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But I keep wondering if Dinky-Dunk is getting the right sort of things to eat, if he's lonely, and what he does in his spare time. And another conclusion I've come to is that men, much as I hate to admit it, are built of a stronger fiber than women. They seem able to stand shock better than the weaker sex. They are not so apt to go down under defeat, to take the full count, as I have done.
You can't have the bottom knocked out of your world, naturally, and find an invisible Nero blithely fiddling on your heart-strings. And I hated to see Dinky-Dunk sitting there with that dead look in his eyes. I hated to see him with his spirit broken, with that hollow and haggard misery about the jowls, which made me think of a hound-dog mourning for a dead master.
The absence of one gives Dinkie the range of the whole shack, and when on the range he's a timber-wolf for trouble, and can annoy his father even more than he can me by his depredations. Last night after supper I heard an icy voice speaking from the end of the dining-room where Dinky-Dunk has installed his desk.
I'll run it in my own way, and I'll run it without hanging on to a woman's skirt!" Dinky-Dunk stared at me as though he were looking at me through a leper-squint. But he had been brutal, was being brutal. And it was a case of fighting fire with fire. "Then you're welcome to the job," I heard him proclaiming out of his blind white heat of rage. "After that, I'm through!"
I remembered how, during the last half-year, Dinky-Dunk had been on the wing, hurrying over to Calgary, and Edmonton, flying east to Winnipeg, scurrying off to the Coast, poring over township maps and blue-prints and official-looking letters from land associations and banks and loan companies.
I crossed casually over to the door, and opened it to sniff at the smell of supper. "Whatever happens, Dinky-Dunk," I very calmly announced, "we've got to eat. And if that she-Indian scorches another scone I'll go down there and scalp her." My husband got slowly and heavily up out of the chair, which gave out a squeak or two even when relieved of his weight.
And as the kiddies get older, I imagine, I'll not be troubled by this terrible feeling of loneliness which has been weighing like a plumb-bob on my heart for the last few days. I wish Dinky-Dunk didn't have to be so much away from home....
Then I stopped to tell Dinky-Dunk that I'd been hopelessly in love with a tenor at thirteen and had written in my journal: "I shall die and turn to dust still adoring him." Then I told him about my first opera, Rigoletto, and hummed "La Donna E Mobile," which of course he remembered himself.
Soapy Stennet, by the way, has been paid off by Dinky-Dunk and is moving on to the Knee-Hill country, where he says he can get good wages breaking and seeding. Soapy, of course, was a good man on the land, but I never took a shine to that hard-eyed Canuck, and we'll get along, in some way or other, without him. For, in the language of the noble Horatius, "I'll find a way, or make it!"
It was a pizzicato note which I promptly recognized as the gentle Pee-Wee's advertisement of wakefulness. So I beat a quick and involuntary retreat, knowing only too well what I'd have ahead of me if Poppsy joined in to make that solo a duet. But Pee-Wee refused to be silenced, and what Dinky-Dunk had just said felt more and more like a branding-iron against my breast.
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