Monday the Twenty-Fifth
I have aroused the ire of the Dour Man. He has sent me a message strongly disapproving of my conduct. He even claims that I’ve humiliated him. I never dreamed, when that movie-man with the camera followed me about at the plowing-match, that my husband would wander into a Calgary picture-house and behold his wife in driving gauntlets and Stetson mounted on a tractor and twiddling her fingers at the camera-operator, just to show how much at home she felt! Dinky-Dunk must have experienced a distinctly new thrill when he saw his own wife come riding through that pictorial news weekly. He would have preferred not recognizing me, I suppose. But there I was, duly named and labeled—and hence the ponderous little note of disapproval.
But I’m not going to let Duncan start a quarrel over trivialities like this. I intend to sit tight. There’d be little use in argument, anyway, for Duncan would only ignore me as the predatory tom-cat ignores the foolishly scolding robin. I’m going to be 204 a regular mallard, and stick to these home regions until the ice forms. And our most mountainous troubles, after all, can’t quite survive being exteriorated through the ink-well. It relieves me to write about them. But I wish I had a woman of my own age to talk to. I get a bit lonely, now that winter is slipping down out of the North again. And I find that I’m not so companionable as I ought to be. It comes home to me, now and then, how far away from the world we are, how remote from everything that counts. The tragedy of life with Chaddie McKail, I suppose, is that she’s let existence narrow down to just one thing, to her family. Other women seem to have substitutes. But I’ve about forgotten how to be a social animal. I seem to grow as segregative as the timber-wolf. There’s nothing for me in the woman’s club life one gets out here. I can’t force myself into church work, and the rural reading-club is something beyond me. I simply couldn’t endure those Women’s Institute meetings which open with a hymn and end up with sponge-cake and green tea, after a platitudinous paper on the Beauty of Prairie Life. It has its beauties, God knows, or we’d all go mad. We women, in this brand-new land, try to bolster ourselves up with the belief that we have 205 greatnesses which the rest of the world must get along without. But that is only the flaunting of La Panache, the feather of courage in our cap of discouragement. There is so much, so much, we are denied! So much we must do without! So much we must see go to others! So much we must never even hope for! Oh, pioneers, great you are and great you must be, to endure what you have endured! You must be strong in your hours of secret questioning and you must be strong in your quest for consolation. If nothing else, you must at least be strong. And these western men of ours should all be strong men, should all be great men, because they must have been the children of great mothers. A prairie mother has to be a great woman. She must be great to survive, to endure, to leave her progeny behind her. I’ve heard the Wise Men talk about nature looking after her own. I’ve heard sentimentalists sing about the strength that lies in the soil. But, oh, pioneers, you know what you know! In your secret heart of hearts you remember the lonely hours, the lonely years, the lonely graves! For in the matter of infant mortality alone, prairie life shows a record shocking to read. We are making that better, it is true, with our district nursing and our motherhood clubs and 206 our rural phones and our organized letting in of light and passing on of knowledge. We are not so overburdened as those nobler women who went before us. But, oh, pioneers along these lonely northern trails, I salute you and honor you for your courage! Your greatness will never be known. It will be seen only in the great country which you gave up your lives to bring to birth!
Wednesday the Twenty-Seventh
What weather-cocks we are! My blue Monday is over and done with, this is a crystalline winter day with all the earth at peace with itself, and I’ve just had a letter from Peter asking if I could take care of his sister’s girl, Susie Mumford, until after Christmas. The Mumfords, it seems, are going through the divorce-mill, and Susie’s mother is anxious that her one and only child should be afar from the scene when the grist of liberty is a-grinding.
I know nothing of Susie except what Peter has told me, that she is not yet nineteen, that she is intelligent, but obstreperous, and much wiser than she pretends to be, that the machinery of life has always run much too smoothly about her for her own good, and that a couple of months of prairie life might be the means of introducing her to her own soul.
That’s all I know of Susie, but I shall welcome her to Casa Grande. I’ll be glad to see a city girl again, to talk over face-creams and the Follies and Tchaikowsky and brassieres and Strindberg with. And 208 I’ll be glad to do a little toward repaying big-hearted old Peter for all his kindnesses of the past. Susie may be both sophisticated and intractable, but I await her with joy. She seems almost the answer to my one big want.
But Casa Grande, I have been realizing, will have to be refurbished for its coming guest. We have grown a bit shoddy about the edges here. It’s hard to keep a house spick and span, with two active-bodied children running about it. And my heart, I suppose, has not been in that work of late. But I’ve been on a tour of inspection, and I realize it’s time to reform. So Struthers and I are about to doll up these dilapidated quarters of ours. And I intend to have my dolorously neglected Guest Room (for such I used to call it) done over before the arrival of Susie....