The Prairie Child. Stringer Arthur

turn at living. But it seems cruel hard to see a little tot, with eagerness still in his heart, taken away, taken away with the wonder of things still in his eyes. It stuns you. It 51 makes you rebel. It leaves a scar that Time itself can never completely heal.

      Yet through it all I can still hear the voice of valorous old Whinnie as he patted my shoulder and smiled with the brine still in the seams of his furrowed old face. “We’ll thole through, lassie; we’ll thole through!” he said over and over again. Yes; we’ll thole through. And this is only the uncovering of old wounds. And one must keep one’s heart and one’s house in order, for with us we still have the living.

      But Dinky-Dunk can’t completely understand, I’m afraid, this morbid hankering of mine to keep my family about me, to have the two chicks that are left to me close under my wing. And never once, since Pee-Wee went, have I actually punished either of my children. It may be wrong, but I can’t help it. I don’t want memories of violence to be left corroding and rankling in my mind. And I’d hate to see any child of mine cringe, like an ill-treated dog, at every lift of the hand. There are better ways of controlling them, I begin to feel, than through fear. Their father, I know, will never agree with me on this matter. He will always insist on mastery, open and undisputed mastery, in his own house. He is the head of this Clan McKail, the sovereign of this little 52 circle. For we can say what we will about democracy, but when a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple. He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old fabrication about the divine right of kings. But I can see that he is often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in his decrees. More and more often, of late, I’ve observed the boy studying his father, studying him with an impersonal and critical eye. And this habit of silent appraisal is plainly something which Duncan resents, and resents keenly. He’s beginning to have a feeling, I’m afraid, that he can’t quite get at the boy. And there’s a youthful shyness growing up in Dinkie which seems to leave him ashamed of any display of emotion before his father. I can see that it even begins to exasperate Duncan a little, to be shut out behind those incontestable walls of reserve. It’s merely, I’m sure, that the child is so terribly afraid of ridicule. He already nurses a hankering to be regarded as one of the grown-ups and imagines there’s something rather babyish in any undue show of feeling. Yet he is hungry for affection. And he aches, I know, for the approbation of his male parent, 53 for the approval of a full-grown man whom he can regard as one of his own kind. He even imitates his father in the way in which he stands in front of the fire, with his heels well apart. And he gives me chills up the spine by pulling short on one bridle-rein and making Buntie, his mustang-pony, pirouette just as the wicked-tempered Briquette sometimes pirouettes when his father is in the saddle. Yet Dinky-Dunk’s nerves are a bit ragged and there are times when he’s not always just with the boy, though it’s not for me to confute what the instinctive genius of childhood has already made reasonably clear to Dinkie’s discerning young eye. But I can not, of course, encourage insubordination. All I can do is to ignore the unwelcome and try to crowd it aside with happier things. I want my boy to love me, as I love him. And I think he does. I know he does. That knowledge is an azure and bottomless lake into which I can toss my blackest pebbles of fear, my flintiest doubts of the future.

      54

Sunday the Fourth

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      I wish I could get by the scruff of the neck that sophomoric old philosopher who once said nothing survives being thought of. For I’ve been learning, this last two or three days, just how wide of the mark he shot. And it’s all arisen out of Dinky-Dunk’s bland intimation that I am “a withered beauty.” Those words have held like a fish-hook in the gills of my memory. If they’d come from somebody else they mightn’t have meant so much. But from one’s own husband—Wow!—they go in like a harpoon. And they have given me a great deal to think about. There are times, I find, when I can accept that intimation of slipping into the sere and yellow leaf without revolt. Then the next moment it fills me with a sort of desperation. I refuse to go up on the shelf. I see red and storm against age. I refuse to bow to the inevitable. My spirit recoils at the thought of decay. For when you’re fading you’re surely decaying, and when you’re decaying 55 you’re approaching the end. So stop, Father Time, stop, or I’ll get out of the car!

      But we can’t get out of the car. That’s the tragic part of it. We have to go on, whether we like it or not. We have to buck up, and grin and bear it, and make the best of a bad bargain. And Heaven knows I’ve never wanted to be one of the Glooms! I’ve no hankering to sit with the Sob Sisters and pump brine over the past. I’m light-hearted enough if they’ll only give me a chance. I’ve always believed in getting what we could out of life and looking on the sunny side of things. And the disturbing part of it is, I don’t feel withered—not by a jugful! There are mornings when I can go about my homely old duties singing like a prairie Tetrazzini. There are days when I could do a hand-spring, if for nothing more than to shock my solemn old Dinky-Dunk out of his dourness. There are times when we go skimming along the trail with the crystal-cool evening air in our faces and the sun dipping down toward the rim of the world when I want to thank Somebody I can’t see for Something-or-other I can’t define. Dum vivimus vivamus.

      But it seems hard to realize that I’m a sedate and elderly lady already on the shady side of thirty. A 56 woman over thirty years old—and I can remember the days of my intolerant youth when I regarded the woman of thirty as an antiquated creature who should be piously preparing herself for the next world. And it doesn’t take thirty long to slip into forty. And then forty merges into fifty—and there you are, a nice old lady with nervous indigestion and knitting-needles and a tendency to breathe audibly after ascending the front-stairs. No wonder, last night, it drove me to taking a volume of George Moore down from the shelf and reading his chapter on “The Woman of Thirty.” But I found small consolation in that over-uxorious essay, feeling as I did that I knew life quite as well as any amorous studio-rat who ever made copy out of his mottled past. So I was driven, in the end, to studying myself long and intently in the broken-hinged mirrors of my dressing-table. And I didn’t find much there to fortify my quailing spirit. I was getting on a bit. I was curling up a little around the edges. There was no denying that fact. For I could see a little fan-light of lines at the outer corner of each eye. And down what Dinky-Dunk once called the honeyed corners of my mouth went another pair of lines which clearly came from too much laughing. But most unmistakably of 57 all there was a line coming under my chin, a small but tell-tale line, announcing the fact that I wasn’t losing any in weight, and standing, I suppose, one of the foot-hills which precede the Rocky-Mountain dewlaps of old age. It wouldn’t be long, I could see, before I’d have to start watching my diet, and looking for a white hair or two, and probably give up horseback riding. And then settle down into an ingle-nook old dowager with a hassock under my feet and a creak in my knees and a fixed conviction that young folks never acted up in my youth as they act up nowadays.

      I tried to laugh it away, but my heart went down like a dredge-dipper. Whereupon I set my jaw, which didn’t make me look any younger. But I didn’t much care, for the mirror had already done its worst.

      “Not muchee!” I said as I sat there making faces at myself. “You’re still one of the living. The bloom may be off in a place or two, but you’re sound to the core, and serviceable for many a year. So sursum corda! ‘Rung ho! Hira Singh!’ as Chinkie taught us to shout in the old polo days. And that means, Go in and win, Chaddie McKail, and die with your boots on if you have to.”

      I was still intent on that study of my robust-looking but slightly weather-beaten map when Dinky-Dunk 58 walked in and caught me in the middle of my Narcissus act.

      “ ‘All is vanity saith the Preacher,’ ” he began. But he stopped short when I swung about at him. For I hadn’t, after all, been able to carpenter together even a whale-boat of consolation out of my wrecked schooner of hope.

      “Oh, Kakaibod,” I wailed, “I’m a pie-faced old has-been, and nobody