The Prairie Child. Stringer Arthur

see myself sky-hooting down that icy slope on my coaster, approaching the old Major from the rear and peremptorily piping out: “One side, please!” For I was young then, and I expected all life to make way for me. But the old Major betrayed no intention of altering his solemnly determined course at any such juvenile suggestion, with the result that he sat down on me bodily, and for the next two blocks approached his club in Madison Square in a manner and at a speed which he had in no wise anticipated. But, Eheu, how long ago it all seemed!

      67

Saturday the Tenth

       Table of Contents

      Peter has written back in answer to my question as to the expediency of sending my boy off to a boarding-school. He put all he had to say in two lines. They were:

      “I had a mother like Dinkie’s, I’d stick to her until the stars were dust.”

      That was very nice of Peter, of course, but I don’t imagine he had any idea of the peck of trouble he was going to stir up at Casa Grande. For Dinky-Dunk picked up the sheet of paper on which that light-hearted message had been written and perused the two lines, perused them with a savagery which rather disturbed me. He read them for the second time, and then he put them down. His eye, as he confronted me, was a glacial one.

      “It’s too bad we can’t run this show without the interference of outsiders,” he announced as he stalked out of the room.

      I’ve been thinking the thing over, and trying to 68 get my husband’s view-point. But I can’t quite succeed. There has always been a touch of the satyric in Dinky-Dunk’s attitude toward Peter’s weekly letter to my boy. He has even intimated that they were written in a new kind of Morse, the inference being that they were intended to carry messages in cipher to eyes other than Dinkie’s. But Peter is much too honest a man for any such resort to subterfuge. And Dinky-Dunk has always viewed with a hostile eye the magazines and books and toys which big-hearted Peter has showered out on us. Peter always was ridiculously open-handed. And he always loved my Dinkie. And it’s only natural that our thoughts should turn back to where our love has been left. Peter, I know, gets quite as much fun out of those elaborately playful letters to Dinkie as Dinkie does himself. And it’s left the boy more anxious to learn, to the end that he may pen a more respectable reply to them.

      Some of Peter’s gifts, it is true, have been embarrassingly ornate, but Peter, who has been given so much, must have remembered how little has come to my kiddies. It was my intention, for a while, to talk this over with Dinky-Dunk, to try to make him see it in a more reasonable light. But I have now given 69 up that intention. There’s a phantasmal something that holds me back. …

      I dreamt last night that my little Dinkie was a grown youth in a Greek academy, wearing a toga and sitting on a marble bench overlooking a sea of lovely sapphire. There both Peter and Percy, also arrayed in togas, held solemn discourse with my offspring and finally agreed that once they were through with him he would be the Wonder of the Age. …

      Dinky-Dunk asked me point-blank to-day if I’d consider the sale of Casa Grande, provided he got the right price for the ranch. I felt, for a moment, as though the bottom had been knocked out of my world. But it showed me the direction in which my husband’s thoughts have been running of late. And I just as pointedly retorted that I’d never consent to the sale of Casa Grande. It’s not merely because it’s our one and only home. It’s more because of the little knoll where the four Manitoba maples have been set and the row of prairie-roses have been planted along the little iron fence, the little iron fence which twice a year I paint a virginal white, with my own hands. For that’s where my Pee-Wee sleeps, and that lonely little grave must never pass out of my care, to be forgotten and neglected and 70 tarnished with time. It’s not a place of sorrow now, but more an altar, duly tended, the flower-covered bed of my Pee-Wee, of my poor little Pee-Wee who was so brimming with life and love. He used to make me think of a humming-bird in a garden—and now all I have left of him is my small chest of toys and trinkets and baby-clothes. God, I know, will be good to that lonely little newcomer in His world of the statelier dead, in His gallery of whispering ghosts. Oh, be good to him, God! Be good to him, or You shall be no God of mine! I can’t think of him as dead, as going out like a candle, as melting into nothingness as the little bones under their six feet of earth molder away. But my laddie is gone. And I must not be morbid. As Peter once said, misery loves company, but the company is apt to seek more convivial quarters. Yet something has gone out of my life, and that something drives me back to my Dinkie and my Poppsy with a sort of fierceness in my hunger to love them, to make the most of them.

      Gershom, who has been giving Poppsy a daily lesson at home, has just inquired why she shouldn’t be sent to school along with Dinkie. And her father has agreed. It gave me the wretched feeling, for a 71 moment or two, that they were conspiring to take my last baby away from me. But I have to bow to the fact that I no longer possess one, since Poppsy announced her preference, the other day, for a doll “with real livings in it.” She begins to show as fixed an aversion to baby-talk as that entertained by old Doctor Johnson himself, and no longer yearns to “do yidin on the team-tars,” as she used to express it. The word “birthday” is still “birfday” with her, and “water” is still “wagger,” but she now religiously eschews all such reiterative diminutives as “roundy-poundy” and “Poppsy-Woppsy” and “beddy-bed.” She has even learned, after much effort, to convert her earlier “keam of feet” into the more legitimate and mature “cream of wheat.” And now that she has a better mastery of the sibilants the charm has rather gone out of the claim, which I so laboriously taught her, that “Daddy is all feet,” meaning, of course, that he was altogether sweet—which he gave small sign of being when he first caught the point of my patient schooling. She is not so quick-tongued as her brother Dinkie, but she has a natural fastidiousness which makes her long for alignment with the proprieties. She is, in fact, a conformist, a sedate and dignified little lady 72 who will never be greatly given to the spilling of beans and the upsetting of apple-carts. She is, in many ways, amazingly like her pater. She will, I know, be a nice girl when she grows up, without very much of that irresponsibility which seems to have been the bugbear of her maternal parent. I’m even beginning to believe there’s something in the old tradition about ancestral traits so often skipping a generation. At any rate, that crazy-hearted old Irish grandmother of mine passed on to me a muckle o’ her wildness, the mad County Clare girl who swore at the vicar and rode to hounds and could take a seven-barred gate without turning a hair and was apt to be always in love or in debt or in hot water. She died too young to be tamed, I’m told, for say what you will, life tames us all in the end. Even Lady Hamilton took to wearing red-flannel petticoats before she died, and Buffalo Bill faded down into plain Mr. William Cody, and the abducted Helen of Troy gave many a day up to her needlework, we are told, and doubtlessly had trouble with both her teeth and her waist measurement.

      Dinky-Dunk is proud of his Poppsy and has announced that it’s about time we tucked the “Poppsy” away with her baby-clothes and resorted to the use 73 of the proper and official “Pauline Augusta.” So Pauline we shall try to have it, after this. There are several things, I think, which draw Dinky-Dunk and his Poppsy—I mean his Pauline—together. One is her likeness to himself. Another is her tractability, though I hate to hitch so big a word on to so small a lady. And still another is the fact that she is a girl. There’s a subliminal play of sex-attraction about it, I suppose, just as there probably is between Dinkie and me. And there’s something very admirable in Pauline Augusta’s staid adoration of her dad. She plays up to him, I can see, without quite knowing she’s doing it. She’s hungry for his approval, and happiest, always, in his presence. Then, too, she makes him forget, for the time at least, his disappointment in a soul-mate who hasn’t quite measured up to expectations! And I devoutly thank the Master of Life and Love that my solemn old Dinky-Dunk can thus care for his one and only daughter. It softens him, and keeps the sordid worries of the moment from vitrifying his heart. It puts a rainbow in his sky of every-day work, and gives him something to plan and plot and live for. And he needs it. We all do. It’s our human and natural hunger for companionship. And as he observed 74 not