Chapter VII: Part 7

"Must I explain?" I inquired with my own first movement in self-defense, for it had suddenly occurred to me that any such explaining would be much more difficult than I dreamed.

"Of course not," said Peter, changing color a little. "It's only that I'm so tremendously anxious to--to understand."

"To understand what?" I questioned, both hoping and dreading that he would go on to the bitter end.

"That _you_ understand," was his cryptic retort. And for once in his life Peter disappointed me.

"I can't afford to," I said with an effort at lightness which seemed to hurt him more than it ought. Then I realized, as I stood looking up into his face, that I was doing little to merit that humble and magnificent loyalty of Peter's. _He_ would play fair to the end. He was too big of heart to think first of himself. It was _me_ he was thinking of; it was _me_ he wanted to see happy. But I had my own road to go, and no outsider could guide me.

"It's no use, Peter," I said as I put my mittened hand on his gauntleted arm without quite knowing I was doing it. And I went on to warn him that he must not confront me with kindness, that I was a good deal like an Indian's dog which neither looks for kindness nor understands it. He laughed a trifle bitterly at that and reminded me, as he stood staring at me, of a Pribilof seal staring into an Arctic sun. Then he said an odd thing. "I wish I could make it a bit easier for you," he remarked as impersonally as though he were meditating aloud.

I asked him why he said that. He evasively explained that he thought it was because I had what the Romans called _constantia_. So I asked him to explain _constantia_. And he said, with a shrug, that we might regard it as firm consideration of a question before acting on it. I explained, at that, that it wasn't a matter of choice, but of character. He was willing to acknowledge that I was right. But before that altogether unsatisfactory little debate was over Peter made me promise him one thing. He has made me promise that before I leave we have a tramp over the prairie together. And we have agreed that Sunday would be as good a day as any.

_Saturday the Twenty-Fifth_

I have sent word to Duncan to expect me in Calgary as soon as I can get things ready. My decision is made. And it is final. Two ghostly hands have reached out and turned me toward my husband. One is the Past. The other is the Proprieties. If life out here were a little more like the diamond-dyed Westerns, Peter Ketley and Duncan McKail would fight with hammerless Colts, the victor would throw me over the horn of his saddle, and vanish in a cloud of dust, while Struthers was turning Casa Grande into a faro-hall and my two kiddies were busy holding up the Elk Crossing stage-coach.

But life, alas, isn't so dramatic as we dream it. It cross-hobbles us and hog-ties us and leaves us afraid of our own wilted impulses. I have a terror of failure. And it's plain enough I have only one mission on God's green footstool. I'm a home-maker, and nothing more. I'm a home-maker confronted by the last chance to make good at my one and only calling. And whatever it costs, I'm going to make my husband recognize me as a patient and long-suffering Penelope....

But enough of the rue! To-morrow I'm going snow-shoeing with Peter. I'm praying that the weather will be propitious. I want one of our sparkling-burgundy days with the sun shining bright and a nip in the air like a stiletto buried in rose leaves. For it may be the last time in all my life I shall walk on the prairie with my friend, Peter Ketley. The page is going to be turned over, the candle snuffed out, and the singing birds of my freedom silenced. I have met my Rubicon, and it must be crossed. But last night, for the first time in a month, I plastered enough cold cream on my nose to make me look like a buttered muffin, and rubbed enough almond-oil meal on my arms to make them look like a miller's. And I've been asking myself if I'm the sedate old lady life has been trying to make me. There are certain Pacific Islands, Gershom tells me, where the climate is so stable that the matter of weather is never even mentioned, where the people who bathe in that eternal calm are never conscious of the conditions surrounding them. That's the penalty, I suppose, that humanity pays for constancy. There are no lapses to record, no deviations to be accounted for, no tempests to send us tingling into the shelters of wonder. And I can't yet be quite sure whether this rebellious old heart of mine wants to be a Pacific Islander or not.

_Monday the Twenty-Seventh_

Peter and I have had our tramp in the snow. It wasn't a sunny day, as I had hoped. It was one of those intensely cold northern days without wind or sun, one of those misted days which Balzac somewhere describes as a beautiful woman born blind. It was fifty-three below zero when we left the house, with the smoke going up in the gray air as straight and undisturbed as a pine-tree and the drifts crunching like dry charcoal under our snow-shoes. We were woolened and mittened and capped and furred up to the eyes, however, and I was warmer than I've been many a time on Boston Common in March, even though we did look like a couple of deep-sea divers and steamed like fire-engines when we breathed.

We tramped until we were tired, swung back to Casa Grande, and Peter came in for a cup of tea and then trudged off to Alabama Ranch again. And that was the lee and the long of it, as the Irish say. What did we talk about? Heaven knows what we didn't talk about! Peter told me about a rancher named Bidwell, north of The Crossing, being found frozen to death in a snow-drift, frozen stiff, with the horse still standing and the rider still sitting upright in the saddle. He said there was a lot of rot talked about the great clean outdoors. The sentimentalists found that they naturally felt a bit niftier in fresh air, but the great outdoors, according to Peter, is an arena of endless murder and rapine and warfare, and the cleanest acre of forest or prairie under the sun somewhere has its stains of blood and its record of cruelty. We talked about Susie and the negative phrasing of the ten moral laws and the Horned Dinosaur from Sand Hill Creek (whose bones Peter reckoned to be at least three million years old) and the marriage customs of the Innuits. And we talked about Matzenauer and Kreisler and the best cure for chilblains and about Gershom and Poppsy and Dinkie--but most of all about Dinkie.

Peter asked me if I'd seen Dinkie's school essays on _The Flag_ and _The Capture of Quebec_, and rather surprised me by handing over crumpled copies of the same, Dinkie having proudly despatched these masterpieces all the way to Philadelphia for his "Uncle Peter's" approval. It hurt me, for just one foolish fraction of a second, to think my boy had confidences with an outsider which he could not have with his own mother. And then I remembered that Peter wasn't an outsider. I realized how much he had brought into my laddie's life, how much, in a different way, he had brought into my own. I even tried to tell him about this. But he stopped me short by saying something in Latin which he later explained meant "by taking the middle course we shall not go amiss." So I came back to Casa Grande, not exactly with a feeling of frustration, but with a feeling of possibilities withheld and issues deferred. It was a companionable enough tramp, I suppose. But I'm afraid I was a disappointment to Peter. His gaiety impressed me as a bit forced. I am slightly mystified by his refusal, while taking serious things seriously, to take anything tragically. Even at tea, with all its air of the valedictory hanging over us, he was nice and gay, like the Christmas beeves the city butchers stick paper rosettes into, or the circus-band playing like mad while the tumbler who has had a fall is being carried out to the dressing-tent. Peter even offhandedly inquired, as he was going, if he might have Scotty to take care of, provided it was not expedient to take Dinkie's dog along to Calgary with us.... I'm not quite certain--I may be wrong, but there are moments, odd earthquakey moments, when I have a suspicion that Peter will be keeping more than Scotty after we've trekked off to Calgary!

_Saturday the Fourth_

This tearing up of roots is a much sorrier business than I had imagined. And more difficult. I find it hard to know what to take and what to leave behind. And there is so much to be thought of, so much to be arranged for, so much to be done. I have had to write Duncan and tell him I'll be a few days later than I intended. My biggest problem has been with Whinstane Sandy and Struthers. I called them in and had a talk with them and told them I wanted them to keep Casa Grande going the same as ever. Then I made myself into the god from the machine by calmly announcing the only way things could be arranged would be for the two of them to get married.

Struthers, at this suggestion, promptly became as coy as a partridge-hen. Whinnie, of course, remained Scottish and canny. He became more shrewdly magnanimous, however, after we'd had a bit of talk by ourselves. "Weel, I'll tak' the woman, rather than see her frettin' hersel' to death!" he finally conceded, knowing only too well he'd nest warm and live well for the rest of his days. He'd been hoping, he confessed to me, that some day he'd get back to that claim of his up in the Klondike. But he wasn't so young as he once was. And perhaps Dinkie, when he was grown to a man, could go up and look after his rights. 'Twould be a grand journey, he averred with a sigh, for a high-spirited lad turned twenty.

"I'll be stayin' with Pee-Wee and the old place here," concluded Whinstane Sandy, giving me his rough old hand as a pledge. And with tears in my eyes I lifted that faithful old hand up to my lips and kissed it. Whinnie, I knew, would die for me. But he would pass away before he'd be willing to put his loyalty and his courage and his kind-heartedness into pretty speeches. Struthers, on the other hand, has become too flighty to be of much use to me in my packing. She has plunged headlong into a riot of baking, has sent for a fresh supply of sage tea, and is secretly perusing a dog-eared volume which I have reason to know is _The Marriage Guide_.

Gershom, all things considered, is the most dolorous member of our home circle. He says little, but inspects me with the wounded eyes of a neglected spaniel. He will stay on at Casa Grande until the Easter holidays, and then migrate to the Teetzels'. As for Dinkie and Poppsy, they are too young to understand. The thought of change excites them, but they have no idea of what they are leaving behind.

Last night, when I was dog-tired after my long day's work, I remembered about Dinkie's school-essays and took them out to read. And having done so, I realized there was something sacred about them. They gave me a glimpse of a groping young soul reaching up toward the light.

"We have a Flag," I read, "to thrill our bones and be prod of and no man boy woman or girl" (and the not altogether artless _diminuendo_ did not escape me!) "should never let it drag in the dust. It flotes at the bow of our ships and waves from the top of most post offices etc. And now we have a flag and a flag staf in front of our school and on holdays and when every grate man dies we put said flag up at haf mast.... It is the flag of the rich and the poor, the flag of our country which all of whose citizens have a right to fly, the hig" (obviously meant for _high_) "and the low, the rich and the poor. And we must not only keep our flag but blazen it still further with deeds nobely done. If ever you have to shed your blood for your country remeber its for the nobelest flag that flies the same being an emblen of our native land to which it represens and stands in high esteem by the whole people of a country." ... God bless his patriotic little bones! My bairn knew what he was trying to get at, but it's plain he didn't quite know how to get there.

But the drama of the Capture of Quebec plainly put him on easier ground. For here was a story worth the telling. And what could be more glorious than the death of Wolfe as I see it through my little Dinkie's eyes?

For I read: "The french said Wolfe" (_can_ has first been written and then scratched out and _would_ substituted) "never get up that rivver but Wolfe fooled them with a trick by running the french flag up on his shipps so the french pilots without fear padled out and come abord when Wolfe took them prissoners and made them pilot the english ships safe to the iland of Orlens. He wanted to capsture the city of Quebec without distroiting it. But the clifs were to high and the brave Montcalm dified Wolfe who lost 400 men and got word Amherst could not come and so himself took sick and went to bed. But a desserter from the french gave Wolfe the pass word and when his ships crept further up the rivver in the dark a french senntry called out qui vive and one of Wolfe's men who spoke french well ansered la france and the senntry said to himself they was french ships and let them go on. Next day Wolfe was better and saw a goat clime up the clifs near the plains of Abraham and said where a goat could go he could go to. So he forgot being sick and desided to clime up Wolfe's cove which was not then called that until later. It was a dark night and they went in row boats with all the oars mufled. It was a formadible sight that would have made even bolder men shrink with fear. But it was the brave Higlanders who lead with their muskits straped to their sholdiers climing up the steep rock by grabbing at roots of trees and shrubbs and not a word was wispered but the french senntrys saw the tree moving and asked qui vive again. The same sholdier who once studdied hard and lernt french said la france as he had done before and they got safe to the top and faced the city. At brake of day they stood face to face, french and english. But Montcalm marched out to cut them off there and Wolfe lined his men up in a line and said hold your fire until they are within forty paces away from us. The french caused many causilties but the english never wavered. Montcalm still on horse back reseaved a mortal wound, he would of fell off if two of his tall granadeers hadn't held him up and Wolfe too was shot on the wirst but went right on. Again he was shot this time more fataly and as they were laying him down one of the men exclaimed See how they run. Who run murmurred the dieing Wolfe. The enemy sir replied the man. Then I die happy said Generral Wolfe and with a great sigh rolled over on his side and died.... And when the doctor told Montcalm he could only live a few hours he said God be prased I shall not live to see Quebec fall. Brave words like those should not be forgoten and what Wolfe said was just as brave. No more fiting words could be said by anybody than those he said in the boats with the mufled oars that night that the paths of glory leed but to the grave." ...

I have folded up the carefully written pages, reverently, remembering my promise to return them to Peter. But for a while at least I shall keep them with me. They have set me thinking, reminding me how time flies. Here is my little boy, grown into an historian, sagely philosophizing over the tragedies of life. My wee laddie, expressing himself through the recorded word.... It seems such a short time ago that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly after his birth and kept up for so long, the naïve journal of a young mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a bit hurried and often incoherent. But I have dutifully noted how my Dinkie first said "Ah goom" for "All gone," just as I have fondly remarked his persistent use of the reiterative intensive, with careful citations of his "da-da" and his "choo-choo car," and a "bow-wow" as applied to any living animal, and "wa-wa" for water, and "me-me" for milk, and "din-din" for dinner, and going "bye-bye" for going to sleep on his little "tum-tum." I even solemnly ask, forgetting my Max Müller, what lies at the root of this strange reduplicative process. Then I come to where I have set down for future generations the momentous fact that my Dinkie first said "let's playtend" for "let's pretend," and spoke of "nasturtiums" as "excursions," and announced that he could bark loud enough to make Baby Poppsy's eyes "bug out" instead of "bulge out." And I come again to where I have affectionately registered the fact that my son says "set-sun" for "sunset" and speaks of his "rumpers" instead of his "rompers," and coins the very appropriate word "downer" to go with its sister word of "upper" and describes his Mummy as "_wearing_ Daddy's coffee-cup" when he really meant _using_ Daddy's coffee-cup.

It all seems very fond and foolish now, just as at one time it all seemed very big and wonderful. And I remember schooling my Poppsy to say "Daddy's all sweet" and how her little tongue, stumbling over the sibilant, converted it into the non-complimentary "Daddy's all feet," which my Dinky-Dunk so scowlingly resented. And I have even compiled a list of Dinkie's earliest "howlers," from the time he was first interested in Adam and Eve and asked to be told about "The Garden of Sweden" until he later explained one of Poppsy's crying-spells by announcing she had dug a hole out by the corral and wanted to bring it into the house. I used to smile a bit skeptically over these tongue-twists of children, but now I know they are re-born with each new generation, the same old turns of thought and the same old kinks of utterance. I don't know why, but there is even a touch of sadness about the old jokes now. The patina of time gathers upon them and mellows them and makes me realize they belong to the past--the past with its pain and its joy, that can never come back to mortal mothers again.

_Monday the Thirtieth_

"We die a little, when we go away." How true it is! By to-morrow we will be gone. My heart is heavy as lead. I go about, doing things for the last time, looking at things for the last time, and pretending to be as matter-of-fact as a tripper breaking camp. But there's a laryngitis lump in my throat and there are times when I'm glad I'm almost too busy to think.

I was hoping that the weather would be bad, as it ought to at this time of the year, so that I might leave my prairie with some lessened pang of regret. But the last two days have been miraculously mild. A Chinook has been blowing, the sky has been a palpitating soft dome of azure, and a winey smell of spring has crept over the earth.... To-night, knowing it was the last night, I crept out to say good-by to my little Pee-Wee asleep in his lonely little bed. It was a perfect night. The Lights were playing low in the north, weaving together in a tangle of green and ruby and amethyst. The prairie was very still. The moonlight lay on everything, thick and golden and soft with mystery. I knelt beside Pee-Wee's grave, not in bitterness, but bathed in peace. I knelt there and prayed.

It frightened me a little, when I looked up, to see Peter standing beside the little white fence. I thought, at first, that he was a ghost, he stood so still and he seemed so tall in the moonlight.

"I'll watch your boy," he said very quietly, "until you come back."

He made me think of the Old Priest in _The Sorrowful Inheritance_. He seemed so calmly benignant, so dependable, so safe in his simple other-worldliness.

"Oh, Peter!" was all I could say as I moved toward him in the moonlight. He nodded, as much to himself as to me, as he took my hand in his. I felt a great ache, which was not really an ache, and a new kind of longing which never before, in all my life, I had nursed or known. I must have moved closer to Peter, though I could feel his hand pull itself away from mine. It made me feel terribly alone in the world.

"Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?" I cried out, with my hand on his shoulder.

Peter shook his head from side to side, very slowly.

"_Verboten!_" he said as he put his hand over the hand which I had put on his shoulder.

"But I may never come back. Peter!" I whispered, feeling the tears go slowly down my wet cheek.

Peter took my unsteady fingers and placed them on the white pickets of the little rectangular fence.

"You'll come back," he said very quietly. And when I looked up he had turned away.

I could see him walking off in the yellow moonlight with his shoulders back and his head up. He walked slowly, with an odd wading movement, like a man walking through water. I was tempted, for a moment, to call after him. But some power that was not of me or any part of me prompted me to silence. I stood watching him until he seemed a moving shadow along the level floor of the world flooded with primrose-yellow, until he became a shifting stroke of umber on a background of misty gold. I stood looking after him as he passed away, out of my sight, and far, far off to the north a coyote howled and over Casa Grande I could see a thin pennon of chimney-smoke going up toward Arcturus.... Good-by, Peter, and God bless you....

Unlimited, indeed, is the power of Eros. For when I went to slip quietly into the house, I found Whinnie and Struthers seated together beside the kitchen range. And Struthers was reading _Tam O'Shanter_ aloud to her laird.

"Read slow, noo, lassie, an' tak' it a' in," said the placidly triumphant voice of Whinstane Sandy, "for it'll be lang before ye ken its like!"

_Thursday the Seventeenth_

The migration has been effected ... I am alone in my room, I have two and three-quarters trunks unpacked, and I feel like a President's wife the night after Inauguration. It is well past midnight, but I am too tired and too unsettled to sleep. Things turn out so differently to what one expects! And all change, to the home-staying heart, can be so abysmally upsetting!...

We were a somewhat disheveled and intimidated flock when we emerged from our train and found Duncan awaiting us with an amazingly big touring-car which, as he explained with a short laugh at my gape of wonder, the Barcona Mines would pay for in a week.

"It's no piker you're pulling with now," he exclaimed as we climbed stiff and awkward into that deep-upholstered grandeur on wheels. He said that the children had grown but would have to be togged out with some new duds--little knowing how I had stayed up until long past midnight mending and pressing and doing my best to make my bucolic offspring presentable. And he told me it was _some_ city I had come to, as I'd very soon see for myself. And it was _some_ shack he'd corralled for his family, he added with a chuckle of pride.

I tried to be interested in the skyscrapers he showed me along Eighth Avenue, and the Palliser, and the concreted subway, and the Rockies, in the distance, with the wine-glow on their snow-clad peaks. And while I did my best to shake off the Maud-Muller feeling which was creeping over me, by studying the tranquillizingly remote mountain-tops, Duncan confided to me that he had first said: "Fifty thousand or bu'st!" But two months ago he had amended that to "A hundred thousand or bu'st!" and now he had his reasons for saying, with his jaw set: "Just a cool quarter of a million, before I quit this game!"

It was for us, I told myself as I looked down at my kiddies, that the Dour Man behind the big mahogany wheel was fighting. This, I felt, should bring me happiness, and a new sense of security. And it was only because my stomach was empty, I tried to assure myself, that my poor old prairie heart felt that way. I should have been happy, for I was going to a brand-new home--and it was one of those foot-hill late afternoons that make you think of the same old razor-blade muffled up in the same old panne-velvet, an evening of softness shot through with a steely sharpness. There was a Chinook arch of Irish point-lace still in the sky, very much like the one I had left behind me, and the sky itself was a canopy of robin-egg blue _crêpe de chine_ hemmed with salmon pink.

But as we whirled up out of the city into the higher ground of some boulevarded and terraced residential district the evening air seemed colder and the solemn old Rockies toward the west took on an air of lonesomeness. It made the thought of home and open fires and quiet rooms very welcome. The lights came out along the asphalted streets, spangling the slopes of that sedate new suburb with rectangular lines of brilliants. Duncan, in answer to the questions of the children, explained that he was taking the longer way round, so as to give us the best view of the house as we drove in.

"Here we are!" he exulted as we slowed down and turned into a crescent lined with baby poplar and Manitoba maple.

I leaned out and saw a big new house of tapestry brick, looking oddly palatial on its imposing slope of rising ground. My husband stopped, in fact, midway in a foolishly pillared gate that bisected a long array of cobble-stone walls, so that we might get a look at the gardens. They seemed very new gardens, but much of their newness was lost in that mercifully subduing light in which I saw trim-painted trellises and sepulchral white flower-urns and pergolas not yet softened with creepers. There was also a large iron fountain, painted white, which Duncan apparently liked very much, from the way he looked at it. From two of the chimneys I could see smoke going up in the quiet air. In the windows I could see lights, rose-shaded and warm, and beyond the shrubbery somewhere back in the garden a workman was driving nails. His hammer fell and echoed like a series of rifle-shots. From the garage chimney, too, came smoke, and it was plain from the sounds that somebody inside was busy tuning up a car-engine.

I sat staring at the grounds, at the cobble-stone walls, at the tapestry-brick house with the high-shouldered French cornices. It began to creep over me how it meant service, how it meant protection, how it meant guarded lives for me and mine, how it stood an amazingly complicated piece of machinery which took much thought to organize and much money to maintain. And the mainspring behind it all, I remembered, was the man sitting at the mahogany wheel so close to me. Light and warmth and comfort and safety--they were all to come from the conceiting and the struggling of my Dour Man, fighting for an empty-headed family who were scarcely worth it. He was, after all, the stoker down in the hole, and without him everything would stop. So when I saw that he was studying my face with that intent sidelong glance of his, I reached over and put my hand on his knee, as I had done so often, in the old days.

He looked down, at that, with what was almost an appearance of embarrassment.

"I want to play my part," I said with all the earnestness of my earnest old heart, as he let in his clutch and we started up the winding drive.

"It ought to be a considerable part," he said as we drew up under a bone-white porte-cochère where a small-bodied Jap stood respectfully impassive and waiting to open the door for us.

My husband got down out of the car. I sat wondering why I should feel so much like a Lady Jane Grey approaching the headsman's _makura_.

"Come on, kids!" Duncan called out with a parade of joviality, like a cheer-leader who realized that things weren't going just right. For Dinkie, I could see, was shrinking back in the padded seat. His underlip was trembling a trifle as he sat staring at the strange new house. But Poppsy, true little woman that she was, smiled appreciatively about at the material grandeurs which confronted her. If she'd had a tail, I'm sure, she'd have been wagging it. And this so tickled her dad that he lifted her out of the car and carried her bodily and triumphantly up the steps.

I waited for Dinkie, whose eye met mine. I did my best to show my teeth, that he might understand how everything was eventually to be for the best. But his face was still clouded as we climbed the steps and passed under the yoke.

The little Jap, whose name, I have since found out, is Tokudo, bowed a jack-knife bow and said "_Irashai_" as I passed him. And "_Irashai_" I have also discovered, is perfectly good Japanese for "Welcome."

We had dinner at seven. It was a well-ordered meal, but it went off rather dismally. I was depressed, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, and the children were tired, and Duncan, I'm afraid, was a bit disappointed in us all. Tokudo had brought cocktails for us, and Duncan, seeing I wasn't drinking mine, stowed both away in his honorable stomach. He ate heartily, I noticed, and gave scant appearance of a man pining away with a broken heart. After dinner he sat back and bit off the end of a cigar.

"This is my idea of living," he proclaimed as he sent a blue cloud up toward the rather awful dome-light above the big table. "There's stir and movement here, all day long. Something more than sunsets to look at! You'll see--something to fill up your day! Why, night seems to come before I even know it. And before I'm out of bed I'm brooding over what's ahead of me for that particular date and day--Say, that girl of ours is falling asleep in her chair there!"

So I escaped and put the children to bed. And while thus engaged I discovered that some of Duncan's new friends were dropping in on him. I wanted to stay up-stairs, for my head was aching a lot and my heart just a little, but Duncan called to me from the bottom of the stairs. So down I went, like a dutiful wife, to the room full of smoke and talk, where two big men and one very thin woman in a baby-bear motor coat were drinking Scotch highballs with my lord and master. They were genial and jolly enough, but I couldn't understand their allusions and I couldn't see the points to their jokes. And they seemed to stay an interminable length of time. I was secretly uncomfortable, until they went, but I became still more uncomfortable after they had gone.

For as we sat there together, in that oppressive big room, I made rather an awful discovery. I found that my husband and I had scarcely anything we could talk about together. So I sat there, like an alligator in a bayou, wondering why his rather flushed face should be turned toward me every now and then.

My heart beat a little faster as I saw him take out his watch and wind it up.

"Let's go to bed," he said as he pushed it back in his waistcoat pocket. My heart stopped beating altogether, for a moment or two. I felt like a slave-girl in a sheik's tent, like a desert-woman just sold into bondage.

It was the smoky air and the highballs, I suppose, which left his eyes a little bloodshot as he turned slowly about and studied my face. Then he repeated what he had said before.

"_I can't!_" I told him, with a foolish surge of terror.

He sat quite a long time without speaking. I could see the corners of the Holbein-Astronomer mouth go down.

"As you say," he finally remarked, with a grim sort of quietness. But every bit of color had gone from his face. I was glad when Tokudo came in to take away the glasses.

Duncan stood up, after the servant had gone again, and bowed to me very solemnly.

"_Oyasumi nasi_," he said with a stabilizing ironic smile.

"What does that mean?" I asked, doing my best to smile back at him.

"That means 'sleep well,'" explained my husband. "But Tokudo would probably translate it into 'Condescend to enjoy honorable tranquillity.'"

Instead of enjoying honorable tranquillity, however, I am sitting up into the wee sma' hours of the night, patrolling the gloomy ramparts of my soul's unrest.

_Wednesday the Twenty-Third_

This change to the city means a new life to my children. But I can also see it means new dangers and new influences. The simplicity of ranch life has vanished. And Dinkie and Poppsy are already getting acquainted with their neighbors. A Ford truck came within an inch of running over Poppsy this morning. She has announced a curiosity to investigate ice-cream sodas, and Dinkie has proclaimed his intention of going to the movies Saturday afternoon with Benny McArthur, the banker's son in the next block. On Monday I'm to take my children to school. "One of the finest school-buildings in all the West," Duncan has proudly explained. I can't help thinking of Gershom and his little cubby-hole of a wooden building where he is even now so solemnly and yet so kind-heartedly teaching the three R's to a gathering of little prairie outlaws.

I shall have time on my hands, I see, for Hilton and his wife, our English gardener-chauffeur and our portly maid-of-all-work, pretty well cover what the wonderful Tokudo overlooks. And Tokudo _is_ a wonder. That cat-footed little Jap does the ordering and cooking and serving; he answers the door and the telephone; he attends to the rugs and the hardwood floors; he rules over the butler's pantry and polishes the silver and inspects the linen, and even keeps the keys to Duncan's carefully guarded wine-cellar, which the mistress of the house herself has not yet dared to invade.

My husband seems to be very busy with his coal-mines and his other interests. He said last night that his idea of happiness is to be so immersed in his work as to be unconscious of time and undisturbed by its passing. And he _has_ been happy, in that way. But Time, that patient remodeler of all things mortal, can still work while we sleep. And something has been happening, without Duncan quite knowing it. He has changed. He is older, for one thing. I don't mean that my husband is an old man. But I can see a number of early-autumnal alterations in him. He's a trifle heavier and stiffer. He's lost a bit of his springiness. And he seems to know it, in his secret heart of hearts, for he tries to make up for that loss with a sort of coerced blitheness which doesn't always carry. He affects a sort of creaking jauntiness which sometimes falls short of its aim. When he can't clear the hurdle, I notice, he has the habit of whipping up his tired spirits with a cocktail or a highball or a silver-fizz. But he is preoccupied, at times. And at other times he is disturbingly short-tempered. He announced this morning, almost gruffly, that we'd had about enough of this "Dinkie and Poppsy business," and the children might as well be called by their real names. So I shall make another effort to get back to "Elmer" and "Pauline Augusta." But I feel, in my bones, that those pompous appellatives will not be always remembered. It has just occurred to me that my old habit of calling my husband "Dinky-Dunk" has slipped away from me. Endearing diminutives, I suppose, are not elicited by polar bears.

_Thursday the Thirty-First_

I don't quite know what's the matter with me. I'm like a cat in a strange garret. I don't seem to be fitting in. I sat at the piano last night playing "What's this dull town to me, Robin Adair?" And Duncan, with the fit and natural spirit of the home-booster, actively resented that oblique disparagement of his new business-center. He believes implicitly in Calgary and its future.

As for myself, I am rigidly suspending all judgments. I'm at least trying to play my part, even though my spirit isn't in it. There are times when I'm tempted to feel that a foot-hill city of this size is neither fish nor fowl. It impresses me as a frontier cow-town grown out of its knickers and still ungainly in its first long trousers. But I can't help being struck by people's incorruptible pride in their own community. It's a sort of religious faith, a fixed belief in the future, a stubborn optimism that is surely something more than self-interest. It's the Dutch courage that makes deprivation and long waiting endurable.

It's the women, and the women alone, who seem left out of the procession. They impress me as having no big interests of their own, so they are compelled to _playtend_ with make-believe interests. They race like mad in the social squirrel-cage, or drug themselves with bridge and golf and the country club, or take to culture with a capital C and read papers culled from the Encyclopedias; or spend their husbands' money on year-old Paris gowns and make love to other women's mates. The altitude, I imagine, has quite a little to do with the febrile pace of things here. Or perhaps it's merely because I'm an old frump from a back-township ranch!

But I have no intention of trying to keep up with them, for I have a constitutional liking for quietness in my old age. And I can't engross myself in their social aspirations, for I've seen a bit too much of the world to be greatly taken with the internecine jealousies of a twenty-year-old foot-hill town. My "day" in this aristocratic section is Thursday, and Tokudo this afternoon admitted callers from seven closed cars, two landaulets, three Detroit electrics and one hired taxi. I know, because I counted 'em. The children and I posed like a Raeburn group and did our best to be respectable, for Duncan's sake. But he seems to have taken up with some queer people here, people who drop in at any time of the evening and smoke and drink and solemnly discuss how a shandygaff should be mixed and tell stories I wouldn't care to have the children hear.

There's one couple Duncan asked me to be especially nice to, a Mr. and Mrs. Murchison. The latter, I find, is usually addressed as "Slinkie" by her friends, and the former is known as "Cattalo Charley" because he once formed a joint-stock company which was to make a fortune interbreeding buffalo and range-cattle, the product of that happy union being known, I believe, as "cattalo." Duncan calls him a "promoter," but my earlier impression of him as a born gambler has been confirmed by the report that he's interested in a lignite briquetting company, that he's fathering a scheme, not only to raise stock-yard reindeer in the sub-Arctics but also to grow karakule sheep in the valleylands of the Coast, that he once sold mummy wheat at forty dollars a bushel, and that in the old boom days he promoted no less than three oil companies. And the time will come, Duncan avers, when that man will be a millionaire.

As for "Slinkie," his wife, I can't be quite sure whether I like her or not. I at least admire her audacity and her steel-trap quickness of mind. She has a dead white skin, green eyes, and most wonderful hair, hair the color of a well-polished copper samovar. She is an extremely thin woman who affects sheathe skirts and rather reminds me of a boa-constrictor. She always reeks of _Apres londre_ and uses a lip-stick as freely before the world as an orchestra conductor uses a baton or a street-sweeper a broom. She is nervous and sharp-tongued and fearless and I thought, at first, that she was making a dead set at my Duncan. But I can now see how she confronts all men with that same dangerous note of intimacy. Her real name is Lois. She talks about her convent days in Belgium, sings _risque_ songs in very bad French, and smokes and drinks a great deal more than is good for her. In Vancouver, when informed that she was waiting for a street-car on a non-stop corner, she sat down between the tracks, with her back to the approaching car. The motorman, of course, had to come to a stop--whereupon she arose with dignity and stepped aboard. Duncan has told me this story twice, and tends to consider Lois a really wonderful character. I am a little afraid of her. She asked me the other day how I liked Calgary. I responded, according to Hoyle, that I liked the clear air and the clean streets and the Rockies looking so companionably down over one's shoulder. Lois hooted as she tapped a cigarette end against her hennaed thumb-nail.

"Just wait until the sand-storms, my dear!" she said as she struck a match on her slipper-heel.

_Saturday the Second_

My old friend Gershom has very slyly written a _rondeau_ to me. I have just found it enclosed in my _Golden Treasury_, which he handed back to me that last night at Casa Grande. It's the first actual _rondeau_ I ever had indited to my humble self, and while I'm a bit set up about it, I can't quite detach from Gershom's lines a vaguely obituarial atmosphere which tends to depress me.

I can see that it may not be the best _rondeau_ in the world, but I'm going to keep it until my bones are dust, for good old Gershom's sake. And some day, when he marries the nice girl he deserves to marry, and has a kiddy or two of his own, I'll shame his gray hairs by parading it before his offspring! I have just been re-reading the lines, in Gershom's copperplate script. They are as follows:

_To C. McK._

_On Returning Her Copy of the Golden Treasury_

This golden book, dear friend, wherein each line
Holds close a charm for knowing eyes to meet,
Holds doubly mystical and doubly sweet
An inner charm no language may define:

For o'er each page a woman's soul divine
Bent low a space for kindred souls to greet,
And here her eyes were lit with gladness fleet
Because of songs that graced with rare design
This book of thine!

And now I give back into Beauty's hand
Her borrowed songs, but I shall hold always
Secret and safe from every care's demand,
A flame of light to fill my emptier days,
That quieter fellowship, which made a shrine
This book of thine!
G. B.

_Tuesday the Fifth_

The weather is balmier, and just a tinge of green is creeping into the tan of the foot-hill slopes. Spring is coming again.

I went shopping in the Hudson Bay Store yesterday and found it much more metropolitan than I had expected. And I find I am three whole laps behind in that steeplechase known as Style. But I got a raft of things for Pauline Augusta, and a Boy Scout outfit for my laddie.

One of the few women I like in Calgary is Dinkie's--I mean Elmer's--new school-teacher. Her name is Lossie Brown and she is an earnest-eyed girl who's saving up to go to Europe some day and study art. She's a trifle shy, and unmistakably moody, but her mind is as bright as a new pin. And some bright morning, when the rose of womanhood has really opened, she's going to wake up a howling beauty. I love her, too, for the interest she has taken in my boy, whom she reports as getting along much better than she had expected. So I have asked her to write a little note to Gershom Binks, advising him of his ex-pupil's advance. For Lossie is a girl I'd like Gershom to know. And she has done this for me. I ask her over to the house as often as I can and yesterday I had Dinkie slip a little platinum-banded fountain-pen, with a card, into the pocket of her rather threadbare ulster. Duncan, however, is not in the least interested in Lossie. He despises what he calls insignificant people.

On my way home from shopping I had Hilton drive me about some of the less-known parts of the city. And I have been compelled to recast some of my earlier impressions of Calgary. It is wonderful, in many ways, and some day, I can see, it will be beautiful, just as Lossie Brown will some day be beautiful.

In the first place, it is so happily situated, lying as it does half-way between the mountains and the plain. And the blue Bow comes dancing so joyously down from the Rockies and the older city sleeps so happily in the sunny crook of its valley-arm, while the newer suburbs seem to boil up and run over the surrounding hills like champagne bubbling over the rim of a glass. There are raw edges, of course, but time will eventually attend to these. Now and then, between the motor-cars, you will see a creaking Red River cart. Next to an office-building of gray sandstone you're likely to spot what looks like a squatter's wickyup of rusty galvanized iron. Yesterday, on our main street where the electric-cars were clanging and the limousines were throwing their exhaust incense to the gods of the future, I caught sight of a lonely and motionless figure, isolated in the midst of a newer world. It was the figure of a Cree squaw, blanketed and many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized, as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that stolid old lady in the blanket.

I'm even beginning to find that one can get tired of optimism, especially when it is being so plainly converted from a psychic abstraction into a municipal asset. There's a sort of communal Christian Science in this place which ordains that thought shall not dwell on such transient evils as drought or black rust or early frost or hail-storms or money stringencies. And there's a sort of youthful greediness in people's longing to live all there is of life to live and to know all there is of life to know. For there is a limit to the sensations we can digest, just as there is a limit to the meat we can digest. And out here we have a tendency to bolt more than is good for us, to bolt it without pausing to get the true taste of it. The women of this town remind me more and more of mice in an oxygen bell; they race round and round, drunk with an excitement they can't quite understand, until they burn up their little lives the same as the mice burn up their little lungs.

... I've had a letter from Whinstane Sandy to-day, writing about seed-wheat and the repairs for the tractor. It seems like a message from another world. He reports that poor old Scotty is eating again and no longer mourns day in and day out for his lost master. And Mr. Ketley has very kindly brought over the liniment for Mudski's shoulder. ... Whatever I may be, or whatever I may have done, I feel that I can still cleanse my heart by sacrifice.

_Friday the Ninth_

One can get out of the habit, apparently, of having children about. My kiddies, I begin to see, occasionally grate on Duncan. He brought tears to the eyes of Pauline Augusta yesterday by the way he scolded her for using a lead-pencil on the living-room woodwork. And the night before he shouted much strong language at Elmer for breaking a window-pane in the garage with Benny McArthur's new air-gun.

Elmer and his father, I'm afraid, have rather grown away from each other. More than once I've caught Duncan staring at his son and heir in a puzzled and a slightly frustrated sort of way. And Elmer's soul promptly becomes _incommunicado_ when his iron-browed pater is in the neighborhood.

Duncan is very proud of his grand new house. He is anxious to build a conservatory out along the southwest wing. But he has asked how long a conservatory would last with two young mountain-goats gamboling along its leads.... Lossie, little suspecting the pang she was giving me, laughingly showed me a manuscript which she found by accident in my Dinkie's reader. It was a poem, dedicated to "D. O'L." And written in a stiff little hand I read:

"Your lips are lined with roses,
Your eyes they shinne like gold
If you call me from the sunlight,
I'll answer from the cold.
But I wonder why, Oh, why,
You stay so far from me?
If you whisper from the prarrie,
I'll call from Calgary."

"Won't it be wonderful," said Lossie as I sat pondering over those foolish little lines, "won't it be wonderful, if Dinkie grows up to be a great poet?"

_Monday the Eleventh_

Elmer, _alias_ Dinkie, after many days' mourning for his lost Scotty, is consoling himself, as other men do, with a substitute. Last Friday he Brought home a flop-eared pup with a drooping tail and an indefinite ancestry, explaining that he had come into possession of the aforementioned animal by the duly delivered purchase-price of thirty-seven cents.

Remembering Minty and certain matters of the past, I was troubled in spirit. But I couldn't see why my son shouldn't have an animal to love. And I have had Hilton fix a little box in one corner of the garage for Dinkie's new pet, which he has christened Rowdy.

Rowdy, I now see, is a canine of limited spirit and is not likely to repeat the offenses of Minty. But Dinkie really loves his new pup, despite the latter's indubitably democratic ancestry. And I begin to suspect that my laddie's weakness for mongrels may arise from his earlier experience with Duncan's blooded bulldog, which he struggled with for three whole days, fondly and foolishly trying to teach that stolid animal the art of "pointing."