Wednesday the Thirtieth
The tension has been relieved by Dinky-Dunk going off to Calgary. Along with him he has taken a rather formidable amount of his personal belongings. But he explains this by stating that business will keep him in the city for at least six or seven weeks. He has been talking a good deal about the Barcona coal-mine of late, and the last night he was with us he talked to Gershom for an hour and more about the advantages of those newer mines over the Drumheller. The newer field has a solid slate roof which makes drifting safe and easy, a finer type of coal, and a chance for big money once the railway runs in its spur and the officials wake up to the importance of giving them the cars they need. The whole country, Dinky-Dunk claims, is underlaid with coal, and our province alone is estimated to contain almost seventeen per cent. of the world’s known supply. And my lord and master expressed the intention of being in on the clean-up.
I don’t know how much of this was intended for 196 my ears. But it served to disquiet me, for reasons I couldn’t quite discern. And the same vague depression crept over me when Dinky-Dunk took his departure. I kept up my air of blitheness, it is true, to the last moment, and was as casual as you please in helping Duncan to pack and reminding him to put his shaving-things in his bag and making sure the last button was on his pajamas. I kissed him good-by, as a dutiful wife ought, and held Pauline Augusta up in the doorway so that she might attempt a last-minute hand-waving at her daddy.
But I slumped, once it was all over. I felt mysteriously alone in an indifferent big world with the rime of winter creeping along its edges. Even Gershom, after the children had had their lesson, became conscious of my preoccupation and went so far as to ask if I wasn’t feeling well.
I smilingly assured him that there was nothing much wrong with me.
“Lerne zu leiden ohne zu klagen!” as the dying Frederick said to a singularly foolish son.
“But you’re upset?” persisted Gershom, with his valorous brand of timidity that so often reminds me of a robin defending her eggs.
“No, it’s not that,” I said with a shake of the head. 197 “It’s only that I’m—I’m a trifle too chilly to be comfortable.”