The Prairie Child Part 8

_Tuesday the Fifth_

School has started again. And it's a solemn business, this matter of planting wisdom in little prairie heads. d.i.n.ky-Dunk, who has been up to his ears in haying and is now watching his grain with a nervous eye, remarked that our offspring would be once more mingling with Mennonites and Swedes and Galicians and Ukrainians. I resented that speech, though I said nothing in reply to it. But I decided to investigate Gershom's school.

So yesterday afternoon I drove over in the car. I had a blow-out on the way, a blow-out which I had to patch up with my own hands, so I arrived too late to inspect Gershom conducting his cla.s.ses. It was almost four, in fact, before I got there, so I pulled up beside the school-gate and sat waiting for the children to come out. And as I sat there in the car-seat, under a sky of unimaginable blue, with the prairie wind whipping my face, I couldn't help studying that bald little temple of learning which stood out so clear-cut in the sharp northern sunlight. It was a plain little frame building set in one corner of a rancher's half-section, an acre of land marked off by a wire fence where the two trails crossed, the two long trails that melted away in the interminable distance. It seemed a lonely little house of scholarship, with its playground worn so bare that even two months of idleness had given scant harborage for the seeds that wind and bird must have brought there. But as I stared at it it seemed to take on a dignity all its own, the dignity of a fixed and far-off purpose. It was the nest of a nation's greatness. It was the outpost of civilization. It was the advance-guard of pioneering man, driving the wilderness deeper and deeper into the North. It was life preparing wistfully for the future.

From it I heard a sudden shrill chorus of voices and the clatter of feet, and I knew that the day's work was over. I saw the children emerge, like bees out of a beehive, and loneliness no longer reigned over that bald yard in the betraying northern sunlight. Yet they were not riotous, those children confronting the wine-like air of the open.

They were more subdued than I had looked for, since I could only too easily remember one of my earlier calls for d.i.n.kie at noon, when I found the entire cla.s.s turned out and riding a rancher's pig, a heavy brood-sow that had in some luckless moment wandered into the school-yard and had been chased and raced until it was too weary to resent a young barbarian mounting its broad back and riding thereon, to the shouts of the other boys and the shrill cries of the girls. But now, from my car-seat, I could see Gershom surrounded by a multi-colored group of little figures, as he stopped to fix a strap-buckle on the school-bag of one of his pupils. And as he stood there in the slanting afternoon sunlight surrounded by his charges he suddenly made me think of the tall old priest in Sorolla's _Triste Herencia_ surrounded by his waifs. I caught the echo of something benignant and Lincoln-like from that raw-boned figure in the big-lensed eye-gla.s.ses and the clothes that didn't quite fit him. And my respect for Gershom went up like a Chinook-fanned thermometer. He took those children of his seriously. He liked them. He was trying to give them the best that was in him. And that solemn purpose saved him, redeemed him, enn.o.bled his baldness just as it enn.o.bled the baldness of the four-square little frame building behind him. I don't know why it was, but for some reason or other that picture of the northern prairie and the gaunt school-teacher surrounded by his pupils in the thinning afternoon sunlight became memorable to me. It photographed itself on my mind, not sharply, but softened with a fringing prism of feeling, like a picture taken with what camera-men call a "soft-focus." It touched my heart, in some way, and threatened to bring a choke up into my foolish old throat.

It was Pauline Augusta who saw me first. She came toward the car with her strapped school-books and her lunch-box in her hand and a prim little smile on her slightly freckled face. She impressed me as a startingly shabby figure, in the old sealskin coat which I had made over for her, worn clean to the hide along the front, for even those early autumn days found a chill in the air when the sun began to get low. She had just climbed in beside me when I caught sight of d.i.n.kie.

I saw him come down the school-steps, stuffing something into the pocket of his reefer-jacket as he came. He looked startlingly tall, for a boy of his years. He seemed deep in thought. There was, indeed, an air of remoteness about him which for a moment rather startled me, an air of belonging, not to me, but to the world into which he was peering with such ardent young eyes. Then he caught sight of me, and at the same moment his face both lightened and brightened. He came toward the car quietly, none the less, and with that slightly sidewise twist of the body which overtakes him in his occasional moments of embarra.s.sment, for it was plain that he stood averse to any undue display of emotion before his playmates. He merely said, "h.e.l.lo, Mummy" and smiled awkwardly. But after he had climbed up into the car and wormed down between Pauline Augusta and me, and after I had tucked the old bear-robe about them and called out to Gershom that I'd carry my kiddies home, I could feel d.i.n.kie's arm push shyly in behind my back and work its way as far around my waist as it was able to reach.

He didn't speak. But his solemn little face gazed up at me, with its habitual hungry look, and I could see the hazel specks in the brown iris of the upturned eye as the arm tightened its hold on me. It made me ridiculously happy. For I knew that my boy loved me. And I love him. I love him so much that it brings a tapering spear-head of pain into my heart, and at the very moment I'm so happy I feel a tear just under the surface.

_Sunday the Tenth_

I have been reading Peter's latest letter to d.i.n.kie, reading it for the second time. It is not so frolicsome as many of its fellows, but it impresses me as typical of its sender.

"I've to-day told fourteen cents' worth of postage-stamps to carry out to you, dear d.i.n.kie, a copy of my own _Tales from Homer_, which may be muddy with a few big words but which the next year or two will surely see tramped down into easier going. You may not like it now, but later on, I know, you will like it better. For it tells of heroes and battles and travels which only a boy can really understand. It tells of the wanderings and adventures of strong and simple-hearted men, men who are as scarce, nowadays, as the shining helmets they used to wear. It tells of women superb and simple and lovely as G.o.ddesses, such as your own prairie might give birth to, such as your own mother must always seem to us. It tells of flashing temples and cities of marble overlooking singing seas of sapphire, of stately ships venturing over dark waters and landing on unknown islands, of siege and sword-fights and caves and giants and sea-G.o.ddesses and magic songs, and all that sunnier and simpler life which the world, as a prosaic old grown-up, has left behind....

"But I'm wrong in this, perhaps, for out in the land where you live there is still largeness and the gold-green ache of wonder beyond every sky-line. And I can't help envying you, d.i.n.kie, for being a part of that world which is so much more heroic than mine.

I live where a very shabby line of horse-cars used to run; and you live where the buffaloes used to run. I hear the rattle of the ash-cans in the morning; and you hear the song of the wind playing on the harp of summer. I pay five hundred dollars a year to wander about a smoky club no bigger than your corral; you wander about a Big Outdoors that rambles off up to the Arctic Circle itself. And you open a window at night and see the Aurora Borealis in all its beauty; and I open mine and observe an electric roof-sign announcing that Somebody's Tonic will take away my tired feeling.

You put up your blind and see G.o.d's footstool bright with dew and dizzy with distance; I put up mine and overlook a wall of brick and mortar with one window wherein a fat man shaves himself. And you can go out in the morning and pick yellow crowfoot and range lilies; and all we can pick about this place of ours are milk-bottles and morning-papers packed full of murder and theft and tax-notices!"

Much of that letter, I know, was over d.i.n.kie's head. But it carried a message or two to d.i.n.kie's mother which in some way threw her heart into high. It was different from the letter that came the week before, the one arriving two days ahead of Kingsley's _Water Babies_ with six lines of Hagedorn inscribed on its fly-leaf:

"And here you are to live, and help us live.

Bend close and listen, bird with folded wings.

Here is life's secret: Keep the upward glance; Remember Aries is your relative, The Moon's your uncle, and those twinkling things Your sisters and your cousins and your aunts!"

This letter seemed like the Peter Ketley we knew best, the sad-eyed Peter with the feather of courage in his cap, the Peter who could caper and make you forget that his heart had ever been heavy. For he wrote:

"This time, d.i.n.kie-Boy, I'm going to tell you about the sea. For the water-tank, as I remember it, is the biggest sea you have at Casa Grande--unless you count the mud when winter breaks up! And your prairie, with its long waves of green, is, I suppose, really a sea that has gone to sleep. But I mean the truly honest-to-goodness sea which has tides and baby-whales and steamers and cramps and sea-serpents in it. You saw it once at Santa Monica, I know, though you may have been too small to remember. But yesterday, I motored to a place called Atlantic City where they sell picture post-cards and push you in a wheeled chair and let you sit on the sand and watch the Water Babies, whom the policemen send to jail if they so much as walk along the beach without their stockings on. These Water Babies were not in a bottle--like the ones you'll read about in the book--but I think there was a bottle or two in some of them, from the way they acted. But one of them was in a pickle, for Father Neptune caught her in his under-tow--which you must not mix up with his under-toe, something with which only the mermaids are familiar--and a life-guard had to swim out and bring her in. And a few minutes after that I saw a real beach-comber. I had read about them in the South Sea Islands, but had never seen one before. This one sat under a striped parasol, with a mirror between her knees, and combed and combed her hair until it was quite dry again. I was disappointed in her knees, because I was hoping, at first, she wouldn't have any, but would be a mermaid who had come up on the sand to sun herself and would have a long and tapering tail covered with scales like a tarpon's. But all she had was beach-shoes tied with silk ribbons, and I preferred watching the water. For when I watch the ocean I always feel like Mr. Hood and wish I was at least three small boys, so that I could pull off my three pairs of shoes and stockings and go paddling up to my six bare knees and let the rollers slap against my three startled little tummies and have thirty toes to step on the squids and star-fish with. And when I went back to the board-walk and watched all the gulls (I don't think I ever saw so many of 'em in one place at once) I couldn't help thinking it was too bad the Pilgrim Fathers didn't wait for three centuries and land at a bright and lively place like this, since it would have made them so much jollier and fizzier. They'd probably have turned the _Mayflower_ into a diving-float and we'd never have had any Blue Laws to break and that curious thing known as The New England Conscience to keep us from being as happy as we feel we ought to be."

_Sunday the Twenty-Fourth_

Harvest is on us, and Casa Grande hums like a beehive. There are three extra "hands" to feed, and Whinnie is going about with a moody eye because Struthers is directing more attention than necessary toward one of the smooth-spoken cutthroats now nesting in our bunk-house. His name is Cuba Sebeck and in times of peace he professes to be a horse-wrangler. Struthers, intent on showing Whinnie that he is not the only man in her world, is placidly but patiently showering the lanky Cuba with a barrage of her fluffiest pastries. She has also given her hair an extra strong wash of sage-tea, which is Struthers'

pet and particular way of putting on war-paint. Whinnie, I notice, shuts himself up after supper with that copy of Burns' poems we gave him last Christmas, morosely exiling himself from all the laughing and gaming and pow-wowing which takes place in the long cool twilights, just outside the bunk-house. Cuba undertook to serenade the dour one by donning certain portions of Struthers' apparel and playing my old banjo under his window. Whinnie quietly retaliated by emptying his bath-water on the musician's head--and the language was indescribable.

I have been forced to speak to d.i.n.ky-Dunk, in fact, about the men's profanity before my children. It is something I will not endure. My husband, on the other hand, refuses to take the matter very seriously.

But I have been keeping a close eye over my kiddies--and woe betide the horse-wrangler who uses unseemly language within their hearing. So far they seem to have gone through it unscathed, about the same as a child can go through the indecorous moments of _The Arabian Nights_, which stands profoundly wicked to only Arabs and old gentlemen.

_Wednesday the Twenty-Eighth_

Summer is slipping away. The days are shortening and there have been light frosts at night, but not enough to hurt d.i.n.ky-Dunk's late oats, which he has been watching with a worried eye. There is a saber-blade edge to the evening air now and we have been having some glorious displays of Northern Lights. I can't help feeling that these Merry Dancers of the Pole, as some one has called them, make up for what the prairie may lack in diversity. Dusk by dusk they drown our world in color, they smother our skies in glory. They are terrifying, sometimes, to the tenderfoot, giving him the feeling that his world is on fire. Poor old Struthers, during an especially active display, invariably gets out her Bible. Used to them as I am, I find they can still touch me with awe. They make me lonesome. They seem like the search-lights of G.o.d, showing up my human littlenesses of soul. They are Armadas of floating glory reminding me there are seas I can never traverse. And the farther north one goes, of course, the more magnificent the displays.

Last night we watched the auroral bands gather and grow in a cold green sky, straight to the north of us, and then waver and deepen until they reached the very zenith, where they hung, swaying curtains of fire. No wonder the redskins call that wild pageantry of color the ghost-dance of their G.o.ds. Even as we watched them, opal and gold and rose and orange and green, we could see them come wheeling down on our little world like an army of angels with incandescent swords. It made one imagine that the very heavens were aflame, going up in quivering veils of white and red and green. And when it was over I listened to a long argument about the Aurora Borealis, or the Aurora Polaris, as Gershom insisted it should be called.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk contended that one could _hear_ these Northern Lights overhead, on a clear night. He described the sound as sometimes a faint crackling, like that of a comb drawn through your hair, and sometimes as a soft rustling noise, like the rustling of a silk petticoat heard through a closed door, coming closer and closer as the display wavered farther and farther toward the south.

Gershom was disposed to dispute this, so our old Klondiker, Whinstane Sandy, was called in to give evidence. He did so promptly and positively, saying he'd heard the Lights many a night in the Far North. Gershom is still unconvinced, but intends to look up his authorities on the matter. He attributes them to sun-spots and a.s.serts it's a well-known fact they often put the telephone and telegraph wires out of commission. He has proposed that we sit up and study them some night, through his telescope, which he is disinterring from the bottom of his trunk....

My lord and master is going about with a less clouded eye, for he has succeeded in selling the Harris Ranch, and selling it for thirty-five hundred dollars more than he had expected. It is to go, eventually, to some tenderfoot out of the East, to some tenderfoot who can have very little definite knowledge of land-values in this jumping-off place on the edge of the world. But may that tenderfoot, whoever he is, be happy in his new home! d.i.n.ky-Dunk is now forever figuring up what he will get for his grain. He's preoccupied with his plans for branching out in the business world. His heart is no longer in his work here. I sometimes feel that we're all merely accidents in his life. And that feeling leaves me with a heart so heavy that I have to keep busy, or I'd fall to luxuriating in that self-pity which is good for neither man nor beast.

Yet d.i.n.ky-Dunk is not all hardness. He surprises me, now and then, by disturbing little gestures of boyishness. He announced to me the other night that the only way to get any use out of a worn-out husband was to revamp him, with the accent on the vamp. I understood what he meant, and I think I actually changed color a trifle. But I know of nothing more desolating than trying to make love to a man either against his will or against your own will. It would be a terrible thing to have him tell you there was no longer any kick in your kisses. So I remain on my dignity. I am companionable, and nothing more. When we were saying good-by, the last time he went off to the city, and he looked up at my perfunctory and quite meaningless peck on his cheek, I felt myself blushing before his quiet and half-quizzical stare. Then he laughed a little as he turned away and pulled on his gauntlets. "The sweeter the champagne, I suppose, the colder it should be served!" he rather cryptically remarked as he climbed into the waiting car. And yesterday he let his soul emerge from its tent of reticence when he climbed up on the wagon-box to stare out over his sea of all but ripened wheat. "Come, money!" he said, with his arms stretched out before him. Now, that was a trick which he had caught from my little d.i.n.kie. I don't know how or where the boy first picked up the habit, but when he particularly wants something he stands solemnly out in the open, with his two little arms outstretched, as though he were supplicating Heaven itself, and says "Come, jack-knife!" or "Come, jelly-roll!" or "Come, rain!" according to his particular desires of the particular moment. I think he really caught it from an ill.u.s.tration in _The Arabian Nights_, from the picture of Ca.s.sim grandiloquently proclaiming "Open Sesame!" He is an imaginative little beggar. "Mummy," he said to me the other night, "see all the moonlight that's been spilled on the gra.s.s!" But children are made that way. Even my sage little Poppsy, when a marigold-leaf fell in the bowl of our solitary gold-fish, cried out to me: "See, Mummy, our fish has had a baby!" s.e.x is still an enigma to her, as much an enigma as it was away last spring when, not being quite sure whether her new kitten was a little boy-cat or a little girl-cat, she sagaciously christened it "Willie-Alice." And a few weeks later, when the unmistakable appearance of tail-feathers finally persuaded even her optimistic young heart that the two chicks which had been bequeathed to her were dishearteningly masculine in their tendencies, she officially re-christened the apostate "Elaine" and "Rowena," and thereafter solemnly accepted them as "Archie" and "Albert." And while speaking of this mysteriously ramifying factor of s.e.x, I am compelled to acknowledge that I encountered a rather disturbing little back-flare of Freudian h.e.l.l-fire only a couple of evenings ago. It took my thoughts galloping back to the time in our post-nuptial era when d.i.n.ky-Dunk went Berserker and chased me around the haystacks with my hair flying. I'd taken d.i.n.kie upon my lap, and, without quite knowing it, sat stroking his frowsy young head. My thoughts, in fact, were a thousand miles away. Then, still without giving much attention to what I was doing, I squeezed that warm little body up close against my own. I was astounded, the next moment, to see my small offspring turn on me with all the l.u.s.ty fierceness of the cave man. He got his arms about me and buried his face in my neck and kissed me as no gentleman, big or little, should ever kiss a lady. His small body was shaken with a subliminal and quite unexpected gust of feeling, just as I've seen a June-time garden shaken by an unexpected gust of wind.

It pa.s.sed away, of course, about as quickly as it came--but with it went a scattering of the white petals of childhood unconcern.

I don't suppose my poor little d.i.n.kie has yet awakened to the fact that his body is a worn river-bed down which must race the freshets of far-off racial instincts. But the thing disturbed me more than I'd be willing to admit. There are murky corridors in the house of life. They stand there, and they must be faced. There are rooms where the air must be kept stirring, corners into which the clear sanity of sunlight must be thrown. d.i.n.kie, since he has stepped into his first experience in the keeping of rabbits, has been asking me a number of rather disconcerting questions. His father, I notice, has the habit of half-diffidently referring the boy to me, just as I nursed the earlier habit of referring him to his father. But some time soon d.i.n.kie and I will have to have a serious talk about this thing called Life, this Life which is so much more uncompromisingly brutal than the child-mind can conceive....

By the way, there's a lot of nonsense talked about motherhood softening women. It may soften them in some ways, but there are many others in which it hardens them. It draws their power of love together into a fixed point, just as the lens of a burning-gla.s.s concentrates the vague warmth of the sun into one small and fiercely illuminated area. It is a form of selfishness, I suppose, but it is a selfishness nature imposes upon us. And it is sanctified by the end it serves. At every turn, now, I find that I am thinking of my children. I seem to have my eyes set steadily on something far, far ahead. I'm not quite certain just what this something is. It's a sort of secret between me and the Master of Life. But the memory of it makes my days more endurable. It allows me to face the future without a quaver of regret.

I am a woman, and I am no longer young. But it gives me courage to laugh in the teeth of Time.

And to laugh, to laugh whatever happens--that is the great thing! It isn't age I dread. But I'd hate to lose that lightness with which those blessed ones we call the young can move through the world, that self-renewing freshness which converts every daybreak into a dewy new world and mints every sunrise into a brand new life ... I asked Gershom to-day if he could possibly tell me how many Parker House rolls a square mile of wheat running forty bushels to the acre would make. And he surprised me by inquiring how many quarts of b.u.t.termilk it would take to shingle a cow. Gershom is widening out a bit....

d.i.n.kie, I notice, has just compiled a list of horses. I read from his carefully ruled half-page:

"Draght horses; carriege horses; riding horses; racing horses; ponyies; percheron from france; Belgain from Beljium; shire clyesdale and saffold punch from great Britain; french coach and German coach; contucky saddle horses; through-breads; Shetland ponies; mushstand ponies; pacers and pintoes." Thus recordeth my Toddler.

_Sunday the Ninth_

I have had d.i.n.kie in bed for the last five days, with a bruised foot.

Duncan shortened the stirrups and put the boy on Briquette, who had just proved a handful for even an old horse-wrangler like Cuba Sebeck.

Briquette bucked and threw the boy. And d.i.n.kie, in the mix-up, got a hoof-pound on the ankle. No bones were broken, luckily, but the foot was very sore and swollen for a few days. No word about the episode has pa.s.sed between Duncan and me. But I'm glad, all things considered, that I was not a witness of the accident. The clouds are already quite heavy enough over Casa Grande.

d.i.n.kie and his mater, however, have been drawn much closer together during the last few days. I've talked to him, and read to him, and without either of us being altogether conscious of it there has been an opening of a closed door or two. d.i.n.kie loves to be read to. The new world of the imagination is just opening up to him. And I envy the rapture of the child in books, rapture not yet spoiled by the intellectual conceit of the grown-up.

But I'm not the only reader about this ranch. I'm afraid the copy of Burns which Santa Claus brought to Whinstane Sandy last Christmas is not adding to his matrimonial tendencies as love-plaints of that nature should. At noon, as soon as dinner is over, he sits on the back step, poring over his beloved Tammas. And at night, now that the evenings are chillier, he retreats to the bunk-house stove, where he smokes and reads aloud. His own mother, he tells me, used to say many of those pieces to him when he was a wee laddie. He both outraged and angered poor Struthers, last Sunday, by reading _Tam O'Shanter_ aloud to her. That autumnal vestal proclaimed that it was anything but suitable literature for an old philanderer who still saw fit to live alone. It showed, she averred, a shocking lack of respect for women-folk and should be taken over by the police.

Struthers even begins to suspect that this much-thumbed volume of Burns lies at the root of Whinnie's acc.u.mulating misanthropy. She has asked me if I thought a volume of Mrs. Hemans would be of service in leading the deluded old misogynist back to the light. The matter has become a more urgent one since Cuba Sebeck suffered a severe bilious attack and a consequent sea-change in his affections. But I'm afraid our Whinnie is too old a bird to be trapped by printer's ink. I notice, in fact, that Struthers is once more spending her evenings in knitting winter socks. And I have a shadow of a suspicion that they are for the obdurate one.

My d.i.n.kie, by the way, has written his first poem, or, rather, his first two poems. The first one he slipped folded into my sewing-basket and I found it when I was looking for new b.u.t.tons for Pauline Augusta's red sweater. It reads: