The Prairie Wife
Theobald Gustav might have been, for with all his force the modern
German, it seems to me, is like the bagpipes in being somewhat lacking
in suavity.
And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my
breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the
face of the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly
decided we'd always be good friends, old-fashioned, above-board,
Platonic good friends. But the trouble with Platonic love is that it's
always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
So I had to look straight at the bosom of that awful yellow-plaid
English mackintosh and tell Dinky-Dunk the truth. And Dinky-Dunk
listened, with his astronomer mouth set rather grim, and otherwise not
in the least put out. His sense of confidence worried me. It was like
the quietness of the man who is holding back his trump. And it wasn't
until the impossible little wife of an impossible big lumberman from
Saginaw, Michigan, showed me the Paris _Herald_ with the cable in it
about that spidery Russian stage-dancer, L----, getting so nearly killed
in Theobald's car down at Long Beach, that I realized there _was_ a
trump card and that Dinky-Dunk had been too manly to play it.
I had a lot of thinking to do, the next three days.
When Theobald came on from Washington and met the steamer my conscience
troubled me and I should still have been kindness itself to him, if it
hadn't been for his proprietary manner (which, by the way, had never
annoyed me before), coupled with what I already knew. We had luncheon in
the Della Robbia room at the Vanderbilt and I was digging the marrons
out of a Nesselrode when, presto, it suddenly came over me that the
baroness was right and that _I could never marry a foreigner_. It came
like a thunderclap. But somewhere in that senate of instinct which
debates over such things down deep in the secret chambers of our souls,
I suppose, the whole problem had been talked over and fought out and put
to the vote. And in the face of the fact that Theobald Gustav had always
seemed more nearly akin to one of Ouida's demigods than any man I had
ever known, the vote had gone against him. My hero was no longer a
hero. I knew there had been times, of course, when that hero, being a
German, had rather regarded this universe of ours as a department-store
and this earth as the particular section over which the August Master
had appointed him floor-walker. I had thought of him as my
_Eisenfresser_ and my big blond _Saebierassler_. But my eyes opened with
my last marron and I suddenly sat back and stared at Theobald's handsome
pink face with its Krupp-steel blue eyes and its haughtily upturned
mustache-ends. He must have seen that look of appraisal on my own face,
for, with all his iron-and-blood Prussianism, he clouded up like a hurt
child. But he was too much of a diplomat to show his feelings. He merely
became so unctuously polite that I felt like poking him in his
steel-blue eye with my mint straw.
Remember, Matilda Anne, not a word was said, not one syllable about what
was there in both our souls. Yet it was one of life's biggest moments,
the Great Divide of a whole career--and I went on eating Nesselrode and
Theobald went on pleasantly smoking his cigarette and approvingly
inspecting his well-manicured nails.
It was funny, but it made me feel blue and unattached and terribly alone
in the world. Now, I can see things more clearly. I know that mood of
mine was not the mere child of caprice. Looking back, I can see how
Theobald had been more critical, more silently combative, from the
moment I stepped off the _Baltic_. I realized, all at once, _that he had
secretly been putting me to a strain_. I won't say it was because my
_dot_ had gone with The Nitrate Mines, or that he had discovered that
Duncan had crossed on the same steamer with me, or that he knew I'd soon
hear of the L---- episode. But these prophetic bones of mine told me
there was trouble ahead. And I felt so forsaken and desolate in spirit
that when Duncan whirled me out to Westbury, in a hired motor-car, to
see the Great Neck First defeated by the Meadow Brook Hunters, I went
with the happy-go-lucky glee of a truant who doesn't give a hang what
happens. Dinky-Dunk was interested in polo ponies, which, he explained
to me, are not a particular breed but just come along by accident--for
he'd bred and sold mounts to the Coronado and San Mateo Clubs and the
Philadelphia City Cavalry boys. And he loved the game. He was so genuine
and sincere and _human_, as we sat there side by side, that I wasn't a
bit afraid of him and knew we could be chums and didn't mind his lapses
into silence or his extension-sole English shoes and crazy London
cravat.
And I was happy, until the school-bell rang--which took the form of
Theobald's telephone message to the Ritz reminding me of our dinner
engagement. It was an awful dinner, for intuitively I knew what was
coming, and quite as intuitively he knew what was coming, and even the
waiter knew when it came,--for I flung Theobald's ring right against his
stately German chest. There'd be no good in telling you, Matilda Anne,
what led up to that most unlady-like action. I don't intend to burn
incense in front of myself. It may have looked wrong. But I know you'll
take my word when I say he deserved it. The one thing that hurts is
that he had the triumph of being the first to sever diplomatic
relations. In the language of Shorty McCabe and my fellow countrymen,
_he threw me down!_ Twenty minutes later, after composing my soul and
powdering my nose, I was telephoning all over the city trying to find
Duncan. I got him at last, and he came to the Ritz on the run. Then we
picked up a residuary old horse-hansom on Fifth Avenue and went rattling
off through Central Park. There I--who once boasted of seven proposals
and three times that number of nibbles--promptly and shamelessly
proposed to my Dinky-Dunk, though he is too much of a gentleman not to
swear it's a horrid lie and that he'd have fought through an acre of
Greek fire to get me!
But whatever happened, Count Theobald Gustav Von Guntner threw me down,
and Dinky-Dunk caught me on the bounce, and now instead of going to
embassy balls and talking world-politics like a Mrs. Humphry Ward
heroine I've married a shack-owner who grows wheat up in the Canadian
Northwest. And instead of wearing a tiara in the Grand Tier at the
Metropolitan I'm up here a dot on the prairie and wearing an apron made
of butcher's linen! _Sursum corda!_ For I'm still in the ring. And it's
no easy thing to fall in love and land on your feet. But I've gone and
done it. I've taken the high jump. I've made my bed, as Uncle Carlton
had the nerve to tell me, and now I've got to lie in it. But _assez
d'Etrangers_!
That wedding-day of mine I'll always remember as a day of smells, the
smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the
lilies-of-the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained
Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she rushed to town an hour after getting my
wire) insisted on carrying, the smell of the leather in the damp taxi,
the tobaccoy smell of Dinky-Dunk's quite impossible best man, who'd been
picked up at the hotel, on the fly, to act as a witness, and the smell
of Dinky-Dunk's brand new gloves as he lifted my chin and kissed me in
that slow, tender, tragic, end-of-the-world way big and bashful men
sometimes have with women. It's all a jumble of smells.
Then Dinky-Dunk got the wire saying he might lose his chance on the
Stuart Ranch, if he didn't close before the Calgary interests got hold
of it. And Dinky-Dunk wanted that ranch. So we talked it over and in
five minutes had given up the idea of going down to Aiken and were
telephoning for the stateroom on the Montreal Express. I had just four
hours for shopping, scurrying about after cook-books and golf-boots and
table-linen and a chafing dish, and a lot of other absurd things I
thought we'd need on the ranch. And then off we flew for the West,
before poor, extravagant, ecstatic Dinky-Dunk's thirty-six wedding
orchids' from Thorley's had faded and before I'd a chance to show Fanny
my nighties!
Am I crazy? Is it all wrong? Do I love my Dinky-Dunk? _Do_ I? The Good
Lord only knows, Matilda Anne! O God, O God, if it _should_ turn out
that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to! I know I'm going to! And
there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, it sends a
comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as
a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love
him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. _I'm going to love my
Dinky-Dunk._ But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a
strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that
leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the
fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his
eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's
when your motor head-lights hit them! It's like taking a little match
and starting a prairie-fire and watching the flames creep and spread
until the heavens are roaring! I wonder if I'm selfish? I wonder? But I
can't answer that now, for it's supper time, and your Tabby has the grub
to rustle!
_Saturday the Twenty-first_
I'm alone in the shack to-night, and I'm determined not to think about
my troubles. So I'm going to write you a ream, Matilda Anne, whether you
like it or not. And I must begin by telling you about the shack itself,
and how I got here. All the way out from Montreal Dinky-Dunk, in his
kindly way, kept doing his best to key me down and make me not expect
too much. But I'd hold his hand, under the magazine I was pretending to
read, and whistle _Home, Sweet Home_! He kept saying it would be hard,
for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of
things I'd be sure to miss. _Love Me and The World Is Mine!_ I hummed,
as I leaned over against his big wide shoulder. And I lay there smiling
and happy, blind to everything that was before me, and I only laughed
when Dinky-Dunk asked me if I'd still say that when I found there
wasn't a nutmeg-grater within seven miles of my kitchen.
"Do you love me?" I demanded, hanging on to him right in front of the
car-porter.
"I love you better than anything else in all this wide world!" was his
slow and solemn answer.
When we left Winnipeg, too, he tried to tell me what a plain little
shack we'd have to put up with for a year or two, and how it wouldn't be
much better than camping out, and how he knew I was clear grit and would
help him win that first year's battle. There was nothing depressing to
me in the thought of life in a prairie-shack. I never knew, of course,
just what it would be like, and had no way of knowing. I remembered
Chinkie's little love of a farm in Sussex, and I'd been a week at the
Westbury's place out on Long Island, with its terraced lawns and gardens
and greenhouses and macadamized roads. And, on the whole, I expected a
cross between a shooting-box and a Swiss chalet, a little nest of a home
that was so small it was sure to be lovable, with a rambler-rose draping
the front and a crystal spring bubbling at the back door, a little
flowery island on the prairie where we could play Swiss-Family-Robinson
and sally forth to shoot prairie-chicken and ruffed grouse to our
hearts' content.
Well, that shack wasn't quite what I expected! But I mustn't run ahead
of my story, Matilda Anne, so I'll go back to where Dinky-Dunk and I got
off the side-line "accommodation" at Buckhorn, with our traps and trunks
and hand-bags and suitcases. And these had scarcely been piled on the
wooden platform before the station-agent came running up to Duncan with