Part 2

"Everything's fine and dandy," announced the barearmed farrier as he snapped his little pen-knife shut. But that triumphant grin of his only made me more tired than ever, and I turned away to the tall young nurse on the other side of my bed.

There was perspiration on her forehead, under the eaves of the pale hair crowned with its pointed little cap. She was still smiling, but she looked human and tired and a little fussed.

"Is it a girl?" I asked her. I had intended to make that query a crushingly imperious one. I wanted it to stand as a reproof to them, as a mark of disapproval for all such untimely merriment. But my voice, I found, was amazingly weak and thin. And I wanted to know.

"It's both," said the tired-eyed girl in the blue and white uniform. And she, too, nodded her head in a triumphant sort of way, as though the credit for some vast and recent victory lay entirely in her own narrow lap.

"It's both?" I repeated, wondering why she too should fail to give a simple answer to a simple question.

"It's twins!" she said, with a little chirrup of laughter.

"Twins?" I gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the last of the pea-green mist out of that room with the dead white walls.

"Twins," proclaimed the doctor, "twins!" He repeated the monosyllable, converting it into a clarion-call that made me think of a rooster crowing.

"A lovely boy and girl," cooed the third nurse with a bottle of olive-oil in her hand. And by twisting my head a little I was able to see the two wire bassinets, side by side, each holding a little mound of something wrapped in a flannelette blanket.

I shut my eyes, for I seemed to have a great deal to think over. Twins! A boy and girl! Two little new lives in the world! Two warm and cuddling little bairns to nest close against my mother-breast.

"I see your troubles cut out for you," said the doctor as he rolled down his shirt-sleeves.

They were all laughing again. But to me it didn't seem quite such a laughing matter. I was thinking of my layette, and trying to count over my supply of binders and slips and shirts and nighties and wondering how I could out-Solomon Solomon and divide the little dotted Swiss dress edged with the French Val lace of which I'd been so proud. Then I fell to pondering over other problems, equally prodigious, so that it was quite a long time before my mind had a chance to meander on to Dinky-Dunk himself.

And when I did think of Dinky-Dunk I had to laugh. It seemed a joke on him, in some way. He was the father of twins. Instead of one little snoozer to carry on his name and perpetuate his race in the land, he now had two. Fate, without consulting him, had flung him double measure. No wonder, for the moment, those midnight toilers in that white-walled house of pain were wearing the smile that refused to come off! That's the way, I suppose, that all life ought to be welcomed into this old world of ours. And now, I suddenly remembered, I could speak of my children--and that means so much more than talking about one's child. Now I was indeed a mother, a prairie mother with three young chicks of her own to scratch for.

I forgot my anxieties and my months of waiting. I forgot those weeks of long mute protest, of revolt against wily old Nature, who so cleverly tricks us into the ways she has chosen. A glow of glory went through my tired body--it was hysteria, I suppose, in the basic meaning of the word--and I had to shut my eyes tight to keep the tears from showing.

But that great wave of happiness which had washed up the shore of my soul receded as it came. By the time I was transferred to the rubber-wheeled stretcher they called "the Wagon" and trundled off to a bed and room of my own, the reaction set in. I could think more clearly. My Dinky-Dunk didn't love me, or he'd never have left me at such a time, no matter what his business calls may have been. The Twins weren't quite so humorous as they seemed. There was even something disturbingly animal-like in the birth of more offspring than one at a time, something almost revolting in this approach to the littering of one's young. They all tried to unedge that animality by treating it as a joke, by confronting it with their conspiracies of jocularity. But it would be no joke to a nursing mother in the middle of a winter prairie with the nearest doctor twenty long miles away.

I countermanded my telegram to Dinky-Dunk at Vancouver, and cried myself to sleep in a nice relaxing tempest of self-pity which my "special" accepted as calmly as a tulip-bed accepts a shower. But lawdy, lawdy, how I slept! And when I woke up and sniffed warm air and that painty smell peculiar to new buildings, and heard the radiators sing with steam and the windows rattle in the northeast blizzard that was blowing, I slipped into a truer realization of the intricate machinery of protection all about me, and thanked my lucky stars that I wasn't in a lonely prairie shack, as I'd been when my almost three-year-old Dinkie was born. I remembered, with little tidal waves of contentment, that my ordeal was a thing of the past, and that I was a mother twice over, and rather hungry, and rather impatient to get a peek at my God-given little babes.

Then I fell to thinking rather pityingly of my forsaken little Dinkie and wondering if Mrs. Teetzel would keep his feet dry and cook his cream-of-wheat properly, and if Iroquois Annie would have brains enough not to overheat the furnace and burn Casa Grande down to the ground. Then I decided to send the wire to Dinky-Dunk, after all, for it isn't every day in the year a man can be told he's the father of twins....

I sent the wire, in the secret hope that it would bring my lord and master on the run. But it was eight days later, when I was up on a back-rest and having my hair braided, that Dinky-Dunk put in an appearance. And when he did come he chilled me. I can't just say why. He seemed tired and preoccupied and unnecessarily self-conscious before the nurses when I made him hold Pee-Wee on one arm and Poppsy on the other.

"Now kiss 'em, Daddy," I commanded. And he had to kiss them both on their red and puckered little faces. Then he handed them over with all too apparent relief, and fell into a brown study.

"What are you worrying over?" I asked him.

"I'm wondering how in the world you'll ever manage," he solemnly acknowledged. I was able to laugh, though it took an effort.

"For every little foot God sends a little shoe," I told him, remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. "And the sooner you get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the happier I'll be. For I'm tired of this place and the smell of the formalin and ether and I'm nearly worried to death about Dinkie. And in all the wide world, O Kaikobad, there's no place like one's own home!"

Dinky-Dunk didn't answer me, but I thought he looked a little wan and limp as he sat down in one of the stiff-backed chairs. I inspected him with a calmer and clearer eye.

"Was that sleeper too hot last night?" I asked, remembering what a bad night could do to a big man.

"I don't seem to sleep on a train the way I used to," he said, but his eye evaded mine. And I suspected something.

"Dinky-Dunk," I demanded, "did you have a berth last night?"

He flushed up rather guiltily. He even seemed to resent my questioning him. But I insisted on an answer.

"No, I sat up," he finally confessed.