Читать книгу The Prairie Child - Stringer Arthur - Страница 5

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I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking over what Dinky-Dunk said. I have been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of mental ju-jutsu I’ve even been trying to justify what I can’t quite understand in him. But it’s no use. There’s one bald, hard fact I can’t escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct under the sands of self-deception. There’s one cold-blooded truth that will have to be faced. My husband is no longer in love with me. Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes of the law, and the mother of his children. We still live together, and, from force of habit, if from nothing else, go through the familiar old rites of daily communion. He sits across the table from me when I eat, and talks casually enough of the trivially momentous problems of the minute, or he reads in his slippers before the fire while I do my sewing within a spool-toss of him. But a row of invisible assegais stand leveled between his 33 heart and mine. A slow glacier of green-iced indifferency shoulders in between us; and gone forever is the wild-flower aroma of youth, the singing spirit of April, the mysterious light that touched our world with wonder. He is merely a man, drawing on to middle age, and I am a woman, no longer young. Gone now are the spring floods that once swept us together. Gone now is the flame of adoration that burned clean our altar of daily intercourse and left us blind to the weaknesses we were too happy to remember. For there was a time when we loved each other. I know that as well as Duncan does. But it died away, that ghostly flame. It went out like a neglected fire. And blowing on dead ashes can never revive the old-time glow.

“So they were married and lived happy ever afterward!” That is the familiar ending to the fairy-tales I read over and over again to my Dinkie and Poppsy. But they are fairy-tales. For who lives happy ever afterward? First love chloroforms us, for a time, and we try to hug to our bosoms the illusion that Heaven itself is only a sort of endless honeymoon presided over by Lohengrin marches. But the anesthetic wears away and we find that life isn’t a bed of roses but a rough field that rewards us 34 as we till it, with here and there the cornflower of happiness laughing unexpectedly up at us out of our sober acres of sober wheat. And often enough we don’t know happiness when we see it. We assuredly find it least where we look for it most. I can’t even understand why we’re equipped with such a hunger for it. But I find myself trending more and more to that cynic philosophy which defines happiness as the absence of pain. The absence of pain—that is a lot to ask for, in this life!

I wonder if Dinky-Dunk is right in his implication that I am getting hard? There are times, I know, when I grate on him, when he would probably give anything to get away from me. Yet here we are, linked together like two convicts. And I don’t believe I’m as hard as my husband accuses me of being. However macadamized they may have made life for me, there’s at least one soft spot in my heart, one garden under the walls of granite. And that’s the spot which my two children fill, which my children keep green, which my children keep holy. It’s them I think of, when I think of the future—when I should at least be thinking a little of my grammar and remembering that the verb “to be” takes the nominative, just as discontented husbands seem to take 35 the initiative! That’s why I can’t quite find the courage to ask for freedom. I have seen enough of life to know what the smash-up of a family means to its toddlers. And I want my children to have a chance. They can’t have that chance without at least two things. One is the guardianship of home life, and the other is that curse of modern times known as money. We haven’t prospered as we had hoped to, but heaven knows I’ve kept an eagle eye on that savings-account of mine, in that absurdly new and resplendent red-brick bank in Buckhorn. Patiently I’ve fed it with my butter and egg money, joyfully I’ve seen it grow with my meager Nitrate dividends, and grimly I’ve made it bigger with every loose dollar I could lay my hands on. There’s no heroism in my going without things I may have thought I needed, just as there can be little nobility in my sticking to a husband who no longer loves me. For it’s not Chaddie McKail who counts now, but her chicks. And I’ll have to look for my reward through them, for I’m like Romanes’ rat now, too big to get into the bottle of cream, but wary enough to know I can dine from a tail still small enough for insertion. I’m merely a submerged prairie-hen with the best part of her life behind her. 36

But it bothers me, what Duncan says about my always thinking of little Dinkie first. And I’m afraid I do, though it seems neither right nor fair. I suppose it’s because he was my first-born—and having come first in my life he must come first in my thoughts. I was made to love somebody—and my husband doesn’t seem to want me to love him. So he has driven me to centering my thoughts on the child. I’ve got to have something to warm up to. And any love I may lavish on this prairie-chick of mine, who has to face life with the lack of so many things, will not only be a help to the boy, but will be a help to me, the part of Me that I’m sometimes so terribly afraid of.

Yet I can’t help wondering if Duncan has any excuses for claiming that it’s personal selfishness which prompts me to keep my boy close to my side. And am I harming him, without knowing it, in keeping him here under my wing? Schools are all right, in a way, but surely a good mother can do as much in the molding of a boy’s mind as a boarding-school with a file of PhD.’s on its staff. But am I a good mother? And should I trust myself, in a matter like this, to my own feelings? Men, in so many things, are better judges than women. Yet it has just 37 occurred to me that all men do not think alike. I’ve been sitting back and wondering what kindly old Peter would say about it. And I’ve decided to write Peter and ask what he advises. He’ll tell the truth, I know, for Peter is as honest as the day is long. …

I’ve just been up to make sure the children were properly covered in bed. And it disturbed me a little to find that without even thinking about it I went to Dinkie first. It seemed like accidental corroboration of all that Duncan has been saying. But I stood studying him as he lay there asleep. It frightened me a little, to find him so big. If it’s true, as Duncan threatens, that time will tend to turn him away from me, it’s something that I’m going to fight tooth and nail. And I’ve seen no sign of it, as yet. With every month and every year that’s added to his age he grows more companionable, more able to bridge the chasm between two human souls. We have more interests in common, more things to talk about. And day by day Dinkie is reaching up to my clumsily mature way of looking at life. He can come to me with his problems, knowing I’ll always give him a hearing, just as he used to come to me with his baby cuts and bruises, knowing they would be duly kissed and cared for. Yet some day, I have 38 just remembered, he may have problems that can’t be brought to me. But that day, please God, I shall defer as long as possible. Already we have our own little secrets and private compacts and understandings. I don’t want my boy to be a mollycoddle. But I want him to have his chance in the world. I want him to be somebody. I can’t reconcile myself to the thought of him growing up to wear moose-mittens and shoe-packs and stretching barb-wire in blue-jeans and riding a tractor across a prairie back-township. I refuse to picture him getting bent and gray wringing a livelihood out of an over-cropped ranch fourteen miles away from a post-office and a world away from the things that make life most worth living. If he were an ordinary boy, I might be led to think differently. But my Dinkie is not an ordinary boy. There’s a spark of the unusual, of the exceptional, in that laddie. And I intend to fan that spark, whatever the cost may be, until it breaks out into genius.