Why is life so tangled up? Why can’t we be either completely happy or completely the other way? Why must wretchedness come sandwiched in between slices of hope and contentment, and why must happiness be haunted by some ghostly echo of pain? And why can’t people be all good or all bad, so that the tares and the wheat never get mixed up together and make a dismal mess of our harvest of Expectation?

These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself since Duncan went back to Calgary last night. He stayed only two days. And they were days of terribly complicated emotions. I went to the station for him, on Saturday, and in my impatience to be there on time found myself with an hour and a half of waiting, an hour and a half of wandering up and down that ugly open platform in the clear cool light of evening. There was a hint of winter in the air, an intimidating northern nip which made the thought of a warm home and an open fire a consolation to the 229 chilled heart. And I felt depressed, in spite of everything I could do to bolster up my courage. In the first place, I couldn’t keep from thinking of Alsina Teeswater. And in the second place, never, never on the prairie, have I watched a railway-train come in or a railway-train pass away without feeling lonesome. It reminds me how big is the outside world, how infinitesimal is Chaddie McKail and her unremembered existence up here a thousand miles from Nowhere! It humbles me. It reminds me that I have in some way failed to mesh in with the bigger machinery of life.

I had a lump in my throat, by the time Dinky-Dunk’s train pulled in and I saw him swing down from the car-steps. I made for him through the crowd, in fact, with my all but forgotten Australian crawl-stroke, and accosted him with rather a briny kiss and so tight a hug that he stood back and studied my face. He wanted to ask, I know, if anything had happened. He was obviously startled, and just a trifle embarrassed. My lump, by this time, was bigger than ever, but I had to swallow it in secret. Dinky-Dunk, I found, was changed in many ways. He was tired, and he seemed older. But he was prosperous-looking, in brand-new raiment, and reported 230 that luck was still with him and everything was flourishing. Give him one year, he protested, and he’d show them he wasn’t a piker.

I waited for him to ask about the children, but his mind seemed full of his Barcona coal business. The railway was learning to treat them half decently and the coal was coming out better than they’d hoped for. They’d a franchise to light the town, developing their power from the mine screenings, and what they got from this would be so much velvet. And he had a chance to take over one of the finest houses in Mount Royal, if he had a family along with him to excuse such magnificence.

That final speech of his brought me up short. It was dark along the trail, and dark in my heart. And more things than one had happened that day to humble me. So I took one hand off the wheel and put it on his knee.

“Do you want me to go to Calgary?” I asked him.

“That’s up to you,” he said, without budging an inch. He said it, in fact, with a steel-cold finality which sent my soul cringing back into its kennel. And the trail ahead of me seemed blacker than ever.

“I’ll have to have time to think it over,” I said with a composure which was nine-tenths pretense. 231

“Some wives,” he remarked, “are willing to help their husbands.”

“I know it, Dinky-Dunk,” I acknowledged, hoping against hope he’d give me the opening I was looking for. “And I want to help, if you’ll only let me.”

“I think I’m doing my part,” he rather solemnly asserted. I couldn’t see his face, in the dark, but there was little hope to be wrung from the tone of his voice. So I knew it would be best to hold my peace.

Casa Grande blazed a welcome to us, as we drove up to it, and the children, thank heaven, were relievingly boisterous over the adventure of their dad’s return. He seemed genuinely amazed at their growth, seemed slightly irritated at Dinkie’s long stares of appraisal, and feigned an interest in the paraded new possessions of Poppsy and her brother—until it came to Peter’s toy air-ship, which was thrust almost bruskly aside.

And that reminds me of one thing which I am reluctant to acknowledge. Dinky-Dunk was anything but nice to Susie. He may have his perverse reasons for disliking everything in any way connected with Peter Ketley, but I at least expected my husband to be agreeable to the casual guest under his roof. 232 Through it all, I must confess, Susie was wonderful. She made no effort to ignore Duncan, as his ignoring of her only too plainly merited. She remained, not only poised and imperturbable, but impersonal and impenetrable. She found herself, I think, driven just a tiny bit closer to Gershom, who still shows a placid exterior to Duncan’s slightly contemptuous indifference.

My husband, I’m afraid, was not altogether happy in his own home. In one way, of course, I can not altogether blame him for that, since his bigger interests now are outside that home. But I begin to see how dangerous these long separations can be. Somewhere and at some time, before too much water runs under the bridges, there will have to be a readjustment.

I realized that, in fact, as I drove Duncan back to the station last night, after I’d duly signed the different papers he’d brought for that purpose. I had a feeling that every chug of the motor was carrying him further and further out of my life. Heaven knows, I was willing enough to eat crow. I was ready to bury the hatchet, and bury it in my own bosom, if need be, rather than see it swinging free to strike some deeper blow. 233

“Dinky-Dunk,” I said after a particularly long silence between us, “what is it you want me to do?”

My heart was beating much faster than he could have imagined and I was grateful for the chance to pretend the road was taking up most of my attention.

“Do about what?” he none too encouragingly inquired.

“We don’t seem to be hitting it off the way we should be,” I went on, speaking as quietly as I was able. “And I want you to tell me where I’m failing to do my share.”

That note of humility from me must have surprised him a little, for we rode quite a distance without a word.

“What makes you feel that way?” he finally asked.

I found it hard to answer that question. It would never be easy, at any rate, to answer it as I wanted to.

“Because things can’t go on this way forever,” I found the courage to tell him.

“Why not?” he asked. He seemed indifferent again.

“Because they’re all wrong,” I rather tremulously replied. “Can’t you see they’re all wrong?”

“But why do you want them changed?” he asked with a disheartening sort of impersonality. 234

“For the sake of the children,” I told him. And I could feel the impatient movement of his body on the car seat beside me.

“The children!” he repeated with acid-drop deliberation. “The children, of course! It’s always the children!”

“You’re still their father,” I reminded him.

“A sort of honorary president of the family,” he amended.

Hope ebbed out of my heart, like air out of a punctured tire.

“Aren’t you making it rather hard for me?” I demanded, trying to hold myself in, but feeling the bob-cat getting the better of the purring tabby.

“I’ve rather concluded that was the way you made it for me,” countered Duncan, with a coolness of manner which I came more and more to resent.

“In what way?” I asked.

“In shutting up shop,” he rather listlessly responded.

“I don’t think I quite understand,” I told him.

“Well, in crowbarring me out of your scheme of life, if you insist on knowing,” were the words that came from the husband sitting so close beside me. “You had your other interests, of course. But you 235 also seem to have had the idea that you could turn me loose like a range horse. I could paw for my fodder and eat snow when I got thirsty. You didn’t even care to give me a wind-break to keep a forty-mile blizzard out of my bones. You didn’t know where I was browsing, and didn’t much care. It was up to me to rustle for myself and be rounded up when the winter was over and there was another spell of work on hand!”

We rode on in silence, for almost a mile, with the cold air beating against my body and a colder numbness creeping about the corner of my heart.

“Do you mean, Dinky-Dunk,” I finally asked, “that you want your freedom?”

“I’m not saying that,” he said, after another short silence.

“Then what is it you want?” I asked, wondering why the windshield should look so blurred in the half-light.

“I want to get something out of life,” was his embittered retort.

It was a retort that I thought over, thought over with an oddly settling mind, like a stirred pool that has been left to clear itself. For that grown man sitting there beside me seemed ridiculously like a 236 spoiled child, an indulged child forlornly alone in the fogs of his own arrogance. He made me think of a black bear which bites at the bullet wound in his own body. I felt suddenly sorry for him, in a maternal sort of way. I felt sorry for him at the same time that I remained a trifle afraid of him, for he still possessed, I knew, his black-bear power of inflicting unlooked-for and ursine blows. I simply ached to swing about on him and say: “Dinky-Dunk, what you need is a good spanking!” But I didn’t have the courage. I had to keep my sense of humor under cover, just as you have to blanket garden-geraniums before the threat of a black frost. Yet, oddly enough, I felt fortified by that sense of pity. It seemed to bring with it the impression that Duncan was still a small boy who might some day grow out of his badness. It made me feel suddenly older and wiser than this overgrown child who was still crying for the moon. And with that feeling came a wave of tolerance, followed by a smaller wave of faith, of faith that everything might yet come out right, if only I could learn to be patient, as mothers are patient with children.

“And I, on my part, Dinky-Dunk, want to see you get the very best out of life,” I found myself saying to him. My intentions were good, but I suppose I 237 made my speech in a very superior and school-teachery sort of way.

“I guess I’ve got about all that’s coming to me,” he retorted, with the note of bitterness still in his voice.

And again I had the feeling of sitting mother-wise and mother-patient beside an unruly small boy.

“There’s much more, Dinky-Dunk, if you only ask for it,” I said as gently as I was able.

He turned, at that, and studied me in the failing light, studied me with a sharp look of interrogation on his face. I had the feeling, as he did so, of something epochal in the air, as though the drama of life were narrowing up to its climactic last moment. Yet I felt helpless to direct the course of that drama. I nursed the impression that we stood at the parting of the ways, that we stood hesitating at the fork of two long and lonely trails which struck off across an illimitable world, farther and farther apart. I vaguely regretted that we were already in the streets of Buckhorn, for I was half hoping that Duncan would tell me to stop the car. Then I vaguely regretted that I was busy driving that car, as otherwise I might have been free to get my arms about that granitic Dour Man of mine and strangle him into 238 submitting to that momentary mood of softness which seems to come less and less to the male as he grows older.

But Duncan merely laughed, a bit uneasily, and just as suddenly grew silent again. I had a sense of asbestos curtains coming down between us, coming down before the climax was reached or the drama was ended. I couldn’t help wondering, as we drove into the cindered station-yard where the lights were already twinkling, if Dinky-Dunk, like myself, sat waiting for something which failed to manifest itself, if he too had held back before the promise of some decisive word which I was without the power to utter. For we were only half-warm, the two of us, toying with the ghosts of the dead past and childishly afraid of the future. We were Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, without the primal hunger to reach out and possess what we too timidly desired. We were more neutral even than Ferdinand and the Lady of the Bust, for we no longer cared sufficiently to let the other know we cared, but waited and waited in that twilight where all cats are gray.

There was, mercifully, very little time left for us before the train came in. We kept our masks on, and talked only of every-day things, about the receipt 239 for the ranch taxes and what steers Whinnie should “finish” and the new granary roof and the fire-lines about the haystacks. Without quite knowing it, when the train pulled in, I put my arm through my husband’s—and for the second time that evening he turned sharply and inspected my face. I felt as though I wanted to hold him back, to hold him back from something unescapable but tragically momentous. I think he felt sorry for me. At any rate, after he had swung his suit-case up on the car-platform, he turned and kissed me good-by. But it was the sort of kiss one gets at funerals. It left me standing there watching the tail-lights blink off down the track, as desolate as though I had been left alone on the deadest promontory of the deadest planet lost in space. I stood there until the lights were gone. I stood there until the platform was empty again and my car was the only car left along the hard-packed cinders. So I climbed into the driving-seat, and pulled on my gauntlets, and headed for home....

Back at Casa Grande I found Dinkie and Whinnie beside the bunk-house stove, struggling companionably through the opening chapters of Treasure Island. My boy smiled up at me, for a moment, but 240 his mind, I could see, was intent on the page along which Whinnie’s stubbled finger was crawling like a plowshare beside each furrow of text. He was in the South Pacific, a thousand miles away from me. In my own house Struthers was putting a petulant-voiced Poppsy to bed, and Gershom, up in his room, was making extraordinary smells at his chemistry experiments. Susie I found curled comfortably up in front of the fire, idling over my first volume of Jean Christophe.

She read three sentences aloud as I sat down beside her. “How happy he is! He is made to be happy!...Life will soon see to it that he is brought to reason.”

She seemed to expect some comment from me, but I found myself with nothing to say. In fact, we both sat there for a long time, staring in silence at the fire.

“Why do you live with a man you don’t love?” she suddenly asked out of the utter stillness.

It startled me, that question. It also embarrassed me, for I could feel my color mount as Susie’s lapis-lazuli eyes rested on my face.

“What makes you think I don’t love him?” I countered, reminding myself that Susie, after all, was still a girl in her teens. 241

“It’s not a matter of thinking,” was Susie’s quiet retort. “I know you don’t.”

“Then I wish I could be equally certain,” I said with a defensive stiffening of the lines of dignity.

But Susie smiled rather wearily at my forlorn little parade of hauteur. Then she looked at the fire.

“It’s hell, isn’t it, being a woman?” she finally observed, unconsciously paraphrasing a much older philosopher.

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

“I don’t see why you stand it,” was her next meditative shaft in my direction.

“What would you do about it?” I guardedly inquired.

Susie’s face took on one of its intent looks. She was only in her teens, but life, after all, hadn’t dealt over-lightly with her. She impressed me, at the moment, as a secretly ardent young person whose hard-glazed little body might be a crucible of incandescent though invisible emotions.

“What would you do about it?” I repeated, wondering what gave some persons the royal right of doing the questionable and making it seem unquestionable.

“Live!” said Susie with quite unlooked-for emphasis. “Live—whatever it costs!” 242

“Wouldn’t you regard this as living?” I asked, after a moment of thought.

“Not as you ought to be,” averred Susie.

“Why not?” I parried.

Susie sighed. She began to see that it was beyond argument, I suppose. Then she too had her period of silence.

“But what are you getting out of it?” she finally demanded. “What is going to happen? What ever has happened?”

“To whom?” I asked, resenting the unconscious cruelty of her questioning.

“To you,” was the reply of the hard-glazed young hedonist confronting me.

“Are you flattering me with the inference that I was cut out for better things?” I interrogated as my gaze met Susie’s. It was her turn to color up a bit. Then she sighed again, and shook her head.

“I don’t suppose it’s doing either of us one earthly bit of good,” she said with a listless small smile of atonement. “And I’m sorry.”

So we let the skeletons stalk away from our pleasant fireside and secrete themselves in their customary closets of silence.

But I’ve been thinking a good deal about that 243 question of Susie’s. What has happened to me, out here on the prairie? What has indeed come into my life?...

I married young and put a stop to those romantic adventurings which enrich the lives of most girls and enlighten the days of many women. I married a man and lived with him in a prairie shack, and sewed and baked for him, and built a new home and lost it, and began over again. I had children, and saw one of them die, and felt my girlhood slip away, and sold butter and eggs, and loved the man of my choice and cleaved to him and planned for my children, until I saw the man of my choice love another woman. And still I clung to my sparless hulk of a home, hoping to hold close about me the children I had brought into the world and would some day lose again to the world. And that was all. That was everything. It is true, nothing much has ever happened to me....

But I stop, to think this over. If these are the small things, then what are the big things of life? What is it that other women get? I have sung and been happy; I have known great joy and walked big with Hope. I have loved and been loved. I have known sorrow, and I have known birth, and I have sat face to face with death. I have, after all, pretty well 244 run the whole gamut, without perhaps realizing it. For these, after all, are the big things, the elemental things, of life. They are the basic things which leave scant room for the momentary fripperies and the hand-made ornaments of existence....

Heigho! I seem to grow into a melancholy Jacques with the advancing years. That’s the way of life, I suppose. But I’ve no intention of throwing up the sponge. If I can no longer get as much fun out of the game as I want, I can at least watch my offspring taking their joy out of it. God be thanked for giving us our children! We can still rest our tired old eyes on them, just as the polisher of precious stones used to keep an emerald in front of him, to relieve his strained vision by gazing at its soft and soothing greenness.

I have just crept in to take a look at my precious Dinkie, fast asleep in the old cast-iron crib that is growing so small for him he has to lie catercornered on his mattress. He seemed so big, stretched out there, that he frightened me with the thought he couldn’t be a child much longer. There are no babies left now in my home circle. And I still have a shamefaced sort of hankering to hold a baby in my arms again!