Sunday the Sixteenth
I’ve just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It’s a very long and businesslike letter, in which he goes into details as to how our company has been incorporated in La Association de Productores de Salitre de Chile, with headquarters at Valparaiso. It’s a new and rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies that with nitrate at ten shillings per Spanish quintal the returns on the investment, under the newer conditions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred kilos, and the price includes the bags, but the weight is taken on the nitrate only, involving a deduction from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent. Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the fixation method from the air may eventually threaten the stability of our entire amalgamated mines, but probably not during his life-time or even my own. And I had to read the letter over for the third time before I winnowed from it the obscure but essential kernel that my shares from this year forward should bring me in an annual dividend of at least two thousand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, once the transportation situation is normalized, but depending largely, of course, on the labor conditions obtaining in Latin America—and much more along the same lines.
That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected nest-egg should have made me happy. But it didn’t. I couldn’t quite react to it. As usual, I thought of the children first, and from their standpoint it did bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, to know that, whatever happened, they could have woolens on their little tummies and shoe-leather on their little piggies. But the news didn’t come with sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out of existence. I’ve even been wondering if there’s any news that could. For the one thing that seems always to face me is the absence of intensity from life. Can it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it’s youth, golden youth, that is slipping away from me?
It startled me a little, to have to face that question. But I shake my fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse to surrender. I shall not allow myself to become antiquated. I’m on the wrong track, in some way, but before I dry up into a winter apple I’m going to find out where the trouble is, and correct it. I never was much of a sleep-walker. I want life, Life—and oodles of it....
Among other things, by the way, which I’ve been missing are books. They at least are to be had for the buying, and I’ve decided there’s no excuse for letting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I’ve had a “serious but not fatal wound,” as the newspapers say, to my personal vanity, but there’s no use in letting go of things, at my time of life. Pee-Wee, I’m sure, will never be satisfied with an empty-headed old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already asking questions that are slightly disturbing. Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked at me with widening eyes. “Mummy,” he called out, “I’ve got a m’sheen inside me!” And Whinnie’s explorations are surely worth emulating. I too have a machine inside me which some day I’ll be compelled to rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump, though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the emotions.
Saturday the Twenty-ninth
Dinky-Dunk is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, as a modern army of assault ignores a fortress by simply circling about its forbidding walls and leaving it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliberately and patiently making love to my children. He is entrenching himself in their affection.
He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me to interfere. Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old Dinky-Dunk’s face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me, in turn, of what a difference there is between your first child and the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year, but by the month.
It’s not that I love the Twins less. It’s only that the novelty has passed. And in one way it’s a good thing, for over your second and third baby you worry less. You know what is needed, and how to do it. You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. You know the way you have to go, henceforth, and you follow it. It is less a Great Adventure, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double-pointed tooth of Anxiety does not rowel quite so often at the core of your heart.... I’ve been wondering if, with the coming of the children, there is not something which slips away from the relationship between husband and wife. That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn’t big enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And it was Nature, you have to admit when you come to look it honestly in the face, Nature in her inexorable economy working out her inexorable ends. If I hadn’t loved Dinky-Dunk, fondly, foolishly, abandonedly, there would have been no little Dinkie and Poppsy and Pee-Wee. They would have been left to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that lonely and twilit No-Man’s Land of barren love and unwanted babes. And the only thing that keeps me human, nowadays, that keeps me from being a woman with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and bones and dehydrated ham-strings, is my kiddies. The thought of them, at any time of the day, can put a cedilla under my heart to soften it....