Part 3 (1/2)
_Wednesday the Eighth_
I've cut off my hair, right bang off. When I got up yesterday morning with so much work ahead of me, with so much to do and so little time to do it in, I started doing my hair. I also started thinking about that Frenchman who committed suicide after counting up the number of b.u.t.tons he had to b.u.t.ton and unb.u.t.ton every morning and evening of every day of every year of his life. I tried to figure up the time I was wasting on that mop of mine. Then the Great Idea occurred to me.
I got the scissors, and in six snips had it off, a big tangled pile of brownish gold, rather bleached out by the sun at the ends. And the moment I saw it there on my dresser, and saw my head in the mirror, I was sorry. I looked like a plucked crow. I could have ditched a freight-train. And I felt positively light-headed. But it was too late for tears. I trimmed off the ragged edges as well as I could, and what didn't get in my eyes got down my neck and itched so terribly that I had to change my clothes. Then I got a nail-punch out of d.i.n.ky-Dunk's tool-kit, and heated it over the lamp and gave a little more wave to that two-inch shock of stubble. It didn't look so bad then, and when I tried on d.i.n.ky-Dunk's coat in front of the gla.s.s I saw that I wouldn't make such a bad-looking boy.
But I waited until noon with my heart in my mouth, to see what d.i.n.ky-Dunk would say. What he really _did_ say I can't write here, for there was a wicked swear-word mixed up in his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of startled wonder. Then he saw the tears in my eyes, I suppose, for he came running toward me with his arms out, and hugged me tight, and said I looked cute, and all he'd have to do would be to get used to it. But all dinner time he kept looking at me as though I were a strange woman, and later I saw him standing in front of the dresser, stooping over that tragic pile of tangled yellow-brown snakes. It reminded me of a man stooping over a grave. I slipped away without letting him see me. But this morning I woke him up early and asked him if he still loved his wife. And when he vowed he did, I tried to make him tell me how much. But that stumped him. He compromised by saying he couldn't cheapen his love by defining it in words; it was limitless. I followed him out after breakfast, with a hunger in my heart which bacon and eggs hadn't helped a bit, and told him that if he really loved me he could tell me how much.
He looked right in my eyes, a little pityingly, it seemed to me, and laughed, and grew solemn again. Then he stooped down and picked up a little blade of prairie-gra.s.s, and held it up in front of me.
”Have you any idea of how far it is from the Rockies across to the Hudson Bay and from the Line up to the Peace River Valley?”
Of course I hadn't.
”And have you any idea of how many millions of acres of land that is, and how many millions of blades of gra.s.s like this there are in each acre?” he soberly demanded.
And again of course I hadn't.
”Well, this one blade of gra.s.s is the amount of love I am able to express for you, and all those other blades in all those millions of acres is what love itself is!”
I thought it over, just as solemnly as he had said it. I think I was satisfied. For when my d.i.n.ky-Dunk was away off on the prairie, working like a nailer, and I was alone in the shack, I went to his old coat hanging there--the old coat that had some subtle aroma of d.i.n.ky-Dunkiness itself about every inch of it--and kissed it on the sleeve.
This afternoon as Paddy and I started for home with a pail of mushrooms I rode face to face with my first coyote. We stood staring at each other. My heart bounced right up into my throat, and for a moment I wondered if I was going to be eaten by a starving timber-wolf, with d.i.n.ky-Dunk finding my bones picked as clean as those animal-carca.s.ses we see in an occasional buffalo-wallow. I kept up my end of the stare, wondering whether to advance or retreat, and it wasn't until that coyote turned tail and scooted that my courage came back. Then Paddy and I went after him, like the wind. But we had to give up. And at supper d.i.n.ky-Dunk told me coyotes were too cowardly to come near a person, and were quite harmless. He said that even when they showed their teeth, the rest of their face was apologizing for the threat. And before supper was over that coyote, at least I suppose it was the same coyote, was howling at the rising full moon. I went out with d.i.n.ky-Dunk's gun, but couldn't get near the brute. Then I came back.
”Sing, you son-of-a-gun, sing!” I called out to him from the shack door.
And that shocked my lord and master so much that he scolded me, for the first time in his life. And when I poked his Adam's apple with my finger he got on his dignity. He was tired, poor boy, and I should have remembered it. And when I requested him not to stand there and stare at me in the hieratic rigidity of an Egyptian idol I could see a little flush of anger go over his face. He didn't say anything. But he took one of the lamps and a three-year-old _Pall-Mall Magazine_ and shut himself up in the bunk-house.
Then I was sorry.
I tiptoed over to the door, and found it was locked. Then I went and got my mouth-organ and sat meekly down on the doorstep and began to play the _Don't Be Cross_ waltz. I dragged it out plaintively, with a _vox humana tremolo_ on the coaxing little refrain. Finally I heard a smothered snort, and the door suddenly opened and d.i.n.ky-Dunk picked me up, mouth-organ and all. He shook me and said I was a little devil, and I called him a big British brute. But he was laughing and a wee bit ashamed of his temper and was very nice to me all the rest of the evening.
I'm getting, I find, to depend a great deal on d.i.n.ky-Dunk, and it makes me afraid, sometimes, for the future. He seems able to slip a hand under my heart and lift it up, exactly as though it were the chin of a wayward child. Yet I resent his power, and keep elbowing for more breathing-s.p.a.ce, like a rush-hour pa.s.senger in the subway crowd.
Sometimes, too, I resent the over-solemn streak in his mental make-up.
He abominates ragtime, and I have rather a weakness for it. So once or twice in his dour days I've found an almost Satanic delight in singing _The Humming c.o.o.n_. And the knowledge that he'd like to forbid me singing rag seems to give a zest to it. So I go about flas.h.i.+ng my saber of independence:
”Ol' Ephr'm Johnson was a deacon of de church in Tennessee, An' of course it was ag'inst de rules t' sing ragtime melodee!”
But I am the one, I notice, who always makes up first. To-night as I was making cocoa before we went to bed I tried to tell my Diddums there was something positively doglike in my devotion to him. He nickered like a pony and said he was the dog in this deal. Then he pulled me over on his knee and said that men get short-tempered when they were tuckered out with worry and hard work, and that probably it would be hard for even two of the seraphim always to get along together in a two-by-four shack, where you couldn't even have, a deadline for the sake of dignity. It was mostly his fault, he knew, but he was going to try to fight against it. And I experienced the unreasonable joy of an unreasonable woman who has succeeded in putting the man she loves with all her heart and soul in the wrong. So I could afford to be humble myself, and make a foolish lot of fuss over him. But I shall always fight for my elbow-room. For there are times when my d.i.n.ky-Dunk, for all his bigness and strength, has to be taken sedately in tow, the same as a racing automobile has to be hauled through the city streets by a d.i.n.ky little low-power hack-car!
_Sat.u.r.day the Tenth_
We've had a cold spell, with heavy frosts at night, but the days are still glorious. The overcast days are so few in the West that I've been wondering if the optimism of the Westerners isn't really due to the suns.h.i.+ne they get. Who could be gloomy under such golden skies? Every pore of my body has a throat and is shouting out a _Tarentella Sincera_ of its own! But it isn't the weather that has keyed me up this time.
It's another wagon-load of supplies which Olie teamed out from Buckhorn yesterday. I've got wall-paper and a new iron bed for the annex, and galvanized wash-tubs and a crock-churn and storm-boots and enough ticking to make ten big pillows, and unbleached linen for two dozen slips--I love a big pillow--and I've been saving up wild-duck feathers for weeks, the downiest feathers you ever sank your ear into, Matilda Anne; and if pillows will do it I'm going to make this house look like a harem! Can you imagine a household with only three pillow-slips, which had to be jerked off in the morning, washed, dried and ironed and put back on their three lonely little pillows before bedtime? Well, there will be no more of that in this shack.
But the important news is that I've got a duck-gun, the duckiest duck-gun you ever saw, and waders, and a c.o.o.n-skin coat and cap and a big leather school-bag for wearing over my shoulder on Paddy. The coat and cap are like the ones we used to laugh at when we went up to Montreal for the tobogganing, in the days when I was young and foolish and willing to sacrifice comfort on the altar of outward appearances.