The Prairie Wife
enrage me. It became monumental, an emblem of vague incapabilities which
I would have to face until the end of my days. I flung that spoon back
in the dish-pan. Then I turned on my husband and called out to him, in a
voice that didn't quite seem like my own, "O God, can't you wash 'em
_clean_? Can't you wash 'em clean?" I even think I ran up and down the
room and pretty well made what Percival Benson would call "a bally ass"
of myself. Dinky-Dunk didn't even answer me. But he dried his hands and
got his things and went outdoors, to the stables, I suppose. His face
was as colorless as it could possibly get. I felt sorry; but it was too
late. And my sniffling didn't do any good. And it startled me, as I sat
thinking things over, to realize that I'd lost my sense of humor.
_Thursday the Fourth_
Dinky-Dunk thinks I'm mad. I'm quite sure he does. He came in at noon
to-day and found me on the floor with the kitten. I'd tied a piece of fur
to the end of a string. Oh, how that kitten scrambled after that fur,
round and round in a circle until he'd tumble over on his own ears! I
was squeaking and weak with laughing when Dinky-Dunk stood in the door.
Poor boy, he takes things so solemnly! But I know he thinks I'm quite
mad. Perhaps I am. I cried myself to sleep last night. And for several
days now I've had a longing for _caviare_.
_Wednesday the Seventeenth_
Spring is surely coming. It promises to be an early one. I feel better
at the thought of it, and of getting out again. But the roads are quite
impassable. Such mud! Such oceans of glue-pot dirt! They have a saying
out here that soil is as rich as it is sticky. If this is true
Dinky-Dunk has a second Garden of Eden. This mud sticks to everything,
to feet, to clothes, to wagon-wheels. But there's getting to be real
warmth in the sun that shines through my window.
_Saturday the Twenty-seventh_
A warm Chinook has licked up the last of the snow. Even Dinky-Dunk
admits that spring is coming. For three solid hours an awakened
blue-bottle has been buzzing against the pane of my bedroom window. I
wonder if most of us aren't like that fly, mystified by the illusion of
light that fails to lead to liberty? This morning I caught sight of
Dinky-Dunk in his fur coat, climbing into the buckboard. I shall always
hate to see him in that rig. It makes me think of a certain night. And
we hate to have memory put a finger on our mental scars. When I was a
girl Aunt Charlotte's second fiend of a husband locked me up in that
lonely Derby house of theirs because I threw pebbles at the swans. Then
off they drove to dinner somewhere and left me a prisoner there, where I
sat listening to the bells of All Saints as the house gradually grew
dark. And ever since then bells at evening have made me feel lonely and
left me unhappy.
But the renaissance of the buckboard means that spring is here again.
And for my Dinky-Dunk that means harder work. He's what they call a
"rustler" out here. He believes in speed. He doesn't even wait until the
frost is out of the ground before he starts to seed--just puts a drill
over a two-inch batter of thawed-out mud, he's so mad about getting
early on the land. He says he wants early wheat or no wheat. But he has
to have help, and men are almost impossible to get. He had hoped for a
gasoline tractor, but it can't be financed this spring, he has confessed
to me. And I know, in my secret heart of hearts, that the tractor would
have been here if it hadn't been for my piano!
There are still hundreds and hundreds of acres of prairie sod to "break"
for spring wheat. Dinky-Dunk declares that he's going to risk everything
on wheat this year. He says that by working two outfits of horses he
himself can sow forty acres a day, but that means keeping the horses on
the trot part of the time. He is thinking so much about his crop that I
accused him of neglecting me.
"Is the varnish starting to wear off?" I inquired with a secret gulp of
womanish self-pity. He saved the day by declaring I was just as crazy
and just as adorable as I ever was. Then he asked me, rather sadly, if I
was bored. "Bored?" I said, "how could I be bored with all these
discomforts? No one is ever bored until they are comfortable!" But the
moment after I'd said it I was sorry.
_Tuesday the Sixth_
Spring is here, with a warm Chinook creeping in from the Rockies and a
sky of robin-egg blue. The gophers have come out of their winter
quarters and are chattering and racing about. We saw a phalanx of wild
geese going northward, and Dinky-Dunk says he's seen any number of
ducks. They go in drifting V's, and I love to watch them melt in the
sky-line. The prairie floor is turning to the loveliest of greens, and
it is a joy just to be alive. I have been out all afternoon. The gophers
aren't going to get ahead of me!
_Monday the Twelfth_
What would you say if you saw Brunhild drive up to your back door? What
would you do if you discovered a Norse goddess placidly surveying you
from a green wagon-seat? How would you act if you beheld a big blonde
Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs?
Well, can you wonder that I stared, all eyes, when Dinky-Dunk brought
home a figure like this, in the shape of a Finn girl named Olga
Sarristo? Olga is to work in the fields, and to help me when she has
time. But I'll never get used to having a Norse Legend standing at my
elbow, for Olga is the most wonderful creature I have ever clapped eyes
on. I say that without doubt, and without exaggeration. And what made
the picture complete, she came driving a yoke of oxen--for Dinky-Dunk
will have need of every horse and hauling animal he can lay his hands
on. I simply held my breath as I stared up at her, high on her
wagon-seat, blocked out in silhouette against the pale sky-line, a
Brunhild with cowhide boots on. She wore a pale blue petticoat and a
Swedish looking black shawl with bright-colored flowers worked along the
hem. She had no hat. But she had two great ropes of pale gold hair,
almost as thick as my arm, and hanging almost as low as her knees. She
looked colossal up on the wagon-seat, but when she got down on the
ground she was not so immense. She is, however, a strapping big woman,
and I don't think I ever saw such shoulders! She is Olympian, Titanic!
She makes me think of the Venus de Milo; there's such a largeness and
calmness and smoothness of surface about her. I suppose a Saint-Gaudens
might say that her mouth was too big and a Gibson might add that her
nose hadn't the narrow rectitude of a Greek statue's, but she's a
beautiful, a beautiful--"woman" was the word I was going to write, but
the word "animal" just bunts and shoves itself in, like a stabled cow
insisting on its own stall. But if you regard her as only animal, you
must at least accept her as a perfect one. Her mouth is large, but I
never saw such red lips, full and red and dewy. Her forehead is low and
square, but milky smooth, and I know she could crack a chicken-bone
between those white teeth of hers. Even her tongue, I noticed, is a
watermelon red. She must be healthy. Dinky-Dunk says she's a find, that
she can drive a double-seeder as well as any man in the West, and that
by taking her for the season he gets the use of the ox-team as well. He
warned me not to ask her about her family, as only a few weeks ago her
father and younger brother were burned to death in their shack, a
hundred miles or so north of us.
_Tuesday the Twentieth_
Olga has been with us a week, and she still fascinates me. She is
installed in the annex, and seems calmly satisfied with her
surroundings. She brought everything she owns tied up in an oat-sack. I
have given her a few of my things, for which she seems dumbly grateful.
She seldom talks, and never laughs. But I am teaching her to say "yes"
instead of "yaw." She studies me with her limpid blue eyes, and if she
is silent she is never sullen. She hasn't the heavy forehead and jaw of
the Galician women and she hasn't the Asiatic cast of face that belongs
to the Russian peasant. And she has the finest mouthful of teeth I ever
saw in a human head--and she never used a toothbrush in her life! She is
only nineteen, but such a bosom, such limbs, such strength!
This is a great deal of talk about Olga, I'm afraid, but you must
remember that Olga is an event. I expected Olie would be keeled over by
her arrival, but they seem to regard each other with silent contempt. I
suppose that is because racially and physically they are of the same
type. I'm anxious to see what Percival Benson thinks of Olga when he
gets back--they would be such opposites. Olga is working with her
ox-team on the land. Two days ago I rode out on Paddy and watched her.
There was something Homeric about it, something Sorolla would have
jumped at. She seemed so like her oxen. She moved like them, and her
eyes were like theirs. She has the same strength and solemnity when she
walks. She's so primitive and natural and instinctive in her actions.
Yesterday, after dinner, she curled up on a pile of hay at one end of
the corral and fell asleep for a few minutes, flat in the strong noonday
light. I saw Dinky-Dunk stop on his way to the stable and stand and look
down at her. I slipped out beside him. "God, what a woman!" he said
under his breath. A vague stab of jealousy went through me as I heard
him say that. Then I looked at her hand, large, relaxed, roughened with
all kinds of weather and calloused with heavy work. And this time it was
an equally vague stab of pity that went through me.
_Monday the Twenty-sixth_
The rush is on, and Dinky-Dunk is always out before six. If it's true,
as some one once said, that the pleasures of life depended on its
anxieties, then we ought to be a hilarious household. Every one is busy,
and I do what I can to help. I don't know why it is, but I find an odd
comfort in the thought of having another woman near me, even Olga. She
also helps me a great deal with the housework. Those huge hands of hers
have a dexterity you'd never dream of. She thinks the piano a sort of
miracle, and me a second miracle for being able to play it. In the
evening she sits back in a corner, the darkest corner she can find, and
listens. She never speaks, never moves, never expresses one iota of
emotion. But in the gloom I can often catch the animal-like glow of her
eyes. They seem almost phosphorescent. Dinky-Dunk had a long letter from
Percival Benson to-day. It was interesting and offhandedly jolly and
just the right sort. And Percy says he'll be back on the Titchborne
place in a few weeks.
_Wednesday the Twenty-eighth_
Olga went through the boards of her wagon-box and got a bad scrape on
her leg. She showed me the extent of her injuries, without the slightest
hesitation, and I gave her first-aid treatment with my carbolated
vaseline. And still again I had to think of the Venus de Milo, for it
was a knee like a statue's, milky white and round and smooth, with a
skin like a baby's, and so different to her sunburnt forearms. It was
Olympian more than Fifth-Avenuey. It was a leg that made me think, not
of Rubens, but of Titian, and my thoughts at once went out to the
right-hand lady of the "Sacred and Profane Love," in the Borghese, there
was such softness and roundness combined with its strength. And
Dinky-Dunk walked in and stood staring at it, himself, with never so
much as a word of apology. Olga looked up at him without a flicker of
her ox-like eyes. It wasn't until I made an angry motion for her to
drop her skirt that she realized any necessity for covering the Titian
knee. But again I felt that odd pang of jealousy needle through me as I
saw his face. At least I suppose it was jealousy, the jealousy of an