Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
I love the milky smell of my Dinky-Dink better than the perfume of any
flower that ever grew. He's so strong now that he can almost lift
himself up by his two little hands. At least he can really and actually
give a little _pull_. Two days ago our touring-car arrived. It is a
beauty. It skims over these smooth prairie trails like a yacht. From now
on we can run into Buckhorn, do our shopping, and run out again inside
of two or three hours. We can also reach the larger towns without
trouble and it will be so much easier to gather up what we need for Casa
Grande. Dinky-Dink seems to love the car. Ten minutes after we have
started out he is always fast asleep. Olga, who holds him in the back
seat when I get tired, sits in rapt and silent bliss as we rock along at
thirty miles an hour. And no wonder, for it's the next best thing to
sailing out on the briny deep!
I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't
actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie
does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such
physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves. And
then I think her largeness oppresses Terry, for no man, whether he's
been a soldier or not, likes to be overtopped by a woman.
The one exception, of course, is Percy. But Percy is a man of
imagination. He can realize that Olga is more than a mere type. He
agrees with me that she's a sort of miracle. To Terry she's only a mute
and muscular Finnish servant-girl with an arm like a grenadier's. To
Percy she is a goddess made manifest, a superhuman body of superhuman
vigor and beauty and at the same time a body crowned with majesty and
robed in mystery. And I still incline to Percy's opinion. Olga is always
wonderful to me. Her lips are such a soft and melting red, the red of
perfect animal health. The very milkiness of her skin is an
advertisement of that queenly and all-conquering vitality which lifts
her so above the ordinary ruck of humanity. And her great ruminative
eyes are as clear and limpid as any woodland pool.
She blushes rose color sometimes when Percy comes in. I think he finds a
secret joy in sensing that reaction in anything so colossal. But he
defends himself behind that mask of cool impersonality which is the last
attribute of the mental aristocrat, no matter what his feelings may be.
His attitude toward Terry, by the way, is a remarkably companionable one
in view of the fact of their earlier contentions. They can let by-gones
be by-gones and talk and smoke and laugh together. It is Terry, if any
one, who is just a wee bit condescending. And I imagine that it is the
aura of Olga which has brought about this oddly democratizing condition
of affairs. She seems to give a new relationship to things, softening a
point here and illuminating a point there as quietly as moonlight itself
can do.
_Monday the Seventeenth_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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