The Prairie Mother Part 16

The season, in fact, holds our fate and our fortune in its lap. Those ninety days that include June and July and August are the days when the northwest farmer is forever on tiptoe watching the weather. It's his time of trial, his period of crisis, when our triple foes of Drought and Hail and Fire may at any moment creep upon him. It keeps one on the _qui vive_, making life a gamble, giving the zest of the uncertain to existence, and leaving no room for boredom. It's the big drama which even dwarfs the once momentous emotions of love and hate and jealousy. For when the Big Rush is on, I've noticed, husbands are apt to neglect their wives, and lovers forget their sweethearts, and neighbors their enmities. Let the world go hang, but before and above everything else, _save your crop!_

Yet, as I was saying, I've been taking stock. It's clear that I should have more cattle. And if all goes well, I want a bank-barn, the same as they have in the East, with cement flooring and modern stalling.

And I've got to comb over my herd, and get rid of the boarders and hatracks, and acquire a blooded bull for Alabama Ranch, to improve the strain. Two of my milkers must go for beef, as well as several scrub springers which it would be false economy to hold. I've also got to do something about my hogs. They are neither "easy feeders" nor good bacon types. With them, too, I want a good sire, a pure-bred Yorkshire or Berkshire. And I must have cement troughs and some movable fencing, so that my young shoats may have pasture-crop. For there is money in pigs, and no undue labor, provided you have them properly fenced.

My chickens, which have been pretty well caring for themselves, have done as well as could be expected. I've tried to get early hatchings from my brooders, for pullets help out with winter eggs when prices are high, laying double what a yearling does during the cold months.

My yellow-beaks and two-year-olds I shall kill off as we're able to eat them, for an old hen is a useless and profitless possession and I begin to understand why lordly man has appropriated that phrase as a term of contempt for certain of my s.e.x. I'm trading in my eggs--and likewise my b.u.t.ter--at Buckhorn, selling the Number One grade and holding back the Number Twos for home consumption. There is an amazing quant.i.ty of Number Twos, because of "stolen nests" and the lack of proper coops and runs. But we seem to get away with them all. d.i.n.kie now loves them and would eat more than one at a time if I'd let him.

The gluttony of the normal healthy three-year-old child, by the way, is something incredible. d.i.n.kie reminds me more and more of a robin in cherry-time. He stuffs sometimes, until his little tummy is as tight as a drum, and I verily believe he could eat his own weight in chocolate blanc-mange, if I'd let him. Eating, with him, is now a serious business, demanding no interruptions or distractions. Once he's decently filled, however, his greediness takes the form of exterior application. He then rejoices to plaster as much as he can in his hair and ears and on his face, until he looks like a cross between a hod-carrier and a Fiji-Islander. And grown men, I've concluded, are very much the same with their appet.i.te of love. They come to you with a brave showing of hunger, but when you've given until no more remains to be given, they become finicky and capricious, and lose their interest in the homely old porridge-bowl which looked all loveliness to them before they had made it theirs....

This afternoon, tired of scheming and conceiting for the future, I had a longing to be frivolous and care-free. So I got out the old rusty-rimmed banjo, tuned her up, and sat on an overturned milk-bucket, with d.i.n.kie and Bobs and Poppsy and Pee-Wee for an audience.

I was leaning back with my knees crossed, strumming out _Turkey in the Straw_ when Peter walked up and sat down between Bobs and d.i.n.kie. So I gave him _The Whistling c.o.o.n_, while the Twins lay there positively pop-eyed with delight, and he joined in with me on _Dixie_, singing in a light and somewhat throaty baritone. Then we swung on to _There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea_, which must always be sung to a church-tune, and still later to that dolorous ballad, _Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prair-hee!_ Then we tried a whistling duet with banjo accompaniment, pretty well murdering the Tinker's Song from _Robin Hood_ until Whinstane Sandy, who was taking his Sabbath bath in the bunk-house, loudly opened the window and stared out with a dourly reproving countenance, which said as plain as words: "This is nae the day for whustlin', folks!"

But little d.i.n.kie, obviously excited by the music, shouted "A-more!

A-more!" so we went on, disregarding Whinnie and the bunk-house window and Struthers' acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the middle of Fay Templeton's lovely old _Rosie, You Are My Posey_, when Lady Alicia rode up, as spick and span as though she'd just pranced off Rotten Row. And as I'd no intention of showing the white feather to her ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I looked up and waved the banjo at her where she sat stock-still on her mount. There was an enigmatic look on her face, but she laughed and waved back, whereupon Peter got up, and helped her dismount as she threw her reins over the pony's head.

I noticed that her eye rested very intently on Peter's face as I introduced him, and he in turn seemed to size the stately newcomer up in one of those lightning-flash appraisals of his. Then Lady Allie joined our circle, and confessed that she'd been homesick for a sight of the kiddies, especially d.i.n.kie, whom she took on her knee and regarded with an oddly wistful and abstracted manner.

My hired man, I noticed, was in no way intimidated by a t.i.tle in our midst, but wagered that Lady Allie's voice would be a contralto and suggested that we all try _On the Road to Mandalay_ together. But Lady Allie acknowledged that she had neither a voice nor an ear, and would prefer listening. We couldn't remember the words, however, and the song wasn't much of a success. I think the damper came when Struthers stepped out into full view, encased in my big bungalow-ap.r.o.n of butcher's linen. Lady Alicia, after the manner of the English, saw her without seeing her. There wasn't the flicker of an eyelash, or a moment's loss of poise. But it seemed too much like a Banquo at the feast to go on with our banjo-strumming, and I attempted to bridge the hiatus by none too gracefully inquiring how things were getting along over at Casa Grande. Lady Allie's contemplative eye, I noticed, searched my face to see if there were any secondary significances to that bland inquiry.

"Everything seems to be going nicely," she acknowledged. Then she rather took the wind out of my sails by adding: "But I really came over to see if you wouldn't dine with me to-morrow at seven. Bring the children, of course. And if Mr.--er--Ketley can come along, it will be even more delightful."

Still again I didn't intend to be stumped by her ladyship, so I said that I'd be charmed, without one second of hesitation, and Peter, with an a.s.sumption of vast gravity, agreed to come along if he didn't have to wear a stiff collar and a boiled shirt. And he continued to rag Lady Allie in a manner which seemed to leave her a little bewildered.

But she didn't altogether dislike it, I could see, for Peter has the power of getting away with that sort of thing.

_Tuesday the Eighth_

Lady Alicia's dinner is over and done with. I can't say that it was a howling success. And I'm still very much in doubt as to its _raison d'etre_, as the youthful society reporters express it. At first I thought it might possibly be to flaunt my lost grandeur in my face.

And then I argued with myself that it might possibly be to exhibit Sing Lo, the new c.h.i.n.k man-servant disinterred from one of the Buckhorn laundries. And still later I suspected that it might be a sort of demonstration of preparedness, like those carefully timed naval parades on the part of one of the great powers disquieted by the activities of a restive neighbor. And then came still another suspicion that it might possibly be a move to precipitate the impalpable, as it were, to put certain family relationships to the touch, and make finally certain as to how things stood.

But that, audacious as I felt Lady Alicia to be, didn't quite hold water. It didn't seem any more reasonable than my earlier theories. And all I'm really certain of is that the dinner was badly cooked and badly served, rather reminding me of a chow-house meal on the occasion of a Celestial New Year. We all wore our every-day clothes (with Peter's most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and d.i.n.kie was given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the bareback rider who's just been carried out on a stretcher. But Constraint was there, all the while, first in the form of d.i.n.ky-Dunk's unoccupied chair, which remained that way until dinner was two-thirds through, and then in the form of d.i.n.ky-Dunk himself, whose explanation about some tractor-work keeping him late didn't quite ring true. His harried look, I must acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me at least it was only too plain that he was there under protest.

I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met role, but it struck me as uncommonly like dancing on a coffin. And for all his garrulity, I know, Peter was really watching us with the eye of a hawk.

"I'm too old a dog," I overheard him telling Lady Alicia, "ever to be surprised at the crumbling of an ideal or the disclosure of a skeleton."

I don't know what prompted that statement, but it had the effect of making Lady Allie go off into one of her purl-two knit-two trances.

"I think you English people," I heard him telling her a little later, "have a tendency to carry moderation to excess."

"I don't quite understand that," she said, lighting what must have been about her seventeenth cigarette.

"I mean you're all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter--which impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie, worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian milk-dog, Peter c.o.c.ked an eye at me as a robin c.o.c.ks an eye at a fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him, "Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye: "Yes, I happen to have read a bit of Henry James."

But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in what Lady Alicia had rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and airy over a game of bridge, whereat d.i.n.ky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn't sorry when those devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another theatricality presented itself when d.i.n.ky-Dunk announced that he'd take us back in the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble-Weed and our sea-going spring-wagon, with plenty of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of putting a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux and planted Peter meekly in the back seat with little d.i.n.kie to hold and took the reins myself.

I started home with a lump in my throat and a weight in my heart, feeling it really wasn't a home that I was driving toward. But it was one of those crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like electric-lights shining through cut-gla.s.s and the air was like a razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of sister-motes in the infinitudes of time and s.p.a.ce.

"_Nitchevo!_" I said out loud, as I stopped on the trail to readjust and wrap the Twins in their rug-lined laundry-basket.

"In that case," Peter unexpectedly remarked, "I'd like to climb into that front seat with you."

"Why?" I asked, not greatly interested.

"Because I want to talk to you," was Peter's answer.

"But I think I'd rather not talk," I told him.

"Why?" it was his turn to inquire.

"Isn't it a rum enough situation as it is?" I demanded. For Peter, naturally, had not used his eyes for nothing that night.

But Peter didn't wait for my permission to climb into the front seat.

He plumped himself down beside me and sat there with my first-born in his arms and one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over his knees.

"I think I'm beginning to see light," he said, after a rather long silence, as we went spanking along the prairie-trail with the cold air fanning our faces.

"I wish _I_ did," I acknowledged.

"You're not very happy, are you?" he ventured, in a voice with just the slightest trace of _vibrato_ in it.

But I didn't see that anything was to be gained by parading my troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.

"Do you like me, Peter?" I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and the very sense of his remoteness, as I'd already told him, gives birth to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper "weenies."

"What do you suppose I've been hanging around for?" demanded Peter, with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.

"To fix the windmill, of course," I told him. "Unless you have improper designs on Struthers!"

He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.

"If it's true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the dark, I suppose that's why she weaves so badly," he observed, after a short silence.

"She undoubtedly drops a st.i.tch now and then," I agreed, wondering if he was thinking of me or Struthers when he spoke. "But you do like me, don't you?"

"I adore you," admitted Peter quite simply.

"In the face of all these?" I said with a contented little laugh, nodding toward my three children.

"In the face of everything," a.s.serted Peter.

"Then I wish you'd do something for me," I told him.

"What?"