The Prairie Mother. Stringer Arthur

old rut, I was going to say—but it is not the same. There is a spirit of unsettledness about it all which I find impossible to define, an air of something impending, of something that should be shunned as long as possible. Perhaps it’s merely a flare-back from my own shaken nerves. Or perhaps it’s because I haven’t been able to get out in the open air as much as I used to. I am missing my riding. And Paddy, my pinto, will give us a morning of it, when we try to get a saddle on his scarred little back, for it’s half a year now since he has had a bit between his teeth.

      It’s Dinky-Dunk that I’m really worrying over, though I don’t know why. I heard him come in very quietly last night as I was tucking little Dinkie up in his crib. I went to the nursery door, half hoping to hear my lord and master sing out his old-time “Hello, Lady-Bird!” or “Are you there, Babushka?” But instead of that he climbed the stairs, rather heavily, and passed on down the hall to the little room he calls his study, his sanctum-sanctorum where he keeps his desk and papers and books—and the duck-guns, so that Dinkie can’t get at them. I could hear him open the desk-top and sit down in the squeaky Bank of England chair.

      When I was sure that Dinkie was off, for good, I tiptoed out and shut the nursery door. Even big houses, I began to realize as I stood there in the hall, could have their drawbacks. In the two-by-four shack where we’d lived and worked and been happy before Casa Grande was built there was no chance for one’s husband to shut himself up in his private boudoir and barricade himself away from his better-half. So I decided, all of a sudden, to beard the lion in his den. There was such a thing as too much formality in a family circle. Yet I felt a bit audacious as I quietly pushed open that study door. I even weakened in my decision about pouncing on Dinky-Dunk from behind, like a leopardess on a helpless stag. Something in his pose, in fact, brought me up short.

      Dinky-Dunk was sitting with his head on his hand, staring at the wall-paper. And it wasn’t especially interesting wall-paper. He was sitting there in a trance, with a peculiar line of dejection about his forward-fallen shoulders. I couldn’t see his face, but I felt sure it was not a happy face.

      I even came to a stop, without speaking a word, and shrank rather guiltily back through the doorway. It was a relief, in fact, to find that I was able to close the door without making a sound.

      When Dinky-Dunk came down-stairs, half an hour later, he seemed his same old self. He talked and laughed and inquired if Nip and Tuck—those are the names he sometimes takes from his team and pins on Poppsy and Pee-Wee—had given me a hard day of it and explained that Francois—our man on the Harris Ranch—had sent down a robe of plaited rabbit-skin for them.

      I did my best, all the time, to keep my inquisitorial eye from fastening itself on Dunkie’s face, for I knew that he was playing up to me, that he was acting a part which wasn’t coming any too easy. But he stuck to his rôle. When I put down my sewing, because my eyes were tired, he even inquired if I hadn’t done about enough for one day.

      “I’ve done about half what I ought to do,” I told him. “The trouble is, Dinky-Dunk, I’m getting old. I’m losing my bounce!”

      That made him laugh a little, though it was rather a wistful laugh.

      “Oh, no, Gee-Gee,” he announced, momentarily like his old self, “whatever you lose, you’ll never lose that undying girlishness of yours!”

      It was not so much what he said, as the mere fact that he could say it, which sent a wave of happiness through my maternal old body. So I made for him with my Australian crawl-stroke, and kissed him on both sides of his stubbly old face, and rumpled him up, and went to bed with a touch of silver about the edges of the thunder-cloud still hanging away off somewhere on the sky-line.

Wednesday the Twenty-fifth

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      There was indeed something wrong. I knew that the moment I heard Dinky-Dunk come into the house. I knew it by the way he let the storm-door swing shut, by the way he crossed the hall as far as the living-room door and then turned back, by the way he slowly mounted the stairs and passed leaden-footed on to his study. And I knew that this time there’d be no “Are you there, Little Mother?” or “Where beest thou, Boca Chica?”

      I’d Poppsy and Pee-Wee safe and sound asleep in the swing-box that dour old Whinstane Sandy had manufactured out of a packing-case, with Francois’ robe of plaited rabbit-skin to keep their tootsies warm. I’d finished my ironing and bathed little Dinkie and buttoned him up in his sleepers and made him hold his little hands together while I said his “Now-I-lay-me” and tucked him up in his crib with his broken mouth-organ and his beloved red-topped shoes under the pillow, so that he could find them there first thing in the morning and bestow on them his customary matutinal kiss of adoration. And I was standing at the nursery window, pretty tired in body but foolishly happy and serene in spirit, staring out across the leagues of open prairie at the last of the sunset.

      It was one of those wonderful sunsets of the winter-end that throw wine-stains back across this bald old earth and make you remember that although the green hasn’t yet awakened into life there’s release on the way. It was a sunset with an infinite depth to its opal and gold and rose and a whisper of spring in its softly prolonged afterglow. It made me glad and sad all at once, for while there was a hint of vast re-awakenings in the riotous wine-glow that merged off into pale green to the north, there was also a touch of loneliness in the flat and far-flung sky-line. It seemed to recede so bewilderingly and so oppressively into a silence and into an emptiness which the lonely plume of smoke from one lonely shack-chimney both crowned and accentuated with a wordless touch of poignancy.

      That pennon of shack-smoke, dotting the northern horizon, seemed to become something valorous and fine. It seemed to me to typify the spirit of man pioneering along the fringes of desolation, adventuring into the unknown, conquering the untamed realms of his world. And it was a good old world, I suddenly felt, a patient and bountiful old world with its Browningesque old bones set out in the last of the sun—until I heard my Dinky-Dunk go lumbering up to his study and quietly yet deliberately shut himself in, as I gave one last look at Poppsy and Pee-Wee to make sure they were safely covered. Then I stood stock-still in the center of the nursery, wondering whether, at such a time, I ought to go to my husband or keep away from him.

      I decided, after a minute or two of thought, to bide a wee. So I slipped quietly down-stairs and stowed Dinkie’s overturned kiddie-car away in the cloak-room and warned Iroquois Annie—the meekest-looking Redskin ever togged out in the cap and apron of domestic servitude—not to burn my fricassee of frozen prairie-chicken and not to scorch the scones so beloved by my Scotch-Canadian lord and master. Then I inspected the supper table and lighted the lamp with the Ruskin-green shade and supplanted Dinky-Dunk’s napkin that had a coffee-stain along its edge with a fresh one from the linen-drawer. Then, after airing the house to rid it of the fumes from Iroquois Annie’s intemperate griddle and carrying Dinkie’s muddied overshoes back to the kitchen and lighting the Chinese hall-lamp, I went to the bottom of the stairs to call my husband down to supper.

      But still again that wordless feeling of something amiss prompted me to hesitate. So instead of calling blithely out of him, as I had intended, I went silently up the stairs. Then I slipped along the hall and just as silently opened his study door.

      My husband was sitting at his desk, confronted by a litter of papers and letters, which I knew to be the mail he had just brought home and flung there. But he wasn’t looking at anything on his desk. He was merely sitting there staring vacantly out of the window at the paling light. His elbows were on the arms of his Bank of England swivel-chair for which I’d made the green baize seat-pad, and as I stared in at him, half in shadow, I had an odd impression of history repeating itself. This puzzled me, for a moment, until I remembered having caught sight of him in much the same attitude, only a few days before. But this time he looked so tired and drawn and spineless that a fish-hook of sudden pity tugged at my throat. For my Dinky-Dunk sat there without moving, with the hope and the joy of life drawn utterly out of his bony big body. The heavy emptiness of his face, as