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The Prairie Child
Monday the Eighteenth
Arthur Stringer
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       _ I have just learned that we were blackballed from the Country Club. My husband, at least, has met with that experience.
       It was Lois who let the cat out of the bag. She wasn't clear on all the details, but it was that old has-been of a Goodhue who was at the bottom of it all, according to the lady known as Slinkie. Duncan and he had clashed, from the first. Then Duncan had bought up his paper, and compelled him to mortgage his home. It was because of something to do with the Barcona Mines directorate, Lois thought, that Captain Goodhue had had Duncan blackballed when he applied for membership in the Country Club, the Captain being vice-president of the original holding company. Lois laughed none too pleasantly when she added that her Charley and my Duncan had joined hands to go after the old man's scalp. And they had got it. They turned him inside out, before they got through with him. They took his fore-lock and his teepee and his last string of wampum. And the old snob, of course, would never forgive them.
       ... They took his fore-lock, and his teepee ... And it was Chaddie McKail and her bairns who were now housing warm in that captured teepee! And all this toiling and moiling, on the part of my husband, all this scheming and intriguing and juggling with figures, had been a campaign for power, a plotting and working to get even with this haughty old enemy who could carry his defeat so lightly! To be blackballed like that, I remembered, was to be proclaimed not a gentleman. And it must have cut deep. At one time, I suppose, Duncan would have called his monocled captain out. But men seem to fight differently nowadays. They fight differently, but no less grimly. And Duncan, whether it is a virtue or a vice in his make-up, would always be a fighter.... Yet I have no sense of gratitude to Lois Murchison for depositing her painful truths in my lap. She warned me, in her artless soprano, that there wasn't much good in sentimentalizing the situation. But she has thrown a shadow across the house which I was trying to make into a home. Without quite knowing it, she has cheapened her life-mate in my eyes. Without quite intending it, she has left my own husband more ignominious than he once stood. I was trying hard to school myself into a respect for his material successes. I was struggling to excuse a great many things by the engrossing nature of his work. But the motive behind all his efforts seemed suddenly a sordid one, in many ways a mean one.
       I keep remembering what Lois said about not sentimentalizing a situation. But I'm not yet such a mush of concession that I can't tell black from white. And there's some part of us, some vague but unescapable part of us, which we must respect, otherwise we have no right to walk God's good earth....
       I want to get away, for a day or two, to think things out. I think, before Duncan gets back to-morrow, I shall take Poppsy and run up to Banff. I may get my view-point back. And the mountain quietness may do me good....
       I keep having that same dull ache of disappointment which came to me as a girl, after I'd idolized a great man called Meredith and after I'd almost prayed to a great poet called Browning, on finding that one was so imperfectly monogamous and that the other philandered and talked foolishly to women. I had thrust my girlish faith in their hands, as so often befalls with the young, and they had betrayed it.... But for the second time since I married, I have been reading Modern Love. And I can almost forgive the Apollo of Box Hill for that betrayal which he knew nothing about. _
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Friday the Eighth of March
Tuesday the Twenty-Third
Sunday the Twenty-Eighth
Friday the Second
Sunday the Fourth
Wednesday the Seventh
Saturday the Tenth
Thursday the Fifteenth
Sunday the Twenty-Fifth
Thursday the Twenty-Ninth
Tuesday the Fourth
Sunday the Fifth
Sunday the Twelth
Sunday the Second
Wednesday the Fifth
Friday the Seventh
Thursday the Thirteenth
Sunday the Sixteenth
Sunday the Thirtieth
Wednesday the Second
Thursday the Tenth
Tuesday the 5th
Sunday the Tenth
Sunday the Twenty-Fourth
Wednesday the Twenty-Eighth
Sunday the Ninth
Saturday the Twenty-Ninth
Tuesday the Eighth
Thursday the 17th
Sunday the Twentieth
Wednesday the Thirtieth
Friday the Fifteenth
Saturday the Twenty-Third
Monday the Twenty-Fifth
Wednesday the Twenty-Seventh
Wednesday the Third
Friday the Fifth
Thursday the 11th
Friday the Twelfth
Tuesday the Sixteenth
Wednesday the Thirty-First
Monday the Nineteenth
Tuesday the Twenty-Seventh
Sunday the Twenty-Ninth
Wednesday the Eighth
Wednesday the Fifteenth
Friday the Seventeenth
Tuesday, the Twenty-First
Friday the Twenty-Fourth
Saturday the Twenty-Fifth
Monday the Twenty-Seventh
Saturday the Fourth
Monday the Thirtieth
Thursday the Seventeenth
Wednesday the Twenty-Third
Thursday the Thirty-First
Saturday the Second
Tuesday the Fifth
Friday the Ninth
Monday the Eleventh
Saturday the Sixteenth
Monday the Eighteenth
Thursday the Twenty-Eighth
Friday the Twenty-Ninth & Saturday the Thirtieth
Sunday the First
Tuesday the Third
Thursday the Fifth
Friday the Sixth
Saturday the Seventh
Two Hours Later
Sunday the Eighth
Thursday the Eleventh
Sunday the Fourteenth