Читать книгу The Prairie Child - Stringer Arthur - Страница 3

Table of Contents

“But the thing I can’t understand, Dinky-Dunk, is how you ever could.”

“Could what?” my husband asked in an aerated tone of voice.

I had to gulp before I got it out.

“Could kiss a woman like that,” I managed to explain.

Duncan Argyll McKail looked at me with a much cooler eye than I had expected. If he saw my shudder, he paid no attention to it.

“On much the same principle,” he quietly announced, “that the Chinese eat birds’ nests.”

“Just what do you mean by that?” I demanded, resenting the fact that he could stand as silent as a December beehive before my morosely questioning eyes.

“I mean that, being married, you’ve run away with the idea that all birds’ nests are made out of 2 mud and straw, with possibly a garnish of horse hairs. But if you’d really examine these edible nests you’d find they were made of surprisingly appealing and succulent tendrils. They’re quite appetizing, you may be sure, or they’d never be eaten!”

I stood turning this over, exactly as I’ve seen my Dinkie turn over an unexpectedly rancid nut.

“Aren’t you, under the circumstances, being rather stupidly clever?” I finally asked.

“When I suppose you’d rather see me cleverly stupid?” he found the heart to suggest.

“But that woman, to me, always looked like a frog,” I protested, doing my best to duplicate his pose of impersonality.

“Well, she doesn’t make love like a frog,” he retorted with his first betraying touch of anger. I turned to the window, to the end that my Eliza-Crossing-the-Ice look wouldn’t be entirely at his mercy. A belated March blizzard was slapping at the panes and cuffing the house-corners. At the end of a long winter, I knew, tempers were apt to be short. But this was much more than a matter of barometers. The man I’d wanted to live with like a second “Suzanne de Sirmont” in Daudet’s Happiness had not only cut me to the quick but was 3 rubbing salt in the wound. He had said what he did with deliberate intent to hurt me, for it was only too obvious that he was tired of being on the defensive. And it did hurt. It couldn’t help hurting. For the man, after all, was my husband. He was the husband to whom I’d given up the best part of my life, the two-legged basket into which I’d packed all my eggs of allegiance. And now he was scrambling that precious collection for a cheap omelette of amorous adventure. He was my husband, I kept reminding myself. But that didn’t cover the entire case. No husband whose heart is right stands holding another woman’s shoulder and tries to read her shoe-numbers through her ardently upturned eyes. It shows the wind is not blowing right in the home circle. It shows a rent in the dyke, a flaw in the blade, a breach in the fortress-wall of faith. For marriage, to the wife who is a mother as well, impresses me as rather like the spliced arrow of the Esquimos: it is cemented together with blood. It is a solemn matter. And for the sake of mutter-schutz, if for nothing else, it must be kept that way.

There was a time, I suppose, when the thought of such a thing would have taken my breath away, would have chilled me to the bone. But I’d been 4 through my refining fires, in that respect, and you can’t burn the prairie over twice in the same season. I tried to tell myself it was the setting, and not the essential fact, that seemed so odious. I did my best to believe it wasn’t so much that Duncan Argyll McKail had stooped to make advances to this bandy-legged she-teacher whom I’d so charitably housed at Casa Grande since the beginning of the year—for I’d long since learned not to swallow the antique claim that of all terrestrial carnivora only man and the lion are truly monogamous—but more the fact it had been made such a back-stairs affair with no solitary redeeming touch of dignity.

Dinky-Dunk, I suppose, would have laughed it away, if I hadn’t walked in on them with their arms about each other, and the bandy-legged one breathing her capitulating sighs into his ear. But there was desperation in the eyes of Miss Alsina Teeswater, and it was plain to see that if my husband had been merely playing with fire it had become a much more serious matter with the lady in the case. There was, in fact, something almost dignifying in that strickenly defiant face of hers. I was almost sorry for her when she turned and walked white-lipped out of the room. What I resented most, 5 as I stood facing my husband, was his paraded casualness, his refusal to take a tragic situation tragically. His attitude seemed to imply that we were about to have a difference over a small thing—over a small thing with brown eyes. He could even stand inspecting me with a mildly amused glance, and I might have forgiven his mildness, I suppose, if it had been without amusement, and that amusement in some way at my expense. He even managed to laugh as I stood there staring at him. It was neither an honest nor a natural laugh. It merely gave me the feeling that he was trying to entrench himself behind a raw mound of mirth, that any shelter was welcome until the barrage was lifted.

“And what do you intend doing about it?” I asked, more quietly than I had imagined possible.

“What would you suggest?” he parried, as he began to feel in his pockets for his pipe.

And I still had a sense, as I saw the barricaded look come into his face, of entrenchments being frantically thrown up. I continued to stare at him as he found his pipe and proceeded to fill it. I even wrung a ghostly satisfaction out of the discovery that his fingers weren’t so steady as he might have wished them to be. 6

“I suppose you’re trying to make me feel like the Wicked Uncle edging away from the abandoned Babes in the Woods?” he finally demanded, as though exasperated by my silence. He was delving for matches by this time, and seemed disappointed that none was to be found in his pockets. I don’t know why he should seem to recede from me, for he didn’t move an inch from where he stood with that defensively mocking smile on his face. But abysmal gulfs of space seemed to blow in like sea-mists between him and me, desolating and lonely stretches of emptiness which could never again be spanned by the tiny bridges of hope. I felt alone, terribly alone, in a world over which the last fire had swept and the last rains had fallen. My throat tightened and my eyes smarted from the wave of self-pity which washed through my body. It angered me, ridiculously, to think that I was going to break down at such a time.

But the more I thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn’t, like the outraged wife of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it epochally shut after me. 7 But modern life never quite lives up to its fiction. And we are never quite free, we women who have given our hostages to fortune, to do as we wish. We have lives other than our own to think about.

“But it’s all been so—so dishonest!” I cried out, stopping myself in the middle of a gesture which might have seemed like wringing my hands.

That, apparently, gave Dinky-Dunk something to get his teeth into. The neutral look went out of his eye, to be replaced by a fortifying stare of enmity.

“I don’t know as it’s any more dishonest than the long-distance brand of the same thing!”

I knew, at once, what he meant. He meant Peter. He meant poor old Peter Ketley, whose weekly letter, year in and year out, came as regular as clockwork to Casa Grande. Those letters came to my son Dinkie, though it couldn’t be denied they carried many a cheering word and many a companionable message to Dinkie’s mother. But it brought me up short, to think that my own husband would try to play cuttle-fish with a clean-hearted and a clean-handed man like Peter. The wave that went through my body, on this occasion, was one of rage. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t. The lion of my anger had me down, by this time, with his paw on my 8 breast. The power of speech was squeezed out of my carcass. I could only stare at my husband with a denuding and devastating stare of incredulity touched with disgust, of abhorrence skirting dangerously close along the margins of hate. And he stared back, with morose and watchful defiance on his face.

Heaven only knows how it would have ended, if that tableau hadn’t gone smash, with a sudden offstage clatter and thump and cry which reminded me there were more people in the world than Chaddie McKail and her philandering old husband. For during that interregnum of parental preoccupation Dinkie and Poppsy had essayed to toboggan down the lower half of the front-stairs in an empty drawer commandeered from my bedroom dresser. Their descent, apparently, had been about as precipitate as that of their equally adventurous sire down the treads of my respect, for they had landed in a heap on the hardwood floor of the hall and I found Dinkie with an abraded shin-bone and Poppsy with a cut lip. My Poppsy was more frightened at the sight of blood than actually hurt by her fall, and Dinkie betrayed a not unnatural tendency to enlarge on his injuries in extenuation of his offense. But that 9 suddenly imposed demand for first-aid took my mind out of the darker waters in which it had been wallowing, and by the time I had comforted my kiddies and completed my ministrations Dinky-Dunk had quietly escaped from the house and my accusatory stares by clapping on his hat and going out to the stables. …

And that’s the scene which keeps pacing back and forth between the bars of my brain like a jaguar in a circus-cage. That’s the scene I’ve been living over, for the last few days, thinking of all the more brilliant things I might have said and the more expedient things I might have done. And that’s the scene which has been working like yeast at the bottom of my sodden batter of contentment, making me feel that I’d swell up and burst, if all that crazy ferment couldn’t find some relief in expression. So after three long years and more of silence I’m turning back to this, the journal of one irresponsible old Chaddie McKail, who wanted so much to be happy and who has in some way missed the pot of gold that they told her was to be found at the rainbow’s end.

It seems incredible, as I look back, that more than three, long years should slip away without the penning 10 of one line in this, the safety-valve of my soul. But the impulse to write rather slipped away from me. It wasn’t that there was so little to record, for life is always life. But when it burns clearest it seems to have the trick of consuming its own smoke and leaving so very little ash. The crowded even tenor of existence goes on, with its tidal ups and downs, too listlessly busy to demand expression. Then the shock of tempest comes, and it’s only after we’re driven out of them that we realize we’ve been drifting so long in the doldrums of life. Then it comes home to us that there are the Dark Ages in the history of a woman exactly as there were the Dark Ages in the history of Europe. Life goes on in those Dark Ages, but it doesn’t feel the call to articulate itself, to leave a record of its experiences. And that strikes me, as I sit here and think of it, as about the deepest tragedy that can overtake anything on this earth. Nothing, after all, is sadder than silence, the silence of dead civilizations and dead cities and dead souls. And nothing is more costly. For beauty itself, in actual life, passes away, but beauty lovingly recorded by mortal hands endures and goes down to our children. And I stop writing, at that word of “children,” for miraculously, 11 as I repeat it, I see it cut a window in the unlighted house of my heart. And that window is the bright little Gothic oriel which will always be golden and luminous with love and will always send the last shadow scurrying away from the mustiest corner of my tower of life. I have my Dinkie and my Poppsy, and nothing can take them away from me. It’s on them that I pin my hope.

12