The Prairie Wife
looked up at him there in his rough fur coat, for a moment, he seemed
millions and millions of miles away from me. I stared at him, trying to
comprehend his utter lack of comprehension. I seemed to view him across
the same gulf which separates a meditative zoo visitor from some
abysmally hirsute animal that eons and eons ago must have been its
cave-fellow and hearth-mate. But now we seemed to have nothing in
common, not even a language with which to link up those lost ages. Yet
from all that mixture of feelings only one survived: I didn't want my
husband to go.
It was the team, as far as I can remember, that really decided the
thing. They had been restive, backing and jerking and pawing and
nickering for their feed-box. And suddenly they jumped forward. But this
time they kept going. Whether Dinky-Dunk tried to hold them back or not
I can't say. But I came back to the shack, shivering. Percy, thank
Heaven, was in his room.
"I think I'll turn in!" he called out, quite casually, through the
partition.
I said "All right," and sat down in front of the fire, trying to
straighten things out. My Dinky-Dunk was gone! He had glared at me, with
hate in his eyes, as he sat in that buckboard. It's all over. He has no
faith in me, his own wife!
I went to bed and tried to sleep. But sleep was out of the question. The
whole thing seemed so absurd, so unreasonable, so unjust. I could feel
waves of anger sweep through my body at the mere thought of it. Then a
wave of something else, of something between anxiety and terror, would
take the place of anger. My husband was gone, and he'd never come back.
I'd put all my eggs in one basket, and the basket had gone over, and
made a saffron-tinted omelet of all my life.
And that's the way I watched the New Year in, I couldn't even afford the
luxury of a little bawl, for I was afraid Percy would hear me. It must
have been almost morning when I fell asleep.
When I woke up Percival Benson was gone, bag and baggage. At first I
resented the thought of his going off that way, without a word, but on
thinking it over I decided he'd done the right thing. There's nothing
like the hard cold light of a winter morning to bring you back to hard
cold facts. Olie had driven Percy in to the station. So I was alone in
the shack all day. I did a heap of thinking during those long hours of
solitude. And out of all that straw of self-examination I threshed just
one little grain of truth. _I could never live on the prairie alone._
And whatever I did, or wherever I went, I could never be happy without
my Dinky-Dunk....
I had just finished supper to-night, as blue as indigo and as spiritless
as a wet hen, when I heard the sound of voices. It took me only ten
seconds to make sure whose they were. Dinky-Dunk had come back with
Olie! I made a high dive for a book from the nearest shelf, swung the
armchair about with a jerk, and sank luxuriously into it, with my feet
up on the warm damper and my eyes leisurely and contentedly perusing
George Moore's _Confessions of a Young Man_ (although I _hate_ the
libidinous stuff like poison!) Then Dinky-Dunk came in. I could see him
stare at me a little awkwardly and contritely (what woman can't read a
book and study a man at the same time?) and I, could see that he was
waiting for an opening. But I gave him none. Naturally, Olie had
explained everything to him. But I had been humiliated, my pride had
been walked over, from end to end. My spirit had been stamped on--and I
had decided on my plan of action. I simply ignored Duncan.
I read for a while, then I took a lamp, went to my room, and
deliberately locked the door. My one regret was that I couldn't see
Dinky-Dunk's face when that key turned. And now I must stop writing, and
go to bed, for I am dog-tired. I know I'll sleep better to-night. It's
nice to remember there's a man near, if he happens to be the man you
care a trifle about, even though you _have_ calmly turned the door-key
on him.
_Sunday the Third_
Dinky-Dunk has at least the sensibilities to respect my privacy of life.
He knows where the deadline is, and doesn't disregard it. But it's
terribly hard to be tragic in a two-by-four shack. You miss the
dignifying touches. And you haven't much leeway for the bulky swings of
grandeur.
For one whole day I didn't speak to Dinky-Dunk, didn't even so much as
recognize his existence. I ate by myself, and did my work--when the
monster was around--with all the preoccupation of a sleep-walker. But
something happened, and I forgot myself. Before I knew it I was asking
him a question. He answered it, quite soberly, quite casually. If he had
grinned, or shown one jot of triumph, I would have walked out of the
shack and never spoken to him again. I think he knew he was on terribly
perilous ground. He picked his way with care. He asked me a question
back, quite offhandedly, and for the time being let the matter rest
there. But the breach was in my walls, Matilda Anne, and I was quite
defenseless. We were both very impersonal and very polite, when he came
in at supper time, though I think I turned a visible pink when I sat
down at the table, for our eyes met there, just a moment and no more. I
knew he was watching me, covertly, all the time. And I knew I was making
him pretty miserable. But I wasn't the least bit ashamed of it.
After supper he indifferently announced that he had nothing to do and
might as well help me wash up. I went to hand him a dish-towel. Instead
of taking the towel he took my hand, with the very profane ejaculation,
as he did so, of "Oh, hell, Gee-Gee, what's the use?"
Then before I knew it, he had me in his arms (our butter-dish was broken
in the collision) and I was weak enough to feel sorry for him and his
poor tragic pleading eyes. Then I gave up. If I was silly enough to have
a little cry on his shoulder, I had the satisfaction of feeling him
give a gulp or two himself.
"You're the most wonderful woman in the world!" he solemnly told me, and
then in a much less solemn way he began kissing me again. But the
barriers were down. And how we talked that night! And how different
everything seemed! And how nice it was to feel his arm over my shoulder
and his quiet breathing on the nape of my neck as I fell asleep. It
seemed as though Love were fanning me with its softest wings. I'm happy
again. But I've been wondering if it's environment that makes character,
or character that makes environment. Sometimes I think it's one way, and
sometimes I feel it's the other. But I can't be sure of my answer--yet!
It's hard for a spoiled woman to remember that her life has to be merged
into somebody else's life. I've been wondering if marriage isn't like a
two-panel screen, which won't stand up if both its panels are too much
in line. Heaven knows, I want harmony! But a woman likes to feel that
instead of being out of step with her whole regiment of life it's the
regiment that's out of step with her. To-night I unlaced Dinky-Dunk's
shoes, and put on his slippers, and sat on the floor between his knees
with my head against the steady _tick-tock_ of his watch-pocket.
"Dinky-Dunk," I solemnly announced, "that gink called Pope was a poor
guesser. The proper study of man should have been _woman_!"
_Thursday the Seventh_
Everything at Casa Grande has settled back into the usual groove. There
is a great deal to do about the shack. The grimmest bug-bear of domestic
work is dish-washing. A pile of greasy plates is the one thing that gets
on my nerves. And it is a little Waterloo that must be faced three times
every day, of every week, of every month, of every year. And I was never
properly "broke" for domesticity and the dish-pan! Why can't some genius
invent a self-washing fry-pan? My hair is growing so long that I can now
do it up in a sort of half-hearted French roll. It has been quite cold,
with a wonderful fall of snow. The sleighing could not be better.
_Saturday the Ninth_
Dinky-Dunk's Christmas present came to-day, over two weeks late. He had
never mentioned it, and I had not only held my peace, but had given up
all thought of getting a really-truly gift from my lord and master.
They brought it out from Buckhorn, in the bobsleigh, all wrapped up in
old buffalo-robes and blankets and tarpaulins. _It's a baby-grand
piano_, and a beauty, and it came all the way from Winnipeg. But either
the shipping or the knocking about or the extreme cold has put it
terribly out of tune, and it can't be used until the piano-tuner travels
a couple of hundred miles out here to put it in shape. And it's far too
big for the shack, even when pushed right up into the corner. But
Dinky-Dunk says that before next winter there'll be a different sort of
house on this spot where Casa Grande now stands.
"And that's to keep your soul alive, in the meantime," he announced. I
scolded him for being so extravagant, when he needed every dollar he
could lay his hands on. But he wouldn't listen to me. In fact, it only
started an outburst.
"My God, Gee-Gee," he cried, "haven't you given up enough for me?
Haven't you sacrificed enough in coming out here to the end of nowhere
and leaving behind everything that made life decent?"
"Why, Honey Chile, didn't I get _you_?" I demanded. But even that didn't
stop him.
"Don't you suppose I ever think what it's meant to you, to a woman like
you? There are certain things we can't have, but there are some things
we're going to have. This next ten or twelve months will be hard, but
after that there's going to be a change--if the Lord's with me, and I
have a white man's luck!"
"And supposing we have bad luck?" I asked him. He was silent for a
moment or two.
"We can always give up, and go back to the city," he finally said.
"Give up!" I said with a whoop. "Give up? Not on your life, Mister Dour
Man! We're not going to be Dixonites! We're going to win out!" And we
were together in a death-clinch, hugging the breath out of each other,
when Olie came in to ask if he hadn't better get the stock stabled, as
there was bad weather coming.
_Monday the Eleventh_
We are having the first real blizzard of the winter. It began yesterday,
as Olie intimated, and for all the tail-end of the day my Dinky-Dunk was
on the go, in the bitter cold, looking after fuel and feed and getting
things ship-shape, for all the world like a skipper who's read his
barometer and seen a hurricane coming. There had been no wind for a
couple of days, only dull and heavy skies with a disturbing sense of
quietness. Even when I heard Olie and Dinky-Dunk shouting outside, and
shoring up the shack-walls with poles, I could not quite make out what
it meant.
Then the blizzard came. It came down out of the northwest, like a
cloudburst. It hummed and sang, and then it whined, and then it
screamed, screamed in a high falsetto that made you think poor old
Mother Earth was in her last throes! The snow was fine and hard, really
minute particles of ice, and not snow at all, as we know it in the
East, little sharp-angled diamond-points that stung the skin like fire.
It came in almost horizontal lines, driving flat across the unbroken
prairie and defying anything made of God or man to stop it. Nothing did
stop it. Our shack and the bunk-house and stables and hay-stacks tore a
few pin-feathers off its breast, though; and those few feathers are
drifts higher than my head, heaped up against each and all of the
buildings.
I scratched the frost off a window-pane, where feathery little drifts
were seeping in through the sill-cracks, when it first began. But the
wind blew harder and harder and the shack rocked and shook with the
tension. Oh, such a wind! It made a whining and wailing noise, with each
note higher, and when you felt that it couldn't possibly increase, that