Letters of a Dakota Divorcee Part 2

"Chappie," the Englishman, has started a society paper--sort of six months gestation of _Town Topics_, so Carlton and I are batting around after midnight, so "we won't become saw." There are all sorts of ways to make a bee buzz. Do keep Bern from wearing red ties while I'm gone and give him a shove along the straight and narrow, once and so often.

After a month and a half of drinking Sioux Falls water, I would bring a higher price as a lime kiln than I would in the woman market. One's pelt gets wind tanned and such a thing as a daintily flushed face is as unlooked for out here as consideration from the natives.

My head ached so yesterday that I called on a doctor, "Visit including all medicine, one dollar." Isn't it "patetic?" He raved about the climate and said he brought his wife here with T. B., and she improved so much. Naturally I asked, "How is she now?" He said, "O, she's dead."

Don't blame him for raving about the climate, do you?

My dear it is worth a trip out here to see a whist party "let out." No, not "bridge,"--they haven't heard of it yet--just plain whist; but as I was saying, to see one turn out with its white alpaca skirt and blue satin ribbon belt. I've paid two dollars at Hammerstein's to see things not half so funny. O, for a sip of Fleischman's coffee--there are grounds for divorce in every cup out here. The b.u.t.ter we eat, walks in from the country alone, and at every meal we get smashed potatoes piled as high as the snow on the Alps. I can't look a potato in the eye any more.

There is a couple here on business from Michigan,--a Mr. and Mrs. Jones, odd name that. Isn't it sad that they are so happily married, they might both be getting divorces, but as it is they are simply wasting a year out here for nothing. I pa.s.sed the Judge on the street this morning and I was so nervous that I walked bow-legged. But thanks to _skirts et cetera-et cetera_.

I have sampled all the churches and have finally landed at the Christian Science house of wors.h.i.+p, as I would rather any day hear a pianola grind out its _papier mache_ music than listen to a poor performer.

If I had Carnegie's millions, I'd go straight to Chicago, buy a big, fat, thick, beef steak, step into the middle of it and eat my way out.

I'm hungry, hungry. I worry down the "dope" that they deal out in the dining room, then go back to my sanctum and finish on limey water and crack-nells--you know what they are, a powdery sort of counterfeit cake that chokes you to death if you happen to breathe while you're chewing it.

Last night while trying to cut some stringy roast beef and still retain my dignity, the man with the red tie said: "Put your other foot on it."

I'm afraid if I don't eat potatoes again, my stomach will shrivel so that I will never be able to sit through a course dinner when I get back. Potatoes distend it all right--I feel like I have swallowed one wing of Fleischman's yeast factory whenever I eat them. You have to come down on the meat with such force to make any impression on it, that more gets pushed up between your teeth than goes down your alimentary ca.n.a.l; then you spend the balance of the night squandering j.a.panese dental floss. I unconsciously finish my prayers with "Lord preserve us from the holy trinity of roast beef, roast mutton and roast pork."

You can recognise one of the clan in a moment by what is known as the "Divorsay jaw." No feek and weeble expression on our faces but "Do or die" is the look we have in our optics.

Every time I go to church I vow I'll never go again. The organ is asthmatic and the wheezing gets on my gray matter.

The Judge has begun to wear a fur coat--Dakota cow fur, I think, and he looks for all the world like a turkey gobbler in distress.

I sleep on what they call here a "sanitary couch." Can't fathom the mystery of the name, for mine is so chucked with dust that I dream I'm in a sand storm crossing the Sahara, and when I awaken my sympathies are keen with the camel.

There's a new boarder here whose face looks like a chapel and every time she opens her mouth you're afraid it's going to be the Lord's Prayer.

She wears a wide ruching which makes her look excited; distributes tracts, and can't see a joke. She says she's Miss and leaves envelopes around with "Mrs." written on them in red ink--modest writing fluid I've always considered it.

Will you buy me some new puffs? Mine are all ratty and I feel bare-footed without them. Enclosed is a clipping from my hair. Read it carefully. False hair is no crime as long as it matches--like that German song that says "Kissing is no sin with a pretty woman."

Have you caught "Three Weeks" yet? I had a violent attack a few days ago. Cured it with a small dose of Christian Science before meals and some of Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, which I shook well after using.

You can imagine what disastrous effect Eleanor Glynn's book had on the "Divorce Colony." We all bunched together and said "What's the use," and if it hadn't been for the old man who eats his soup out loud, we would have bolted in a ma.s.s to suggest "Free Love" to our respective "Fiascos"--Dakota's past tense for "Fiance."

I long so to flash my calciums on a Fifth Ave. stroller that I'd flirt with G.o.d if I met him.

I close dear with a sigh over my chin, which is getting triple (an invention of the devil).

_Auf wiedersehen_, MARIANNE.

October 25.

My Dear:

I've changed lodgings and before I took the new chambers, I inquired of the landlady if there was any electricity in the house and she answered "Yes," so today I asked here where it was, and she pointed to the telephone. O, me! O, my! this life is wearing me to a fraz!

Last week the autumn leaves fell and in order to show Mrs. Judge how simple and near to nature I live, I raked their lawn, and ours, clean, and stood long after dark making huge bonfires on a line with the sidewalk. But lo! the fleas that were of the earth became the fleas of me and I have occupied most of my time since scratching. But anything to pa.s.s the hours away.

Our hedges are cut for the last time this fall, and look as though they are fresh from the barber. Isn't that phrase "for the last time" the most desolate utterance that a human voice can make? It goes thundering down the aisles of time only to be lost in the arcana of treacherous memory. To dream for the last time--to love for the last time--bitter contemplation--funereal introspection.

I am suffering from acute nostalgia--by this time you are standing in the gun-room at Keith Lodge, drinking your first. I can hear Duncan ask: "Scotch or Irish," and see you tip it off with Blake and the rest. No bridge for you tonight--early to bed and tomorrow morning you'll all start out in your natty knickers and short kilts to murder things that will fall in b.l.o.o.d.y feathery heaps at your feet. Native woodc.o.c.k, jack snipe, black mallard, grouse, etc., the restless eager setters doing their own retrieving; the soft dank ground daintily overspread with the frond of marvelous fern like my window pane this morning with its delicate tracery in frost; the tall-stemmed alders echoing your shots to skyward; the big dense timber with its springy ground all saturated with the fragrance of the mounting sea: I seem like something dead whispering to you from the tomb. Nothing lasts longer than twenty-four hours in New York--not even a memory, so no one misses me. It's another of G.o.d's jollies and I know I'm ungrateful dear, for you are thinking of me I know, with my dear old "Sport" ready to point for you tomorrow, just to receive your pats of recognition and thanks. My feelings are worn into meaningless smoothness like the head on an old coin, and because I have added my quota of absurdity to the morning papers I am no longer interesting. But, pshaw! one can't buy cocaine for a nickel, and as I could live extravagantly on the interest of my debts, I haven't more than five cents to invest.

Don't mind this slump in grit--it will return to par and slang tomorrow.

Keep a record of all you do to send to me, and above all--win the cup.

With whom are you shooting?

I will now stuff the cracks of my door with medicated cotton, open the portholes and smoke my cigarette alone--Lord preserve me, if anybody knew! See if you can't get the Humane Society to form a branch out here to feed and water the widows.

I have just returned from a little walk with Carlton--I suppose my eyes prattled, for he smiled at me through his wrinkles and was rather more thoughtful of my comforts than usual. His _Insouciance_ is charming and always turns the tide of my melancholy. He is the only man who ever ventured to stand on my tack and take me broadsides. We have framed up a little Bacchic plot to be enacted on our way back from the Post where I shall soon meander to mail this on the late Rock Island.

I am certainly in love, because I know the symptoms, but I can't tell with whom. Some temperature, high pulse and strange flutterings--but who is the victim? Bern or Howard in New York or Carlton here? The thought of all of them stirs me, so how am I to know which is in the lead? Hope the period of incubation will soon be over and the blooming thing a.s.sert itself. I have often been vaccinated and the thing always takes, but still I am not immune and never will be until I am six feet under, even if I live to be an hundred years old! Did you catch the an? But it's disgusting not to know whether it is the measles or something worse, however I am taking all precautions and awaiting developments.

I often wonder what I'll do with my decree when I get it--I can't wear it on my finger, and it certainly isn't the thing for gold leaf and a shadow box--Oh! I shan't waste time placing it; perhaps Carlton will find a pigeon-hole for it somewhere.

I haven't written to Bern in days, but I don't care; I never considered a banker as one of the human race, anyway. Poor Bern; he's thrown out like a bill in Parliament! Beaten by a blackball called Carlton--I'd hate to see him now. Roland the Furious is charming in a poem, but in a drawing room, prosaic and expensive.

Carlton and I went to church Sunday and were refused communion--the dear good Bishop has but one eye, so he sees things half way. I said: "If this is G.o.d's table, I want communion, if it's the Episcopal, I don't."

In his sermon he called divorcees "social lepers, social filthiness,"

and said: "After the new law goes into effect, we'll have no more dumping here." He's an old pop-gun that shoots spit-b.a.l.l.s, so the wounds he makes are not fatal. Carlton refuses to go to church here or anywhere else again, and will once more trudge along his Sunday field of Bacchus cultivated by Venus.

By the way, after June 1st, all divorcees will be required to stay one year, then they won't come at all. Oklahoma had a hunch and changed her law back to three months. Now the colony will transplant itself, then watch the death agony of Sioux Falls. She's foolish--foolis.h.!.+ The Easterners have made this burg what it is. Take away our influence and she'll sink into nothingness again. Some of us are bad, but all of us are not; however, the Sioux Falls gossips make no distinction. They lift their $2.98 skirts when they pa.s.s us, for fear of inoculation by the _bacillus_ divorce. I often wonder if they realize that the prejudice is returned with compound interest.

When any new gossip is born, they fly around the streets like the beads of a rosary when the string is snapped. Perhaps you haven't noticed how serious this letter is. I'm frowning as I write--a habit most bad on the eyebrows--surest of signs that I am sinking again into the quagmire of love.

I have felt my pulse so often and know all the symptoms--which I more than enjoy scrutinizing--not even the finest emotion escapes me. I believe that I play the game well for I am still unjaded, which is unusual with so much over-feeding.

Is your new fur coat unborn lamb, or did it happen? Speaking of possessions--my appendix still gives me ample proof of its constancy.

The blue devils are chasing me today and I am wearing the expression that sits on the lips of every portrait in every exhibition. I smile to keep from crying, because if I cry--I'm lost!

As I am of the experienced elite of society that sups, I must bid you adieu--I promise more jocosity in my next.

Affy, MARIANNE.

December 1.

Since writing you I have heard the turkey gobbler say his last prayer and have had a coming out party for "Penny," short for appendix. The receiving party was comprised of two eminent surgeons, two trained nurses, who served adhesive plaster and instruments, and an "etherist"

who poured. Costumes were uniformly white with great profusion of gauze tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, with which I also eventually became somewhat decorated. One of the internes wasn't half bad, so I kept the nurse busy combing my adopted hair and pinning it on becomingly. It is a much quicker and easier process to have your appendix cut out than your husband.

I was away four weeks and am now back in Sioux and well taken care of by my landlady, whose hair and face disagree as to age. My walls are hung with ten-cent store art, and if I were not awfully strong-minded I could not overcome the effect.

The white auto called last night, and as my head rested on his shoulder our conversation was the rambling sort that may be ticketed "all rights reserved," so I won't repeat it as the postmaster-general would refuse me stamps in the future if I sent it through the mail. In Chicago they'd take out my phone if I squeaked it over the wires. Carlton is deeply interested in some mines out here--spinach mines I think. I made up my mind to something last night--I am determined to get him away from that carrotty giraffe whom he used to believe he loved. If in my convalescent state I am unable to arouse his sympathy, I'll relapse into white muslin emotions and thereby gain my end. I am made from dust and the slightest rustle from the right man's coat can blow me whithersoever it willeth. You know I am a spoiled child who has had everything it wanted, so bon-bons no longer excite me. Carlton is so thin that you can see daylight through his lattice work, and cold as paving stone in winter. He's a real "millionery," but his cash is 40 degrees below, so I am determined to warm up his eagles and teach them to fly. I am going to touch that cash box under his left breast and show him that the devil has a sister. The man wants bleeding--he has too many bank notes in his veins. He seems to be toppling so I might as well register him in my "Book of Mistakes."