The Prairie Wife
to wear the wrong kind of corsets. And when they're male they watch
themselves in the mirrors, or talk so much about themselves that you
haven't a chance to talk about _yourself_--which is really the
completest definition of a bore, isn't it? I'd much rather know them
through their books than through those awful Sunday evening _soirees_
where poor old leonine M---- used to perspire reading those Socialist
poems of his to the adoring ladies, and Sanguinary John used to wear the
same flannel shirt that shielded him from the Polar blasts up in
Alaska--open at the throat, and all that sort of thing, just like a
movie-actor cowboy, only John had grown a little stout and he kept
spoiling the Strong-Man picture by so everlastingly posing at one end
of the grand-piano! You know the way they do it, one pensive elbow on
the piano-end and the delicately drooping palm holding up the weary
brains, the same as you prop up a King-orange bough when it gets too
heavy with fruit! And then he had a lovely bang and a voice like a
maiden-lady from Maine. And take it from me, O lord and master, that man
devoured all his raw beef and blood on his typewriter-ribbon. I dubbed
him the King of the Eye-Socket school, and instead of getting angry he
actually thanked me for it. That was the sort of advertising he was
after."
Dinky-Dunk grinned a little as I rattled on. Then he grew serious again.
"Why is it," he asked, "a writer in Westminster Abbey is always a
genius, but a writer in the next room is rather a joke?"
I tried to explain it for him. "Because writers are like Indians. The
only good ones are the dead ones. And it's the same with those siren
affinities of history. Annie Laurie lived to be eighty, though the
ballad doesn't say so. And Lady Hamilton died poor and ugly and went
around with red herrings in her pocket. And Cleopatra was really a
redheaded old political schemer, and Paris got tired of Helen of Troy.
Which means that history, like literature, is only _Le mensonge
convenu_!"
This made Dinky-Dunk sit up and stare at me. "Look here, Gee-Gee, I
don't mind a bit of book-learning, but I hate to see you tear the whole
tree of knowledge up by the roots and knock me down with it! And it was
_salons_ we were talking about, and not the wicked ladies of the past!"
"Well, the only _salon_ I ever saw in America had the commercial air of
a millinery opening where tea happened to be served," I promptly
declared. "And the only American woman I ever knew who wanted to have a
_salon_ was a girl we used to call Asafetida Anne. And if I explained
why you'd make a much worse face than that, my Diddums. But she had a
weakness for black furs and never used to wash her neck. So the Plimpton
Mark was always there!"
"Don't get bitter, Gee-Gee," announced Dinky-Dunk as he proceeded to
light his pipe. And I could afford to laugh at his solemnity.
"I'm not bitter, Honey Chile; I'm only glad I got away from all that
Bohemian rubbish. You may call me a rattle-box, and accuse me of being
temperamental now and then--which I'm not--but the one thing in life
which I love is _sanity_. And that, Dinky-Dunk, is why I love you, even
though you are only a big sunburnt farmer fighting and planning and
grinding away for a home for an empty-headed wife who's going to fail at
everything but making you love her!"
Then followed a few moments when I wasn't able to talk,
... The sequel's scarce essential--
Nay, more than this, I hold it still
Profoundly confidential!
Then as we sat there side by side I got thinking of the past and of the
Bohemians before whom I had once burned incense. And remembering a
certain visit to Box Hill with Lady Agatha's mother, years and years
ago, I had to revise my verdict on authors, for one of the warmest
memories in all my life is that of dear old Meredith in his wheelchair,
with his bearded face still flooded with its kindly inner light and his
spirit still mellow with its unquenchable love of life. And once as a
child, I went on to tell Dinky-Dunk, I had met Stevenson. It was at
Mentone, and I can still remember him leaning over and taking my hand.
His own hand was cold and lean, like a claw, and with the quick instinct
of childhood I realized, too, that he was _condescending_ as he spoke to
me, for all the laugh that showed the white teeth under his drooping
black mustache. Wrong as it seemed, I didn't like him any more than I
afterward liked the Sargent portrait of him, which was really an echo of
my own first impression, though often and often I've tried to blot out
that first unfair estimate of a real man of genius. There's so much in
the _Child's Garden of Verse_ that I love; there's so much in the man's
life that demands admiration, that it seems wrong not to capitulate to
his charm. But when one's own family are one's biographers it's hard to
be kept human. "Yet there's one thing, Dinky-Dunk, that I do respect him
for," I went on. "He had seen the loveliest parts of this world, and,
when he had to, he could light-heartedly give it all up and rough it in
this American West of ours, even as you and I!" Whereupon Dinky-Dunk
argued that we ought to forgive an invalid his stridulous preaching
about bravery and manliness and his over-emphasis of fortitude, since it
was plainly based on an effort to react against a constitutional
weakness for which he himself couldn't be blamed.
And I confessed that I could forgive him more easily than I could
Sanguinary John with his literary Diabolism and that ostentatious
stone-age blugginess with which he loved to give the ladies goose-flesh,
pretending he was a bull in a china-shop when he's really only a white
mouse in an ink-pot! And after Dinky-Dunk had knocked out his pipe and
wound up his watch he looked over at me with his slow Scotch-Canadian
smile. "For a couple of hay-seeds who have been harpooning the _salon_
idea," he solemnly announced, "I call this quite a literary evening!"
But what's the use of having an idea or two in your head if you can't
air 'em now and then?
_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_
To-day I stumbled on the surprise of my life! It was A Man! I took Paddy
and cantered over to the old Titchborne Ranch and was prowling around
the corral, hoping I might find a few belated mushrooms. But nary a one
was there. So I whistled on my four fingers for Paddy (I've been
teaching him to come at that call) and happened to glance in the
direction of the abandoned shack. Then I saw the door open, and _out
walked a man_.
He was a young man, in puttees and knickers and Norfolk jacket, and he
was smoking a cigarette. He stared at me as though I were the Missing
Link. Then he said "Hello!" rather inadequately, it seemed to me.
I answered back "Hello," and wondered whether to take to my heels or
not. But my courage got its second wind, and I stayed. Then we shook
hands, very formally, and explained who we were. And I discovered that
his name was Percival Benson Woodhouse (and the Lord forgive me if they
ever call him Percy for short!) and that his aunt is the Countess of
D---- and that he knows a number of people you and Lady Agatha have
often spoken of. He's got a Japanese servant called Kino, or perhaps
it's spelt Keeno, I don't know which, who's housekeeper, laundress,
_valet_, gardener, groom and _chef_, all in one,--so, at least Percival
Benson confessed to me. He also confessed that he'd bought the
Titchborne Ranch, from photographs, from "one of those land chaps" in
London. He wanted to rough it a bit, and they told him there would be
jolly good game shooting. So he even brought along an elephant-gun, which
his cousin had used in India. The photographs which the "land chap" had
showed him turned out to be pictures of the Selkirks. And, taking it all
in all, he fancied that he'd been jolly well bunked. But Percival seemed
to accept it with the stoicism of the well-born Britisher. He'd have a
try at the place, although there was no game.
"But there _is_ game," I told him, "slathers of it, oodles of it!"
He mildly inquired where and what? I told him: Wild duck,
prairie-chicken, wild geese, jack-rabbits, now and then a fox, and loads
of coyotes. He explained, then, that he meant big game--and how grandly
those two words, "big game," do roll off the English tongue! He has a
sister in the Bahamas, who may join him next summer if he should decide
to stick it out. He considered that it would be a bit rough for a girl,
during the winter season up here.
Yet before I go any further I must describe Percival Benson Woodhouse to
you, for he's not only "our sort," but a type as well.
In the first place, he's a Magdalen College man, the sort we've seen
going up and down the High many and many a time. He's rather gaunt and
rather tall, and he stoops a little. "At home" they call it the "Oxford
stoop," if I'm not greatly mistaken. His hands are thin and long and
bony. His eyes are nice, and he looks very good form. I mean he's the
sort of man you'd never take for the "outsider" or "rotter." He's the
sort who seem to have the royal privilege of doing even doubtfully
polite things and yet doing them in such a way as to make them seem
quite proper. I don't know whether I make that clear or not, but one
thing is clear, and this is that our Percival Benson is an aristocrat.
You see it in his over-sensitive, over-refined, almost womanishly
delicate face, with those idealizing and quite unpractical eyes of his.
You see it in the thin, high-arched, bony nose (almost as fine a beak as
the one belonging to His Grace, the Duke of M----!) and you see it in
the sad and somewhat elongated face, as though he had pored over big
books too much, a sort of air of pathos and aloofness from things. His
mouth strikes you as being rather meager, until he smiles, which is
quite often, for, glory be, he has a good sense of humor. But besides
that he has a neatness, a coolness, an impersonal sort of ease, which
would make you think that he might have stepped out of one of Henry
James's earlier novels of about the time of the _Portrait of a Lady_.
And I like him. I knew that at once. He's _effete_ and old-worldish and
probably useless, out here, but he stands for something I've been
missing, and I'll be greatly mistaken if Percival Benson and Chaddie
McKail are not pretty good friends before the winter's over! He's asked
if he might be permitted to call, and he's coming for dinner to-morrow
night, and I do hope Dinky-Dunk is nice to him--if we're to be
neighbors. But Dinky-Dunk says Westerners don't ask to be permitted to
call. They just stick their cayuse into the corral and walk in, the same
as an Indian does. And Dinky-Dunk says that if he comes in evening dress
he'll shoot him, sure pop!
_Thursday the Twenty-ninth_
Percy (how I hate that name!) was here for dinner last night, and all
things considered, we didn't fare so badly. We had tomato bisque and
scalloped potatoes and prairie-chicken (they need to be well basted) and
hot biscuits and stewed dried peaches with cream. Then we had coffee and
the men smoked their pipes. We talked until a quarter to one in the
morning, and my poor Dinky-Dunk, who has been working so hard and seeing
nobody, really enjoyed that visit and really likes Percival Benson.
Percy got talking about Oxford, and you could see that he loved the old
town and that he felt more at home on the Isis than on the prairie. He
said he once heard Freeman tell a story about Goldwin Smith, who used to
be Regius Professor of History at the University. G. S. seemed
astonished that F. couldn't tell him, at some _viva voce_ exam,
whatever that may mean, the cause of King John's death. Then G. S.
explained that poor John died of too much peaches and fresh ale, "which
would give a man considerable belly-ache," the Regius Professor of