The Prairie Wife Part 10

Olga has been with us a week, and she still fascinates me. She is installed in the annex, and seems calmly satisfied with her surroundings. She brought everything she owns tied up in an oat-sack. I have given her a few of my things, for which she seems dumbly grateful.

She seldom talks, and never laughs. But I am teaching her to say "yes"

instead of "yaw." She studies me with her limpid blue eyes, and if she is silent she is never sullen. She hasn't the heavy forehead and jaw of the Galician women and she hasn't the Asiatic cast of face that belongs to the Russian peasant. And she has the finest mouthful of teeth I ever saw in a human head--and she never used a toothbrush in her life! She is only nineteen, but such a bosom, such limbs, such strength!

This is a great deal of talk about Olga, I'm afraid, but you must remember that Olga is an event. I expected Olie would be keeled over by her arrival, but they seem to regard each other with silent contempt. I suppose that is because racially and physically they are of the same type. I'm anxious to see what Percival Benson thinks of Olga when he gets back--they would be such opposites. Olga is working with her ox-team on the land. Two days ago I rode out on Paddy and watched her.

There was something Homeric about it, something Sorolla would have jumped at. She seemed so like her oxen. She moved like them, and her eyes were like theirs. She has the same strength and solemnity when she walks. She's so primitive and natural and instinctive in her actions.

Yesterday, after dinner, she curled up on a pile of hay at one end of the corral and fell asleep for a few minutes, flat in the strong noonday light. I saw d.i.n.ky-Dunk stop on his way to the stable and stand and look down at her. I slipped out beside him. "G.o.d, what a woman!" he said under his breath. A vague stab of jealousy went through me as I heard him say that. Then I looked at her hand, large, relaxed, roughened with all kinds of weather and calloused with heavy work. And this time it was an equally vague stab of pity that went through me.

_Monday the Twenty-sixth_

The rush is on, and d.i.n.ky-Dunk is always out before six. If it's true, as some one once said, that the pleasures of life depended on its anxieties, then we ought to be a hilarious household. Every one is busy, and I do what I can to help. I don't know why it is, but I find an odd comfort in the thought of having another woman near me, even Olga. She also helps me a great deal with the housework. Those huge hands of hers have a dexterity you'd never dream of. She thinks the piano a sort of miracle, and me a second miracle for being able to play it. In the evening she sits back in a corner, the darkest corner she can find, and listens. She never speaks, never moves, never expresses one iota of emotion. But in the gloom I can often catch the animal-like glow of her eyes. They seem almost phosph.o.r.escent. d.i.n.ky-Dunk had a long letter from Percival Benson to-day. It was interesting and offhandedly jolly and just the right sort. And Percy says he'll be back on the t.i.tchborne place in a few weeks.

_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_

Olga went through the boards of her wagon-box and got a bad sc.r.a.pe on her leg. She showed me the extent of her injuries, without the slightest hesitation, and I gave her first-aid treatment with my carbolated vaseline. And still again I had to think of the Venus de Milo, for it was a knee like a statue's, milky white and round and smooth, with a skin like a baby's, and so different to her sunburnt forearms. It was Olympian more than Fifth-Avenuey. It was a leg that made me think, not of Rubens, but of t.i.tian, and my thoughts at once went out to the right-hand lady of the "Sacred and Profane Love," in the Borghese, there was such softness and roundness combined with its strength. And d.i.n.ky-Dunk walked in and stood staring at it, himself, with never so much as a word of apology. Olga looked up at him without a flicker of her ox-like eyes. It wasn't until I made an angry motion for her to drop her skirt that she realized any necessity for covering the t.i.tian knee. But again I felt that odd pang of jealousy needle through me as I saw his face. At least I suppose it was jealousy, the jealousy of an artful little Mona-Lisa minx who didn't even cla.s.s in with the demiG.o.ds. When Olga was gone, however, I said to d.i.n.ky-Dunk: "Isn't that a limb for your life?"

He merely said: "We don't grow limbs up here, Tabby. They're legs, just plain legs!"

"Anything but _plain_!" I corrected him. Then he acknowledged that he'd seen those knees before. He'd stumbled on Olga and her brother knee-deep in mud and cow manure, treading a mixture to plaster their shack with, the same as the Doukhobors do. It left me less envious of those Junoesque knees.

_Monday the Second_

Keeping chickens is a much more complicated thing than the outsider imagines. For example, several of my best hens, quite untouched by the modern spirit of feminine unrest, have been developing "broodiness" and I have been trying to "break them up," as the poulterers put it. But they are determined to set. This mothering instinct is a fine enough thing in its way, but it's been spoiling too many good eggs. So I've been trying to emanc.i.p.ate these ruffled females. I lift them off the nest by the tail feathers, ten times a day. I fling cold water in their solemn maternal faces. I put little rings of barb-wire under their sentimental old bosoms. But still they set. And one, having pecked me on the wrist until the blood came, got her ears promptly boxed--in face of the fact that all poultry keepers acknowledge that kindness to a hen improves her laying qualities.

_Thursday the Fifth_

Casa Grande is a beehive of industry. Every one has a part to play. I am no longer expected to sit by the fire and purr. At nights I sew.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk is so hard on his clothes! When it's not putting on patches it's sewing on b.u.t.tons. Then we go to bed at half-past nine. At half-past nine, think of it! Little me, who more than once went humming up Fifth Avenue when morning was showing gray over the East River, and often left Sherry's (oh, those dear old dancing days!) when the milk wagons were rumbling through Forty-fourth Street, and once triumphantly announced, on coming out of Dorlon's and studying the old Oyster-Letter clock, that I'd stuck it out to Y minutes past O! But it's no hardship to get up at five, these glorious mornings. The days get longer, and the weather is perfect. And the prairie looks as though a vacuum cleaner had been at work on it overnight. Positively, there's a charwoman who does this old world over, while we sleep! By morning it's as bright as a new pin. And out here every one is thinking of the day ahead; d.i.n.ky-Dunk, of his crop; Olga, of the pair of sky-blue corsets I've written to the Winnipeg mail-order house for; Olie, of the final waterproofing of the granaries so the wheat won't get spoilt any more; Gee-Gee, herself, of--of something which she's almost afraid to think about.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, in his deviling moods, says I'm an old married woman now, that I'm settled, that I've eaten my pie! Perhaps I have. I'm not imaginative, so I must depend on others for my joy of living. I know now that I can never create, never really express myself in any way worth while, either on paper or canvas or keyboard. And people without imagination, I suppose, simply have to drop back to racial simplicities--which means I'll have to have a family, and feed hungry mouths, and keep a home going. And I'll have to get all my art at second-hand, from magazines and gramophone records and plaster-of-Paris casts. Just a housewife! And I so wanted to be something more, once! Yet I wonder if, after all, the one is so much better than the other? I wonder? And here comes my d.i.n.ky-Dunk, and in three minutes he'll be kissing me on the tip of the chin and asking me what there's going to be good for supper! And that is better than fame! For all afternoon those twelve little lines of Dobson's have been running through my head:

Fame is a food that dead men eat-- I have no stomach for such meat.

In little light and narrow rooms, They eat it in the silent tombs, With no kind voice of comrade near To bid the banquet be of cheer.

But Friendship is a n.o.ble thing-- Of Friendship it is good to sing, For truly when a man shall end, He lives in memory of his friend Who doth his better part recall And of his faults make funeral!

But when you put the word "love" there instead of "friendship" you make it even better.... Olga, by the way, is not so stupid as you might imagine. She's discovered something which I didn't intend her to find out.... And Olie, also by the way, has solved the problem of "breaking up" my setting hens. He has made a swinging coop with a wire netting bottom, for all the world like the hanging gardens of Babylon, and into this all the ruffled mothers-to-be have been thrust and the coop hung up on the hen-house wall. Open wire is a very uncomfortable thing to set on, and these hens have at last discovered that fact. I have been out looking at them. I never saw such a parliament of solemn indignation.

But their pride has been broken, and they are beginning to show a healthier interest in their meals.

_Tuesday the Tenth_

I've been wondering if d.i.n.ky-Dunk is going to fall in love with Olga.

Yesterday I saw him staring at her neck. She's the type of woman that would really make the right sort of wilderness wife. She seems an integral part of the prairie, broad-bosomed, fecund, opulent. And she's so placid and large and soft-spoken and easy to live with. She has none of my moods and tantrums.

Her corsets came to-day, and I showed her how to put them on. She is incontinently proud of them, but in my judgment they only make her ridiculous. It's as foolish as putting a French _toque_ on one of her oxen. The skin of Olga's great shoulders is as smooth and creamy as a baby's. I have been watching her eyes. They are not a dark blue, but in a strong side-light they seem deep wells of light, layer on layer of azure. And she is mysterious to me, calmly and magnificently inscrutable. And I once thought her an uncouth animal. But she is a great help. She has planted rows and rows of sweet peas all about Casa Grande and is starting to make a kitchen garden, which she's going to fence off and look after with her own hands. It will be twice the size of Olie's. But I do hope she doesn't ever grow into something mysterious to my d.i.n.ky-Dunk. This morning she said I ought to work in the garden, that the more I kept on my feet the better it would be for me later on.

As for d.i.n.ky-Dunk, the poor boy is working himself gaunt. Yet tired as he is, he tries to read a few pages of something worth while every night. Sometimes we take turns in reading. Last night he handed me over his volume of Spencer with a pencil mark along one pa.s.sage. This pa.s.sage said: "Intellectual activity in women is liable to be diminished after marriage by that antagonism between individuation and reproduction everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why, but that pa.s.sage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my brain I carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this same philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking on his pa.s.sion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a generalization. So I could afford to laugh. "Spencer's idea of a tragedy," I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk, "is a deduction killed by a fact!" And again I smiled my Mona-Lisa smile. "And I'm going to be one of the facts!" I proudly proclaimed.

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, after thinking this over, broke into a laugh. "You know, Gee-Gee," he solemnly announced, "there are times when you seem almost clever!" But I wasn't clever in this case, for it was hours later before I saw the trap which d.i.n.ky-Dunk had laid for me!

_Monday the Sixteenth_

All day Sat.u.r.day Olga and d.i.n.ky-Dunk were off in the chuck-wagon, working too far away to come home for dinner. The thought of them being out there, side by side, hung over me like a cloud. I remembered how he had absently stared at the white column of her neck. And I pictured him stopping in his work and studying her faded blue cotton waist pulled tight across the line of that opulent bust. What man wouldn't be impressed by such bodily magnificence, such lavish and undulating youth and strength? And there's something so soft and diffused about those ox-like eyes of hers! You do not think, then, of her eyes being such a pale blue, any more than you could stop to accuse summer moonlight of not being ruddy. And those unruffled blue eyes never seem to see you; they rather seem to bathe you in a gaze as soft and impersonal as moonlight itself.

I simply couldn't stand it any more. I got on Paddy and galloped out for my d.i.n.ky-Dunk, as though it were my sudden and solemn duty to save him from some imminent and awful catastrophe.

I stopped on the way, to watch a couple of prairie-chickens minuetting through the turns of their vernal courtships. The pompous little beggars with puffed-out wattles and neck ruffs were positively doing cancans and two-steps along the prairie floor. Love was in the air, that perfect spring afternoon, even for the animal world. So instead of riding openly and honestly up to d.i.n.ky-Dunk and Olga, I kept under cover as much as I could and stalked them, as though I had been a timber wolf.

Then I felt thoroughly and unspeakably ashamed of myself, for I caught sight of Olga high on her wagon, like a Valkyr on a cloud, and d.i.n.ky-Dunk hard at work a good two miles away.

He was a little startled to see me come cantering up on Paddy. I don't know whether it was silly or not, but I told him straight out what had brought me. He hugged me like a bear and then sat down on the prairie and laughed. "With that cow?" he cried. And I'm sure no man could ever call the woman he loves a cow.... I believe d.i.n.ky-Dunk suspects something. He's just asked me to be more careful about riding Paddy. And he's been more solemnly kind, lately. But I'll never tell him--never--never!

_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_

Percy will be back to-morrow. It will be a different looking country to what it was when he left. I've been staring up at a cobalt sky, and begin to understand why people used to think Heaven was somewhere up in the midst of such celestial blue. And on the prairie the sky is your first and last friend. Wasn't it Emerson who somewhere said that the firmament was the daily bread for one's eyes? And oh, the lovely, greening floor of the wheat country now! Such a soft yellow-green glory stretching so far in every direction, growing so much deeper day by day!

And the sun and s.p.a.ce and clear light on the sky-line and the pillars of smoke miles away and the wonderful, mysterious promise that is hanging over this teeming, steaming, shimmering, abundant broad bosom of earth!

It thrills me in a way I can't explain. By night and day, before breakfast and after supper, the talk is of wheat, wheat, wheat, until I nearly go crazy. I complained to d.i.n.ky-Dunk that he was dreaming wheat, living wheat, breathing wheat, that he and all the rest of the world seemed mad about wheat.

"And there's just one other thing you must remember, Lady Bird," was his answer. "All the rest of the world is _eating_ wheat. It can't live without wheat. And I'd rather be growing the bread that feeds the hungry than getting rich making cordite and Krupp guns!" So he's risking everything on this crop of his, and is eternally figuring and planning and getting ready for the _grande debacle_. He says it will be like a battle. And no general goes into a battle without being prepared for it.

But when we read about the doings of the outside world, it seems like reading of happenings that have taken place on the planet Mars. We're our own little world just now, self-contained, rounded-out, complete.