such a mysterious influence over men?"

Instead of answering me, he merely ground his gears as though they had been his own teeth. So I repeated my question.

"Why don't you ask that school-teacher of yours?" he demanded.

"But what," I inquired, "has Gershom got to do with it?"

He turned and inspected me with such a pointed stare that we nearly ran into a Bain wagon full of bagged grain.

"You don't suppose I can't see that that beanpole's fallen in love with you?" he rudely and raucously challenged.

"Why, I feel exactly like a mother to that poor boy," I innocently protested.

"Mother nothing!" snorted my lord and master. "Any fool could see he's going mushy on you!"

I pretended to be less surprised than I really was, but it gave me considerable to think over. My husband was wrong, in a way, but no woman feels bad at the thought that somebody is fond of her. It's nice to know there's a heart or two at which one can still warm one's outstretched hands. The short-cut to ruin, with a man, is the knowledge that women are fond of him. But let a woman know that she is not unloved and she walks the streets of Heaven, to say nothing of nearly breaking her neck to make herself worthy of those transporting affections.

But I soon had other things to think of, that afternoon, for d.i.n.kie and I had a little secret shopping to do. And in the midst of it I caught the familiar tawny look which occasionally comes into my man-child's eyes. It's the look of dreaming, the look of brooding wildness where some unknown Celtic great-great-grandfather of a great-great-grandfather stirs in his moorland grave like a collie-dog in his afternoon sleep. And it all arose out of nothing more than a blind beggar sitting on an upturned nail-keg at the edge of the sidewalk and rather miraculously playing a mouth-organ and a guitar at one and the same time. The guitar was a dog-eared old instrument that had most decidedly seen better days, stained and bruised and greasy-looking along the shank. The mouth-organ was held in position by two wires that went about the beggar's neck, to leave his hands free for strumming on the larger instrument. The music he made was simple enough, rudimentary old waltz-tunes and plaintive old airs that I hadn't heard for years. But I could see it go straight to the head of my boy. His intent young face took on the fierce emptiness of a Barres lion overlooking some time-worn desert. He forgot me, and he forgot the shopping that had kept him awake about half the night, and he forgot Buckhorn and the fact that he was a small boy on the streets of a bald little prairie town. He was thousands of years and thousands of miles away from me. He was a king's son in Babylon, commanding the court-musicians to make sweet discourse for him. He was Saul harkening to David. He was a dreamy-eyed Pict listening to music wafted at dusk from a Roman camp about which helmeted sentries paced.

He was a medieval prince, falsely imprisoned, leaning from dark and lonely towers to catch the strains of some wandering troubadour from his native Southlands. He was a Magyar chieftain listening to the mountain-side music of valleyed goat-herders with a touch of madness to it. It engulfed him and entranced him and awoke ancestral tom-toms in his blood. And I waited beside him until the afternoon sunlight grew thinner and paler and my legs grew tired, for I knew that his hungry little soul was being fed. His eye met mine, when it was all over, but he had nothing to say. I could see, however, that he had been stirred to the depths,--and by a tin mouth-organ and a greasy-sided guitar!

To-night I found d.i.n.kie poring over the pictures in my Knight edition of Shakespeare. He seemed especially impressed, as I stopped and looked over his shoulder, by a steel engraving of Gerome's _Death of Caesar_, where the murdered emperor lies stretched out on the floor of the Forum, now all but empty, with the last of the Senators crowding out through the door. Two of the senatorial chairs are overturned, and Caesar's throne lies face-down on the dais steps. So d.i.n.kie began asking questions about a drama which he could not quite comprehend.

But they were as nothing to the questions he asked when he turned to another of the Gerome pictures, this one being the familiar old _Cleopatra and Caesar_. He wanted to know why the lady hadn't more clothes on, and why the big black man was hiding down behind her, and what Caesar was writing a letter for, and why he was looking at the lady the way he did. So, glancing about to make sure that d.i.n.ky-Dunk was within ear-shot, I did my best to explain the situation to little d.i.n.kie.

"Caesar, my son, was a man who set out in the world to be a great conqueror. But when he got quite bald, as you may see by the picture, and had reached middle age, he forgot about being a great conqueror.

He even forgot about being so comfortably middle-aged and that it was not easy for a man of his years to tumble gracefully into love, for those romantic impulses, my son, are a.s.sociated more with irresponsible youth and are apt to be called by rather an ugly name when they occur in advanced years. But Caesar fell in love with the lady you see in the picture, whose name was Cleopatra and who was one of the greatest man-eaters that ever came out of Egypt. She had a weakness for big strong men, and although certain authorities have claimed that she was a small and hairy person with a very uncertain temper, she undoubtedly set a very good table and made her gentlemen friends very comfortable, for Caesar stayed feasting and forgetting himself for nearly a year with her. It must have been very pleasant, for Caesar loved power, and intended to be one of the big men of his time. But the lady also loved power, and was undoubtedly glad to see that she could make Caesar forget about going home, though it was too bad that he forgot, for always, even after he had lived to write about all the great things he had done in the world, people remembered more about his rather absurd infatuation for the lady than about all the battles he had won and all the prizes he had captured. And the lady, of course----"

But I was interrupted at this point. And it was by d.i.n.ky-Dunk.

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" he said as he flung down his paper and strode out into the other room. And those exits, I remembered, were getting to be a bit of a habit with my harried old Diddums.

_Sunday the Fifth_

The Day of Rest seems to be the only day left to me now for my writing. There are no idlers in the neighborhood of Casa Grande. The days are becoming incredibly long, but they still seem over-short for all there is to do. The men are much too busy on the land to give material thought to any thing so womanish as a kitchen-garden. So I have my own garden to see to. And sometimes I work there until I'm almost ready to drop. On a couple of nights, recently, when it came watering-time, even these endless evenings had slipped into such darkness that I could scarcely see the plants I was so laboriously irrigating by hand. It wasn't until the water turned the soil black that the growing green stood pallidly out against the mothering dark earth.... But it is delightful work. I really love it. And I love to see things growing. After the bringing up of a family, the bringing up of a garden surely comes next.

Yet too much work, I find, can make tempers a trifle short. I spoke rather sharply to d.i.n.ky-Dunk yesterday regarding the folly of leaving firearms about the house where children can reach them. And he was equally snappy as he flung his ugly old Colt in its ugly old holster up over the top corner of our book-cabinet. So, to get even with him, when d.i.n.kie came in with some sort of wide-petaled field-flower and asked if I didn't want my fortune told, I announced I rather fancied it was pretty well told already.... Scotty, by the way, now follows d.i.n.kie to school and waits outside and comes loping home with him again. And my two bairns have a new and highly poetic occupation. It is that of patiently garnering youthful potato-bugs and squashing the acc.u.mulated harvest between two bricks.

_Sunday the Twelth_

I have been examining Gershom with a more interested eye. And when he changed color, under that inspection, I apologized for making him blush. And as that only added to his embarra.s.sment, I artlessly asked him what a blush really was. That, of course, was throwing the rabbit straight back into the brier-patch, as far as Gershom was concerned.

For he promptly and meticulously informed me that a blush was a miniature epilepsy, a vasomotor impulse leading to the dilation or constriction of the facial blood-vessels, some psychologists even claiming the blush to be a vestigial survival of the prehistoric flight-effort of the heart, coming from the era of marriage by capture, when to be openly admired meant imminent danger.

"That isn't a bit pretty," I told Gershom. "It's as horrid as what my husband said about handshaking originating in man's desire to be dead sure his gentleman friend didn't have a knife up his sleeve, for use before the greeting was over. It would have been so much nicer, Gershom, if you could have told me that the first blush was born on the same day as the first kiss."