My husband yesterday accused me of getting moss-backed. He had been harping on the city string again and asked me if I intended to live and die a withered beauty on a back-trail ranch.

That “withered beauty” hurt, though I did my best to ignore it, for the time at least. And Dinky-Dunk went on to say that it struck him as one of life’s little ironies that I should want to stick to the sort of life we were leading, remembering what I’d come from.

“Dinky-Dunk,” I told him, “it’s terribly hard to explain exactly how I feel about it all. I suppose I could never make you see it as I see it. But it’s a feeling like loyalty, loyalty to the land that’s given us what we have. And it’s also a feeling of disliking to see one old rule repeating itself: what has once been a crusade becoming merely a business. To turn and leave our land now, it seems to me, would make us too much like those soulless soil-robbers you used to rail at, like those squatters who’ve merely squeezed 45 out what they could and have gone on, like those land-miners who take all they can get and stand ready to put nothing back. Why, if we were all like that, we’d have no country here. We’d be a wilderness, a Barren Grounds that went from the Border up to the Circle. But there’s something bigger than that about it all. I love the prairie. Just why it is, I don’t know. It’s too fundamental to be fashioned into words, and I never realized how deep it was until I went back to the city that time. One can just say it, and let it go at that: I love the prairie. It isn’t merely its bigness, just as it isn’t altogether its freedom and its openness. Perhaps it’s because it keeps its spirit of the adventurous. I love it the same as my children love The Arabian Nights and The Swiss Family Robinson. I thought it was mostly cant, once, that cry about being next to nature, but the more I know about nature the more I feel with Pope that naught but man is vile, to speak as impersonally, my dear Diddums, as the occasion will permit. I’m afraid I’m like that chickadee that flew into the bunk-house and Whinnie caught and put in a box-cage for Dinkie. I nearly die at the thought of being cooped up. I want clean air and open space about me.” 46

“I never dreamed you’d been Indianized to that extent,” murmured my husband.

“Being Indianized,” I proceeded, “seems to carry the inference of also being barbarized. But it isn’t quite that, Dinky-Dunk, for there’s something almost spiritually satisfying about this prairie life if you’ve only got the eyes to see it. I think that’s because the prairie always seems so majestically beautiful to me. I can see your lip curl again, but I know I’m right. When I throw open my windows of a morning and see that placid old never-ending plain under its great wash of light something lifts up in my breast, like a bird, and no matter how a mere man has been doing his best to make me miserable that something stands up on the tip of my heart and does its darnedest to sing. It impresses me as life on such a sane and gigantic scale that I want to be an actual part of it, that I positively ache to have a share in its immensities. It seems so fruitful and prodigal and generous and patient. It’s so open-handed in the way it produces and gives and returns our love. And there’s a completeness about it that makes me feel it can’t possibly be wrong.”

“The Eskimo, I suppose, feels very much the same 47 in his little igloo of ice with a pot of whale-blubber at his elbow,” observed my husband.

“You’re a brute, my dear Diddums, and more casually cruel than a Baffin-land cannibal,” I retorted. “But we’ll let it pass. For I’m talking about something that’s too fundamental to be upset by a bitter tongue. There was a time, I know, when I used to fret about the finer things I thought I was losing out of life, about the little hand-made fripperies people have been forced to conjure up and carpenter together to console them for having to live in human beehives made of steel and concrete. But I’m beginning to find out that joy isn’t a matter of geography and companionship isn’t a matter of over-crowded subways. And the strap-hangers and the train-catchers and the first-nighters can have what they’ve got. I don’t seem to envy them the way I used to. I don’t need a Louvre when I’ve got the Northern Lights to look at. And I can get along without an Æolian Hall when I’ve got a little music in my own heart—for it’s only what you’ve got there, after all, that really counts in this world!”

“All of which means,” concluded my husband, “that you are most unmistakably growing old!” 48

“You have already,” I retorted, “referred to me as a withered beauty.”

Dinky-Dunk studied me long and intently. I even felt myself turning pink under that prolonged stare of appraisal.

“You are still easy to look at,” he over-slangily and over-generously admitted. “But I do regret that you aren’t a little easier to live with!”

I could force a little laugh, at that, but I couldn’t quite keep a tremor out of my voice when I spoke again.

“I’m sorry you see only my bad side, Dinky-Dunk. But it’s kindness that seems to bring everything that is best out of us women. We’re terribly like sliced pineapple in that respect: give us just a sprinkling of sugar, and out come all the juices!”

It was Dinky-Dunk’s color that deepened a little as he turned and knocked out his pipe.

“That’s a Chaddie McKail argument,” he merely observed as he stood up. “And a Chaddie McKail argument impresses me as suspiciously like Swiss cheese: it doesn’t seem to be genuine unless you can find plenty of holes in it.”

I did my best to smile at his humor. 49

“But this isn’t an argument,” I quietly corrected. “I’d look at it more in the nature of an ultimatum.”

That brought him up short, as I had intended it to do. He stood worrying over it as Bobs and Scotty worry over a bone.

“I’m afraid,” he finally intoned, “I’ve been repeatedly doing you the great injustice of underestimating your intelligence!”

“That,” I told him, “is a point where I find silence imposed upon me.”

He didn’t speak until he got to the door.

“Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared the air a bit anyway,” he said with a grim look about his Holbein Astronomer old mouth as he went out.

But we haven’t cleared the air. And it disturbs me more than I can say to find that I have reservations from my husband. It bewilders me to see that I can’t be perfectly candid with him. But there are certain deeper feelings that I can no longer uncover in his presence. Something holds me back from explaining to him that this fixed dread of mine for all cities is largely based on my loss of little Pee-Wee. For if I hadn’t gone to New York that time, to Josie Langdon’s wedding, I might never have lost my boy. They 50 did the best they could, I suppose, before their telegrams brought me back, but they didn’t seem to understand the danger. And little did I dream, before the Donnelly butler handed me that first startling message just as we were climbing into the motor to go down to the Rochambeau to meet Chinkie and Tavvy, that within a week I was to sit and watch the cruelest thing that can happen in this world. I was to see a small child die. I was to watch my own Pee-Wee pass quietly away.

I have often wondered, since, why I never shed a tear during all those terrible three days. I couldn’t, in some way, though the nurse herself was crying, and poor old Whinnie and Struthers were sobbing together next to the window, and dour old Dinky-Dunk, on the other side of the bed, was racking his shoulders with smothered sobs as he held the little white hand in his and the warmth went forever out of the little fingers where his foolish big hand was trying to hold back the life that couldn’t be kept there. The old are ready to die, or can make themselves ready. They have run their race and had their 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.