Arthur Stringer

“ Alternating waves of sourness and tenderness sweep through me, and if I wasn’t a busy woman I’d possibly make a fine patient for one of those fashionable nerve-specialists who don’t flourish on the prairie.
But I can’t quite succeed in making myself as miserable as I feel I ought to be. There seems to be a great deal happening all about us, and yet nothing ever happens. My children are hale and hearty, my ranch is fat with its promise of harvest, and I am surrounded by people who love and respect me. ”

“ Pinshaw, Peter’s gardener and care-taker, had before our arrival picked several clumps of violets, with perfume like the English violets, and the house was aired and everything waiting and ready when we came, even to two bottles of certified milk in the icebox for the babies and half a dozen Casaba melons for their elders. My one disturbing thought is that it will be a hard house to live up to. But Struthers, who is not untouched with her folie de grandeur, has the slightly flurried satisfaction of an exile who has at last come into her own. ”

“ It won’t be long now before Dinkie has a pinto of his own and will go bobbing off across the prairie-floor, I suppose, like a monkey on a circus-horse. Even now he likes nothing better than coming with his mother while she gathers her “clutch” of eggs. He can scramble into a manger—where my unruly hens persist in making an occasional nest—like a marmoset. The delight on his face at the discovery of even two or three “cackle-berries,” as Whinnie calls them, is worth the occasional breakage and yolk-stained rompers. ”

“ I remember a New York woman who did that, left the drawn milk of her breast on ice, so that she might gad and shop for a half-day at a time. But the more I think it over the more unnatural and inhuman it seems. Yet to hunt for help, in this busy land, is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack. Already, in the clear morning air, one can hear the stutter and skip and cough of the tractors along the opalescent sky-line, accosting the morning sun with their rattle and tattle of harvests to be. ”

“ Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year, but by the month.
It’s not that I love the Twins less. It’s only that the novelty has passed. And in one way it’s a good thing, for over your second and third baby you worry 290 less. You know what is needed, and how to do it. You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. ”

“ I’ve written to Peter, reminding him of his promise, and asking about the Pasadena bungalow.
It seems the one way out. I’m tired of living like an Alpine ibex, all day long above the snow-line. I’m tired of this blind alley of inaction. I’m tired of decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to get away to think things over, to step back and regain a perspective on the over-smudged canvas of life.
To remain at Alabama Ranch during the winter can mean only a winter of discontent and drifting—and drifting closer and closer to uncharted rocky ledges. ”

“ But Lady Alicia, when she arrived with Dinky-Dunk 67 just before nightfall, didn’t impress me as very much of an invalid. She struck me more as a very vital and audacious woman, neither young nor old, with an odd quietness of manner to give a saber-edge to her audacity. I could hear her laughing, musically and not unpleasantly, at the mud-coated “democrat,” which on its return looked a good deal like a ’dobe hut mounted on four chariot wheels. But everything, for that matter, was covered with mud, horses and harness and robes and even the blanket in which Lady Alicia had wrapped herself. ”

“ Eagle-Moccasin called our “stink-wagon” to turn the grass upside down and grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once wallowed. But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day world, I find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glamorous, if one has only the eye to see it, as the romance of the past. In one generation, almost, we are making a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up cities and threading the continent with steel, we are feeding the world on the best and cleanest wheat known to hungry man. ”

“ Humor is the salt of life. The older I grow the more I realize that truth. And I’m going to keep more of it, if I can, in the work-room of my soul. Last night, when Dinky-Dunk and I were so uppish with each other, one single clap of humor might have shaken the solemnity out of the situation and shown us up for the poseurs we really were. But Pride is the mother of all contention. ”

“ I begin to see that it’s true what Dinky-Dunk said about business looming bigger in men’s lives than women are apt to remember. He’s working hard, and his neck’s so thin that his Adam’s apple sticks out like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding his crop running much higher than he had figured. He’s as keen as ever he was for power and prosperity. He wants success, and night and day he’s scheming for it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t deliberately use his cousin Allie in this juggling back of Casa Grande into his own hands. ”

“ That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn’t big enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And it was Nature, you have to admit when you come to look it honestly in the face, Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I hadn’t loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. ”

“ You no longer fret about him being unco guid, and you comfortably give up trying to match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still love him, but you love him differently. There’s a touch of pity in your respect for him, a mellowing compassion, a little of the eternal mother mixed up with the eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you will no longer demand the impossible of him. Being a woman, you will still want to be loved. But being a woman of discernment, you will remember that in some way and by some means, if you want to be loved, you must remain lovable. ”

“ All we can do, we who are older and wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the meshed perfection of youth has been bruised and abused and loosened, tighten up the bearings, and keep as blithely as we can to the worn old road. For life, after all, is a turn-pike of concession deep-bedded with compromise. And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he can’t live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. ”

“ There’s too much at stake to let either ruffled nerves or false modesty—or whatever you want to call it—come between you and the very unhappy woman who still is your wife. It’s time, I think, when we both ought to look everything squarely in the face, for, after all, we’ve only one life to live, and if you’re happy, at this moment, if you’re completely and tranquilly happy as I write this, then I’ve banked wrong, tragically wrong, on what I thought you were. For I have banked on you, Dinky-Dunk, banked about all my life and happiness—and it’s too late to change, even if I wanted to. ”

“ I could see reflected in that seamed old face the desolation which for a minute or two I didn’t have the heart to look upon. I knew, even before I got slowly up and followed him toward the door, that our crop was gone, that we had lost everything.
I stood in the doorway, staring out at what, only that morning, had been a world golden with promise, rich and bountiful and beautiful to the eye and blessed in the sight of God. And now, at one stroke, it was all wiped out. As far as the eye could see I beheld only flattened and shredded ruin. Every acre of my crop was gone. ”

“ We seem so like the Children of Israel bundled out of a Promised Land, or old Adam and Eve turned out of the Garden with their little Cains and Abels. “We’re up against it, Gee-Gee,” as Dinky-Dunk grimly observed. I could see that we were, without his telling me. But I refused to acknowledge it, even to myself. And it wasn’t the first occasion. This time, thank heaven, I can at least face it with fortitude, if not with relish. I don’t like poverty. And I don’t intend to like it. And I’m not such a hypocrite as to make a pretense of liking it. ”

“ We all wore our every-day clothes (with Peter’s most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and Dinkie was given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the bareback rider who’s just been carried out on a stretcher. ”

“ Dinky-Dunk’s face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it, that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I’d acted on impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. ”

“ It made me wish that I had a Struthers or two of my own on the string. And that made my thoughts go hurtling back to my old Hortense and how we had parted at the Hotel de L’Athenee, and to Theobald Gustav and his aunt the Baroness, and the old lost life that seemed such years and years away....
But I promptly put the lid down on those over-disturbing reminiscences. There should be no post-mortems in this family circle, no jeremiads over what has gone before. This is the New World and the new age where life is too crowded for regrets. ”

“ It may not be often, but life does occasionally surprise us by being theatrical. For I could not banish from my bones an impression of tremendous reservations, 337 of guarded waiting and watching from every point of that sedate and quiet-mannered little triangle. Yet for only one moment had I seen it come to the front. That was during the moment when Dinky-Dunk and Peter first shook hands. On both faces, for that moment, I caught the look with which two knights measure each other. ”

“ You are fond of him, at first, for what you consider his 11 perfections, the same as you are fond of a brand-new traveling bag. There isn’t a scratch on his polish or a flaw in his make-up. Then you live with him for a few years. You live with him and find that life is making a few dents in his loveliness of character, that the edges are worn away, that there’s a weakness or two where you imagined only strength to be, and that instead of standing a saint and hero all in one, he’s merely an unruly and unreliable human being with his ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. ”

“ I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn’t keep a collection of several big tears from tickling.
“I’m a fool, Dinky-Dunk, a most awful fool,” I tried to tell him, when he gave me a chance to breathe again. “And I’ve got a temper like a bob-cat!”
“No, no, Beloved,” he protested, “it’s not foolishness—it’s nobility!”
I couldn’t answer him, for his arms had closed about me again. “And I love you, Tabbie, I love you with every inch of my body!”
Women are weak. ”

“ If we were the cinema kind of ranchers Pee-Wee would be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little Dinkie would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away holding up the Transcontinental Limited, and Mummsie would be wearing chaps, toting a gun, and pretending to the sheriff that her jail-breaking brother was not hidden in the cellar!
Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who till the soil and try to make a home for themselves and their children, only we are without a great many of their conveniences, even though we do beat them out in the matter of soil. ”