The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur
to his rather gray-looking cheek-bones. “But can’t you see that now it’s the children we’ve got to think of?”
“I have thought of them,” I quietly announced. As though any mother, on prairie or in metropolis, didn’t think of them first and last and in-between-whiles! “And that’s what simplifies the situation. I want them to have a fair chance. I’d rather they—”
“It’s not quite that criminal,” cut in Dinky-Dunk, with almost an angry flush creeping up toward his forehead.
“I’m only taking your own word for that,” I reminded him, deliberately steeling my heart against the tides of compassion that were trying to dissolve it. “And I’m only taking what is, after all, the easiest course out of the situation.”
Dinky-Dunk’s color receded, leaving his face even more than ever the color of old cheese, for all the tan of wind and sun which customarily tinted it, like afterglow on a stubbled hillside.
“But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say about all this,” he reminded me.
“Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good,” I retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland with bated breath, just because she had a title. I’d scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.
“You’re missing the point,” began Dinky-Dunk.
“Listen!” I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was promptly augmented into a duet.
“Poppsy’s got Pee-Wee awake,” I announced as I rose from my chair. It seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune, before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer in spirit by the time I’d crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the table to resume my seat opposite him.
“You don’t despise me, do you?” he demanded, holding me by the sleeve and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as wistful as an old hound’s in winter, an eye with a hunger I’d not seen there this many a day.
“Despise you, Acushla?” I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had gathered and swung between us for so many months. I’d worried, in secret, about that fog. I’d tried to tell myself that it was the coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the last acre of land.
“My dear, my dear,” I tried to tell him, “I was never hungry for money. The one thing I’ve always been hungry for is love. What’d be the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time? And what’s the good of life if you can’t crowd a little affection into it? I was just thinking we’re all terribly like children in a Maypole dance. We’re so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We don’t remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in our ends. So carpe diem, say I. And perhaps you remember that sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and pinned to my bedroom door: ‘Better it is that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses!’ ”
Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a sad and slightly acidulated smile.
“You’d need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you’d lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack,” he warned me.
“Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad,” I very promptly informed him.
“But you do know that,” he contended, man-like. I was glad to find, though, that a little of the bitterness had gone out of his eyes.
“Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger to hear that sort of thing, hunger to hear it all the time. On that theme they want their husbands to be like those little Japanese wind-harps that don’t even know how to be silent.”
“Then why did you say, about a month ago, that marriage was like Hogan’s Alley, the deeper one got into it the tougher it was?”
“Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole days without kissing me good-by?” I countered. I tried to speak lightly, but it took an effort. For my husband’s neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the first intimation that the glory was over and done with. It had given me about the same feeling that we used to have as flapperettes when the circus-manager mounted the tub and began to announce the after-concert, all for the price of ten cents, one dime!
“I wanted to, Tabbie, but you impressed me as looking rather unapproachable that day.”
“When the honey is scarce, my dear, even bees are said to be cross,” I reminded him. “And that’s the thing that disturbs me, Dinky-Dunk. It must disturb any woman to remember that she’s left her happiness in one man’s hand. And it’s more than one’s mere happiness, for mixed up with that is one’s sense of humor and one’s sense of proportion. They all go, when you make me miserable. And the Lord knows, my dear, that a woman without a sense of humor is worse than a dipper without a handle.”
Dinky-Dunk sat studying me.
“I guess it was my own sense of proportion that got out of kilter, Gee-Gee,” he finally said. “But there’s one thing I want you to remember. If I got deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn’t for what money meant to me. I’ve never been able to forget what I took you away from. I took you away from luxury and carted you out here to the end of Nowhere and had you leave behind about everything that made life decent. And the one thing I’ve always wanted to do is make good on that over-draft on your bank-account of happiness. I’ve wanted to give back to you the things you sacrificed. I knew I owed you that, all along. And when the children came I saw that I owed it to you more than ever. I want to give Dinky-Dink and Poppsy and Pee-Wee a fair chance in life. I want to be able to start them right, just as much as you do. And you can’t be dumped back into a three-roomed wickiup, with three children to bring up, and feel that you’re doing the right thing by your family.”
It wasn’t altogether happy talk, but deep down in my heart I was glad we were having it. It seemed to clear the air, very much as a good old-fashioned thunder-storm can. It left us stumbling back to the essentials of existence. It showed us where we stood, and what we meant to each other, what we must mean to each other. And now that the chance had come, I intended to have my say out.
“The things that make life decent, Dinky-Dunk, are the things that we carry packed away in our own immortal soul, the homely old things like honesty and self-respect and contentment of mind. And if we’ve got to cut close to the bone before we can square up our ledger of life, let’s start the carving while we have the chance. Let’s get our conscience clear and know we’re playing the game.”
I was dreadfully afraid he was going to laugh at me, it sounded so much like pulpiteering. But I was in earnest, passionately in earnest, and my lord and master seemed to realize it.
“Have you thought about the kiddies?” he asked me, for the second time.
“I’m