The Prairie Mother Part 17

"Break that woman's heart," I announced, with a backward nod of my head toward Casa Grande.

"I'd much rather break _yours_," he coolly contended. "Or I'd prefer knowing I had the power of doing it."

I shook my head. "It can't be done, Peter. And it can't even be pretended. Imagine the mother of twins trying to flirt with a man even as nice as you are! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dinosauria getting up and trying to do a two-step. And I'm getting old and prosy, Peter, and if I pretend to be skittish now and then it's only to mask the fact that I'm on the shelf, that I've eaten my pie and that before long I'll be dyeing my hair every other Sunday, the same as Struthers, and----"

"Rot!" interrupted Peter. "All rot!"

"Why rot?" I demanded.

"Because to me you're the embodiment of undying youth," a.s.serted the troubadour beside me. It was untrue, and it was improper, but for a moment or two at least my hungry heart closed about that speech the same as a child's hand closes about a chocolate-drop. Women are made that way. But I had to keep to the trail.

"Supposing we get back to earth," I suggested.

"What's the matter with the way we were heading?" countered the quiet-eyed Peter.

"It doesn't seem quite right," I argued. And he laughed a little wistfully.

"What difference does it make, so long as we're happy?" he inquired.

And I tried to reprove him with a look, but I don't think it quite carried in the misty starlight.

"I can't say," I told him, "that I approve of your reasoning."

"That's just the point," he said with a slightly more reckless note in his laughter. "It doesn't pretend to be reasoning. It's more like that abandoning of all reasoning which brings us our few earthly glories."

"_Cogito, ergo sum_," I announced, remembering my Descartes.

"Well, I'm going to keep on just the same," protested Peter.

"Keep on at what?" I asked.

"At thinking you're adorable," was his reply.

"Well, the caterpillars have been known to stop the train, but you must remember that it's rather hard on the caterpillars," I proclaimed as we swung off the trail and headed in for Alabama Ranch.

_Sunday the Thirteenth_

On Friday night there were heavy showers again, and now Whinnie reports that our Marquis wheat couldn't look better and ought to run well over forty bushels to the acre. We are a.s.sured of sufficient moisture, but our two enemies yclept Fire and Hail remain. I should like to have taken out hail insurance, but I haven't the money on hand.

I can at least make sure of my fire-guards. Turning those essential furrows will be good training for Peter. That individual, by the way, has been quieter and more ruminative of late, and, if I'm not mistaken, a little gentler in his att.i.tude toward me. Yet there's not a trace of pose about him, and I feel sure he wouldn't harm the morals of a lady-bug. He's kind and considerate, and doing his best to be a good pal. Whinnie, by the way, regards me with a mildly reproving eye, and having apparently concluded that I am a renegade, is concentrating his affection on d.i.n.kie, for whom he is whittling out a new Noah's Ark in his spare time. He is also teaching d.i.n.kie to ride horseback, lifting him up to the back of either Nip or Tuck when they come for water and letting him ride as far as the stable. He looks very small up on that big animal.

At night, now that the evenings are so long, Whinnie takes my laddie on his knee and tells him stories, stories which he can't possibly understand, I'm sure, but d.i.n.kie likes the drone of Whinnie's voice and the feel of those rough old arms about his little body. We all hunger for affection. The idiot who said that love was the bitters in the c.o.c.ktail of life wasn't either a good liver or a good philosopher.

For love is really the whole c.o.c.ktail. Take that away, and nothing is left....

I seem to be getting moodier, as summer advances. Alternating waves of sourness and tenderness sweep through me, and if I wasn't a busy woman I'd possibly make a fine patient for one of those fas.h.i.+onable nerve-specialists who don't flourish on the prairie.

But I can't quite succeed in making myself as miserable as I feel I ought to be. There seems to be a great deal happening all about us, and yet nothing ever happens. My children are hale and hearty, my ranch is fat with its promise of harvest, and I am surrounded by people who love and respect me. But it doesn't seem enough. Coiled in my heart is one small disturbing viper which I can neither scotch nor kill. Yet I decline to be the victim of anything as ugly as jealousy.

For jealousy is both poisonous and pathetic. But I'd like to choke that woman!

Yesterday Lady Alicia, who is now driving her own car, picked up Peter from his fire-guard work and carried him off on an experimental ride to see what was wrong with her carbureter--the same old carbureter!

She let him out at the shack, on her way home, and Struthers witnessed the tail end of that _enlevement_. It spoilt her day for her. She fumed and fretted and made things fly--for Struthers always works hardest, I've noticed, when in a temper--and surrendering to the corroding tides which were turning her gentle nature into gall and wormwood, obliquely and tremulously warned the somewhat startled Peter against unG.o.dly and frivolous females who 'ave no right to be corrupting simple-minded colonials and who 'ave no scruples against playing with men the same as a cat would play with a mouse.

"So be warned in time," I sternly exclaimed to Peter, when I accidentally overheard the latter end of Struthers' exhortation.

"And there are others as ought to be warned in time!" was Struthers'

Parthian arrow as she flounced off to turn the omelette which she'd left to scorch on the cook-stove.

Peter's eye met mine, but neither of us said anything. It reminded me of cowboy honor, which prompts a rider never to "touch leather," no matter how his bronco may be bucking. And _omelette_, I was later reminded, comes from the French _alumelle_, which means s.h.i.+p's plating, a bit of etymology well authenticated by Struthers' skillet.

_Wednesday the Twenty-third_

Summer is here, here in earnest, and already we've had a few scorching days. Haying will soon be upon us, and there is no slackening in the wheels of industry about Alabama Ranch. My Little Alarm-Clocks have me up bright and early, and the morning prairie is a joy that never grows old to the eye. Life is good, and I intend to be happy, for

I'm going alone, Though h.e.l.l forefend, By a way of my own To the bitter end!

And our miseries, after all, are mostly in our own minds. Yesterday I came across little d.i.n.kie lamenting audibly over a scratch on his hand at least seven days old. He insisted that I should kiss it, and, after witnessing that healing touch, was perfectly satisfied. And there's no reason why grown-ups should be more childish than children themselves.

One thing that I've been missing this year, more than ever before, is fresh fruit. During the last few days I've nursed a craving for a tart Northern-Spy apple, or a Golden Pippin with a water-core, or a juicy and b.u.t.tery Bartlett pear fresh from the tree. Those longings come over me occasionally, like my periodic hunger for the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, a vague ache for just one vision of tumbling beryl water, for the plunge of cool green waves and the race of foam. And Peter overheard me lamenting our lack of fruit and proclaiming I could eat my way right across the Niagara Peninsula in peach time. So when he came back from Buckhorn this afternoon with the farm supplies, he brought on his own hook two small boxes of California plums and a whole crate of oranges.

It was very kind of him, and also very foolish, for the oranges will never keep in this hot weather, and the only way that I can see to save them is to make them up into marmalade. It was pathetic to see little d.i.n.kie with his first orange. It was hard to persuade him that it wasn't a new kind of ball. But once the flavor of its interior juices was made known to him, he took to it like a cat to cream.

It brought home to me how many things there are my kiddies have had to do without, how much that is a commonplace to the city child must remain beyond the reach of the prairie tot. But I'm not complaining. I am resolved to be happy, and in my prophetic bones is a feeling that things are about to take a turn for the better, something better than the humble stewed prune for d.i.n.kie's little tummy and something better than the companions.h.i.+p of the hired help for his mother. Not that both Peter and Whinnie haven't a warm place in my heart! They couldn't be better to me. But I'm one of those neck-or-nothing women, I suppose, who are silly enough to bank all on a single throw, who have to put all their eggs of affection in one basket. I can't be indiscriminate, like d.i.n.kie, for instance, whom I found the other day kissing every picture of a man in the Mail-Order Catalogue and murmuring "Da-da!"

and doing the same to every woman-picture and saying "Mummy." To be lavish with love is, I suppose, the prerogative of youth. Age teaches us to treasure it and sustain it, to guard it as we'd guard a lonely flame against the winds of the world. But the flame goes out, and we grope on through the darkness wondering why there can never be another....

I wonder if Lady Alicia is as cold as she seems? For she has the appearance of keeping her emotions in an ice-box of indifferency, the same as city florists keep their flowers chilled for commercial purposes. Lady Allie, I'm sure, is fond of my little d.i.n.kie. Yet there's a note of condescension in her affection, for even in what seems like an impulse of adoration her exclamation nearly always is "Oh, you lovable little rabbit!" or, if not that, it's likely to be "You adorable little donkey you!" She says it very prettily, of course, setting it to music almost with that melodious English drawl of hers. She is, she must be, a very fascinating woman. But at the first tee, friends.h.i.+p ends, as the golf-nuts say.

...I asked Peter the other day what he regarded as my besetting sin and the brute replied: "Topping the box." I told him I didn't quite get the idea. "A pa.s.sion to produce a good impression," he explained, "by putting all your biggest mental strawberries on the top!"

"That sounds suspiciously like trying to be a Smart Aleck," I retorted.

"It may sound that way, but it isn't. You're so mentally alive, I mean, that you've simply got to be slightly acrobatic. And it's as natural, of course, as a child's dancing."

But Peter is wrong. I've been out of the world so long that I've a dread of impressing people as stupid, as being a clodhopper. And if trying hard not to be thought that is "topping the box," I suppose I'm guilty.

"You are also not without vanity," Peter judicially continued. "But every naturally beautiful woman has a right to that." And I proved Peter's contention by turning sh.e.l.l-pink even under my sunburn and feeling a warm little runway of pleasure creep up through my carca.s.s, for the homeliest old prairie-hen that ever made a pinto shy, I suppose, loves to be told that she's beautiful.

Peter, of course, is a conscienceless liar, but I can't help liking him, and he'll always nest warm in the ashes of my heart....

There's one thing I must do, as soon as I have the chance, and that is get in to a dentist and have my teeth attended to. And now that I'm so much thinner I want a new and respectable pair of corsets. I've been studying my face in the gla.s.s, and I can see, now, what an awful Ananias Peter really is. Struthers, by the way, observed me in the midst of that inspection, and, if I'm not greatly mistaken, indulged in a sniff. To her, I suppose, I'm one of those vain creatures who fall in love with themselves as a child and perpetuate, thereby, a life romance!