The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur
was able to smile at this, though I wasn’t.
“But we have the glory of doing things,” I contended, “and somebody, I believe, has summed up your Marcus Aurelius by saying he left behind him a couple of beautiful books, an execrable son, and a decaying nation. And we don’t intend to decay! We don’t live for the moment, it’s true. But we live for To-morrow. We write epics in railway lines, and instead of working out sonnets we build new cities, and instead of sitting down under a palm-tree and twiddling our thumbs we turn a wilderness into a new nation, and grow grain and give bread to the hungry world where the gipsies don’t seem quite able to make both ends meet!”
I had my say out, and Lady Alicia sat looking at me with a sort of mild and impersonal surprise. But she declined to argue about it all. And it was just as well she didn’t, I suppose, for I had my Irish up and didn’t intend to sit back and see my country maligned.
But on the way home to the Harris Ranch last night, with Dinky-Dunk silent and thoughtful, and a cold star or two in the high-arching heavens over us, I found that my little fire of enthusiasm had burnt itself out and those crazy lines of John Davidson kept returning to my mind:
| “After the end of all things, After the years are spent, After the loom is broken, After the robe is rent, Will there be hearts a-beating, Will friend converse with friend, Will men and women be lovers, After the end?” |
I felt very much alone in the world, and about as cheerful as a moonstruck coyote, after those lines had rattled in my empty brain like a skeleton in the wind. It wasn’t until I saw the light in our wickiup window and heard Bobs’ bay of welcome through the crystal-clear twilight that the leaden weight of desolation slipped off the ledge of my heart. But as I heard that deep-noted bark of gladness, that friendly intimation of guardianship unrelaxed and untiring, I remembered that I had one faithful and unexacting friend, even though it was nothing better than a dog.
Sunday the Twelfth
Dinky-Dunk rather surprised me to-day by asking why I was so stand-offish with his Cousin Allie. I told him that I wasn’t in the habit of curling up like a kitten on a slab of Polar ice.
“But she really likes you, Tabbie,” my husband protested. “She wants to know you and understand you. Only you keep intimidating her, and placing her at a disadvantage.”
This was news to me. Lady Alicia, I’d imagined, stood in awe of nothing on the earth beneath nor the heavens above. She can speak very sharply, I’ve already noticed, to Struthers, when the occasion arises. And she’s been very calm and deliberate, as I’ve already observed, in her manner of taking over Casa Grande. For she has formally taken it over, Dinky-Dunk tells me, and in a day or two we all have to trek to town for the signing of the papers. She is, apparently, going to run the ranch on her own hook, and in her own way. It will be well worth watching.
I was rather anxious to hear the particulars of the transfer to Lady Allie, but Dinky-Dunk seemed a little reluctant to go into details, and I didn’t intend to make a parade of my curiosity. I can bide my time. … Yesterday I put on my old riding-suit, saddled Paddy, fed the Twins to their last mouthful, and went galloping off through the mud to help bring the cattle over to the Harris Ranch. I was a sight, in that weather-stained old suit and ragged toppers, even before I got freckled and splashed with prairie-mud. I was standing up in the stirrups laughing at Francois, who’d had a bad slip and fallen in a puddle just back of our old corral, when her Ladyship came out. She must have taken me for a drunken cowboy who’d rolled into a sheep-dip, for my nose was red and my old Stetson sombrero was crooked on the back of my head and even my hair was caked with mud. She called to me, rather imperiously, so I went stampeding up to her, and let Paddy indulge in that theatrical stop-slide of his, on his haunches, so that it wasn’t until his nose was within two feet of her own that she could be quite sure she wasn’t about to be run down.
Her eyes popped a little when she saw it was a woman on Paddy, though she’d refused to show a trace of fear when we went avalanching down on her. Then she studied my get-up.
“I should rather like to ride that way,” she coolly announced.
“It’s the only way,” I told her, making Paddy pirouette by pressing a heel against his short-ribs. She meant, of course, riding astride, which must have struck her as the final word in audacity.
“I like your pony,” next remarked Lady Alicia, with a somewhat wistful intonation in her voice.
“He’s a brick,” I acknowledged. Then I swung about to help Francois head off a bunch of rampaging steers. “Come and see us,” I called back over my shoulder. If Lady Alicia answered, I didn’t have time to catch what she said.
But that romp on Paddy has done me good. It shook the solemnity out of me. I’ve just decided that I’m not going to surrender to this middle-aged Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire stuff before my time. I’m going to refuse to grow old and poky. I’m going to keep the spark alive, the sacred spark of youth, even though folks write me down as the biggest loon west of the Dirt Hills. So dear Lord—this is my prayer—whatever You do to me, keep me alive. O God, don’t let me, in Thy divine mercy, be a Dead One. Don’t let me be a soured woman with a self-murdered soul. Keep the wine of youth in my body and the hope of happiness in my heart. Yea, permit me deeply to live and love and laugh, so that youth may abide in my bones, even as it did in that once-renowned Duchess of Lienster,
| Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten, To die of a fall from a cherry-tree then! |
My poor old Dinky-Dunk, by the way, meanders about these days so moody and morose it’s beginning to disturb me. He’s at the end of his string, and picked clean to the bone, and I’m beginning to see that it’s my duty to buoy that man up, to nurse him back into a respectable belief in himself. His nerves are a bit raw, and he’s not always responsible for his manners. The other night he came in tired, and tried to read, when Poppsy and Pee-Wee were both going it like the Russian Balalaika. To tell the truth, their little tummies were a bit upset, because the food purveyor had had too strenuous a day to be regular in her rounds.
“Can’t you keep those squalling brats quiet?” Dinky-Dunk called out to me. It came like a thunder clap. It left me gasping, to think that he could call his own flesh and blood “squalling brats.” And I was shocked and hurt, but I decided not to show it.
“Will somebody kindly page Lord Chesterfield?” I quietly remarked as I went to the Twins and wheeled them out to the kitchen, where I gave them hot peppermint and rubbed their backs and quieted them down again.
I suppose there’s no such thing as a perfect husband. That’s a lesson we’ve all got to learn, the same as all children, apparently, have to find out that acorns and horse-chestnuts aren’t edible. For the nap wears off men the same as it does off clothes. I dread to have to write it down, but I begin to detect thinnesses in Dinky-Dunk, and a disturbing little run or two in the even web of his character. But he knows when he’s played Indian and attempts oblique and rather shamefaced efforts to make amends, later on, when it won’t be too noticeable. Last night, as I sat sewing, our little Dinkie must have had a bad dream, for he wakened from a sound sleep with a scream of terror. Dinky-Dunk went to him first, and took him up and sang to him, and when I glanced in I saw a rumply and tumbly and sleepy-eyed tot with his kinky head against his father’s shoulder. As I took up my sewing again and heard Dinky-Dunk singing to his son, it seemed a proud and happy and contented sort of voice. It rose and fell in that next room, in a sort of droning bass, and for the life of me I can’t tell why, but as I stopped in my sewing and sat listening to that father singing to his sleepy-eyed first-born, it brought the sudden tears to my eyes. It has been a considerable length of time, en passant, since I found myself sitting down and pumping the brine. I must be getting