And I don’t intend to dwell on those hardships. I’m holding out the hand of compromise to my fellow-trekker. Existence is only a prairie-schooner, and we have to accommodate ourselves to it. And I thank Heaven now that I can see things more clearly and accept them more quietly. That’s a lesson Time teaches us. And Father Time, after all, has to hand us something to make up for so mercilessly permitting 92 us to grow old. It leaves us more tolerant. We’re not allowed to demand more life, but we can at least ask for more light. So I intend to be cool-headedly rational about it all. I’m going to keep Reason on her throne. I’m going to be a bitter-ender, in at least one thing: I’m going to stick to my Dinky-Dunk to the last ditch. I’m going to patch up the old top and forget the old scars. For we’re in the same schooner, and we must make the most of it. And if I have to eat my pot of honey on the grave of all our older hopes, I’m at least going to dig away at that pot until its bottom is scraped clean. I’m going to remain the neck-or-nothing woman I once prided myself on being. I’m even going to overlook Dinky-Dunk’s casual cruelty in announcing, when I half-jokingly inquired why he preferred other women to his own Better-Half, that no horse eats hay after being turned out to fresh grass. I’m going on, I repeat, no matter what happens. I’m going on to the desperate end, like my own Dinkie with the chocolate-cake when I warned him he’d burst if he dared to eat another piece and he responded: “Then pass the cake, Mummy—and everybody stand back!”
Tuesday the Fourth
Sursum corda is the word—so here goes! I am determined to be blithe and keep the salt of humor sprinkled thick across the butter-crock of concession. Dinky-Dunk watches me with a guarded and wary eye and Pauline Augusta does not always approve of me. Yesterday, when I got on Briquette and made that fire-eater jump the two rain-barrels put end to end Dinky-Dunk told me I was too old to be taking a chance like that. So I promptly and deliberately turned a somersault on the prairie-sod, just to show him I wasn’t the old lady he was trying to make me out. Gershom, who’d just got back with the children and was unhitching Calamity Kate, retreated with his eyebrows up, toward the stable. And on the youthful face of Pauline Augusta I saw nothing but pained incredulity touched with reproof, for Poppsy is not a believer in the indecorous. She has herself staidly intimated that she’d prefer the rest of the family to address her as “Pauline Augusta” instead of “Poppsy” which still so unwittingly 94 creeps into our talk. So hereafter we must be more careful. For Pauline Augusta can already sew a fine seam and array her seven dolls with a preciseness and neatness which is to be highly commended.
On Saturday, when we motored into Buckhorn for supplies, I escorted Pauline Augusta to Hunk Granby, the town barber, to have her hair cut Dutch. Her lip quivered and she gave every indication of an outbreak, for she was mortally afraid of that strange man and his still stranger clipping-machine. But I spotted a concert-guitar on a bench at the back of Hunk’s emporium and as it was the noon-hour and there was no audience, I rendered a jazz obbligato to the snip of the scissors.
“Say, Birdie, you’ll sure have me buck and wing dancin’ if you keep that up!” remarked the man of the shears. I merely smiled and gave him Texas Tommy, cum gusto, whereupon he acknowledged he was having difficulty in making his feet behave. We became quite a companionable little family, in fact, as the bobbing process went on, and when Dinky-Dunk called for us as he’d promised he was patently scandalized to find his superannuated old soul-mate sight-reading When Katy Couldn’t Katy Wouldn’t—it 95 was a new one to me—in the second ragged plush shaving-chair of a none too clean barber-shop festooned with lithographs which would have made old Anthony Comstock turn in his grave. But you have to be feathered to the toes like a ptarmigan in this northern country so that rough ways and rough winds can’t strike a chill into you. The barber, in fact, refused to take any money for Dutching my small daughter’s hair, proclaiming that the music was more than worth it. But my husband, with a dangerous light in his eye, insisted on leaving four bits on the edge of the shelf loaded down with bottled beautifiers, and escorted us out to the muddy old devil-wagon where Dinkie sat awaiting us.
“Dinky-Dunk,” I said with a perfectly straight face as we climbed in, “what is it gives me such a mysterious influence over men?”
Instead of answering me, he merely ground his gears as though they had been his own teeth. So I repeated my question.
“Why don’t you ask that school-teacher of yours?” he demanded.