The Prairie Wife
on the mouth. I don't even mind the taste of the pipe. Then he's off,
and I'm alone for the afternoon.
But I'm getting things organized now so that I have a little spare time.
And with time on my hands I find myself turning very restless. Yesterday
I wandered off on the prairie and nearly got lost. Dinky-Dunk says I
must be more careful, until I get to know the country better. He put me
up on his shoulder and made me promise. Then he let me down. It made me
wonder if I hadn't married a masterful man. Above all things I've always
wanted freedom.
"I'm a wild woman, Duncan. You'll never tame me," I confessed to him.
He laughed a little.
"So you think you will?" I demanded.
"No, _I_ won't, Gee-Gee, but life will!"
And again I felt some ghostly spirit of revolt stirring in me, away down
deep. I think he saw some shadow of it, caught some echo of it, for his
manner changed and he pushed back the hair from my forehead and kissed
me, almost pityingly.
"There's one thing must _not_ happen!" I told him as he held me in his
arms.
He did not let his eyes meet mine.
"Why?" he asked.
"I'm afraid--out here!" I confessed as I clung to him and felt the need
of having him close to me. He was very quiet and thoughtful all
evening. Before I fell asleep he told me that on Monday the two of us
would team in to Buckhorn and get a wagon-load of supplies.
_Saturday the Twenty-eighth_
I have got my cayuse. Dinky-Dunk meant him for a surprise, but the
shyest and reddest-headed cowboy that ever sat in a saddle came
cantering along the trail, and I saw him first. He was leading the
shaggiest, piebaldest, pottest-tummied, craziest-looking little cayuse
that ever wore a bridle. I gave one look at his tawny-colored forelock,
which stood pompadour-style about his ears, and shouted out
"Paderewski!" Dinky-Dunk came and stood beside me and laughed. He said
that cayuse _did_ look like Paderewski, but the youth of the fiery locks
blushingly explained that his present name was "Jail-Bird," which some
fool Scandinavian had used instead of "Grey-Bird," his authentic and
original appellative. But I stuck to my name, though we have shortened
it into "Paddy." And Paddy must indeed have been a jail-bird, or
deserved to be one, for he is marked and scarred from end to end. But
he is good-tempered, tough as hickory and obligingly omnivorous. Every
one in the West, men and women alike, rides astride, and I have been
practising on Paddy. It seems a very comfortable and sensible way to
ride, but I shall have to toughen up a bit before I hit the trail for
any length of time.
I've been wondering, Matilda Anne, if this all sounds pagan and foolish
to you, uncultured, as Theobald Gustav would put it? I've also been
wondering, since I wrote that last sentence, if people really need
culture, or what we used to call culture, and if it means as much to
life as so many imagine. Here we are out here without any of the
refinements of civilization, and we're as much at peace with our own
souls as are the birds of the air--when there _are_ birds in the air,
which isn't in our country! Culture, it seems to me as I look back on
things, tends to make people more and more mere spectators of life,
detaching them from it and lifting them above it. Or can it be that the
mere spectators demand culture, to take the place of what they miss by
not being actual builders and workers?
We are farmers, just rubes and hicks, as they say in my country. But
we're tilling the soil and growing wheat. We're making a great new
country out of what was once a wilderness. To me, that seems almost
enough. We're laboring to feed the world, since the world must have
bread, and there's something satisfying and uplifting in the mere
thought that we can answer to God, in the end, for our lives, no matter
how raw and rude they may have been. And there are mornings when I am
Browning's "Saul" in the flesh. The great wash of air from sky-line to
sky-line puts something into my blood or brain that leaves me almost
dizzy. I sizzle! It makes me pulse and tingle and cry out that life is
good--_good_! I suppose it is nothing more than altitude and ozone. But
in the matter of intoxicants it stands on a par with anything that was
ever poured out of bottles at Martin's or Bustanoby's. And at sunrise,
when the prairie is thinly silvered with dew, when the tiny hammocks of
the spider-webs swing a million sparkling webs strung with diamonds,
when every blade of grass is a singing string of pearls, hymning to God
on High for the birth of a golden day, I can feel my heart swell, and
I'm so abundantly, so inexpressibly alive, alive to every finger-tip!
Such space, such light, such distances! And being Saul is so much better
than reading about him!
_Wednesday the First_
I was too tired to write any last night, though there seemed so much to
talk about. We teamed into Buckhorn for our supplies, two leisurely,
lovely, lazy days on the trail, which we turned into a sort of
gipsy-holiday. We took blankets and grub and feed for the horses and a
frying-pan, and camped out on the prairie. The night was pretty cool,
but we made a good fire, and had hot coffee. Dinky-Dunk smoked and I
sang. Then we rolled up in our blankets and as I lay there watching the
stars I got thinking of the lights of the Great White Way. Then I nudged
my husband and asked him if he knew what my greatest ambition in life
used to be. And of course he didn't. "Well, Dinky-Dunk," I told him, "it
was to be the boy who opens the door at _Malliard's_! For two whole
years I ate my heart out with envy of that boy, who always lived in the
odor of such heavenly hot chocolate and wore two rows of shining
buttons down his braided coat and was never without white gloves and
morning, noon and night paraded about in the duckiest little skull-cap
cocked very much to one side like a Grenadier's!" And Dinky-Dunk told me
to go to sleep or he'd smother me with a horse-blanket. So I squirmed
back into my blanket and got "nested" and watched the fire die away
while far, far off somewhere a coyote howled. That made me lonesome, so
I got Dinky-Dunk's hand, and fell asleep holding it in mine.
I woke up early. Dinky-Dunk had forgotten about my hand, and it was
cold. In the East there was a low bar of ethereally pale silver, which
turned to amber, and then to ashes of roses, and then to gold. I saw one
sublime white star go out, in the West, and then behind the bars of gold
the sky grew rosy with morning until it was one Burgundian riot of
bewildering color. I sat up and watched it. Then I reached over and
shook Dinky-Dunk. It was too glorious a daybreak to miss. He looked at
me with one eye open, like a sleepy hound.
"You must see it, Dinky-Dunk! It's so resplendent it's positively
vulgar!"
He sat up, stared at the pageantry of color for one moment, and then
wriggled down into his blanket again. I tickled his nose with a blade of
sweet-grass. Then I washed my face in the dew, the same as we did in
Christ-Church Meadow that glorious May-Day in Oxford. By the time
Dinky-Dunk woke up I had the coffee boiling and the bacon sizzling in
the pan. It was the most celestial smell that ever assailed human
nostrils, and I blush with shame at the thought of how much I ate at
that breakfast, sitting flat on an empty oat-sack and leaning against a
wagon-wheel. By eight o'clock we were in the metropolis of Buckhorn and
busy gathering up our things there. And they made a very respectable
wagon-load.
_Thursday the Second_
I have been practising like mad learning to play the mouth-organ. I
bought it in Buckhorn, without letting Dinky-Dunk know, and all day
long, when I knew it was safe, I've been at it. So to-night, when I had
my supper-table all ready, I got the ladder that leaned against one of
the granaries and mounted the nearest hay-stack. There, quite out of
sight, I waited until Dinky-Dunk came in with his team. I saw him go
into the shack and then step outside again, staring about in a brown
study. Then I struck up _Traumerei_.
You should have seen that boy's face! He looked up at the sky, as though
my poor little harmonica were the aerial outpourings of archangels. He
stood stock-still, drinking it in. Then he bolted for the stables,
thinking it came from there. It took him some time to corner me up on my
stack-top. Then I slid down into his arms. And I believe he loves that
mouth-organ music. After supper he made me go out and sit on the oat-box
and play my repertory. He says it's wonderful, from a distance. But that
mouth-organ's rather brassy, and it makes my lips sore. Then, too, my
mouth isn't big enough for me to "tongue" it properly. When I told
Dinky-Dunk this he said:
"Of course it isn't! What d'you suppose I've been calling you Boca Chica
for?"
And I've just discovered "Boca Chica" is Spanish for "Little Mouth"--and
me with a trap, Matilda Anne, that you used to call the Cave of the
Winds! Now Dinky-Dunk vows he'll have a Victrola before the winter is
over! Ye gods and little fishes, what a luxury! There was a time, not so
long ago, when I was rather inclined to sniff at the Westbury's electric
player-piano and its cabinet of neatly canned classics! How life humbles
us! And how blind all women are in their ideals and their search for
happiness! The sea-stones that lie so bright on the shores of youth can
dry so dull in the hand of experience! And yet, as Birdalone's Nannie
once announced, "If you thuck 'em they thay boo-ful!" And I guess it
must be a good deal the same with marriage. You can't even afford to lay
down on your job of loving. The more we ask, the more we must give. I've
just been thinking of those days of my fiercely careless childhood when
my soul used to float out to placid happiness on one piece of
plum-cake--only even then, alas, it floated out like a polar bear on its
iceberg, for as that plum-cake vanished my peace of mind went with it,
madly as I clung to the last crumb. But now that I'm an old married
woman I don't intend to be a Hamlet in petticoats. A good man loves me,
and I love him back. And I intend to keep that love alive.
_Friday the Third_
I have just issued an ultimatum as to pigs. There shall be no more loose
porkers wandering about my dooryard. It's an advertisement of bad
management. And what's more, when I was hanging out my washing this
morning a shote rooted through my basket of white clothes with his dirty
nose, and while I made after him his big brother actually tried to eat
one of my wet table-napkins. And that meant another hour's hard work
before the damage was repaired.
_Saturday the Fourth_
Olie is painting the shack, inside and out, and now you'd never know our
poor little Joseph-coat home. I told Dinky-Dunk if we'd ever put a
chameleon on that shack-wall he'd have died of brain-fag trying to make
good on the color-schemes. So Dinky-Dunk made Olie take a day off and
ply the brush. But the smell of paint made me think of Channel passages,
so off I went with Dinky-Dunk, _a la_ team and buckboard, to the Dixon
Ranch to see about some horses, nearly seventy miles there and back. It
was a glorious autumn day, and a glorious ride, with "Bronk" and
"Tumble-Weed" loping along the double-trail and the air like crystal.
Dinky-Dunk and I sang most of the way. The gophers must have thought we
were mad. My lord and master is incontinently proud of his voice,
especially the chest-tones, but he rather tails behind me on the tune,
plainly not always being sure of himself. We had dinner with the Dixons,
and about three million flies. They gave me the blues, that family, and
especially Mrs. Dixon. She seemed to make prairie-life so ugly and empty
and hardening. Poor, dried-up, sad-eyed soul, she looked like a woman of