The Prairie Wife
To-day after dinner Dinky-Dunk took the Boy and held him up on Paddy's
back, where he looked like a bump on a log. And that started me thinking
that it wouldn't be so long before my little Snoozerette had a pony of
his own and would be cantering off across the prairie like a monkey on a
circus horse. For I want my boy to ride, and ride well. And then a
little later he would be cantering off to school. And then it wouldn't
be such a great while before he'd be hitting the trail side by side with
some clear-eyed prairie girl on a dappled pinto, and I'd be a
silvery-haired old lady wondering if that clear-eyed girl was good
enough for my son! And there I was, as usual, dreaming of the future!
All day long the fact that Dinky-Dunk is getting extravagant has been
hitting me just under the fifth rib. So I asked him if we could really
afford a six-cylinder car with tan slip-covers and electric lights.
"Afford it?" he echoed, "of course we can afford it. We can afford
anything. Hang it all, our lean days are over and we haven't had the
imagination to wake up to the fact. And d'you know what I'm going to do
if certain things come my way? I'm going to send you and the Babe down
to New York for the winter!"
"And where will you be?" I promptly inquired. The look of mingled pride
and determination went out of his face.
"Oh, I'll have to hang around the Polar regions up here to look after
things. But you and the Boy have got to have your chance. And I'll come
down for two weeks at Easter and bring you home with me!"
"And will you be enjoying it up here?" I inquired.
"Of course I won't," acknowledged Dinky-Dunk. "But think what it will
mean to you, Gee-Gee, to have a few months in the city again! And think
what you've been missing!"
"Goosey-goosey-gander!" I said as I got his foolish old head in
Chancery. "I want you to listen to me. There's nothing I've been
missing. And you are plum locoed, Honey Chile, if you think I could ever
be happy away from you, in New York or any other city. And I wouldn't go
there for the winter if you gave me the Plaza and all the Park for a
back yard!"
That declaration of mine seemed to puzzle him. "But think what it would
mean to the Boy!" he contended.
"Well, what?" I demanded.
"Oh, good--er--good pictures and music and all that sort of thing!" he
vaguely explained. I couldn't help laughing at him.
"But, Dinky-Dunk, don't you think Babe's a month or so too young to take
up Debussy and the Post-Impressionists, you big, foolish, adorable old
muddle-headed captor of helpless ladies' hearts!" And I firmly announced
that he could never, never get rid of me.
_Thursday the Fifteenth_
Now that Olga is working altogether inside with me she is losing quite a
little of her sunburn. Her skin is softer and she has acquired a little
more of the Leonardo di Vinci look. She almost seems to be getting
spiritualized--but it may be simply because she's lengthened her skirts.
She loves Babe, and, I'm afraid, is rather spoiling him. I find her a
better and better companion, not only because she talks more, but
because she seems in some way to be climbing up to a newer level.
Between whiles, I'm teaching her to cook. She learns readily, and is
proud of her progress. But the thing of which she is proudest is her
corsets. And they _do_ make a difference. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed
this. Yesterday he stood and stared after her.
"By gum," he sagely remarked, "that girl is getting a figure!" Men are
so absurd. When this same Olga was going about half uncovered he never
even noticed her. Now that she's mystified her nether limbs with a
little drapery he stands staring after her as though she were a Venus de
Milo come to life. And Olga is slowly but surely losing a little of her
Arcadian simplicity. Yesterday I caught her burning up her cowhide
boots. She is ashamed of them. And she is spending most of her money on
clothes, asking me many strange questions as to apparel and carrying off
my fashion magazines to her bedroom for secret perusal. For the first
time in her life she is using cold cream. And the end seems to justify
the means, for her skin is now like apple blossoms. Rodin, I feel sure,
would have carried that woman across America on his back, once to have
got her into his atelier!
Last week I persuaded Terry to take a try at Meredith and lent him my
green cloth copy of _Harry Richmond_. Three days ago I found the seventh
page turned down at the corner, and suspecting that this marked the
final frontier of his advance, I tied a strand of green silk thread
about the volume. It was still there this morning, though Terry daily
and stoutly maintains that he's getting on grand with that fine green
book of mine! But at noon to-day when Dinky-Dunk got back from Buckhorn
he handed Terry a parcel, and I noticed the latter glanced rather
uneasily about as he unwrapped it. This afternoon I discovered that it
held two new books in paper covers. One was _The Hidden Hand_ and the
other was called _The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_. Terry, of late, has
been doing his reading in his own room. And Nick Carter, apparently, is
not to be so easily displaced. But a man who can make you read his books
for the third time must be a genius. If I were an author, that's the
sort of man I'd envy. And I think I'll try Percival Benson with _The
Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_ when Terry is through with it!
_Friday the Sixteenth_
We were just finishing dinner to-day, and an uncommonly good one it
seemed to me, and I was looking contentedly about my little family
circle, wondering what more life could hold for a big healthy hulk of a
woman like me, when the drone and purr of an approaching motor-car broke
through the sound of our talk. Dinky-Dunk, in fact, was laying down the
law about the farmer of the West, maintaining that he was a
broader-spirited and bigger-minded man than his brother of the East, and
pointing out that the westerner's wife was a queen who if she had little
ease at least had great honor. And I was just thinking that one glorious
thing about this same queen was that she at least escaped from all the
twentieth-century strain and dislocation in the relationship between
city men and women, when the hum of that car brought me back to earth
and reminded me that I might have a tableful of guests to feed. The car
itself drew up, with a flutter of its engine, half-way between the shack
and the corral, and at that sound I imagine we all rather felt like
Robinson Crusoes listening to the rattle of an anchor cable in Juan
Fernandez's quietest bay. And through the open window I could make out a
huge touring-car pretty well powdered with dust and with no less than
six men in it.
Terry, all eyes, dove for the window, and Olie, all mouth, for the door.
Olga leaned half-way across the table to look out, and I did a little
staring myself. The only person who remained quiet was Dinky-Dunk. He
knocked out his pipe, stuck it in his pocket, put on his hat and caught
up a package of papers from his work table. Then he stalked out, with
his gray fighting look about the eyes. He went out just as one of the
bigger men was about to step down from the car, so that the bigger man
changed his mind and climbed back in his seat, like a king reascending
his throne. And they all sat there so sedate and non-committal and
dignified, rather like dusty pallbearers in an undertaker's wagonette,
that I promptly decided they had come to foreclose a mortgage and take
my Dinky-Dunk's land away from him, at one fell swoop!
I could see my lord walk right up to the running-board, with curt little
nods to his visitors, and I knew by the trim of his shoulders that there
was trouble ahead. Yet they started talking quietly enough. But inside
of two minutes my Dinky-Dunk was shaking his fist in the face of one of
the younger and bigger men and calling him a liar and somewhat
tautologically accusing him of knowing that he was a liar and that he
always had been one. This altogether ungentlemanly language naturally
brought forth language quite as ungentlemanly from the accused, who
stood up in the car and took his turn at dancing about and shaking his
own fist. And then the others seemed to take sides, and voices rose to a
shout, and I saw that there was going to be another fight at Casa
Grande--and I promptly decided to be in it. So off went my apron and
out I went.
It was funny. For, oddly enough, the effect of my entrance on the scene
was like that on a noisy class-room at the teacher's return. The tumult
stopped, rather sheepishly, and that earful of men instinctively slipped
on their armor plate of over-obsequious sex gallantry. They knew I
wasn't a low-brow. I went right up to them, though something about their
funereal discomfiture made me smile. So Dinky-Dunk, mad as a wet hen
though he was, had to introduce every man-jack of them to me! One was a
member of Parliament, and another belonged to some kind of railway
committee, and another was a road construction official, and another was
a mere capitalist who owned two or three newspapers. The man Dinky-Dunk
had been calling a liar was a civil engineer, although it seemed to me
that he had been acting decidedly uncivil. They ventured a platitude
about the beautiful Indian summer weather and labored out a ponderous
joke or two about such a bad-tempered man having such a good-looking
wife--for which I despised them all. But I could see that even if my
intrusion had put the soft pedal on their talk it had also left
everything uncomfortably tentative and non-committal. For some reason or
other this was a man's fight, one which had to be settled in a man's
way. So I decided to retire with outward dignity even if with inward
embarrassment. But I resented their uncouth commercial gallantry almost
as much as I abominated their trying to bully my True Love. And I gave
them one Parthian shot as I turned away.
"The last prize-fight I saw was in a sort of _souteneur's_ cabaret in
the Avenue des Tilleuls," I sweetly explained to them. "But that was
nearly three years ago. So if there is going to be a bout in my back
yard, I trust you gentlemen will be so good as to call me!"
And smiling up into their somewhat puzzled faces, I turned on my heel
and went into the house. One of the men laughed loud and deep, at this
speech of mine, and a couple of the others seemed to sit puzzling over
it. Yet two minutes after I was inside the shack that most uncivil civil
engineer and Dinky-Dunk were at it again. Their language was more than I
should care to repeat. The end of it was, however, that the six dusty
pallbearers all stepped stiffly down out of their car and Dinky-Dunk
shouted for Olie and Terry. At first I thought it was to be a duel, only
I couldn't make out how it could be fought with a post-hole augur and a
few lengths of jointed gaspipe, for this was what the men carried away
with them.
Away across the prairie I could see them apparently engaged in the silly
and quite profitless occupation of putting down a post-hole where it
wasn't in the least needed, and then clustering about this hole like a
bunch of professorial bigwigs about a new specimen on a microscope
slide. Then they moved on and made another hole, and still another,
until I got tired of watching them. It was two hours later before they
came back. Their voices now seemed more facetious and there was more
laughing and joking, Dinky-Dunk and the uncivil civil engineer being the
only quiet ones. And then the car engine purred and hummed and they
climbed heavily in and lighted cigars and waved hands and were off in a
cloud of dust.
But Dinky-Dunk, when he came back to the shack with his papers, was in
no mood for talking. And I knew better than to try to pump him. To-night