The Prairie Child Part 2

I sat back, trying to picture my home and my life without d.i.n.kie. But it was unbearable. It was unthinkable.

"I shall never agree to that," I quietly retorted.

"Why?" asked my husband, with a note of triumph which I resented.

"For one thing, because he is still a child, because he is too young,"

I contended, knowing that I could never agree with d.i.n.ky-Dunk in his thoroughly English ideas of education even while I remembered how he had once said that the greatness of England depended on her public-schools, such as Harrow and Eton and Rugby and Winchester, and that she had been the best colonizer in the world because her boys had been taken young and taught not to overvalue home ties, had been made manlier by getting off with their own kind instead of remaining hitched to an ap.r.o.n-string.

"And you prefer keeping him stuck out here on the prairie?" demanded d.i.n.ky-Dunk.

"The prairie has been good enough for his parents, this last seven or eight years," I contended.

"It hasn't been good enough for me," my husband cried out with quite unlooked-for pa.s.sion. "And I've about had my fill of it!"

"Where would you prefer going?" I asked, trying to speak as quietly as I could.

"That's something I'm going to find out as soon as the chance comes,"

he retorted with a slow and embittered emphasis which didn't add any to my peace of mind.

"Then why cross our bridges," I suggested, "until we come to them?"

"But you're not looking for bridges," he challenged. "You don't want to see anything beyond living like Doukhobours out here on the edge of Nowhere and remembering that you've got your precious offspring here under your wing and wondering how many bushels of Number-One-Hard it will take to buy your d.i.n.kie a riding pinto!"

"Aren't you rather tired to-night?" I asked with all the patience I could command.

"Yes, and I'm talking about the thing that makes me tired. For you know as well as I do that you've made that boy of yours a sort of anesthetic. You put him on like a nose-cap, and forget the world. He's about all you remember to think about. Why, when you look at the clock, nowadays, it isn't ten minutes to twelve. It's always d.i.n.kie minutes to d.i.n.k. When you read a book you're only reading about what your d.i.n.kie might have done or what your d.i.n.kie is some day to write.

When you picture the Prime Minister it's merely your d.i.n.kie grown big, laying down the law to a House of Parliament made up of other d.i.n.kies, rows and rows of 'em. When the sun s.h.i.+nes you're wondering whether it's warm enough for your d.i.n.kie to walk in, and when the snow begins to melt you're wondering whether it's soft enough for the beloved d.i.n.kie to mold into s...o...b..a.l.l.s. When you see a girl you at once get busy speculating over whether or not she'll ever be beautiful enough for your d.i.n.kie, and when one of the Crowned Heads of Europe announces the alliance of its youngest princess you fall to pondering if d.i.n.kie wouldn't have made her a better husband. And when the flowers come out in your window-box you wonder if they're fair enough to bloom beside your d.i.n.kie. I don't suppose I ever made a haystack that you didn't wonder whether it wasn't going to be a grand place for d.i.n.kie to slide down. And when d.i.n.kie draws a goggle-eyed man on his scribbler you see Michael Angelo totter and t.i.tian turn in his grave. And when d.i.n.kie writes a composition of thirty crooked lines on the landing of Hengist you feel that fate did Hume a mean trick in letting him pa.s.s away before inspecting that final word in historical record. And heaven's just a row of d.i.n.kies with little gold harps tucked under their wings.

And you think you're breathing air, but all you're breathing is d.i.n.kies, millions and millions of etherealized d.i.n.kies. And when you read about the famine in China you inevitably and adroitly hitch the death of seven thousand c.h.i.n.ks in Yangchow on to the interests of your immortal offspring. And I suppose Rome really came into being for the one ultimate end that an immortal young d.i.n.kie might possess his full degree of d.i.n.kiness and the glory that was Greece must have been merely the tom-toms tuning up for the finished dance of our d.i.n.kie's grandeur. Day and night, it's d.i.n.kie, just d.i.n.kie!"

I waited until he was through. I waited, heavy of heart, until his foolish fires of revolt had burned themselves out. And it didn't seem to add to his satisfaction to find that I could inspect him with a quiet and slightly commiserative eye.

"You are accusing me," I finally told him, "of something I'm proud of.

And I'm afraid I'll always be guilty of caring for my own son."

He turned on me with a sort of heavy triumph.

"Well, it's something that you'll jolly well pay the piper for, some day," he announced.

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded.

"I mean that nothing much is ever gained by letting the maternal instinct run over. And that's exactly what you're doing. You're trying to tie d.i.n.kie to your side, when you can no more tie him up than you can tie up a sunbeam. You could keep him close enough to you, of course, when he was small. But he's bound to grow away from you as he gets bigger, just as I grew away from my mother and you once grew away from yours. It's a natural law, and there's no use crocking your knees on it. The boy's got his own life to live, and you can't live it for him. It won't be long, now, before you begin to notice those quiet withdrawals, those slippings-back into his own sh.e.l.l of self-interest.

And unless you realize what it means, it's going to hurt. And unless you reckon on that in the way you order your life you're not only going to be a very lonely old lady but you're going to b.u.mp into a big hole where you thought the going was smoothest!"

I sat thinking this over, with a ton of lead where my heart should have been.

"I've already b.u.mped into a big hole where I thought the going was smoothest," I finally observed.

My husband looked at me and then looked away again.

"I was hoping we could fill that up and forget it," he ventured in a valorously timid tone which made it hard, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, to keep my throat from tightening. But I sat there, shaking my head from side to side.

"I've got to love something," I found myself protesting. "And the children seem all that is left."

"How about me?" asked my husband, with his acidulated and slightly one-sided smile.

"You've changed, d.i.n.ky-Dunk," was all I could say.

"But some day," he contended, "you may wake up to the fact that I'm still a human being."

"I've wakened up to the fact that you're a different sort of human being than I had thought."

"Oh, we're all very much alike, once you get our number," a.s.serted my husband.

"You mean men are," I amended.

"I mean that if men can't get a little warmth and color and sympathy in the home-circle they're going to edge about until they find a subst.i.tute for it, no matter how shoddy it may be," contended d.i.n.ky-Dunk.

"But isn't that a hard and bitter way of writing life down to one's own level?" I asked, trying to swallow the choke that wouldn't stay down in my throat.

"Well, I can't see that we get much ahead by trying to sentimentalize the situation," he said, with a gesture that seemed one of frustration.

We sat staring at each other, and again I had the feeling of abysmal gulfs of s.p.a.ce intervening between us.

"Is that all you can say about it?" I asked, with a foolish little gulp I couldn't control.

"Isn't it enough?" demanded d.i.n.ky-Dunk. And I knew that nothing was to be gained, that night, by the foolish and futile clash of words.

_Tuesday the Twenty-Third_

I've been doing a good deal of thinking over what d.i.n.ky-Dunk said. I have been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of mental ju-jutsu I've even been trying to justify what I can't quite understand in him. But it's no use. There's one bald, hard fact I can't escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct under the sands of self-deception. There's one cold-blooded truth that will have to be faced. _My husband is no longer in love with me._ Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes of the law, and the mother of his children. We still live together, and, from force of habit, if from nothing else, go through the familiar old rites of daily communion. He sits across the table from me when I eat, and talks casually enough of the trivially momentous problems of the minute, or he reads in his slippers before the fire while I do my sewing within a spool-toss of him. But a row of invisible a.s.segais stand leveled between his heart and mine. A slow glacier of green-iced indifferency shoulders in between us; and gone forever is the wild-flower aroma of youth, the singing spirit of April, the mysterious light that touched our world with wonder. He is merely a man, drawing on to middle age, and I am a woman, no longer young. Gone now are the spring floods that once swept us together. Gone now is the flame of adoration that burned clean our altar of daily intercourse and left us blind to the weaknesses we were too happy to remember. For there was a time when we loved each other. I know that as well as Duncan does. But it died away, that ghostly flame. It went out like a neglected fire. And blowing on dead ashes can never revive the old-time glow.

"So they were married and lived happy ever afterward!" That is the familiar ending to the fairy-tales I read over and over again to my d.i.n.kie and Poppsy. But they are fairy-tales. For who lives happy ever afterward? First love chloroforms us, for a time, and we try to hug to our bosoms the illusion that Heaven itself is only a sort of endless honeymoon presided over by Lohengrin marches. But the anesthetic wears away and we find that life isn't a bed of roses but a rough field that rewards us as we till it, with here and there the cornflower of happiness laughing unexpectedly up at us out of our sober acres of sober wheat. And often enough we don't know happiness when we see it.

We a.s.suredly find it least where we look for it most. I can't even understand why we're equipped with such a hunger for it. But I find myself trending more and more to that cynic philosophy which defines happiness as the absence of pain. The absence of pain--that is a lot to ask for, in this life!

I wonder if d.i.n.ky-Dunk is right in his implication that I am getting hard? There are times, I know, when I grate on him, when he would probably give anything to get away from me. Yet here we are, linked together like two convicts. And I don't believe I'm as hard as my husband accuses me of being. However macadamized they may have made life for me, there's at least one soft spot in my heart, one garden under the walls of granite. And that's the spot which my two children fill, which my children keep green, which my children keep holy. It's them I think of, when I think of the future--when I should at least be thinking a little of my grammar and remembering that the verb "to be"

takes the nominative, just as discontented husbands seem to take the initiative! That's why I can't quite find the courage to ask for freedom. I have seen enough of life to know what the smash-up of a family means to its toddlers. And I want my children to have a chance.

They can't have that chance without at least two things. One is the guardians.h.i.+p of home life, and the other is that curse of modern times known as money. We haven't prospered as we had hoped to, but heaven knows I've kept an eagle eye on that savings-account of mine, in that absurdly new and resplendent red-brick bank in Buckhorn. Patiently I've fed it with my b.u.t.ter and egg money, joyfully I've seen it grow with my meager Nitrate dividends, and grimly I've made it bigger with every loose dollar I could lay my hands on. There's no heroism in my going without things I may have thought I needed, just as there can be little n.o.bility in my sticking to a husband who no longer loves me.

For it's not Chaddie McKail who counts now, but her chicks. And I'll have to look for my reward through them, for I'm like Romanes' rat now, too big to get into the bottle of cream, but wary enough to know I can dine from a tail still small enough for insertion. I'm merely a submerged prairie-hen with the best part of her life behind her.

But it bothers me, what Duncan says about my always thinking of little d.i.n.kie first. And I'm afraid I do, though it seems neither right nor fair. I suppose it's because he was my first-born--and having come first in my life he must come first in my thoughts. I was made to love somebody--and my husband doesn't seem to want me to love him. So he has driven me to centering my thoughts on the child. I've got to have something to warm up to. And any love I may lavish on this prairie-chick of mine, who has to face life with the lack of so many things, will not only be a help to the boy, but will be a help to me, the part of Me that I'm sometimes so terribly afraid of.

Yet I can't help wondering if Duncan has any excuses for claiming that it's personal selfishness which prompts me to keep my boy close to my side. And am I harming him, without knowing it, in keeping him here under my wing? Schools are all right, in a way, but surely a good mother can do as much in the molding of a boy's mind as a boarding-school with a file of Ph.D.'s on its staff. But am I a good mother? And should I trust myself, in a matter like this, to my own feelings? Men, in so many things, are better judges than women. Yet it has just occurred to me that all men do not think alike. I've been sitting back and wondering what kindly old Peter would say about it.

And I've decided to write Peter and ask what he advises. He'll tell the truth, I know, for Peter is as honest as the day is long....

I've just been up to make sure the children were properly covered in bed. And it disturbed me a little to find that without even thinking about it I went to d.i.n.kie first. It seemed like accidental corroboration of all that Duncan has been saying. But I stood studying him as he lay there asleep. It frightened me a little, to find him so big. If it's true, as Duncan threatens, that time will tend to turn him away from me, it's something that I'm going to fight tooth and nail. And I've seen no sign of it, as yet. With every month and every year that's added to his age he grows more companionable, more able to bridge the chasm between two human souls. We have more interests in common, more things to talk about. And day by day d.i.n.kie is reaching up to my clumsily mature way of looking at life. He can come to me with his problems, knowing I'll always give him a hearing, just as he used to come to me with his baby cuts and bruises, knowing they would be duly kissed and cared for. Yet some day, I have just remembered, he may have problems that can't be brought to me. But that day, please G.o.d, I shall defer as long as possible. Already we have our own little secrets and private compacts and understandings. I don't want my boy to be a mollycoddle. But I want him to have his chance in the world. I want him to be somebody. I can't reconcile myself to the thought of him growing up to wear moose-mittens and shoe-packs and stretching barb-wire in blue-jeans and riding a tractor across a prairie back-towns.h.i.+p. I refuse to picture him getting bent and gray wringing a livelihood out of an over-cropped ranch fourteen miles away from a post-office and a world away from the things that make life most worth living. If he were an ordinary boy, I might be led to think differently. But my d.i.n.kie is not an ordinary boy. There's a spark of the unusual, of the exceptional, in that laddie. And I intend to fan that spark, whatever the cost may be, until it breaks out into genius.