The Prairie Child Part 16

_Sunday the Twenty-Ninth_

Nearly six weeks, I notice, have slipped by. For a month and a half, apparently, the impulse to air my troubles went hibernating with the bears. Yet it has been a mild winter, so far, with very little snow and a great deal of suns.h.i.+ne--a great deal of suns.h.i.+ne which doesn't elate me as it ought. I can't remember who it was said a happy people has no history. But that's not true of a happy woman. It's when her heart is full that she makes herself heard, that she sings like a lark to the world. When she's wretched, she retires with her grief....

I haven't been altogether wretched, it's true, just as I haven't been altogether hilarious, but it disturbs me to find that for a month and a half I haven't written a line in this, the mottled old book of my life. It's not that the last month or two has been empty, for no months are really empty. They have to be filled with something. But there are times, I suppose, when lives lie fallow, the same as fields lie fallow, times when the days drag like harrow-teeth across the perplexed loam of our soul and nothing comes of it at all. Not, I repeat, that I have been momentously unhappy. It's more that a sort of sterilizing indifferency took possession of me and made the little ups and downs of existence as unworthy of record as the ups and downs of the waves on the deadest sh.o.r.es of the Dead Sea. It's not that I'm idle, and it's not that I'm old, and it's not that there's anything wrong with this disappointingly healthy body of mine. But I rather think I need a change of some kind. I even envy Susie, who has ambled on to the Coast and is staying with the Lougheeds in Victoria, playing golf and picking winter roses and writing back about her trips up Vancouver Island and her approaching journey down into California.

"What do we know of the New World," she parodied in her last letter that came to me, "who only the old East know?" Then she goes on to say: "I'm just back from a West Coast trip on the roly-poly _Maquinna_ and if my thoughts go wobbly and my hand goes crooked it's because my head is so prodigiously full of

SEALS SALMON SUNSETS STARS SURF SOLANDER ISLAND SIWASHES SAGHALIE LAMONTIS SKOOk.u.m CHUCK SEA-LIONS

[Transcriber's note: In original, initial "S" was one very large decorative letter, 10 letter-heights tall.]

and alas, also _Seasickness_, that I can't think straight!"

Susie's soul, apparently, has had the dry-shampoo it was in need of.

But as for me, I'm like an old horse-shoe with its calks worn off. The Master-Blacksmith of Life should poke me deep into His fires and fling me on His anvil and make me over!

I've been worrying about my d.i.n.kie. It's all so trivial, in a way, and yet I can't persuade myself it isn't also tragic. He told Susie, before she left, that he was quite willing to go to bed a little earlier one night, because then "he could dream about Doreen." And I noticed, not long ago, that instead of taking just _one_ of our Newton Pippins to school with him, he had formed the habit of taking _two_.

On making investigation, I discovered that this second apple ultimately and invariably found its way into the hands of Mistress Doreen O'Lone. And last week d.i.n.kie autocratically commanded Whinstane Sandy to hitch Mudski up in the old cutter, to go sleigh-riding with the lady of his favor to the Teetzels' taffy-pull. d.i.n.kie's mother was not consulted in the matter--and that is the disturbing feature of it all. I can't help remembering what Duncan once said about my boy growing out of my reach. If I ever lost my d.i.n.kie I would indeed be alone, terribly and hopelessly alone.

_Wednesday the Eighth_

d.i.n.kie, who has been disturbing me the last few days by going about with an air of suppressed excitement, brought my anxiety to a head yesterday by staring into my face and then saying:

"Mummy, I've got a secret!"

"What secret?" I asked, doing my best to appear indifferent.

But d.i.n.kie was not to be trapped.

"It wouldn't be a secret, if I told you," he sagaciously explained.

I studied my child with what was supposed to be a reproving eye.

"You mean you can't even tell your own Mummy?" I demanded.

He shook his head, in solemn negation.

"But can you, some day?" I pursued.

He thought this over.

"Yes, some day," he acknowledged, squeezing my knee.

"How long will I have to wait?" I asked, wondering what could bring such a rhapsodic light into his hazel-specked eye. I thought, of course, of Doreen O'Lone. And I wished the O'Lones would follow in the footsteps of so many other successful ranchers and trek off to California. Then, as I sat studying d.i.n.kie, I countermanded that wish.

For its fulfillment would bring loneliness to the heart of my laddie--and loneliness is h.e.l.l! So, instead, I struggled as best I could to banish all thought of the matter from my mind. But it was only half a success. I remembered that Gershom himself had been going about as abstracted as an ant-eater and as gloomy as a crow, during the last week; and I kept sniffing something unpropitious up-wind. I even hoped that d.i.n.kie would return to the subject, as children with a secret have the habit of doing. But he has been as tight-lipped on the matter as his reticent old dad might have been.

_Wednesday the Fifteenth_

I got an altogether unlooked-for Valentine yesterday. It was a brief but a significant letter from d.i.n.ky-Dunk, telling me that he had "taken over" the Goodhue house in Mount Royal and asking me if I intended to be its mistress. He has bought the house, apparently, completely furnished and is getting ready to move into it the first week in March.

The whole thing has rather taken my breath away. I don't object to an ultimatum, but I do dislike to have it come like a bolt from the blue.

I have arrived at my Rubicon, all right, and about everything that's left of my life, I suppose, will hang on my decision. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry, to be horrified or hilarious. At one moment I have a tendency to emulate Marguerite doing the Jewel-Song in _Faust_. "This isn't _me_! This isn't _me_!" I keep protesting to myself. But Marguerite, I know, would never be so ungrammatical. And then I begin to foresee difficulties. The mere thought of leaving Casa Grande tears my heart. When we go away, as that wise man of Paris once said, we die a little. This will always seem my home. I could never forsake it utterly. I dread to forsake it for even a portion of each year. I am a part of the prairie, now, and I could never be entirely happy away from it. And to accept that challenge--for however one may look at it, it remains a challenge--and go to the new home in Calgary would surely be another concession. And I have been conceding, conceding, for the sake of my children. How much more can I concede?

Yet, when all is said and done, I am one of a family. I am not a free agent. I am chained to the oar for life. When we link up with the race we have more than the little ring of our own Ego to remember. It is not, as d.i.n.ky-Dunk once pointed out to me, a good thing to get "Indianized." We have our community obligations and they must be faced. The children, undoubtedly, would have advantages in the city.

And to find my family reunited would be "_le desir de paraitre_." But I can't help remembering how much there is to remember. I'm humbler now, it's true, than I once was. I no longer say "One side, please!"

to life, while life, like old Major Elmes on Murray Hill, declines to vary its course for one small and piping voice. Instead of getting gangway, I find, I'm apt to get an obliterating thump on the spine.

Heaven knows, I want to do the right thing. But the issue seems so hopelessly tangled. I have brooded over it and I have even prayed over it. But it all seems to come to nothing. I sometimes nurse a ghostly sort of hope that it may be taken out of my hands, that some power outside myself may intervene to decide. For it impresses me as ominous that I should be able to hesitate at such a time, when a woman, for once in her life, should know her own mind, should see her own fixed goal and fight her way to it. I've been wondering if I haven't ebbed away into that half-warm impersonality which used to impress me as the last stage in moral decay.

But I'm not the fishy type of woman. I know I'm not. And I'm not a hard-head. I've always had a horror of being hard, for fear my hardness might in some way be pa.s.sed on to my d.i.n.kie. I want to keep my boy kindly and considerate of others, and loyal to the people who love him. But I balk at that word "loyal." For if I expect loyalty in my offspring I surely must have it myself. And I stood up before a minister of G.o.d, not so many years ago, and took an oath to prove loyal to my husband, to cleave to him in sickness and in health. I also took an oath to honor him. But he has made that part of the compact almost impossible. And my children, if I go back to him, will come under his influence. And I can't help questioning what that influence will be. I have only one life to live. And I have a human anxiety to get out of it all that is coming to me. I even feel that it owes me something, that there are certain arrears of happiness to be made up.... I wish I had a woman, older and wiser than myself, to talk things over with. I have had the impulse to write to Peter, and tell him everything, and ask him what I ought to do. But that doesn't impress me as being quite fair to Peter. And, oddly enough, it doesn't impress me as being quite fair to d.i.n.ky-Dunk. So I'm going to wait a week or two and let the cream of conviction rise on the pan of indecision. There's a tiny parliament of angels, in the inner chambers of our heart, who talk these things over and decide them while we sleep.

_Friday the Seventeenth_

We had to dig in, like bears, for two whole days while the first real snow-storm of the winter raged outside. But the skies have cleared, the wind has gone, and the weather is crystal-clear again. d.i.n.kie and Poppsy, furred to the ears, are out on the drifts learning to use the snow-shoes which Percy and Olga sent down to them for Christmas.

d.i.n.kie has made himself a spear by las.h.i.+ng his broken-bladed jack-knife to the handle of my headless dutch-hoe and has converted himself into a stealthy Iluit stalking a polar bear in the form of poor old Scotty, who can't quite understand why he is being driven so relentlessly from crevice to Arctic crevice. They have also built an igloo, and indulged in what is apparently marriage by capture, with the reluctant bride making her repeated escape by floundering over drifts piled even higher than the fence-tops. It makes me hanker to get my own snow-shoes on my moccasined feet again and go trafficking over that undulating white world of snow, where barb-wire means no more than a line-fence in Noah's Flood. No one could remain morose, in weather like this. You must dress for it, of course, since that arching blue sky has sword-blades of cold sheathed in its velvety soft azure. But it goes to your head, like wine, and you wonder what makes you feel that life is so well worth living.

_Tuesday, the Twenty-First_

The armistice continues. And I continue to sit on my keg of powder and sing "_O Sole Mio_" to the northern moon.

I have had Whinstane Sandy build a toboggan-slide out of the old binder-shed, which has been pretty well blown to pieces by last summer's wind-storms. He picked out the soundest of the two-by-fours and made a framework which he boarded over with the best of the weather-bleached old siding. For when you haven't the luxury of a hill on your landscape, you can at least make an imitation one. Whinnie even planed the board-joints in the center of the runway and counter-sunk every nail-head--and cussed volubly when he pounded his heavily mittened thumb with the hammer. The finished structure could hardly be called a thing of beauty. We have only one of the stable-ladders to mount it from the rear, and instead of toboggans we have only Poppsy's home-made hand-sleigh and d.i.n.kie's somewhat dilapidated "flexible coaster." But when water had been carried out to that smooth runway and the boards had been coated with ice, like brazil-nuts _glace_, and the snow along the lower course had been well packed down, it at least gave you a run for your money.

The tip-top point of the slide couldn't have been much more than fourteen or fifteen feet above the prairie-floor, but it seemed perilous enough when I tried it out--much to the perturbation of Whinstane Sandy--by lying stomach-down on d.i.n.kie's coaster and letting myself shoot along that well-iced incline. It was a kingly sensation, that of speed wedded to danger, and it took me back to Davos at a breath. Then I tried it with d.i.n.kie, and then with Poppsy, and then with Poppsy and d.i.n.kie together. We had some grand old tumbles, in the loose snow, and some unmentionable bruises, before we became sufficiently expert to tool our sleigh-runners along their proper trail. But it was good fun. The excitement of the thing, in fact, rather got into my blood. In half an hour the three of us were covered with snow, were shouting like Comanches, and were having an altogether wild time of it. There was climbing enough to keep us warm, for all the sub-zero weather, and I was finally allowed to escape to the house only on the promise that I risk my neck again on the morrow.

_Friday the Twenty-Fourth_

My d.i.n.kie's secret is no longer a secret. It divulged itself to me to-day with the suddenness of a thunder-clap. _Peter Ketley has been back at Alabama Ranch for nearly three weeks._