The Prairie Child. Stringer Arthur

suppose I have given most of my time and attention to my children. And it’s as perilous, I suppose, to give your heart to a man and then take it even partly away again as it is to give a trellis to a rose-bush and then expect it to stand alone. My husband, too, has been restless and dissatisfied with prairie life during the last year or so, has been rocking in his own doldrums of inertia where the sight of even the humblest ship—and the Wandering Sail in this case always seemed to me as soft and shapeless as a boned squab-pigeon!—could promptly elicit an answering signal.

      But I strike a snag there, for Alsina has not been so boneless as I anticipated. There was an unlooked-for intensity in her eyes and a mild sort of tragedy in her voice when she came and told me that she was going to another school in the Knee-Hill country and asked if I could have her taken in to Buckhorn the next morning. Some one, of course, had to go. There was one too many in this prairie home that must always remain so like an island dotting the lonely wastes of a lonely sea. And triangles, oddly enough, seem to flourish best in city squares. But much as I wanted to talk to Alsina, I was compelled to respect her reserve. I even told her that 15 Dinkie would miss her a great deal. She replied, with a choke in her voice, that he was a wonderful child. That, of course, was music to the ears of his mother, and my respect for the tremulous Miss Teeswater went up at least ten degrees. But when she added, without meeting my eye, that she was really fond of the boy, I couldn’t escape the impression that she was edging out on very thin ice. It was, I think, only the silent misery in her half-averted face which kept me from inquiring if she hadn’t rather made it a family affair. But that, second thought promptly told me, would seem too much like striking the fallen. And we both seemed to feel, thereafter, that silence was best.

      Practically nothing passed between us, in fact, until we reached the station. I could see that she was dreading the ordeal of saying good-by. That unnamed sixth sense peculiar to cab-drivers and waiters and married women told me that every moment on the bald little platform was being a torture to her. As the big engine came lumbering up to a standstill she gave me one quick and searching look. It was a look I shall never forget. For, in it was a question and something more than a question. An unworded appeal was there, and also an unworded 16 protest. It got past my outposts of reason, in some way. It came to me in my bitterness like the smell of lilacs into a sick-room. I couldn’t be cruel to that poor crushed outcast who had suffered quite as much from the whole ignoble affair as I had suffered. I suddenly held out my hand to her, and she took it, with that hungry questioning look still on her face.

      “It’s all right,” I started to say. But her head suddenly went down between her hunched-up shoulders. Her body began to shake and tears gushed from her eyes. I had to help her to the car steps.

      “It was all my fault,” she said in a strangled voice, between her helpless little sobs.

      It was brave of her, of course, and she meant it for the best. But I wish she hadn’t said it. Instead of making everything easier for me, as she intended, she only made it harder. She left me disturbingly conscious of ghostly heroisms which transposed what I had tried to regard as essentially ignoble into some higher and purer key. And she made it harder for me to look at my husband, when I got home, with a calm and collected eye. I felt suspiciously like Lady Macbeth after the second murder. I felt that we were fellow-sharers of a guilty secret 17 it would never do to drag too often into the light of every-day life.

      But it will no more stay under cover, I find, than a dab-chick will stay under water. It bobs up in the most unexpected places, as it did last night, when Dinkie publicly proclaimed that he was going to marry his Mummy when he got big.

      “It would be well, my son, not to repeat the mistakes of your father!” observed Dinky-Dunk. And having said it, he relighted his quarantining pipe and refused to meet my eye. But it didn’t take a surgical operation to get what he meant into my head. It hurt, in more ways than one, for it struck me as suspiciously like a stone embodied in a snowball—and even our offspring recognized this as no fair manner of fighting.

      “Then it impresses you as a mistake?” I demanded, seeing red, for the coyote in me, I’m afraid, will never entirely become house-dog.

      “Isn’t that the way you regard it?” he asked, inspecting me with a non-committal eye.

      I had to bite my lip, to keep from flinging out at him the things that were huddled back in my heart. But it was no time for making big war medicine. So I got the lid on, and held it there. 18

      “My dear Dinky-Dunk,” I said with an effort at a gesture of weariness, “I’ve long since learned that life can’t be made clean, like a cat’s body, by the use of the tongue alone!”

      Dinky-Dunk did not look at me. Instead, he turned to the boy who was watching that scene with a small frown of perplexity on his none too approving face.

      “You go up to the nursery,” commanded my husband, with more curtness than usual.

      But before Dinkie went he slowly crossed the room and kissed me. He did so with a quiet resoluteness which was not without its tacit touch of challenge.

      “You may feel that way about the use of the tongue,” said my husband as soon as we were alone, “but I’m going to unload a few things I’ve been keeping under cover.”

      He waited for me to say something. But I preferred remaining silent.

      “Of course,” he floundered on, “I don’t want to stop you martyrizing yourself in making a mountain out of a mole-hill. But I’m getting a trifle tired of this holier-than-thou attitude. And––”

      “And?” I prompted, when he came to a stop and sat pushing up his brindled front-hair until it made 19 me think of the Corean lion on the library mantel, the lion in pottery which we invariably spoke of as the Dog of Fo. My wintry smile at that resemblance seemed to exasperate him.

      “What were you going to say?” I quietly inquired.

      “Oh, hell!” he exclaimed, with quite unexpected vigor.

      “I hope the children are out of hearing,” I reminded him, solemn-eyed.

      “Yes, the children!” he cried, catching at the word exactly as a drowning man catches at a lifebelt. “The children! That’s just the root of the whole intolerable situation. This hasn’t been a home for the last three or four years; it’s been nothing but a nursery. And about all I’ve been is a retriever for a crèche, a clod-hopper to tiptoe about the sacred circle and see to it there’s enough flannel to cover their backs and enough food to put into their stomachs. I’m an accident, of course, an intruder to be faced with fortitude and borne with patience.”

      “This sounds quite disturbing,” I interrupted. “It almost leaves me suspicious that you are about to emulate the rabbit and devour your young.”

      Dinky-Dunk fixed me with an accusatory finger.

      “And the fact that you can get humor out of it 20 shows me just how far it has gone,” he cried with a bitterness which quickly enough made me sober again. “And I could stand being deliberately shut out of your life, and shut out of their lives as far as you can manage it, but I can’t see that it’s doing either them or you any particular good.”

      “But I am responsible for the way in which those children grow up,” I said, quite innocent of the double entendre which brought a dark flush to my husband’s none too happy face.

      “And I suppose I’m not to contaminate them?” he demanded.

      “Haven’t you done enough along that line?” I asked.

      He swung about, at that, with something dangerously like hate on his face.

      “Whose children are they?” he challenged.

      “You are their father,” I quietly acknowledged. It rather startled me to find Dinky-Dunk regarding himself as a fur coat and my offspring as moth-eggs which I had laid deep in the pelt of his life, where we were slowly but surely eating the glory out of that garment and leaving it as bald as a prairie dog’s belly.