The Prairie Wife
_Friday the Third_
Two things of vast importance have happened. Dinky-Dunk has packed up
and made off to Edmonton to interview some railway officials, and Percy
is back. Dinky-Dunk is so mysteriously silent as to the matter of his
trip that I'm afraid he is worried about money matters. And he asked me
if I'd mind keeping the household expenses down as low as I could,
without actual hardship, for the next few months.
As for Percy, he seemed a little constrained, but looked ever so much
better. He is quite sunburned, likes California and says we ought to
have a winter bungalow there (and Dinky-Dunk just warning me to save on
the pantry pennies!) He's brought a fastidious little old English woman
back with him as a housekeeper, a Mrs. Watson, and she looks both
capable and practical. Notwithstanding the fact that she seems to have
stepped right out of Dickens, and carries a huge Manx cat about with
her, Percy said he thought they'd muddle along in some way. Thoughtful
boy that he was, he brought me a portmanteau packed full of the newer
novels and magazines, and a two-pound jar of smoking tobacco for
Dinky-Dunk.
_Thursday the Ninth_
A Belasco couldn't have more carefully stage-managed the first meeting
between Percy and Olga. I felt that she was my discovery, and I wanted
to spring her on him, at the right moment, and in the right way. I
wanted to get the Valkyr on a cloud effect. So I kept Percy in the house
on the pretext of giving him a cup of tea, until I should hear the
rumble of the wagon and know that Olga was swinging home with her team.
It so happened, when I heard the first faint far thunder of that homing
wagon, that Percy was sitting in my easy chair, with a cup of my
thinnest china in one hand and a copy of Walter Pater's _Marius the
Epicurean_ in the other. We had been speaking of climate, and he wanted
to look up the passage where Pater said, "one always dies of the
cold"--which I consider a slur on the Northwest!
I couldn't help realizing, as I sat staring at Percy, at the thin,
over-sensitive face, and the high-arched, over-refined nose, and the
narrow, stooping, over-delicate shoulders, what a direct opposite he was
to Olga, in every way. Instead of thin china and Pater in her hand at
that very moment, I remembered she'd probably have a four-tined fork or
a mud-stained fence stretcher.
I went to the door and looked out. At the proper moment I called Percy.
Olga was standing up in the wagon-box, swinging about one corner of the
corral. She stood with her shoulders well back, for her weight was
already on the lines, to pull the team up. Her loose blue skirt edge was
fluttering in the wind, but at the front was held tight against her
legs, like the drapery of the Peace figure in the Sherman statue in the
Plaza. Across that Artemis-like bosom her thin waist was stretched
tight. She had no hat on, and her pale gold hair, which had been braided
and twisted up into a heavy crown, had the sheen of metal on it, in the
later afternoon sun. And in that clear glow of light, which so often
plays mirage-like tricks with vision, she loomed up like a demi-god, or
a she-Mercury who ought to have had little bicycle wheels attached to
her heels.
Percy is never demonstrative. But I could see that he was more than
impressed. He was amazed.
"My word!" he said very quietly.
"What does she make you think of?" I demanded.
Percy put down his teacup.
"Don't go away," I commanded, "but tell me what she makes you think of."
He still stood staring at her with puckered up eyes.
"She's like band-music going by!" he proclaimed. "No, she's more than
that; she's Wagner on wheels," he finally said. "No, not that! A Norse
myth in dimity!"
I told him it wasn't dimity, but he was too interested in Olga to listen
to me.
Half an hour later, when she met him, she was very shy. She turned an
adorable pink, and then calmly rebuttoned the two top buttons of her
waist, which had been hanging loose. And I noticed that Percy did
precisely what I saw Dinky-Dunk once doing. He sat staring absently yet
studiously at the milky white column of Olga's neck! And I had to speak
to him twice, before he even woke up to the fact that he was being
addressed by his hostess.
_Wednesday the Fifteenth_
Dinky-Dunk is back, and very busy again. During the day I scarcely get a
glimpse of him, except at meal-times. I have a steadily growing sense of
being neglected, but I know how a worried man hates petulance. The
really important thing is that Percy is giving Olga lessons in reading
and writing. For, although a Finn, she is a Canadian Finn from almost
the shadow of the sub-Arctics, and has had little chance for education.
But her mind is not obtuse.
Yesterday I asked Olga what she thought of Percival Benson. "Ah lak
heem," she calmly admitted in her majestic, monosyllabic way. "He is a
fonny leetle man." And the "fonny leetle man" who isn't really little,
seems to like Olga, odd as it may sound. They are such opposites, such
contradictions! Percy says she's Homeric. He says he never saw eyes that
were so limpid, or such pools of peace and calm. He insists on the fact
that she's essentially maternal, as maternal as the soil over which she
walks, as Percy put it. I told him what Dinky-Dunk had once told me,
about Olga killing a bull. The bull was a vicious brute that had
attacked her father and knocked him down. He was striking at the fallen
man with his fore-paws when Olga heard his cries. She promptly came for
that bull with a pitchfork. And speaking of Homer, it must have been a
pretty epical battle, for she killed the bull and left the fork-tines
eight inches in his body while she picked up her father and carried him
back to the house. And I won't even kill my own hens, but have always
appointed Olie as the executioner.
_Friday the Seventeenth_
It is funny to see Percy teaching Olga. She watches him as though he
were a miracle man. Her dewy red lips form the words slowly, and the
full white throat utters them largely, laboriously, instruments on them,
and in some perhaps uncouth way makes them lovely. I sit with my sewing,
listening. Sometimes I open the piano and play. But I feel out of it. I
seem to be on the fringe of things that are momentous only to other
people. Last night, when Percy said he thought he'd sell his ranch,
Dinky-Dunk looked up from his paper-littered desk and told him to hang
on to that land like a leech. But he didn't explain why.
_Saturday the Nineteenth_
I can't even remember the date. But I know that midsummer is here, that
the men folks are so busy I have to shift for myself, and that the talk
is still of wheat, and how it's heading, and how the dry weather of the
last few weeks will affect the length of the straw. Dinky-Dunk is making
desperate efforts to get men to cut wild-hay. He's bought the hay rights
of a large stretch between some sloughs about seven miles east of our
place. He says men are scarcer than hen's teeth, but has the promise of
a couple of cutthroats who were thrown off a freight-train near
Buckhorn. Percy volunteered to help, and was convinced of the fact that
he could drive a mower. Olie, who nurses a vast contempt for Percy, and,
I secretly believe, rather resents his attentions to Olga, put the new
team of colts on the mower. They promptly ran away with Percy, who came
within an ace of being thrown in front of the mower-knife, which would
have chopped him up into very unscholarly mincemeat. Olga got on a
horse, bareback, and rounded up the colts. Then she cooed about poor
bruised Percy and tried to coax him to come to the house. But Percy said
he was going to drive that team, even if he had to be strapped to the
mower-seat. And, oddly enough, he did "gat them beat," as Olga expressed
it, but it tired him out and wilted his collar and the sweat was running
down his face when he came in at noon. Olga is very proud of him. But
she announced that she'd drive that mower herself, and sailed into Olie
for giving a tenderfoot a team like that to drive. It was her first
outburst. I couldn't understand a word she said, but I know that she was
magnificent. She looked like a statue of Justice that had suddenly
jumped off its pedestal and was doing its best to put a Daniel Webster
out of business!
_Friday the Twenty-eighth_
The weather is still very dry. But Dinky-Dunk feels sure it will not
affect his crop. He says the filaments of a wheat-plant will go almost
two feet deep in search for moisture. Yesterday Percy appeared in a
flannel shirt, and without his glasses. I think he is secretly
practising calisthenics. He said he was going to cut out this afternoon
tea, because it doesn't seem to fit in with prairie life. I fancy I see
the re-barbarianizing influence of Olga at work on Percival Benson
Woodhouse. Either Dinky-Dunk or Olie, I find, has hidden my saddle!
_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_
To-day has been one of the hottest days of the year. It may be good for
the wheat, but I can't say that it seems good for me. All day long I've
been fretting for far-away things, for foolish and impossible things. I
tried reading Keats, but that only made me worse than ever. I've been
longing for a glimpse of the Luxembourg Gardens in spring, with all the
horse-chestnuts in bloom. I've been wondering how lovely it would be to
drift into the Blue Grotto at Capri and see the azure sea-water drip
from the trailing boat-oars. I've been burning with a hunger to see a
New England orchard in the slanting afternoon sunlight of an early June
afternoon. The hot white light of this open country makes my eyes ache
and seems to dry my soul up. I can't help thinking of cool green
shadows, and musky little valleys of gloom with a brook purling over
mossy stones. I long for the solemn greenery of great elms, aisles and
aisles of cathedral-like gloom and leaf-filtered sunlight. I'd love to
hear an English cuckoo again, and feel the soft mild sea-air that blows
up through Louis's dear little Devonshire garden. But what's the use!
I went to the piano and pounded out _Kennst Du Das Land_ with all my
soul, and I imagine it did me good. It at least bombarded the silence
out of Casa Grande. The noise of life is so far away from you on the
prairie! It is not utterly silent, just that dreamy and disembodied sigh
of wind and grass against which a human call targets like a leaden
bullet against metal. It is almost worse than silence.
_Sunday the Thirtieth_
My mood is over. Early, early this morning I slipped out of bed and
watched day break. I saw the first faint orange rim along the limitless
sky-line, and then the pearly pink above it, and all the sweet dimness
and softness and mystery of God's hand pulling the curtains of morning
apart. And then the rioting orchestras of color struck up, and I leaned
out of the window bathed in glory as the golden disk of the sun showed
over the dewy prairie-edge. Oh, the grandeur of it! And oh, the
God-given freshness of that pellucid air! I love my land! I love it!
_Tuesday the First_
I have married a _man_! My Dinky-Dunk is not a softy. I had that proved
to me yesterday, when I put Paddy in the buckboard and drove out to
where the men were working in the hay. I was taking their dinner out to
them, neatly packed in the chuck-box. One of the new men, who'd been
hired for the rush, had been overworking his team. The brute had been
prodding them with a pitchfork, instead of using a whip. Dinky-Dunk saw
the marks, and noticed one of the horses bleeding. But he didn't
interfere until he caught the man in the act of jabbing the tines into
Maid Marian's flank. Then he jumped for him, just as I drove up. He
cursed that man, cursed and damned him most dreadfully and pulled him