Part 27

But that, audacious as I felt Lady Alicia to be, didn't quite hold water. It didn't seem any more reasonable than my earlier theories. And all I'm really certain of is that the dinner was badly cooked and badly served, rather reminding me of a chow-house meal on the occasion of a Celestial New Year. We all wore our every-day clothes (with Peter's most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and Dinkie was given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the bareback rider who's just been carried out on a stretcher. But Constraint was there, all the while, first in the form of Dinky-Dunk's unoccupied chair, which remained that way until dinner was two-thirds through, and then in the form of Dinky-Dunk himself, whose explanation about some tractor-work keeping him late didn't quite ring true. His harried look, I must acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me at least it was only too plain that he was there under protest.

I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met rôle, but it struck me as uncommonly like dancing on a coffin. And for all his garrulity, I know, Peter was really watching us with the eye of a hawk.

"I'm too old a dog," I overheard him telling Lady Alicia, "ever to be surprised at the crumbling of an ideal or the disclosure of a skeleton."

I don't know what prompted that statement, but it had the effect of making Lady Allie go off into one of her purl-two knit-two trances.

"I think you English people," I heard him telling her a little later, "have a tendency to carry moderation to excess."

"I don't quite understand that," she said, lighting what must have been about her seventeenth cigarette.

"I mean you're all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter--which impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie, worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him, "Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye: "Yes, I happen to have read a bit of Henry James."

But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in what Lady Alicia had rechristened the Lounge, and then made doleful efforts to be light and airy over a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen dollars of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to borrow six bits from Peter to even up with Lady Allie, who was inhospitable enough to remain the winner of the evening. And I wasn't sorry when those devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard and thrust before me an undebatable excuse for trekking homeward. And another theatricality presented itself when Dinky-Dunk announced that he'd take us back in the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble-Weed and our sea-going spring-wagon, with plenty of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of putting a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux and planted Peter meekly in the back seat with little Dinkie to hold and took the reins myself.

I started home with a lump in my throat and a weight in my heart, feeling it really wasn't a home that I was driving toward. But it was one of those crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like electric-lights shining through cut-glass and the air was like a razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of sister-motes in the infinitudes of time and space.

"Nitchevo!" I said out loud, as I stopped on the trail to readjust and wrap the Twins in their rug-lined laundry-basket.

"In that case," Peter unexpectedly remarked, "I'd like to climb into that front seat with you."

"Why?" I asked, not greatly interested.

"Because I want to talk to you," was Peter's answer.

"But I think I'd rather not talk," I told him.

"Why?" it was his turn to inquire.

"Isn't it a rum enough situation as it is?" I demanded. For Peter, naturally, had not used his eyes for nothing that night.

But Peter didn't wait for my permission to climb into the front seat. He plumped himself down beside me and sat there with my first-born in his arms and one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over his knees.

"I think I'm beginning to see light," he said, after a rather long silence, as we went spanking along the prairie-trail with the cold air fanning our faces.

"I wish I did," I acknowledged.

"You're not very happy, are you?" he ventured, in a voice with just the slightest trace of vibrato in it.

But I didn't see that anything was to be gained by parading my troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.

"Do you like me, Peter?" I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and the very sense of his remoteness, as I'd already told him, gives birth to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper "weenies."

"What do you suppose I've been hanging around for?" demanded Peter, with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.

"To fix the windmill, of course," I told him. "Unless you have improper designs on Struthers!"

He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.

"If it's true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the dark, I suppose that's why she weaves so badly," he observed, after a short silence.

"She undoubtedly drops a stitch now and then," I agreed, wondering if he was thinking of me or Struthers when he spoke. "But you do like me, don't you?"

"I adore you," admitted Peter quite simply.