Song of the Lark
Willa Cather

(1915 edition)



CONTENTS:

PART I.  FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD
    II.  THE SONG OF THE LARK
   III.  STUPID FACES
    IV.  THE ANCIENT PEOPLE
     V.  DOCTOR ARCHIE'S VENTURE
    VI.  KRONBORG
         EPILOGUE





PART I

FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD

I


Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish
clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in
Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store.
Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room
and the double student's lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass
sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was
so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted
and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had
worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about it.
The doctor's flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase,
with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was
filled with medical books of every thickness and color. On the top shelf
stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark
mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.

As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the doctor
in small Colorado towns twenty-five years ago was generally young.
Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders
which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a
distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.

There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown
hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over his high forehead. His
nose was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent. He wore a
curly, reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look
a little like the pictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large and
well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded with crinkly
reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly, wide-waled serge; the
traveling men had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver tailor.
The doctor was always well dressed.

Dr. Archie turned up the student's lamp and sat down in the swivel chair
before his desk. He sat uneasily, beating a tattoo on his knees with his
fingers, and looked about him as if he were bored. He glanced at his
watch, then absently took from his pocket a bunch of small keys,
selected one and looked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely perceptible,
played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative. Behind the door
that led into the hall, under his buffaloskin driving-coat, was a locked
cupboard. This the doctor opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of
muddy overshoes. Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses and
decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters. Hearing a step in the empty,
echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cupboard again, snapping the
Yale lock. The door of the waiting-room opened, a man entered and came
on into the consulting-room.

"Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg," said the doctor carelessly. "Sit down."

His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin brown beard,
streaked with gray. He wore a frock coat, a broad-brimmed black hat, a
white lawn necktie, and steel rimmed spectacles. Altogether there was a
pretentious and important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his
coat and sat down.

"Good-evening, doctor. Can you step around to the house with me? I think
Mrs. Kronborg will need you this evening." This was said with profound
gravity and, curiously enough, with a slight embarrassment.

"Any hurry?" the doctor asked over his shoulder as he went into his
operating-room.

Mr. Kronborg coughed behind his hand, and contracted his brows. His face
threatened at every moment to break into a smile of foolish excitement.
He controlled it only by calling upon his habitual pulpit manner. "Well,
I think it would be as well to go immediately. Mrs. Kronborg will be
more comfortable if you are there. She has been suffering for some
time."

The doctor came back and threw a black bag upon his desk. He wrote some
instructions for his man on a prescription pad and then drew on his
overcoat. "All ready," he announced, putting out his lamp. Mr. Kronborg
rose and they tramped through the empty hall and down the stairway to
the street. The drug store below was dark, and the saloon next door was
just closing. Every other light on Main Street was out.

On either side of the road and at the outer edge of the board sidewalk,
the snow had been shoveled into breastworks. The town looked small and
black, flattened down in the snow, muffled and all but extinguished.
Overhead the stars shone gloriously. It was impossible not to notice
them. The air was so clear that the white sand hills to the east of
Moonstone gleamed softly. Following the Reverend Mr. Kronborg along the
narrow walk, past the little dark, sleeping houses, the doctor looked up
at the flashing night and whistled softly. It did seem that people were
stupider than they need be; as if on a night like this there ought to be
something better to do than to sleep nine hours, or to assist Mrs.
Kronborg in functions which she could have performed so admirably
unaided. He wished he had gone down to Denver to hear Fay Templeton sing
"See-Saw." Then he remembered that he had a personal interest in this
family, after all. They turned into another street and saw before them
lighted windows; a low story-and-a-half house, with a wing built on at
the right and a kitchen addition at the back, everything a little on the
slant--roofs, windows, and doors. As they approached the gate, Peter
Kronborg's pace grew brisker. His nervous, ministerial cough annoyed the
doctor. "Exactly as if he were going to give out a text," he thought. He
drew off his glove and felt in his vest pocket. "Have a troche,
Kronborg," he said, producing some. "Sent me for samples. Very good for
a rough throat."

"Ah, thank you, thank you. I was in something of a hurry. I neglected to
put on my overshoes. Here we are, doctor." Kronborg opened his front
door--seemed delighted to be at home again.

The front hall was dark and cold; the hatrack was hung with an
astonishing number of children's hats and caps and cloaks. They were
even piled on the table beneath the hatrack. Under the table was a heap
of rubbers and overshoes. While the doctor hung up his coat and hat,
Peter Kronborg opened the door into the living-room. A glare of light
greeted them, and a rush of hot, stale air, smelling of warming
flannels.

At three o'clock in the morning Dr. Archie was in the parlor putting on
his cuffs and coat--there was no spare bedroom in that house. Peter
Kronborg's seventh child, a boy, was being soothed and cosseted by his
aunt, Mrs. Kronborg was asleep, and the doctor was going home. But he
wanted first to speak to Kronborg, who, coatless and fluttery, was
pouring coal into the kitchen stove. As the doctor crossed the
dining-room he paused and listened. From one of the wing rooms, off to
the left, he heard rapid, distressed breathing. He went to the kitchen
door.

"One of the children sick in there?" he asked, nodding toward the
partition.

Kronborg hung up the stove-lifter and dusted his fingers. "It must be
Thea. I meant to ask you to look at her. She has a croupy cold. But in
my excitement--Mrs. Kronborg is doing finely, eh, doctor? Not many of
your patients with such a constitution, I expect."

"Oh, yes. She's a fine mother." The doctor took up the lamp from the
kitchen table and unceremoniously went into the wing room. Two chubby
little boys were asleep in a double bed, with the coverlids over their
noses and their feet drawn up. In a single bed, next to theirs, lay a
little girl of eleven, wide awake, two yellow braids sticking up on the
pillow behind her. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were blazing.

The doctor shut the door behind him. "Feel pretty sick, Thea?" he asked
as he took out his thermometer. "Why didn't you call somebody?"

She looked at him with greedy affection. "I thought you were here," she
spoke between quick breaths. "There is a new baby, isn't there? Which?"

"Which?" repeated the doctor.

"Brother or sister?"

He smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. "Brother," he said,
taking her hand. "Open."

"Good. Brothers are better," she murmured as he put the glass tube under
her tongue.

"Now, be still, I want to count." Dr. Archie reached for her hand and
took out his watch. When he put her hand back under the quilt he went
over to one of the windows--they were both tight shut--and lifted it a
little way. He reached up and ran his hand along the cold, unpapered
wall. "Keep under the covers; I'll come back to you in a moment," he
said, bending over the glass lamp with his thermometer. He winked at her
from the door before he shut it.

Peter Kronborg was sitting in his wife's room, holding the bundle which
contained his son. His air of cheerful importance, his beard and
glasses, even his shirt-sleeves, annoyed the doctor. He beckoned
Kronborg into the living-room and said sternly:--

"You've got a very sick child in there. Why didn't you call me before?
It's pneumonia, and she must have been sick for several days. Put the
baby down somewhere, please, and help me make up the bed-lounge here in
the parlor. She's got to be in a warm room, and she's got to be quiet.
You must keep the other children out. Here, this thing opens up, I see,"
swinging back the top of the carpet lounge. "We can lift her mattress
and carry her in just as she is. I don't want to disturb her more than
is necessary."

Kronborg was all concern immediately. The two men took up the mattress
and carried the sick child into the parlor. "I'll have to go down to my
office to get some medicine, Kronborg. The drug store won't be open.
Keep the covers on her. I won't be gone long. Shake down the stove and
put on a little coal, but not too much; so it'll catch quickly, I mean.
Find an old sheet for me, and put it there to warm."

The doctor caught his coat and hurried out into the dark street. Nobody
was stirring yet, and the cold was bitter. He was tired and hungry and
in no mild humor. "The idea!" he muttered; "to be such an ass at his
age, about the seventh! And to feel no responsibility about the little
girl. Silly old goat! The baby would have got into the world somehow;
they always do. But a nice little girl like that--she's worth the whole
litter. Where she ever got it from--" He turned into the Duke Block and
ran up the stairs to his office.

Thea Kronborg, meanwhile, was wondering why she happened to be in the
parlor, where nobody but company--usually visiting preachers--ever
slept. She had moments of stupor when she did not see anything, and
moments of excitement when she felt that something unusual and pleasant
was about to happen, when she saw everything clearly in the red light
from the isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner--the nickel trimmings
on the stove itself, the pictures on the wall, which she thought very
beautiful, the flowers on the Brussels carpet, Czerny's "Daily Studies"
which stood open on the upright piano. She forgot, for the time being,
all about the new baby.

When she heard the front door open, it occurred to her that the pleasant
thing which was going to happen was Dr. Archie himself. He came in and
warmed his hands at the stove. As he turned to her, she threw herself
wearily toward him, half out of her bed. She would have tumbled to the
floor had he not caught her. He gave her some medicine and went to the
kitchen for something he needed. She drowsed and lost the sense of his
being there. When she opened her eyes again, he was kneeling before the
stove, spreading something dark and sticky on a white cloth, with a big
spoon; batter, perhaps. Presently she felt him taking off her nightgown.
He wrapped the hot plaster about her chest. There seemed to be straps
which he pinned over her shoulders. Then he took out a thread and needle
and began to sew her up in it. That, she felt, was too strange; she must
be dreaming anyhow, so she succumbed to her drowsiness.

Thea had been moaning with every breath since the doctor came back, but
she did not know it. She did not realize that she was suffering pain.
When she was conscious at all, she seemed to be separated from her body;
to be perched on top of the piano, or on the hanging lamp, watching the
doctor sew her up. It was perplexing and unsatisfactory, like dreaming.
She wished she could waken up and see what was going on.

The doctor thanked God that he had persuaded Peter Kronborg to keep out
of the way. He could do better by the child if he had her to himself. He
had no children of his own. His marriage was a very unhappy one. As he
lifted and undressed Thea, he thought to himself what a beautiful thing
a little girl's body was,--like a flower. It was so neatly and
delicately fashioned, so soft, and so milky white. Thea must have got
her hair and her silky skin from her mother. She was a little Swede,
through and through. Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would
cherish a little creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so
little and hot, so clever, too,--he glanced at the open exercise book on
the piano. When he had stitched up the flaxseed jacket, he wiped it
neatly about the edges, where the paste had worked out on the skin. He
put on her the clean nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and tucked
the blankets about her. As he pushed back the hair that had fuzzed down
over her eyebrows, he felt her head thoughtfully with the tips of his
fingers. No, he couldn't say that it was different from any other
child's head, though he believed that there was something very different
about her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose,
fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin--the one soft touch
in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had
caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually
drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her
affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make
up the doctor's life in Moonstone.

The windows grew gray. He heard a tramping on the attic floor, on the
back stairs, then cries: "Give me my shirt!" "Where's my other
stocking?"

"I'll have to stay till they get off to school," he reflected, "or
they'll be in here tormenting her, the whole lot of them."



II


For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might
slip through his hands, do what he might. But she did not. On the
contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her father remarked,
she must have inherited the "constitution" which he was never tired of
admiring in her mother.

One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found
Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight
was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a
big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand
and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy forehead
and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her mother's
room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed darning
stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck and a
determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and
unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in
bed, still looked like a girl's. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie
respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined.
Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had
brought her husband some property, too,--one fourth of her father's
broad acres in Nebraska,--but this she kept in her own name. She had
profound respect for her husband's erudition and eloquence. She sat
under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by his
stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by
lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the
pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his administration of
worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at
table; she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever
parental sentiment there was in the house, to remember birthdays and
anniversaries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals. It
was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and their conduct in
some sort of order, and this she accomplished with a success that was a
source of wonder to her neighbors. As she used to remark, and her
husband admiringly to echo, she "had never lost one." With all his
flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact, punctual way
in which his wife got her children into the world and along in it. He
believed, and he was right in believing, that the sovereign State of
Colorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.

Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in
heaven. More modern views would not have startled her; they would simply
have seemed foolish--thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built
the tower of Babel, or like Axel's plan to breed ostriches in the
chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on
this and other matters, it would have been difficult to say, but once
formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questioned her
convictions than she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even
tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong prejudices, and she
never forgave.

When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg was reflecting that
the washing was a week behind, and deciding what she had better do about
it. The arrival of a new baby meant a revision of her entire domestic
schedule, and as she drove her needle along she had been working out new
sleeping arrangements and cleaning days. The doctor had entered the
house without knocking, after making noise enough in the hall to prepare
his patients. Thea was reading, her book propped up before her in the
sunlight.

"Mustn't do that; bad for your eyes," he said, as Thea shut the book
quickly and slipped it under the covers.

Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: "Bring the baby here, doctor, and
have that chair. She wanted him in there for company."

Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow paper bag down on
Thea's coverlid and winked at her. They had a code of winks and
grimaces. When he went in to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag
cautiously, trying to keep it from crackling. She drew out a long bunch
of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they had been
packed still clinging to them. They were called Malaga grapes in
Moonstone, and once or twice during the winter the leading grocer got a
keg of them. They were used mainly for table decoration, about
Christmas-time. Thea had never had more than one grape at a time before.
When the doctor came back she was holding the almost transparent fruit
up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green skins softly with the tips of
her fingers. She did not thank him; she only snapped her eyes at him in
a special way which he understood, and, when he gave her his hand, put
it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if she were trying to do so
without knowing it--and without his knowing it.

Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair. "And how's Thea feeling
to-day?"

He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a third person
overheard his conversation. Big and handsome and superior to his fellow
townsmen as Dr. Archie was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter
Kronborg he often dodged behind a professional manner. There was
sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self consciousness all over
his big body, which made him awkward--likely to stumble, to kick up
rugs, or to knock over chairs. If any one was very sick, he forgot
himself, but he had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.

Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with pleasure. "All right.
I like to be sick. I have more fun then than other times."

"How's that?"

"I don't have to go to school, and I don't have to practice. I can read
all I want to, and have good things,"--she patted the grapes. "I had
lots of fun that time I mashed my finger and you wouldn't let Professor
Wunsch make me practice. Only I had to do left hand, even then. I think
that was mean."

The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger, where the nail had
grown back a little crooked. "You mustn't trim it down close at the
corner there, and then it will grow straight. You won't want it crooked
when you're a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts."

She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his new scarf-pin.
"That's the prettiest one you ev-ER had. I wish you'd stay a long while
and let me look at it. What is it?"

Dr. Archie laughed. "It's an opal. Spanish Johnny brought it up for me
from Chihuahua in his shoe. I had it set in Denver, and I wore it to-day
for your benefit."

Thea had a curious passion for jewelry. She wanted every shining stone
she saw, and in summer she was always going off into the sand hills to
hunt for crystals and agates and bits of pink chalcedony. She had two
cigar boxes full of stones that she had found or traded for, and she
imagined that they were of enormous value. She was always planning how
she would have them set.

"What are you reading?" The doctor reached under the covers and pulled
out a book of Byron's poems. "Do you like this?"

She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly, and pointed to "My
native land, good-night." "That," she said sheepishly.

"How about `Maid of Athens'?"

She blushed and looked at him suspiciously. "I like 'There was a sound
of revelry,'" she muttered.

The doctor laughed and closed the book. It was clumsily bound in padded
leather and had been presented to the Reverend Peter Kronborg by his
Sunday-School class as an ornament for his parlor table.

"Come into the office some day, and I'll lend you a nice book. You can
skip the parts you don't understand. You can read it in vacation.
Perhaps you'll be able to understand all of it by then."

Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano. "In vacation I have
to practice four hours every day, and then there'll be Thor to take care
of." She pronounced it "Tor."

"Thor? Oh, you've named the baby Thor?" exclaimed the doctor.

Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly, "That's a
nice name, only maybe it's a little--old fashioned." She was very
sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact
that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish
English, at that, one might add.

Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter Kronborg had been
sent to a small divinity school in Indiana by the women of a Swedish
evangelical mission, who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and
begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth through the
seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and to bury the
members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his
Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he had learned
out of books at college. He always spoke of "the infant Saviour," "our
Heavenly Father," etc. The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human
speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate.
Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due to the fact that he
habitually expressed himself in a book learned language, wholly remote
from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish
to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial
English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until
she went to school never spoke at all, except in monosyllables, and her
mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied. She was still inept in
speech for a child so intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she
seldom attempted to explain them, even at school, where she excelled in
"written work" and never did more than mutter a reply.

"Your music professor stopped me on the street to-day and asked me how
you were," said the doctor, rising. "He'll be sick himself, trotting
around in this slush with no overcoat or overshoes."

"He's poor," said Thea simply.

The doctor sighed. "I'm afraid he's worse than that. Is he always all
right when you take your lessons? Never acts as if he'd been drinking?"

Thea looked angry and spoke excitedly. "He knows a lot. More than
anybody. I don't care if he does drink; he's old and poor." Her voice
shook a little.

Mrs. Kronborg spoke up from the next room. "He's a good teacher, doctor.
It's good for us he does drink. He'd never be in a little place like
this if he didn't have some weakness. These women that teach music
around here don't know nothing. I wouldn't have my child wasting time
with them. If Professor Wunsch goes away, Thea'll have nobody to take
from. He's careful with his scholars; he don't use bad language. Mrs.
Kohler is always present when Thea takes her lesson. It's all right."
Mrs. Kronborg spoke calmly and judicially. One could see that she had
thought the matter out before.

"I'm glad to hear that, Mrs. Kronborg. I wish we could get the old man
off his bottle and keep him tidy. Do you suppose if I gave you an old
overcoat you could get him to wear it?" The doctor went to the bedroom
door and Mrs. Kronborg looked up from her darning.

"Why, yes, I guess he'd be glad of it. He'll take most anything from me.
He won't buy clothes, but I guess he'd wear 'em if he had 'em. I've
never had any clothes to give him, having so many to make over for."

"I'll have Larry bring the coat around to-night. You aren't cross with
me, Thea?" taking her hand.

Thea grinned warmly. "Not if you give Professor Wunsch a coat--and
things," she tapped the grapes significantly. The doctor bent over and
kissed her.



III


Being sick was all very well, but Thea knew from experience that
starting back to school again was attended by depressing difficulties.
One Monday morning she got up early with Axel and Gunner, who shared her
wing room, and hurried into the back living-room, between the
dining-room and the kitchen. There, beside a soft-coal stove, the
younger children of the family undressed at night and dressed in the
morning. The older daughter, Anna, and the two big boys slept upstairs,
where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The
first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean,
prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of
breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as
she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter underwear
was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because
she happened to have the most sensitive skin. While she was tugging it
on, her Aunt Tillie brought in warm water from the boiler and filled the
tin pitcher. Thea washed her face, brushed and braided her hair, and got
into her blue cashmere dress. Over this she buttoned a long apron, with
sleeves, which would not be removed until she put on her cloak to go to
school. Gunner and Axel, on the soap box behind the stove, had their
usual quarrel about which should wear the tightest stockings, but they
exchanged reproaches in low tones, for they were wholesomely afraid of
Mrs. Kronborg's rawhide whip. She did not chastise her children often,
but she did it thoroughly. Only a somewhat stern system of discipline
could have kept any degree of order and quiet in that overcrowded house.

Mrs. Kronborg's children were all trained to dress themselves at the
earliest possible age, to make their own beds,--the boys as well as the
girls,--to take care of their clothes, to eat what was given them, and
to keep out of the way. Mrs. Kronborg would have made a good chess
player; she had a head for moves and positions.

Anna, the elder daughter, was her mother's lieutenant. All the children
knew that they must obey Anna, who was an obstinate contender for
proprieties and not always fair minded. To see the young Kronborgs
headed for Sunday School was like watching a military drill. Mrs.
Kronborg let her children's minds alone. She did not pry into their
thoughts or nag them. She respected them as individuals, and outside of
the house they had a great deal of liberty. But their communal life was
definitely ordered.

In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen; Gus and Charley
and Anna first, while the younger children were dressing. Gus was
nineteen and was a clerk in a dry-goods store. Charley, eighteen months
younger, worked in a feed store. They left the house by the kitchen door
at seven o'clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt Tillie get the breakfast
for the younger ones. Without the help of this sister-in-law, Tillie
Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg's life would have been a hard one. Mrs. Kronborg
often reminded Anna that "no hired help would ever have taken the same
interest."

Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from a lowly,
ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of Sweden. His
great-grandfather had gone to Norway to work as a farm laborer and had
married a Norwegian girl. This strain of Norwegian blood came out
somewhere in each generation of the Kronborgs. The intemperance of one
of Peter Kronborg's uncles, and the religious mania of another, had been
alike charged to the Norwegian grandmother. Both Peter Kronborg and his
sister Tillie were more like the Norwegian root of the family than like
the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was strong in Thea, though
in her it took a very different character.

Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl at
thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes--which taste, as Mrs.
Kronborg philosophically said, did nobody any harm. Tillie was always
cheerful, and her tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the day.
She had been cruelly overworked on her father's Minnesota farm when she
was a young girl, and she had never been so happy as she was now; had
never before, as she said, had such social advantages. She thought her
brother the most important man in Moonstone. She never missed a church
service, and, much to the embarrassment of the children, she always
"spoke a piece" at the Sunday-School concerts. She had a complete set of
"Standard Recitations," which she conned on Sundays. This morning, when
Thea and her two younger brothers sat down to breakfast, Tillie was
remonstrating with Gunner because he had not learned a recitation
assigned to him for George Washington Day at school. The unmemorized
text lay heavily on Gunner's conscience as he attacked his buckwheat
cakes and sausage. He knew that Tillie was in the right, and that "when
the day came he would be ashamed of himself."

"I don't care," he muttered, stirring his coffee; "they oughtn't to make
boys speak. It's all right for girls. They like to show off."

"No showing off about it. Boys ought to like to speak up for their
country. And what was the use of your father buying you a new suit, if
you're not going to take part in anything?"

"That was for Sunday-School. I'd rather wear my old one, anyhow. Why
didn't they give the piece to Thea?" Gunner grumbled.

Tillie was turning buckwheat cakes at the griddle. "Thea can play and
sing, she don't need to speak. But you've got to know how to do
something, Gunner, that you have. What are you going to do when you git
big and want to git into society, if you can't do nothing? Everybody'll
say, `Can you sing? Can you play? Can you speak? Then git right out of
society.' An' that's what they'll say to you, Mr. Gunner."

Gunner and Alex grinned at Anna, who was preparing her mother's
breakfast. They never made fun of Tillie, but they understood well
enough that there were subjects upon which her ideas were rather
foolish. When Tillie struck the shallows, Thea was usually prompt in
turning the conversation.

"Will you and Axel let me have your sled at recess?" she asked.

"All the time?" asked Gunner dubiously.

"I'll work your examples for you to-night, if you do."

"Oh, all right. There'll be a lot of 'em."

"I don't mind, I can work 'em fast. How about yours, Axel?"

Axel was a fat little boy of seven, with pretty, lazy blue eyes. "I
don't care," he murmured, buttering his last buckwheat cake without
ambition; "too much trouble to copy 'em down. Jenny Smiley'll let me
have hers."

The boys were to pull Thea to school on their sled, as the snow was
deep. The three set off together. Anna was now in the high school, and
she no longer went with the family party, but walked to school with some
of the older girls who were her friends, and wore a hat, not a hood like
Thea.



IV


"And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!" Those were the closing words of
Thea's favorite fairy tale, and she thought of them as she ran out into
the world one Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm. She
was going to the Kohlers' to take her lesson, but she was in no hurry.

It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little
overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with
sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had
just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood
trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery
tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for
everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one
had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The
double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in
which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and
the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their
skin.

Thea had to walk more than a mile to reach the Kohlers' house, a very
pleasant mile out of town toward the glittering sand hills,--yellow this
morning, with lines of deep violet where the clefts and valleys were.
She followed the sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town;
then took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where the
Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry sand creek,
across which the railroad track ran on a trestle. Beyond that gulch, on
a little rise of ground that faced the open sandy plain, was the
Kohlers' house, where Professor Wunsch lived. Fritz Kohler was the town
tailor, one of the first settlers. He had moved there, built a little
house and made a garden, when Moonstone was first marked down on the
map. He had three sons, but they now worked on the railroad and were
stationed in distant cities. One of them had gone to work for the Santa
Fe, and lived in New Mexico.

Mrs. Kohler seldom crossed the ravine and went into the town except at
Christmas-time, when she had to buy presents and Christmas cards to send
to her old friends in Freeport, Illinois. As she did not go to church,
she did not possess such a thing as a hat. Year after year she wore the
same red hood in winter and a black sunbonnet in summer. She made her
own dresses; the skirts came barely to her shoe-tops, and were gathered
as full as they could possibly be to the waistband. She preferred men's
shoes, and usually wore the cast-offs of one of her sons. She had never
learned much English, and her plants and shrubs were her companions. She
lived for her men and her garden. Beside that sand gulch, she had tried
to reproduce a bit of her own village in the Rhine Valley. She hid
herself behind the growth she had fostered, lived under the shade of
what she had planted and watered and pruned. In the blaze of the open
plain she was stupid and blind like an owl. Shade, shade; that was what
she was always planning and making. Behind the high tamarisk hedge, her
garden was a jungle of verdure in summer. Above the cherry trees and
peach trees and golden plums stood the windmill, with its tank on
stilts, which kept all this verdure alive. Outside, the sage-brush grew
up to the very edge of the garden, and the sand was always drifting up
to the tamarisks.

Every one in Moonstone was astonished when the Kohlers took the
wandering music-teacher to live with them. In seventeen years old Fritz
had never had a crony, except the harness-maker and Spanish Johnny. This
Wunsch came from God knew where,--followed Spanish Johnny into town when
that wanderer came back from one of his tramps. Wunsch played in the
dance orchestra, tuned pianos, and gave lessons. When Mrs. Kohler
rescued him, he was sleeping in a dirty, unfurnished room over one of
the saloons, and he had only two shirts in the world. Once he was under
her roof, the old woman went at him as she did at her garden. She sewed
and washed and mended for him, and made him so clean and respectable
that he was able to get a large class of pupils and to rent a piano. As
soon as he had money ahead, he sent to the Narrow Gauge lodging-house,
in Denver, for a trunkful of music which had been held there for unpaid
board. With tears in his eyes the old man--he was not over fifty, but
sadly battered--told Mrs. Kohler that he asked nothing better of God
than to end his days with her, and to be buried in the garden, under her
linden trees. They were not American basswood, but the European linden,
which has honey-colored blooms in summer, with a fragrance that
surpasses all trees and flowers and drives young people wild with joy.

Thea was reflecting as she walked along that had it not been for
Professor Wunsch she might have lived on for years in Moonstone without
ever knowing the Kohlers, without ever seeing their garden or the inside
of their house. Besides the cuckoo clock,--which was wonderful enough,
and which Mrs. Kohler said she kept for "company when she was
lonesome,"--the Kohlers had in their house the most wonderful thing Thea
had ever seen--but of that later.

Professor Wunsch went to the houses of his other pupils to give them
their lessons, but one morning he told Mrs. Kronborg that Thea had
talent, and that if she came to him he could teach her in his slippers,
and that would be better. Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word
"talent," which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would
have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there,
it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day and
must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice
four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the piano, just as
a child with measles must be kept under the blankets. Mrs. Kronborg and
her three sisters had all studied piano, and all sang well, but none of
them had talent. Their father had played the oboe in an orchestra in
Sweden, before he came to America to better his fortunes. He had even
known Jenny Lind. A child with talent had to be kept at the piano; so
twice a week in summer and once a week in winter Thea went over the
gulch to the Kohlers', though the Ladies' Aid Society thought it was not
proper for their preacher's daughter to go "where there was so much
drinking." Not that the Kohler sons ever so much as looked at a glass of
beer. They were ashamed of their old folks and got out into the world as
fast as possible; had their clothes made by a Denver tailor and their
necks shaved up under their hair and forgot the past. Old Fritz and
Wunsch, however, indulged in a friendly bottle pretty often. The two men
were like comrades; perhaps the bond between them was the glass wherein
lost hopes are found; perhaps it was common memories of another country;
perhaps it was the grapevine in the garden--knotty, fibrous shrub, full
of homesickness and sentiment, which the Germans have carried around the
world with them.

As Thea approached the house she peeped between the pink sprays of the
tamarisk hedge and saw the Professor and Mrs. Kohler in the garden,
spading and raking. The garden looked like a relief-map now, and gave no
indication of what it would be in August; such a jungle! Pole beans and
potatoes and corn and leeks and kale and red cabbage--there would even
be vegetables for which there is no American name. Mrs. Kohler was
always getting by mail packages of seeds from Freeport and from the old
country. Then the flowers! There were big sunflowers for the canary
bird, tiger lilies and phlox and zinnias and lady's-slippers and
portulaca and hollyhocks,--giant hollyhocks. Beside the fruit trees
there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa, and a balm-of-Gilead, two
lindens, and even a ginka,--a rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped
like butterflies, which shivered, but never bent to the wind.

This morning Thea saw to her delight that the two oleander trees, one
white and one red, had been brought up from their winter quarters in the
cellar. There is hardly a German family in the most arid parts of Utah,
New Mexico, Arizona, but has its oleander trees. However loutish the
American-born sons of the family may be, there was never one who refused
to give his muscle to the back-breaking task of getting those tubbed
trees down into the cellar in the fall and up into the sunlight in the
spring. They may strive to avert the day, but they grapple with the tub
at last.

When Thea entered the gate, her professor leaned his spade against the
white post that supported the turreted dove-house, and wiped his face
with his shirt-sleeve; someway he never managed to have a handkerchief
about him. Wunsch was short and stocky, with something rough and
bear-like about his shoulders. His face was a dark, bricky red, deeply
creased rather than wrinkled, and the skin was like loose leather over
his neck band--he wore a brass collar button but no collar. His hair was
cropped close; iron-gray bristles on a bullet-like head. His eyes were
always suffused and bloodshot. He had a coarse, scornful mouth, and
irregular, yellow teeth, much worn at the edges. His hands were square
and red, seldom clean, but always alive, impatient, even sympathetic.

"MORGEN," he greeted his pupil in a businesslike way, put on a black
alpaca coat, and conducted her at once to the piano in Mrs. Kohler's
sitting-room. He twirled the stool to the proper height, pointed to it,
and sat down in a wooden chair beside Thea.

"The scale of B flat major," he directed, and then fell into an attitude
of deep attention. Without a word his pupil set to work.

To Mrs. Kohler, in the garden, came the cheerful sound of effort, of
vigorous striving. Unconsciously she wielded her rake more lightly.
Occasionally she heard the teacher's voice. "Scale of E minor...WEITER,
WEITER!...IMMER I hear the thumb, like a lame foot. WEITER...WEITER,
once...SCHON! The chords, quick!"

The pupil did not open her mouth until they began the second movement of
the Clementi sonata, when she remonstrated in low tones about the way he
had marked the fingering of a passage.

"It makes no matter what you think," replied her teacher coldly. "There
is only one right way. The thumb there. EIN, ZWEI, DREI, VIER," etc.
Then for an hour there was no further interruption.

At the end of the lesson Thea turned on her stool and leaned her arm on
the keyboard. They usually had a little talk after the lesson.

Herr Wunsch grinned. "How soon is it you are free from school? Then we
make ahead faster, eh?"

"First week in June. Then will you give me the `Invitation to the
Dance'?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "It makes no matter. If you want him, you
play him out of lesson hours."

"All right." Thea fumbled in her pocket and brought out a crumpled slip
of paper. "What does this mean, please? I guess it's Latin."

Wunsch blinked at the line penciled on the paper. "Wherefrom you get
this?" he asked gruffly.

"Out of a book Dr. Archie gave me to read. It's all English but that.
Did you ever see it before?" she asked, watching his face.

"Yes. A long time ago," he muttered, scowling. "Ovidius!" He took a stub
of lead pencil from his vest pocket, steadied his hand by a visible
effort, and under the words:

"LENTE CURRITE, LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI," he wrote in a clear,
elegant Gothic hand,--

"GO SLOWLY, GO SLOWLY, YE STEEDS OF THE NIGHT."

He put the pencil back in his pocket and continued to stare at the
Latin. It recalled the poem, which he had read as a student, and thought
very fine. There were treasures of memory which no lodging-house keeper
could attach. One carried things about in one's head, long after one's
linen could be smuggled out in a tuning-bag. He handed the paper back
to Thea. "There is the English, quite elegant," he said, rising.

Mrs. Kohler stuck her head in at the door, and Thea slid off the stool.
"Come in, Mrs. Kohler," she called, "and show me the piece-picture."

The old woman laughed, pulled off her big gardening gloves, and pushed
Thea to the lounge before the object of her delight. The
"piece-picture," which hung on the wall and nearly covered one whole end
of the room, was the handiwork of Fritz Kohler. He had learned his trade
under an old-fashioned tailor in Magdeburg who required from each of his
apprentices a thesis: that is, before they left his shop, each
apprentice had to copy in cloth some well known German painting,
stitching bits of colored stuff together on a linen background; a kind
of mosaic. The pupil was allowed to select his subject, and Fritz Kohler
had chosen a popular painting of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. The
gloomy Emperor and his staff were represented as crossing a stone
bridge, and behind them was the blazing city, the walls and fortresses
done in gray cloth with orange tongues of flame darting about the domes
and minarets. Napoleon rode his white horse; Murat, in Oriental dress, a
bay charger. Thea was never tired of examining this work, of hearing how
long it had taken Fritz to make it, how much it had been admired, and
what narrow escapes it had had from moths and fire. Silk, Mrs. Kohler
explained, would have been much easier to manage than woolen cloth, in
which it was often hard to get the right shades. The reins of the
horses, the wheels of the spurs, the brooding eyebrows of the Emperor,
Murat's fierce mustaches, the great shakos of the Guard, were all worked
out with the minutest fidelity. Thea's admiration for this picture had
endeared her to Mrs. Kohler. It was now many years since she used to
point out its wonders to her own little boys. As Mrs. Kohler did not go
to church, she never heard any singing, except the songs that floated
over from Mexican Town, and Thea often sang for her after the lesson was
over. This morning Wunsch pointed to the piano.

"On Sunday, when I go by the church, I hear you sing something."

Thea obediently sat down on the stool again and began, "COME, YE
DISCONSOLATE." Wunsch listened thoughtfully, his hands on his knees.
Such a beautiful child's voice! Old Mrs. Kohler's face relaxed in a
smile of happiness; she half closed her eyes. A big fly was darting in
and out of the window; the sunlight made a golden pool on the rag carpet
and bathed the faded cretonne pillows on the lounge, under the
piece-picture. "EARTH HAS NO SORROW THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL," the song
died away.

"That is a good thing to remember," Wunsch shook himself. "You believe
that?" looking quizzically at Thea.

She became confused and pecked nervously at a black key with her middle
finger. "I don't know. I guess so," she murmured.

Her teacher rose abruptly. "Remember, for next time, thirds. You ought
to get up earlier."

That night the air was so warm that Fritz and Herr Wunsch had their
after-supper pipe in the grape arbor, smoking in silence while the sound
of fiddles and guitars came across the ravine from Mexican Town. Long
after Fritz and his old Paulina had gone to bed, Wunsch sat motionless
in the arbor, looking up through the woolly vine leaves at the
glittering machinery of heaven.

"LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI."

That line awoke many memories. He was thinking of youth; of his own, so
long gone by, and of his pupil's, just beginning. He would even have
cherished hopes for her, except that he had become superstitious. He
believed that whatever he hoped for was destined not to be; that his
affection brought ill-fortune, especially to the young; that if he held
anything in his thoughts, he harmed it. He had taught in music schools
in St. Louis and Kansas City, where the shallowness and complacency of
the young misses had maddened him. He had encountered bad manners and
bad faith, had been the victim of sharpers of all kinds, was dogged by
bad luck. He had played in orchestras that were never paid and wandering
opera troupes which disbanded penniless. And there was always the old
enemy, more relentless than the others. It was long since he had wished
anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the body. Now
that he was tempted to hope for another, he felt alarmed and shook his
head.

It was his pupil's power of application, her rugged will, that
interested him. He had lived for so long among people whose sole
ambition was to get something for nothing that he had learned not to
look for seriousness in anything. Now that he by chance encountered it,
it recalled standards, ambitions, a society long forgot. What was it she
reminded him of? A yellow flower, full of sunlight, perhaps. No; a thin
glass full of sweet-smelling, sparkling Moselle wine. He seemed to see
such a glass before him in the arbor, to watch the bubbles rising and
breaking, like the silent discharge of energy in the nerves and brain,
the rapid florescence in young blood--Wunsch felt ashamed and dragged
his slippers along the path to the kitchen, his eyes on the ground.



V


The children in the primary grades were sometimes required to make
relief maps of Moonstone in sand. Had they used colored sands, as the
Navajo medicine men do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have
indicated the social classifications of Moonstone, since these conformed
to certain topographical boundaries, and every child understood them
perfectly.

The main business street ran, of course, through the center of the town.
To the west of this street lived all the people who were, as Tillie
Kronborg said, "in society." Sylvester Street, the third parallel with
Main Street on the west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings
were built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from the
court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie's house, its big
yard and garden surrounded by a white paling fence. The Methodist Church
was in the center of the town, facing the court-house square. The
Kronborgs lived half a mile south of the church, on the long street that
stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement. This was the first
street west of Main, and was built up only on one side. The preacher's
house faced the backs of the brick and frame store buildings and a draw
full of sunflowers and scraps of old iron. The sidewalk which ran in
front of the Kronborgs' house was the one continuous sidewalk to the
depot, and all the train men and roundhouse employees passed the front
gate every time they came uptown. Thea and Mrs. Kronborg had many
friends among the railroad men, who often paused to chat across the
fence, and of one of these we shall have more to say.

In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street, toward the deep
ravine which, farther south, wound by Mexican Town, lived all the
humbler citizens, the people who voted but did not run for office. The
houses were little story-and-a-half cottages, with none of the fussy
architectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street. They
nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Virginia creeper; their
occupants had no social pretensions to keep up. There were no half-glass
front doors with doorbells, or formidable parlors behind closed
shutters. Here the old women washed in the back yard, and the men sat in
the front doorway and smoked their pipes. The people on Sylvester Street
scarcely knew that this part of the town existed. Thea liked to take
Thor and her express wagon and explore these quiet, shady streets, where
the people never tried to have lawns or to grow elms and pine trees, but
let the native timber have its way and spread in luxuriance. She had
many friends there, old women who gave her a yellow rose or a spray of
trumpet vine and appeased Thor with a cooky or a doughnut. They called
Thea "that preacher's girl," but the demonstrative was misplaced, for
when they spoke of Mr. Kronborg they called him "the Methodist
preacher."

Dr. Archie was very proud of his yard and garden, which he worked
himself. He was the only man in Moonstone who was successful at growing
rambler roses, and his strawberries were famous. One morning when Thea
was downtown on an errand, the doctor stopped her, took her hand and
went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly always did when they
met.

"You haven't been up to my place to get any strawberries yet, Thea.
They're at their best just now. Mrs. Archie doesn't know what to do with
them all. Come up this afternoon. Just tell Mrs. Archie I sent you.
Bring a big basket and pick till you are tired."

When she got home Thea told her mother that she didn't want to go,
because she didn't like Mrs. Archie.

"She is certainly one queer woman," Mrs. Kronborg assented, "but he's
asked you so often, I guess you'll have to go this time. She won't bite
you."

After dinner Thea took a basket, put Thor in his baby buggy, and set out
for Dr. Archie's house at the other end of town. As soon as she came
within sight of the house, she slackened her pace. She approached it
very slowly, stopping often to pick dandelions and sand-peas for Thor to
crush up in his fist.

It was his wife's custom, as soon as Dr. Archie left the house in the
morning, to shut all the doors and windows to keep the dust out, and to
pull down the shades to keep the sun from fading the carpets. She
thought, too, that neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house
was closed up. She was one of those people who are stingy without motive
or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it. She must have known
that skimping the doctor in heat and food made him more extravagant than
he would have been had she made him comfortable. He never came home for
lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and shreds of food. No
matter how much milk he bought, he could never get thick cream for his
strawberries. Even when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in
smooth, ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-hand, to
dilute it before it got to the breakfast table. The butcher's favorite
joke was about the kind of meat he sold Mrs. Archie. She felt no
interest in food herself, and she hated to prepare it. She liked nothing
better than to have Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days--he often
went chiefly because he was hungry--and to be left alone to eat canned
salmon and to keep the house shut up from morning until night.

Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said, "they ate too
much and broke too much"; she even said they knew too much. She used
what mind she had in devising shifts to minimize her housework. She used
to tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would be no
housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married, she had been always in a
panic for fear she would have children. Now that her apprehensions on
that score had grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having dust
in the house as she had once been of having children in it. If dust did
not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said. She would take any
amount of trouble to avoid trouble. Why, nobody knew. Certainly her
husband had never been able to make her out. Such little, mean natures
are among the darkest and most baffling of created things. There is no
law by which they can be explained. The ordinary incentives of pain and
pleasure do not account for their behavior. They live like insects,
absorbed in petty activities that seem to have nothing to do with any
genial aspect of human life.

Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, "liked to gad." She liked to have
her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and to be out of it--anywhere. A
church social, a prayer meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no
preference. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit for hours
in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, listening to the talk of
the women who came in, watching them while they tried on hats, blinking
at them from her corner with her sharp, restless little eyes. She never
talked much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town and she had
a sharp ear for racy anecdotes--"traveling men's stories," they used to
be called in Moonstone. Her clicking laugh sounded like a typewriting
machine in action, and, for very pointed stories, she had a little
screech.

Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years, and when she was
Belle White she was one of the "pretty" girls in Lansing, Michigan. She
had then a train of suitors. She could truly remind Archie that "the
boys hung around her." They did. They thought her very spirited and were
always saying, "Oh, that Belle White, she's a case!" She used to play
heavy practical jokes which the young men thought very clever. Archie
was considered the most promising young man in "the young crowd," so
Belle selected him. She let him see, made him fully aware, that she had
selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who could not withstand
such enlightenment. Belle's family were sorry for him. On his wedding
day her sisters looked at the big, handsome boy--he was twenty-four--as
he walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they looked at each
other. His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant face, his gentle,
protecting arm, made them uncomfortable. Well, they were glad that he
was going West at once, to fulfill his doom where they would not be
onlookers. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off
their hands.

More than that, Belle seemed to have got herself off her hands. Her
reputed prettiness must have been entirely the result of determination,
of a fierce little ambition. Once she had married, fastened herself on
some one, come to port,--it vanished like the ornamental plumage which
drops away from some birds after the mating season. The one aggressive
action of her life was over. She began to shrink in face and stature. Of
her harum-scarum spirit there was nothing left but the little screech.
Within a few years she looked as small and mean as she was.

Thor's chariot crept along. Thea approached the house unwillingly. She
didn't care about the strawberries, anyhow. She had come only because
she did not want to hurt Dr. Archie's feelings. She not only disliked
Mrs. Archie, she was a little afraid of her. While Thea was getting the
heavy baby-buggy through the iron gate she heard some one call, "Wait a
minute!" and Mrs. Archie came running around the house from the back
door, her apron over her head. She came to help with the buggy, because
she was afraid the wheels might scratch the paint off the gateposts. She
was a skinny little woman with a great pile of frizzy light hair on a
small head.

"Dr. Archie told me to come up and pick some strawberries," Thea
muttered, wishing she had stayed at home.

Mrs. Archie led the way to the back door, squinting and shading her eyes
with her hand. "Wait a minute," she said again, when Thea explained why
she had come.

She went into her kitchen and Thea sat down on the porch step. When Mrs.
Archie reappeared she carried in her hand a little wooden butter-basket
trimmed with fringed tissue paper, which she must have brought home from
some church supper. "You'll have to have something to put them in," she
said, ignoring the yawning willow basket which stood empty on Thor's
feet. "You can have this, and you needn't mind about returning it. You
know about not trampling the vines, don't you?"

Mrs. Archie went back into the house and Thea leaned over in the sand
and picked a few strawberries. As soon as she was sure that she was not
going to cry, she tossed the little basket into the big one and ran
Thor's buggy along the gravel walk and out of the gate as fast as she
could push it. She was angry, and she was ashamed for Dr. Archie. She
could not help thinking how uncomfortable he would be if he ever found
out about it. Little things like that were the ones that cut him most.
She slunk home by the back way, and again almost cried when she told her
mother about it.

Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband's supper. She laughed
as she dropped a new lot into the hot grease. "It's wonderful, the way
some people are made," she declared. "But I wouldn't let that upset me
if I was you. Think what it would be to live with it all the time. You
look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and take a dime and go
downtown and get an ice-cream soda. That'll make you feel better. Thor
can have a little of the ice-cream if you feed it to him with a spoon.
He likes it, don't you, son?" She stooped to wipe his chin. Thor was
only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite true that he
liked ice-cream.



VI


Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah's ark town
set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and
cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their
turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the
North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail,
brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting,
wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water
and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain.
The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break
into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water.

The long street which connected Moonstone with the depot settlement
traversed in its course a considerable stretch of rough open country,
staked out in lots but not built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the
town and the railroad. When you set out along this street to go to the
station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and farther apart,
until they ceased altogether, and the board sidewalk continued its
uneven course through sunflower patches, until you reached the solitary,
new brick Catholic Church. The church stood there because the land was
given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining waste lots, in
the hope of making them more salable--"Farrier's Addition," this patch
of prairie was called in the clerk's office. An eighth of a mile beyond
the church was a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk
became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the gully was old
Uncle Billy Beemer's grove,--twelve town lots set out in fine,
well-grown cottonwood trees, delightful to look upon, or to listen to,
as they swayed and rippled in the wind. Uncle Billy had been one of the
most worthless old drunkards who ever sat on a store box and told filthy
stories. One night he played hide-and-seek with a switch engine and got
his sodden brains knocked out. But his grove, the one creditable thing
he had ever done in his life, rustled on. Beyond this grove the houses
of the depot settlement began, and the naked board walk, that had run in
out of the sunflowers, again became a link between human dwellings.

One afternoon, late in the summer, Dr. Howard Archie was fighting his
way back to town along this walk through a blinding sandstorm, a silk
handkerchief tied over his mouth. He had been to see a sick woman down
in the depot settlement, and he was walking because his ponies had been
out for a hard drive that morning.

As he passed the Catholic Church he came upon Thea and Thor. Thea was
sitting in a child's express wagon, her feet out behind, kicking the
wagon along and steering by the tongue. Thor was on her lap and she held
him with one arm. He had grown to be a big cub of a baby, with a
constitutional grievance, and he had to be continually amused. Thea took
him philosophically, and tugged and pulled him about, getting as much
fun as she could under her encumbrance. Her hair was blowing about her
face, and her eyes were squinting so intently at the uneven board
sidewalk in front of her that she did not see the doctor until he spoke
to her.

"Look out, Thea. You'll steer that youngster into the ditch."

The wagon stopped. Thea released the tongue, wiped her hot, sandy face,
and pushed back her hair. "Oh, no, I won't! I never ran off but once,
and then he didn't get anything but a bump. He likes this better than a
baby buggy, and so do I."

"Are you going to kick that cart all the way home?"

"Of course. We take long trips; wherever there is a sidewalk. It's no
good on the road."

"Looks to me like working pretty hard for your fun. Are you going to be
busy to-night? Want to make a call with me? Spanish Johnny's come home
again, all used up. His wife sent me word this morning, and I said I'd
go over to see him to-night. He's an old chum of yours, isn't he?"

"Oh, I'm glad. She's been crying her eyes out. When did he come?"

"Last night, on Number Six. Paid his fare, they tell me. Too sick to
beat it. There'll come a time when that boy won't get back, I'm afraid.
Come around to my office about eight o'clock,--and you needn't bring
that!"

Thor seemed to understand that he had been insulted, for he scowled and
began to kick the side of the wagon, shouting, "Go-go, go-go!" Thea
leaned forward and grabbed the wagon tongue. Dr. Archie stepped in front
of her and blocked the way. "Why don't you make him wait? What do you
let him boss you like that for?"

"If he gets mad he throws himself, and then I can't do anything with
him. When he's mad he's lots stronger than me, aren't you, Thor?" Thea
spoke with pride, and the idol was appeased. He grunted approvingly as
his sister began to kick rapidly behind her, and the wagon rattled off
and soon disappeared in the flying currents of sand.

That evening Dr. Archie was seated in his office, his desk chair tilted
back, reading by the light of a hot coal-oil lamp. All the windows were
open, but the night was breathless after the sandstorm, and his hair was
moist where it hung over his forehead. He was deeply engrossed in his
book and sometimes smiled thoughtfully as he read. When Thea Kronborg
entered quietly and slipped into a seat, he nodded, finished his
paragraph, inserted a bookmark, and rose to put the book back into the
case. It was one out of the long row of uniform volumes on the top
shelf.

"Nearly every time I come in, when you're alone, you're reading one of
those books," Thea remarked thoughtfully. "They must be very nice."

The doctor dropped back into his swivel chair, the mottled volume still
in his hand. "They aren't exactly books, Thea," he said seriously.
"They're a city."

"A history, you mean?"

"Yes, and no. They're a history of a live city, not a dead one. A
Frenchman undertook to write about a whole cityful of people, all the
kinds he knew. And he got them nearly all in, I guess. Yes, it's very
interesting. You'll like to read it some day, when you're grown up."

Thea leaned forward and made out the title on the back, "A Distinguished
Provincial in Paris."

"It doesn't sound very interesting."

"Perhaps not, but it is." The doctor scrutinized her broad face, low
enough to be in the direct light from under the green lamp shade. "Yes,"
he went on with some satisfaction, "I think you'll like them some day.
You're always curious about people, and I expect this man knew more
about people than anybody that ever lived."

"City people or country people?"

"Both. People are pretty much the same everywhere."

"Oh, no, they're not. The people who go through in the dining-car aren't
like us."

"What makes you think they aren't, my girl? Their clothes?"

Thea shook her head. "No, it's something else. I don't know." Her eyes
shifted under the doctor's searching gaze and she glanced up at the row
of books. "How soon will I be old enough to read them?"

"Soon enough, soon enough, little girl." The doctor patted her hand and
looked at her index finger. "The nail's coming all right, isn't it? But
I think that man makes you practice too much. You have it on your mind
all the time." He had noticed that when she talked to him she was always
opening and shutting her hands. "It makes you nervous."

"No, he don't," Thea replied stubbornly, watching Dr. Archie return the
book to its niche.

He took up a black leather case, put on his hat, and they went down the
dark stairs into the street. The summer moon hung full in the sky. For
the time being, it was the great fact in the world. Beyond the edge of
the town the plain was so white that every clump of sage stood out
distinct from the sand, and the dunes looked like a shining lake. The
doctor took off his straw hat and carried it in his hand as they walked
toward Mexican Town, across the sand.

North of Pueblo, Mexican settlements were rare in Colorado then. This
one had come about accidentally. Spanish Johnny was the first Mexican
who came to Moonstone. He was a painter and decorator, and had been
working in Trinidad, when Ray Kennedy told him there was a "boom" on in
Moonstone, and a good many new buildings were going up. A year after
Johnny settled in Moonstone, his cousin, Famos Serrenos, came to work in
the brickyard; then Serrenos' cousins came to help him. During the
strike, the master mechanic put a gang of Mexicans to work in the
roundhouse. The Mexicans had arrived so quietly, with their blankets and
musical instruments, that before Moonstone was awake to the fact, there
was a Mexican quarter; a dozen families or more.

As Thea and the doctor approached the 'dobe houses, they heard a guitar,
and a rich barytone voice--that of Famos Serrenos--singing "La
Golandrina." All the Mexican houses had neat little yards, with tamarisk
hedges and flowers, and walks bordered with shells or whitewashed
stones. Johnny's house was dark. His wife, Mrs. Tellamantez, was sitting
on the doorstep, combing her long, blue-black hair. (Mexican women are
like the Spartans; when they are in trouble, in love, under stress of
any kind, they comb and comb their hair.) She rose without embarrassment
or apology, comb in hand, and greeted the doctor.

"Good-evening; will you go in?" she asked in a low, musical voice. "He
is in the back room. I will make a light." She followed them indoors,
lit a candle and handed it to the doctor, pointing toward the bedroom.
Then she went back and sat down on her doorstep.

Dr. Archie and Thea went into the bedroom, which was dark and quiet.
There was a bed in the corner, and a man was lying on the clean sheets.
On the table beside him was a glass pitcher, half-full of water. Spanish
Johnny looked younger than his wife, and when he was in health he was
very handsome: slender, gold-colored, with wavy black hair, a round,
smooth throat, white teeth, and burning black eyes. His profile was
strong and severe, like an Indian's. What was termed his "wildness"
showed itself only in his feverish eyes and in the color that burned on
his tawny cheeks. That night he was a coppery green, and his eyes were
like black holes. He opened them when the doctor held the candle before
his face.

"MI TESTA!" he muttered, "MI TESTA," doctor. "LA FIEBRE!" Seeing the
doctor's companion at the foot of the bed, he attempted a smile.
"MUCHACHA!" he exclaimed deprecatingly.

Dr. Archie stuck a thermometer into his mouth. "Now, Thea, you can run
outside and wait for me."

Thea slipped noiselessly through the dark house and joined Mrs.
Tellamantez. The somber Mexican woman did not seem inclined to talk, but
her nod was friendly. Thea sat down on the warm sand, her back to the
moon, facing Mrs. Tellamantez on her doorstep, and began to count the
moon flowers on the vine that ran over the house. Mrs. Tellamantez was
always considered a very homely woman. Her face was of a strongly marked
type not sympathetic to Americans. Such long, oval faces, with a full
chin, a large, mobile mouth, a high nose, are not uncommon in Spain.
Mrs. Tellamantez could not write her name, and could read but little.
Her strong nature lived upon itself. She was chiefly known in Moonstone
for her forbearance with her incorrigible husband.

Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with Johnny, and everybody liked
him. His popularity would have been unusual for a white man, for a
Mexican it was unprecedented. His talents were his undoing. He had a
high, uncertain tenor voice, and he played the mandolin with exceptional
skill. Periodically he went crazy. There was no other way to explain his
behavior. He was a clever workman, and, when he worked, as regular and
faithful as a burro. Then some night he would fall in with a crowd at
the saloon and begin to sing. He would go on until he had no voice left,
until he wheezed and rasped. Then he would play his mandolin furiously,
and drink until his eyes sank back into his head. At last, when he was
put out of the saloon at closing time, and could get nobody to listen to
him, he would run away--along the railroad track, straight across the
desert. He always managed to get aboard a freight somewhere. Once beyond
Denver, he played his way southward from saloon to saloon until he got
across the border. He never wrote to his wife; but she would soon begin
to get newspapers from La Junta, Albuquerque, Chihuahua, with marked
paragraphs announcing that Juan Tellamantez and his wonderful mandolin
could be heard at the Jack Rabbit Grill, or the Pearl of Cadiz Saloon.
Mrs. Tellamantez waited and wept and combed her hair. When he was
completely wrung out and burned up,--all but destroyed,--her Juan always
came back to her to be taken care of,--once with an ugly knife wound in
the neck, once with a finger missing from his right hand,--but he played
just as well with three fingers as he had with four.

Public sentiment was lenient toward Johnny, but everybody was disgusted
with Mrs. Tellamantez for putting up with him. She ought to discipline
him, people said; she ought to leave him; she had no self-respect. In
short, Mrs. Tellamantez got all the blame. Even Thea thought she was
much too humble. To-night, as she sat with her back to the moon, looking
at the moon flowers and Mrs. Tellamantez's somber face, she was thinking
that there is nothing so sad in the world as that kind of patience and
resignation. It was much worse than Johnny's craziness. She even
wondered whether it did not help to make Johnny crazy. People had no
right to be so passive and resigned. She would like to roll over and
over in the sand and screech at Mrs. Tellamantez. She was glad when the
doctor came out.

The Mexican woman rose and stood respectful and expectant. The doctor
held his hat in his hand and looked kindly at her.

"Same old thing, Mrs. Tellamantez. He's no worse than he's been before.
I've left some medicine. Don't give him anything but toast water until I
see him again. You're a good nurse; you'll get him out." Dr. Archie
smiled encouragingly. He glanced about the little garden and wrinkled
his brows. "I can't see what makes him behave so. He's killing himself,
and he's not a rowdy sort of fellow. Can't you tie him up someway? Can't
you tell when these fits are coming on?"

Mrs. Tellamantez put her hand to her forehead. "The saloon, doctor, the
excitement; that is what makes him. People listen to him, and it excites
him."

The doctor shook his head. "Maybe. He's too much for my calculations. I
don't see what he gets out of it."

"He is always fooled,"--the Mexican woman spoke rapidly and tremulously,
her long under lip quivering.

"He is good at heart, but he has no head. He fools himself. You do not
understand in this country, you are progressive. But he has no judgment,
and he is fooled." She stooped quickly, took up one of the white
conch-shells that bordered the walk, and, with an apologetic inclination
of her head, held it to Dr. Archie's ear. "Listen, doctor. You hear
something in there? You hear the sea; and yet the sea is very far from
here. You have judgment, and you know that. But he is fooled. To him, it
is the sea itself. A little thing is big to him." She bent and placed
the shell in the white row, with its fellows. Thea took it up softly and
pressed it to her own ear. The sound in it startled her; it was like
something calling one. So that was why Johnny ran away. There was
something awe-inspiring about Mrs. Tellamantez and her shell.

Thea caught Dr. Archie's hand and squeezed it hard as she skipped along
beside him back toward Moonstone. She went home, and the doctor went
back to his lamp and his book. He never left his office until after
midnight. If he did not play whist or pool in the evening, he read. It
had become a habit with him to lose himself.



VII


Thea's twelfth birthday had passed a few weeks before her memorable call
upon Mrs. Tellamantez. There was a worthy man in Moonstone who was
already planning to marry Thea as soon as she should be old enough. His
name was Ray Kennedy, his age was thirty, and he was conductor on a
freight train, his run being from Moonstone to Denver. Ray was a big
fellow, with a square, open American face, a rock chin, and features
that one would never happen to remember. He was an aggressive idealist,
a freethinker, and, like most railroad men, deeply sentimental. Thea
liked him for reasons that had to do with the adventurous life he had
led in Mexico and the Southwest, rather than for anything very personal.
She liked him, too, because he was the only one of her friends who ever
took her to the sand hills. The sand hills were a constant
tantalization; she loved them better than anything near Moonstone, and
yet she could so seldom get to them. The first dunes were accessible
enough; they were only a few miles beyond the Kohlers', and she could
run out there any day when she could do her practicing in the morning
and get Thor off her hands for an afternoon. But the real hills--the
Turquoise Hills, the Mexicans called them--were ten good miles away, and
one reached them by a heavy, sandy road. Dr. Archie sometimes took Thea
on his long drives, but as nobody lived in the sand hills, he never had
calls to make in that direction. Ray Kennedy was her only hope of
getting there.

This summer Thea had not been to the hills once, though Ray had planned
several Sunday expeditions. Once Thor was sick, and once the organist in
her father's church was away and Thea had to play the organ for the
three Sunday services. But on the first Sunday in September, Ray drove
up to the Kronborgs' front gate at nine o'clock in the morning and the
party actually set off. Gunner and Axel went with Thea, and Ray had
asked Spanish Johnny to come and to bring Mrs. Tellamantez and his
mandolin. Ray was artlessly fond of music, especially of Mexican music.
He and Mrs. Tellamantez had got up the lunch between them, and they were
to make coffee in the desert.

When they left Mexican Town, Thea was on the front seat with Ray and
Johnny, and Gunner and Axel sat behind with Mrs. Tellamantez. They
objected to this, of course, but there were some things about which Thea
would have her own way. "As stubborn as a Finn," Mrs. Kronborg sometimes
said of her, quoting an old Swedish saying. When they passed the
Kohlers', old Fritz and Wunsch were cutting grapes at the arbor. Thea
gave them a businesslike nod. Wunsch came to the gate and looked after
them. He divined Ray Kennedy's hopes, and he distrusted every expedition
that led away from the piano. Unconsciously he made Thea pay for
frivolousness of this sort.

As Ray Kennedy's party followed the faint road across the sagebrush,
they heard behind them the sound of church bells, which gave them a
sense of escape and boundless freedom. Every rabbit that shot across the
path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway
thought, a message that one sent into the desert. As they went farther,
the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a
shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the
sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned
loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to a
preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts
standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years
actually washed over that desert;--the mirage itself may be the ghost
of that long-vanished sea. Beyond the phantom lake lay the line of
many-colored hills; rich, sun-baked yellow, glowing turquoise, lavender,
purple; all the open, pastel colors of the desert.

After the first five miles the road grew heavier. The horses had to slow
down to a walk and the wheels sank deep into the sand, which now lay in
long ridges, like waves, where the last high wind had drifted it. Two
hours brought the party to Pedro's Cup, named for a Mexican desperado
who had once held the sheriff at bay there. The Cup was a great
amphitheater, cut out in the hills, its floor smooth and packed hard,
dotted with sagebrush and greasewood.

On either side of the Cup the yellow hills ran north and south, with
winding ravines between them, full of soft sand which drained down from
the crumbling banks. On the surface of this fluid sand, one could find
bits of brilliant stone, crystals and agates and onyx, and petrified
wood as red as blood. Dried toads and lizards were to be found there,
too. Birds, decomposing more rapidly, left only feathered skeletons.

After a little reconnoitering, Mrs. Tellamantez declared that it was
time for lunch, and Ray took his hatchet and began to cut greasewood,
which burns fiercely in its green state. The little boys dragged the
bushes to the spot that Mrs. Tellamantez had chosen for her fire.
Mexican women like to cook out of doors.

After lunch Thea sent Gunner and Axel to hunt for agates. "If you see a
rattlesnake, run. Don't try to kill it," she enjoined.

Gunner hesitated. "If Ray would let me take the hatchet, I could kill
one all right."

Mrs. Tellamantez smiled and said something to Johnny in Spanish.

"Yes," her husband replied, translating, "they say in Mexico, kill a
snake but never hurt his feelings. Down in the hot country, MUCHACHA,"
turning to Thea, "people keep a pet snake in the house to kill rats and
mice. They call him the house snake. They keep a little mat for him by
the fire, and at night he curl up there and sit with the family, just as
friendly!"

Gunner sniffed with disgust. "Well, I think that's a dirty Mexican way
to keep house; so there!"

Johnny shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps," he muttered. A Mexican learns
to dive below insults or soar above them, after he crosses the border.

By this time the south wall of the amphitheater cast a narrow shelf of
shadow, and the party withdrew to this refuge. Ray and Johnny began to
talk about the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, two places much shrouded
in mystery in those days, and Thea listened intently. Mrs. Tellamantez
took out her drawn-work and pinned it to her knee. Ray could talk well
about the large part of the continent over which he had been knocked
about, and Johnny was appreciative.

"You been all over, pretty near. Like a Spanish boy," he commented
respectfully.

Ray, who had taken off his coat, whetted his pocketknife thoughtfully on
the sole of his shoe. "I began to browse around early. I had a mind to
see something of this world, and I ran away from home before I was
twelve. Rustled for myself ever since."

"Ran away?" Johnny looked hopeful. "What for?"

"Couldn't make it go with my old man, and didn't take to farming. There
were plenty of boys at home. I wasn't missed."

Thea wriggled down in the hot sand and rested her chin on her arm. "Tell
Johnny about the melons, Ray, please do!"

Ray's solid, sunburned cheeks grew a shade redder, and he looked
reproachfully at Thea. "You're stuck on that story, kid. You like to get
the laugh on me, don't you? That was the finishing split I had with my
old man, John. He had a claim along the creek, not far from Denver, and
raised a little garden stuff for market. One day he had a load of melons
and he decided to take 'em to town and sell 'em along the street, and he
made me go along and drive for him. Denver wasn't the queen city it is
now, by any means, but it seemed a terrible big place to me; and when we
got there, if he didn't make me drive right up Capitol Hill! Pap got out
and stopped at folkses houses to ask if they didn't want to buy any
melons, and I was to drive along slow. The farther I went the madder I
got, but I was trying to look unconscious, when the end-gate came loose
and one of the melons fell out and squashed. Just then a swell girl, all
dressed up, comes out of one of the big houses and calls out, `Hello,
boy, you're losing your melons!' Some dudes on the other side of the
street took their hats off to her and began to laugh. I couldn't stand
it any longer. I grabbed the whip and lit into that team, and they tore
up the hill like jack-rabbits, them damned melons bouncing out the back
every jump, the old man cussin' an' yellin' behind and everybody
laughin'. I never looked behind, but the whole of Capitol Hill must have
been a mess with them squashed melons. I didn't stop the team till I got
out of sight of town. Then I pulled up an' left 'em with a rancher I was
acquainted with, and I never went home to get the lickin' that was
waitin' for me. I expect it's waitin' for me yet."

Thea rolled over in the sand. "Oh, I wish I could have seen those melons
fly, Ray! I'll never see anything as funny as that. Now, tell Johnny
about your first job."

Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and
kindly--perhaps the chief requisites in a good story-teller.
Occasionally he used newspaper phrases, conscientiously learned in his
efforts at self-instruction, but when he talked naturally he was always
worth listening to. Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had,
almost from the time he first ran away, tried to make good his loss. As
a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read
instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary. By the light of
many camp-fires he had pondered upon Prescott's histories, and the works
of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book-agent.
Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general culture came
hard, and he was determined to get it. Ray was a freethinker, and
inconsistently believed himself damned for being one. When he was
braking, down on the Santa Fe, at the end of his run he used to climb
into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker
about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll's
speeches and "The Age of Reason."

Ray was a loyal-hearted fellow, and it had cost him a great deal to give
up his God. He was one of the stepchildren of Fortune, and he had very
little to show for all his hard work; the other fellow always got the
best of it. He had come in too late, or too early, on several schemes
that had made money. He brought with him from all his wanderings a good
deal of information (more or less correct in itself, but unrelated, and
therefore misleading), a high standard of personal honor, a sentimental
veneration for all women, bad as well as good, and a bitter hatred of
Englishmen. Thea often thought that the nicest thing about Ray was his
love for Mexico and the Mexicans, who had been kind to him when he
drifted, a homeless boy, over the border. In Mexico, Ray was Senor
Ken-ay-dy, and when he answered to that name he was somehow a different
fellow. He spoke Spanish fluently, and the sunny warmth of that tongue
kept him from being quite as hard as his chin, or as narrow as his
popular science.

While Ray was smoking his cigar, he and Johnny fell to talking about the
great fortunes that had been made in the Southwest, and about fellows
they knew who had "struck it rich."

"I guess you been in on some big deals down there?" Johnny asked
trustfully.

Ray smiled and shook his head. "I've been out on some, John. I've never
been exactly in on any. So far, I've either held on too long or let go
too soon. But mine's coming to me, all right." Ray looked reflective. He
leaned back in the shadow and dug out a rest for his elbow in the sand.
"The narrowest escape I ever had, was in the Bridal Chamber. If I hadn't
let go there, it would have made me rich. That was a close call."

Johnny looked delighted. "You don' say! She was silver mine, I guess?"

"I guess she was! Down at Lake Valley. I put up a few hundred for the
prospector, and he gave me a bunch of stock. Before we'd got anything
out of it, my brother-in-law died of the fever in Cuba. My sister was
beside herself to get his body back to Colorado to bury him. Seemed
foolish to me, but she's the only sister I got. It's expensive for dead
folks to travel, and I had to sell my stock in the mine to raise the
money to get Elmer on the move. Two months afterward, the boys struck
that big pocket in the rock, full of virgin silver. They named her the
Bridal Chamber. It wasn't ore, you remember. It was pure, soft metal you
could have melted right down into dollars. The boys cut it out with
chisels. If old Elmer hadn't played that trick on me, I'd have been in
for about fifty thousand. That was a close call, Spanish."

"I recollec'. When the pocket gone, the town go bust."

"You bet. Higher'n a kite. There was no vein, just a pocket in the rock
that had sometime or another got filled up with molten silver. You'd
think there would be more somewhere about, but NADA. There's fools
digging holes in that mountain yet."

When Ray had finished his cigar, Johnny took his mandolin and began
Kennedy's favorite, "Ultimo Amor." It was now three o'clock in the
afternoon, the hottest hour in the day. The narrow shelf of shadow had
widened until the floor of the amphitheater was marked off in two
halves, one glittering yellow, and one purple. The little boys had come
back and were making a robbers' cave to enact the bold deeds of Pedro
the bandit. Johnny, stretched gracefully on the sand, passed from
"Ultimo Amor" to "Fluvia de Oro," and then to "Noches de Algeria,"
playing languidly.

Every one was busy with his own thoughts. Mrs. Tellamantez was thinking
of the square in the little town in which she was born; of the white
church steps, with people genuflecting as they passed, and the
round-topped acacia trees, and the band playing in the plaza. Ray
Kennedy was thinking of the future, dreaming the large Western dream of
easy money, of a fortune kicked up somewhere in the hills,--an oil well,
a gold mine, a ledge of copper. He always told himself, when he accepted
a cigar from a newly married railroad man, that he knew enough not to
marry until he had found his ideal, and could keep her like a queen. He
believed that in the yellow head over there in the sand he had found his
ideal, and that by the time she was old enough to marry, he would be
able to keep her like a queen. He would kick it up from somewhere, when
he got loose from the railroad.

Thea, stirred by tales of adventure, of the Grand Canyon and Death
Valley, was recalling a great adventure of her own. Early in the summer
her father had been invited to conduct a reunion of old frontiersmen, up
in Wyoming, near Laramie, and he took Thea along with him to play the
organ and sing patriotic songs. There they stayed at the house of an old
ranchman who told them about a ridge up in the hills called Laramie
Plain, where the wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the Mormons were
still visible. The old man even volunteered to take Mr. Kronborg up into
the hills to see this place, though it was a very long drive to make in
one day. Thea had begged frantically to go along, and the old rancher,
flattered by her rapt attention to his stories, had interceded for her.

They set out from Laramie before daylight, behind a strong team of
mules. All the way there was much talk of the Forty-niners. The old
rancher had been a teamster in a freight train that used to crawl back
and forth across the plains between Omaha and Cherry Creek, as Denver
was then called, and he had met many a wagon train bound for California.
He told of Indians and buffalo, thirst and slaughter, wanderings in
snowstorms, and lonely graves in the desert.

The road they followed was a wild and beautiful one. It led up and up,
by granite rocks and stunted pines, around deep ravines and echoing
gorges. The top of the ridge, when they reached it, was a great flat
plain, strewn with white boulders, with the wind howling over it. There
was not one trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep
furrows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon wheels, and now grown over with
dry, whitish grass. The furrows ran side by side; when one trail had
been worn too deep, the next party had abandoned it and made a new trail
to the right or left. They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts, running
east and west, and grown over with grass. But as Thea ran about among
the white stones, her skirts blowing this way and that, the wind brought
to her eyes tears that might have come anyway. The old rancher picked up
an iron ox-shoe from one of the furrows and gave it to her for a
keepsake. To the west one could see range after range of blue mountains,
and at last the snowy range, with its white, windy peaks, the clouds
caught here and there on their spurs. Again and again Thea had to hide
her face from the cold for a moment. The wind never slept on this plain,
the old man said. Every little while eagles flew over.

Coming up from Laramie, the old man had told them that he was in
Brownsville, Nebraska, when the first telegraph wires were put across
the Missouri River, and that the first message that ever crossed the
river was "Westward the course of Empire takes its way." He had been in
the room when the instrument began to click, and all the men there had,
without thinking what they were doing, taken off their hats, waiting
bareheaded to hear the message translated. Thea remembered that message
when she sighted down the wagon tracks toward the blue mountains. She
told herself she would never, never forget it. The spirit of human
courage seemed to live up there with the eagles. For long after, when
she was moved by a Fourth-of-July oration, or a band, or a circus
parade, she was apt to remember that windy ridge.

To-day she went to sleep while she was thinking about it. When Ray
wakened her, the horses were hitched to the wagon and Gunner and Axel
were begging for a place on the front seat. The air had cooled, the sun
was setting, and the desert was on fire. Thea contentedly took the back
seat with Mrs. Tellamantez. As they drove homeward the stars began to
come out, pale yellow in a yellow sky, and Ray and Johnny began to sing
one of those railroad ditties that are usually born on the Southern
Pacific and run the length of the Santa Fe and the "Q" system before
they die to give place to a new one. This was a song about a Greaser
dance, the refrain being something like this:--


"Pedro, Pedro, swing high, swing low,
And it's allamand left again;
For there's boys that's bold and there's some that's cold,
But the gold boys come from Spain,
Oh, the gold boys come from Spain!"



VIII


Winter was long in coming that year. Throughout October the days were
bathed in sunlight and the air was clear as crystal. The town kept its
cheerful summer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills
every day went through magical changes of color. The scarlet sage
bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood leaves were bright gold
long before they fell, and it was not until November that the green on
the tamarisks began to cloud and fade. There was a flurry of snow about
Thanksgiving, and then December came on warm and clear.

Thea had three music pupils now, little girls whose mothers declared
that Professor Wunsch was "much too severe." They took their lessons on
Saturday, and this, of course, cut down her time for play. She did not
really mind this because she was allowed to use the money--her pupils
paid her twenty-five cents a lesson--to fit up a little room for herself
upstairs in the half-story. It was the end room of the wing, and was not
plastered, but was snugly lined with soft pine. The ceiling was so low
that a grown person could reach it with the palm of the hand, and it
sloped down on either side. There was only one window, but it was a
double one and went to the floor. In October, while the days were still
warm, Thea and Tillie papered the room, walls and ceiling in the same
paper, small red and brown roses on a yellowish ground. Thea bought a
brown cotton carpet, and her big brother, Gus, put it down for her one
Sunday. She made white cheesecloth curtains and hung them on a tape. Her
mother gave her an old walnut dresser with a broken mirror, and she had
her own dumpy walnut single bed, and a blue washbowl and pitcher which
she had drawn at a church fair lottery. At the head of her bed she had a
tall round wooden hat-crate, from the clothing store. This, standing on
end and draped with cretonne, made a fairly steady table for her
lantern. She was not allowed to take a lamp upstairs, so Ray Kennedy
gave her a railroad lantern by which she could read at night.

In winter this loft room of Thea's was bitterly cold, but against her
mother's advice--and Tillie's--she always left her window open a little
way. Mrs. Kronborg declared that she "had no patience with American
physiology," though the lessons about the injurious effects of alcohol
and tobacco were well enough for the boys. Thea asked Dr. Archie about
the window, and he told her that a girl who sang must always have plenty
of fresh air, or her voice would get husky, and that the cold would
harden her throat. The important thing, he said, was to keep your feet
warm. On very cold nights Thea always put a brick in the oven after
supper, and when she went upstairs she wrapped it in an old flannel
petticoat and put it in her bed. The boys, who would never heat bricks
for themselves, sometimes carried off Thea's, and thought it a good joke
to get ahead of her.

When Thea first plunged in between her red blankets, the cold sometimes
kept her awake for a good while, and she comforted herself by
remembering all she could of "Polar Explorations," a fat, calf-bound
volume her father had bought from a book-agent, and by thinking about
the members of Greely's party: how they lay in their frozen
sleeping-bags, each man hoarding the warmth of his own body and trying
to make it last as long as possible against the on-coming cold that
would be everlasting. After half an hour or so, a warm wave crept over
her body and round, sturdy legs; she glowed like a little stove with the
warmth of her own blood, and the heavy quilts and red blankets grew warm
wherever they touched her, though her breath sometimes froze on the
coverlid. Before daylight, her internal fires went down a little, and
she often wakened to find herself drawn up into a tight ball, somewhat
stiff in the legs. But that made it all the easier to get up.

The acquisition of this room was the beginning of a new era in Thea's
life. It was one of the most important things that ever happened to her.
Hitherto, except in summer, when she could be out of doors, she had
lived in constant turmoil; the family, the day school, the
Sunday-School. The clamor about her drowned the voice within herself. In
the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs sleeping-rooms by
a long, cold, unfinished lumber room, her mind worked better. She
thought things out more clearly. Pleasant plans and ideas occurred to
her which had never come before. She had certain thoughts which were
like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends. She left
them there in the morning, when she finished dressing in the cold, and
at night, when she came up with her lantern and shut the door after a
busy day, she found them awaiting her. There was no possible way of
heating the room, but that was fortunate, for otherwise it would have
been occupied by one of her older brothers.

From the time when she moved up into the wing, Thea began to live a
double life. During the day, when the hours were full of tasks, she was
one of the Kronborg children, but at night she was a different person.
On Friday and Saturday nights she always read for a long while after she
was in bed. She had no clock, and there was no one to nag her.

Ray Kennedy, on his way from the depot to his boardinghouse, often
looked up and saw Thea's light burning when the rest of the house was
dark, and felt cheered as by a friendly greeting. He was a faithful
soul, and many disappointments had not changed his nature. He was still,
at heart, the same boy who, when he was sixteen, had settled down to
freeze with his sheep in a Wyoming blizzard, and had been rescued only
to play the losing game of fidelity to other charges.

Ray had no very clear idea of what might be going on in Thea's head, but
he knew that something was. He used to remark to Spanish Johnny, "That
girl is developing something fine." Thea was patient with Ray, even in
regard to the liberties he took with her name. Outside the family, every
one in Moonstone, except Wunsch and Dr. Archie, called her "Thee-a," but
this seemed cold and distant to Ray, so he called her "Thee." Once, in a
moment of exasperation, Thea asked him why he did this, and he explained
that he once had a chum, Theodore, whose name was always abbreviated
thus, and that since he was killed down on the Santa Fe, it seemed
natural to call somebody "Thee." Thea sighed and submitted. She was
always helpless before homely sentiment and usually changed the subject.

It was the custom for each of the different Sunday Schools in Moonstone
to give a concert on Christmas Eve. But this year all the churches were
to unite and give, as was announced from the pulpits, "a semi-sacred
concert of picked talent" at the opera house. The Moonstone Orchestra,
under the direction of Professor Wunsch, was to play, and the most
talented members of each Sunday School were to take part in the
programme. Thea was put down by the committee "for instrumental." This
made her indignant, for the vocal numbers were always more popular. Thea
went to the president of the committee and demanded hotly if her rival,
Lily Fisher, were going to sing. The president was a big, florid,
powdered woman, a fierce W.C.T.U. worker, one of Thea's natural enemies.
Her name was Johnson; her husband kept the livery stable, and she was
called Mrs. Livery Johnson, to distinguish her from other families of
the same surname. Mrs. Johnson was a prominent Baptist, and Lily Fisher
was the Baptist prodigy. There was a not very Christian rivalry between
the Baptist Church and Mr. Kronborg's church.

When Thea asked Mrs. Johnson whether her rival was to be allowed to
sing, Mrs. Johnson, with an eagerness which told how she had waited for
this moment, replied that "Lily was going to recite to be obliging, and
to give other children a chance to sing." As she delivered this thrust,
her eyes glittered more than the Ancient Mariner's, Thea thought. Mrs.
Johnson disapproved of the way in which Thea was being brought up, of a
child whose chosen associates were Mexicans and sinners, and who was, as
she pointedly put it, "bold with men." She so enjoyed an opportunity to
rebuke Thea, that, tightly corseted as she was, she could scarcely
control her breathing, and her lace and her gold watch chain rose and
fell "with short, uneasy motion." Frowning, Thea turned away and walked
slowly homeward. She suspected guile. Lily Fisher was the most stuck-up
doll in the world, and it was certainly not like her to recite to be
obliging. Nobody who could sing ever recited, because the warmest
applause always went to the singers.

However, when the programme was printed in the Moonstone GLEAM, there it
was: "Instrumental solo, Thea Kronborg. Recitation, Lily Fisher."

Because his orchestra was to play for the concert, Mr. Wunsch imagined
that he had been put in charge of the music, and he became arrogant. He
insisted that Thea should play a "Ballade" by Reinecke. When Thea
consulted her mother, Mrs. Kronborg agreed with her that the "Ballade"
would "never take" with a Moonstone audience. She advised Thea to play
"something with variations," or, at least, "The Invitation to the
Dance."

"It makes no matter what they like," Wunsch replied to Thea's
entreaties. "It is time already that they learn something."

Thea's fighting powers had been impaired by an ulcerated tooth and
consequent loss of sleep, so she gave in. She finally had the molar
pulled, though it was a second tooth and should have been saved. The
dentist was a clumsy, ignorant country boy, and Mr. Kronborg would not
hear of Dr. Archie's taking Thea to a dentist in Denver, though Ray
Kennedy said he could get a pass for her. What with the pain of the
tooth, and family discussions about it, with trying to make Christmas
presents and to keep up her school work and practicing, and giving
lessons on Saturdays, Thea was fairly worn out.

On Christmas Eve she was nervous and excited. It was the first time she
had ever played in the opera house, and she had never before had to face
so many people. Wunsch would not let her play with her notes, and she
was afraid of forgetting. Before the concert began, all the participants
had to assemble on the stage and sit there to be looked at. Thea wore
her white summer dress and a blue sash, but Lily Fisher had a new pink
silk, trimmed with white swansdown.

The hall was packed. It seemed as if every one in Moonstone was there,
even Mrs. Kohler, in her hood, and old Fritz. The seats were wooden
kitchen chairs, numbered, and nailed to long planks which held them
together in rows. As the floor was not raised, the chairs were all on
the same level. The more interested persons in the audience peered over
the heads of the people in front of them to get a good view of the
stage. From the platform Thea picked out many friendly faces. There was
Dr. Archie, who never went to church entertainments; there was the
friendly jeweler who ordered her music for her,--he sold accordions and
guitars as well as watches,--and the druggist who often lent her books,
and her favorite teacher from the school. There was Ray Kennedy, with a
party of freshly barbered railroad men he had brought along with him.
There was Mrs. Kronborg with all the children, even Thor, who had been
brought out in a new white plush coat. At the back of the hall sat a
little group of Mexicans, and among them Thea caught the gleam of
Spanish Johnny's white teeth, and of Mrs. Tellamantez's lustrous,
smoothly coiled black hair.

After the orchestra played "Selections from Erminie," and the Baptist
preacher made a long prayer, Tillie Kronborg came on with a highly
colored recitation, "The Polish Boy." When it was over every one
breathed more freely. No committee had the courage to leave Tillie off a
programme. She was accepted as a trying feature of every entertainment.
The Progressive Euchre Club was the only social organization in the town
that entirely escaped Tillie. After Tillie sat down, the Ladies'
Quartette sang, "Beloved, it is Night," and then it was Thea's turn.

The "Ballade" took ten minutes, which was five minutes too long. The
audience grew restive and fell to whispering. Thea could hear Mrs.
Livery Johnson's bracelets jangling as she fanned herself, and she could
hear her father's nervous, ministerial cough. Thor behaved better than
any one else. When Thea bowed and returned to her seat at the back of
the stage there was the usual applause, but it was vigorous only from
the back of the house where the Mexicans sat, and from Ray Kennedy's
CLAQUEURS. Any one could see that a good-natured audience had been
bored.

Because Mr. Kronborg's sister was on the programme, it had also been
necessary to ask the Baptist preacher's wife's cousin to sing. She was a
"deep alto" from McCook, and she sang, "Thy Sentinel Am I." After her
came Lily Fisher. Thea's rival was also a blonde, but her hair was much
heavier than Thea's, and fell in long round curls over her shoulders.
She was the angel-child of the Baptists, and looked exactly like the
beautiful children on soap calendars. Her pink-and-white face, her set
smile of innocence, were surely born of a color-press. She had long,
drooping eyelashes, a little pursed-up mouth, and narrow, pointed teeth,
like a squirrel's.

Lily began:--

"ROCK OF AGES, CLEFT FOR ME, carelessly the maiden sang."

Thea drew a long breath. That was the game; it was a recitation and a
song in one. Lily trailed the hymn through half a dozen verses with
great effect. The Baptist preacher had announced at the beginning of the
concert that "owing to the length of the programme, there would be no
encores." But the applause which followed Lily to her seat was such an
unmistakable expression of enthusiasm that Thea had to admit Lily was
justified in going back. She was attended this time by Mrs. Livery
Johnson herself, crimson with triumph and gleaming-eyed, nervously
rolling and unrolling a sheet of music. She took off her bracelets and
played Lily's accompaniment. Lily had the effrontery to come out with,
"She sang the song of Home, Sweet Home, the song that touched my heart."
But this did not surprise Thea; as Ray said later in the evening, "the
cards had been stacked against her from the beginning." The next issue
of the GLEAM correctly stated that "unquestionably the honors of the
evening must be accorded to Miss Lily Fisher." The Baptists had
everything their own way.

After the concert Ray Kennedy joined the Kronborgs' party and walked
home with them. Thea was grateful for his silent sympathy, even while it
irritated her. She inwardly vowed that she would never take another
lesson from old Wunsch. She wished that her father would not keep
cheerfully singing, "When Shepherds Watched," as he marched ahead,
carrying Thor. She felt that silence would become the Kronborgs for a
while. As a family, they somehow seemed a little ridiculous, trooping
along in the starlight. There were so many of them, for one thing. Then
Tillie was so absurd. She was giggling and talking to Anna just as if
she had not made, as even Mrs. Kronborg admitted, an exhibition of
herself.

When they got home, Ray took a box from his overcoat pocket and slipped
it into Thea's hand as he said goodnight. They all hurried in to the
glowing stove in the parlor. The sleepy children were sent to bed. Mrs.
Kronborg and Anna stayed up to fill the stockings.

"I guess you're tired, Thea. You needn't stay up." Mrs. Kronborg's clear
and seemingly indifferent eye usually measured Thea pretty accurately.

Thea hesitated. She glanced at the presents laid out on the dining-room
table, but they looked unattractive. Even the brown plush monkey she had
bought for Thor with such enthusiasm seemed to have lost his wise and
humorous expression. She murmured, "All right," to her mother, lit her
lantern, and went upstairs.

Ray's box contained a hand-painted white satin fan, with pond lilies--an
unfortunate reminder. Thea smiled grimly and tossed it into her upper
drawer. She was not to be consoled by toys. She undressed quickly and
stood for some time in the cold, frowning in the broken looking glass at
her flaxen pig-tails, at her white neck and arms. Her own broad,
resolute face set its chin at her, her eyes flashed into her own
defiantly. Lily Fisher was pretty, and she was willing to be just as big
a fool as people wanted her to be. Very well; Thea Kronborg wasn't. She
would rather be hated than be stupid, any day. She popped into bed and
read stubbornly at a queer paper book the drug-store man had given her
because he couldn't sell it. She had trained herself to put her mind on
what she was doing, otherwise she would have come to grief with her
complicated daily schedule. She read, as intently as if she had not been
flushed with anger, the strange "Musical Memories" of the Reverend H. R.
Haweis. At last she blew out the lantern and went to sleep. She had many
curious dreams that night. In one of them Mrs. Tellamantez held her
shell to Thea's ear, and she heard the roaring, as before, and distant
voices calling, "Lily Fisher! Lily Fisher!"



IX


Mr. Kronborg considered Thea a remarkable child; but so were all his
children remarkable. If one of the business men downtown remarked to him
that he "had a mighty bright little girl, there," he admitted it, and at
once began to explain what a "long head for business" his son Gus had,
or that Charley was "a natural electrician," and had put in a telephone
from the house to the preacher's study behind the church.

Mrs. Kronborg watched her daughter thoughtfully. She found her more
interesting than her other children, and she took her more seriously,
without thinking much about why she did so. The other children had to be
guided, directed, kept from conflicting with one another. Charley and
Gus were likely to want the same thing, and to quarrel about it. Anna
often demanded unreasonable service from her older brothers; that they
should sit up until after midnight to bring her home from parties when
she did not like the youth who had offered himself as her escort; or
that they should drive twelve miles into the country, on a winter night,
to take her to a ranch dance, after they had been working hard all day.
Gunner often got bored with his own clothes or stilts or sled, and
wanted Axel's. But Thea, from the time she was a little thing, had her
own routine. She kept out of every one's way, and was hard to manage
only when the other children interfered with her. Then there was trouble
indeed: bursts of temper which used to alarm Mrs. Kronborg. "You ought
to know enough to let Thea alone. She lets you alone," she often said to
the other children.

One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has
admirers. Thea, however, had one in the person of her addle-pated aunt,
Tillie Kronborg. In older countries, where dress and opinions and
manners are not so thoroughly standardized as in our own West, there is
a belief that people who are foolish about the more obvious things of
life are apt to have peculiar insight into what lies beyond the obvious.
The old woman who can never learn not to put the kerosene can on the
stove, may yet be able to tell fortunes, to persuade a backward child to
grow, to cure warts, or to tell people what to do with a young girl who
has gone melancholy. Tillie's mind was a curious machine; when she was
awake it went round like a wheel when the belt has slipped off, and when
she was asleep she dreamed follies. But she had intuitions. She knew,
for instance, that Thea was different from the other Kronborgs, worthy
though they all were. Her romantic imagination found possibilities in
her niece. When she was sweeping or ironing, or turning the ice-cream
freezer at a furious rate, she often built up brilliant futures for
Thea, adapting freely the latest novel she had read.

Tillie made enemies for her niece among the church people because, at
sewing societies and church suppers, she sometimes spoke vauntingly,
with a toss of her head, just as if Thea's "wonderfulness" were an
accepted fact in Moonstone, like Mrs. Archie's stinginess, or Mrs.
Livery Johnson's duplicity. People declared that, on this subject,
Tillie made them tired.

Tillie belonged to a dramatic club that once a year performed in the
Moonstone Opera House such plays as "Among the Breakers," and "The
Veteran of 1812." Tillie played character parts, the flirtatious old
maid or the spiteful INTRIGANTE. She used to study her parts up in the
attic at home. While she was committing the lines, she got Gunner or
Anna to hold the book for her, but when she began "to bring out the
expression," as she said, she used, very timorously, to ask Thea to hold
the book. Thea was usually--not always--agreeable about it. Her mother
had told her that, since she had some influence with Tillie, it would be
a good thing for them all if she could tone her down a shade and "keep
her from taking on any worse than need be." Thea would sit on the foot
of Tillie's bed, her feet tucked under her, and stare at the silly text.
"I wouldn't make so much fuss, there, Tillie," she would remark
occasionally; "I don't see the point in it"; or, "What do you pitch your
voice so high for? It don't carry half as well."

"I don't see how it comes Thea is so patient with Tillie," Mrs. Kronborg
more than once remarked to her husband. "She ain't patient with most
people, but it seems like she's got a peculiar patience for Tillie."

Tillie always coaxed Thea to go "behind the scenes" with her when the
club presented a play, and help her with her make-up. Thea hated it, but
she always went. She felt as if she had to do it. There was something in
Tillie's adoration of her that compelled her. There was no family
impropriety that Thea was so much ashamed of as Tillie's "acting" and
yet she was always being dragged in to assist her. Tillie simply had
her, there. She didn't know why, but it was so. There was a string in
her somewhere that Tillie could pull; a sense of obligation to Tillie's
misguided aspirations. The saloon-keepers had some such feeling of
responsibility toward Spanish Johnny.

The dramatic club was the pride of Tillie's heart, and her enthusiasm
was the principal factor in keeping it together. Sick or well, Tillie
always attended rehearsals, and was always urging the young people, who
took rehearsals lightly, to "stop fooling and begin now." The young men
--bank clerks, grocery clerks, insurance agents--played tricks, laughed
at Tillie, and "put it up on each other" about seeing her home; but they
often went to tiresome rehearsals just to oblige her. They were
good-natured young fellows. Their trainer and stage-manager was young
Upping, the jeweler who ordered Thea's music for her.

Though barely thirty, he had followed half a dozen professions, and had
once been a violinist in the orchestra of the Andrews Opera Company,
then well known in little towns throughout Colorado and Nebraska.

By one amazing indiscretion Tillie very nearly lost her hold upon the
Moonstone Drama Club. The club had decided to put on "The Drummer Boy of
Shiloh," a very ambitious undertaking because of the many supers needed
and the scenic difficulties of the act which took place in Andersonville
Prison. The members of the club consulted together in Tillie's absence
as to who should play the part of the drummer boy. It must be taken by a
very young person, and village boys of that age are self-conscious and
are not apt at memorizing. The part was a long one, and clearly it must
be given to a girl. Some members of the club suggested Thea Kronborg,
others advocated Lily Fisher. Lily's partisans urged that she was much
prettier than Thea, and had a much "sweeter disposition." Nobody denied
these facts. But there was nothing in the least boyish about Lily, and
she sang all songs and played all parts alike. Lily's simper was
popular, but it seemed not quite the right thing for the heroic drummer
boy.

Upping, the trainer, talked to one and another: "Lily's all right for
girl parts," he insisted, "but you've got to get a girl with some ginger
in her for this. Thea's got the voice, too. When she sings, `Just Before
the Battle, Mother,' she'll bring down the house."

When all the members of the club had been privately consulted, they
announced their decision to Tillie at the first regular meeting that was
called to cast the parts. They expected Tillie to be overcome with joy,
but, on the contrary, she seemed embarrassed. "I'm afraid Thea hasn't
got time for that," she said jerkily. "She is always so busy with her
music. Guess you'll have to get somebody else."

The club lifted its eyebrows. Several of Lily Fisher's friends coughed.
Mr. Upping flushed. The stout woman who always played the injured wife
called Tillie's attention to the fact that this would be a fine
opportunity for her niece to show what she could do. Her tone was
condescending.

Tillie threw up her head and laughed; there was something sharp and wild
about Tillie's laugh--when it was not a giggle. "Oh, I guess Thea hasn't
got time to do any showing off. Her time to show off ain't come yet. I
expect she'll make us all sit up when it does. No use asking her to take
the part. She'd turn her nose up at it. I guess they'd be glad to get
her in the Denver Dramatics, if they could."

The company broke up into groups and expressed their amazement. Of
course all Swedes were conceited, but they would never have believed
that all the conceit of all the Swedes put together would reach such a
pitch as this. They confided to each other that Tillie was "just a
little off, on the subject of her niece," and agreed that it would be as
well not to excite her further. Tillie got a cold reception at
rehearsals for a long while afterward, and Thea had a crop of new
enemies without even knowing it.



X


Wunsch and old Fritz and Spanish Johnny celebrated Christmas together,
so riotously that Wunsch was unable to give Thea her lesson the next
day. In the middle of the vacation week Thea went to the Kohlers'
through a soft, beautiful snowstorm. The air was a tender blue-gray,
like the color on the doves that flew in and out of the white dove-house
on the post in the Kohlers' garden. The sand hills looked dim and
sleepy. The tamarisk hedge was full of snow, like a foam of blossoms
drifted over it. When Thea opened the gate, old Mrs. Kohler was just
coming in from the chicken yard, with five fresh eggs in her apron and a
pair of old top-boots on her feet. She called Thea to come and look at a
bantam egg, which she held up proudly. Her bantam hens were remiss in
zeal, and she was always delighted when they accomplished anything. She
took Thea into the sitting-room, very warm and smelling of food, and
brought her a plateful of little Christmas cakes, made according to old
and hallowed formulae, and put them before her while she warmed her
feet. Then she went to the door of the kitchen stairs and called: "Herr
Wunsch, Herr Wunsch!"

Wunsch came down wearing an old wadded jacket, with a velvet collar. The
brown silk was so worn that the wadding stuck out almost everywhere. He
avoided Thea's eyes when he came in, nodded without speaking, and
pointed directly to the piano stool. He was not so insistent upon the
scales as usual, and throughout the little sonata of Mozart's she was
studying, he remained languid and absent-minded. His eyes looked very
heavy, and he kept wiping them with one of the new silk handkerchiefs
Mrs. Kohler had given him for Christmas. When the lesson was over he did
not seem inclined to talk. Thea, loitering on the stool, reached for a
tattered book she had taken off the music-rest when she sat down. It was
a very old Leipsic edition of the piano score of Gluck's "Orpheus." She
turned over the pages curiously.

"Is it nice?" she asked.

"It is the most beautiful opera ever made," Wunsch declared solemnly.
"You know the story, eh? How, when she die, Orpheus went down below for
his wife?"

"Oh, yes, I know. I didn't know there was an opera about it, though. Do
people sing this now?"

"ABER JA! What else? You like to try? See." He drew her from the stool
and sat down at the piano. Turning over the leaves to the third act, he
handed the score to Thea. "Listen, I play it through and you get the
RHYTHMUS. EINS, ZWEI, DREI, VIER." He played through Orpheus' lament,
then pushed back his cuffs with awakening interest and nodded at Thea.
"Now, VOM BLATT, MIT MIR."

"ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN, ALL' MEIN GLUCK IST NUN DAHIN."

Wunsch sang the aria with much feeling. It was evidently one that was
very dear to him.

"NOCH EINMAL, alone, yourself." He played the introductory measures,
then nodded at her vehemently, and she began:--

"ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN."

When she finished, Wunsch nodded again. "SCHON," he muttered as he
finished the accompaniment softly. He dropped his hands on his knees and
looked up at Thea. "That is very fine, eh? There is no such beautiful
melody in the world. You can take the book for one week and learn
something, to pass the time. It is good to know--always. EURIDICE,
EU--RI--DI--CE, WEH DASS ICH AUF ERDEN BIN!" he sang softly, playing the
melody with his right hand.

Thea, who was turning over the pages of the third act, stopped and
scowled at a passage. The old German's blurred eyes watched her
curiously.

"For what do you look so, IMMER?" puckering up his own face. "You see
something a little difficult, may-be, and you make such a face like it
was an enemy."

Thea laughed, disconcerted. "Well, difficult things are enemies, aren't
they? When you have to get them?"

Wunsch lowered his head and threw it up as if he were butting something.
"Not at all! By no means." He took the book from her and looked at it.
"Yes, that is not so easy, there. This is an old book. They do not print
it so now any more, I think. They leave it out, may-be. Only one woman
could sing that good."

Thea looked at him in perplexity.

Wunsch went on. "It is written for alto, you see. A woman sings the
part, and there was only one to sing that good in there. You understand?
Only one!" He glanced at her quickly and lifted his red forefinger
upright before her eyes.

Thea looked at the finger as if she were hypnotized. "Only one?" she
asked breathlessly; her hands, hanging at her sides, were opening and
shutting rapidly.

Wunsch nodded and still held up that compelling finger. When he dropped
his hands, there was a look of satisfaction in his face.

"Was she very great?"

Wunsch nodded.

"Was she beautiful?"

"ABER GAR NICHT! Not at all. She was ugly; big mouth, big teeth, no
figure, nothing at all," indicating a luxuriant bosom by sweeping his
hands over his chest. "A pole, a post! But for the voice--ACH! She have
something in there, behind the eyes," tapping his temples.

Thea followed all his gesticulations intently. "Was she German?"

"No, SPANISCH." He looked down and frowned for a moment. "ACH, I tell
you, she look like the Frau Tellamantez, some-thing. Long face, long
chin, and ugly al-so."

"Did she die a long while ago?"

"Die? I think not. I never hear, anyhow. I guess she is alive somewhere
in the world; Paris, may-be. But old, of course. I hear her when I was a
youth. She is too old to sing now any more."

"Was she the greatest singer you ever heard?"

Wunsch nodded gravely. "Quite so. She was the most--" he hunted for an
English word, lifted his hand over his head and snapped his fingers
noiselessly in the air, enunciating fiercely, "KUNST-LER-ISCH!" The word
seemed to glitter in his uplifted hand, his voice was so full of
emotion.

Wunsch rose from the stool and began to button his wadded jacket,
preparing to return to his half-heated room in the loft. Thea
regretfully put on her cloak and hood and set out for home.

When Wunsch looked for his score late that afternoon, he found that Thea
had not forgotten to take it with her. He smiled his loose, sarcastic
smile, and thoughtfully rubbed his stubbly chin with his red fingers.
When Fritz came home in the early blue twilight the snow was flying
faster, Mrs. Kohler was cooking HASENPFEFFER in the kitchen, and the
professor was seated at the piano, playing the Gluck, which he knew by
heart. Old Fritz took off his shoes quietly behind the stove and lay
down on the lounge before his masterpiece, where the firelight was
playing over the walls of Moscow. He listened, while the room grew
darker and the windows duller. Wunsch always came back to the same
thing:--

"ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN,...EURIDICE, EURIDICE!"

From time to time Fritz sighed softly. He, too, had lost a Euridice.



XI


One Saturday, late in June, Thea arrived early for her lesson. As she
perched herself upon the piano stool,--a wobbly, old-fashioned thing
that worked on a creaky screw,--she gave Wunsch a side glance, smiling.
"You must not be cross to me to-day. This is my birthday."

"So?" he pointed to the keyboard.

After the lesson they went out to join Mrs. Kohler, who had asked Thea
to come early, so that she could stay and smell the linden bloom. It was
one of those still days of intense light, when every particle of mica in
the soil flashed like a little mirror, and the glare from the plain
below seemed more intense than the rays from above. The sand ridges ran
glittering gold out to where the mirage licked them up, shining and
steaming like a lake in the tropics. The sky looked like blue lava,
forever incapable of clouds,--a turquoise bowl that was the lid of the
desert. And yet within Mrs. Kohler's green patch the water dripped, the
beds had all been hosed, and the air was fresh with rapidly evaporating
moisture.

The two symmetrical linden trees were the proudest things in the garden.
Their sweetness embalmed all the air. At every turn of the
paths,--whether one went to see the hollyhocks or the bleeding heart, or
to look at the purple morning-glories that ran over the
bean-poles,--wherever one went, the sweetness of the lindens struck one
afresh and one always came back to them. Under the round leaves, where
the waxen yellow blossoms hung, bevies of wild bees were buzzing. The
tamarisks were still pink, and the flower-beds were doing their best in
honor of the linden festival. The white dove-house was shining with a
fresh coat of paint, and the pigeons were crooning contentedly, flying
down often to drink at the drip from the water tank. Mrs. Kohler, who
was transplanting pansies, came up with her trowel and told Thea it was
lucky to have your birthday when the lindens were in bloom, and that she
must go and look at the sweet peas. Wunsch accompanied her, and as they
walked between the flower-beds he took Thea's hand.

"ES FLUSTERN UND SPRECHEN DIE BLUMEN,"--he muttered. "You know that von
Heine? IM LEUCHTENDEN SOMMERMORGEN?" He looked down at Thea and softly
pressed her hand.

"No, I don't know it. What does FLUSTERN mean?"

"FLUSTERN?--to whisper. You must begin now to know such things. That is
necessary. How many birthdays?"

"Thirteen. I'm in my 'teens now. But how can I know words like that? I
only know what you say at my lessons. They don't teach German at school.
How can I learn?"

"It is always possible to learn when one likes," said Wunsch. His words
were peremptory, as usual, but his tone was mild, even confidential.
"There is always a way. And if some day you are going to sing, it is
necessary to know well the German language."

Thea stooped over to pick a leaf of rosemary. How did Wunsch know that,
when the very roses on her wall-paper had never heard it? "But am I
going to?" she asked, still stooping.

"That is for you to say," returned Wunsch coldly. "You would better
marry some JACOB here and keep the house for him, may-be? That is as one
desires."

Thea flashed up at him a clear, laughing look. "No, I don't want to do
that. You know," she brushed his coat sleeve quickly with her yellow
head. "Only how can I learn anything here? It's so far from Denver."

Wunsch's loose lower lip curled in amusement. Then, as if he suddenly
remembered something, he spoke seriously. "Nothing is far and nothing is
near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life
is little. There is only one big thing--desire. And before it, when it
is big, all is little. It brought Columbus across the sea in a little
boat, UND SO WEITER." Wunsch made a grimace, took his pupil's hand and
drew her toward the grape arbor. "Hereafter I will more speak to you in
German. Now, sit down and I will teach you for your birthday that little
song. Ask me the words you do not know already. Now: IM LEUCHTENDEN
SOMMERMORGEN."

Thea memorized quickly because she had the power of listening intently.
In a few moments she could repeat the eight lines for him. Wunsch nodded
encouragingly and they went out of the arbor into the sunlight again. As
they went up and down the gravel paths between the flowerbeds, the white
and yellow butterflies kept darting before them, and the pigeons were
washing their pink feet at the drip and crooning in their husky bass.
Over and over again Wunsch made her say the lines to him. "You see it is
nothing. If you learn a great many of the LIEDER, you will know the
German language already. WEITER, NUN." He would incline his head gravely
and listen.


"IM LEUCHTENDEN SOMMERMORGEN
GEH' ICH IM GARTEN HERUM;
ES FLUSTERN UND SPRECHEN DIE BLUMEN,
ICH ABER, ICH WANDTE STUMM.

"ES FLUSTERN UND SPRECHEN DIE BLUMEN
UND SCHAU'N MITLEIDIG MICH AN:
`SEI UNSERER SCHWESTER NICHT BOSE,
DU TRAURIGER, BLASSER MANN!'"


(In the soft-shining summer morning
I wandered the garden within.
The flowers they whispered and murmured,
But I, I wandered dumb.

The flowers they whisper and murmur,
And me with compassion they scan:
"Oh, be not harsh to our sister,
Thou sorrowful, death-pale man!")


Wunsch had noticed before that when his pupil read anything in verse the
character of her voice changed altogether; it was no longer the voice
which spoke the speech of Moonstone. It was a soft, rich contralto, and
she read quietly; the feeling was in the voice itself, not indicated by
emphasis or change of pitch. She repeated the little verses musically,
like a song, and the entreaty of the flowers was even softer than the
rest, as the shy speech of flowers might be, and she ended with the
voice suspended, almost with a rising inflection. It was a nature-voice,
Wunsch told himself, breathed from the creature and apart from language,
like the sound of the wind in the trees, or the murmur of water.

"What is it the flowers mean when they ask him not to be harsh to their
sister, eh?" he asked, looking down at her curiously and wrinkling his
dull red forehead.

Thea glanced at him in surprise. "I suppose he thinks they are asking
him not to be harsh to his sweetheart--or some girl they remind him of."

"And why TRAURIGER, BLASSER MANN?"

They had come back to the grape arbor, and Thea picked out a sunny place
on the bench, where a tortoise-shell cat was stretched at full length.
She sat down, bending over the cat and teasing his whiskers. "Because he
had been awake all night, thinking about her, wasn't it? Maybe that was
why he was up so early."

Wunsch shrugged his shoulders. "If he think about her all night already,
why do you say the flowers remind him?"

Thea looked up at him in perplexity. A flash of comprehension lit her
face and she smiled eagerly. "Oh, I didn't mean `remind' in that way! I
didn't mean they brought her to his mind! I meant it was only when he
came out in the morning, that she seemed to him like that,--like one of
the flowers."

"And before he came out, how did she seem?"

This time it was Thea who shrugged her shoulders. The warm smile left
her face. She lifted her eyebrows in annoyance and looked off at the
sand hills.

Wunsch persisted. "Why you not answer me?"

"Because it would be silly. You are just trying to make me say things.
It spoils things to ask questions."

Wunsch bowed mockingly; his smile was disagreeable. Suddenly his face
grew grave, grew fierce, indeed. He pulled himself up from his clumsy
stoop and folded his arms. "But it is necessary to know if you know some
things. Some things cannot be taught. If you not know in the beginning,
you not know in the end. For a singer there must be something in the
inside from the beginning. I shall not be long in this place, may-be,
and I like to know. Yes,"--he ground his heel in the gravel,--"yes, when
you are barely six, you must know that already. That is the beginning of
all things; DER GEIST, DIE PHANTASIE. It must be in the baby, when it
makes its first cry, like DER RHYTHMUS, or it is not to be. You have
some voice already, and if in the beginning, when you are with
things-to-play, you know that what you will not tell me, then you can
learn to sing, may-be."

Wunsch began to pace the arbor, rubbing his hands together. The dark
flush of his face had spread up under the iron-gray bristles on his
head. He was talking to himself, not to Thea. Insidious power of the
linden bloom! "Oh, much you can learn! ABER NICHT DIE AMERICANISCHEN
FRAULEIN. They have nothing inside them," striking his chest with both
fists. "They are like the ones in the MARCHEN, a grinning face and
hollow in the insides. Something they can learn, oh, yes, may-be! But
the secret--what make the rose to red, the sky to blue, the man to love
--IN DER BRUST, IN DER BRUST it is, UND OHNE DIESES GIEBT ES KEINE
KUNST, GIEBT ES KEINE KUNST!" He threw up his square hand and shook it,
all the fingers apart and wagging. Purple and breathless he went out of
the arbor and into the house, without saying good-bye. These outbursts
frightened Wunsch. They were always harbingers of ill.

Thea got her music-book and stole quietly out of the garden. She did not
go home, but wandered off into the sand dunes, where the prickly pear
was in blossom and the green lizards were racing each other in the
glittering light. She was shaken by a passionate excitement. She did not
altogether understand what Wunsch was talking about; and yet, in a way
she knew. She knew, of course, that there was something about her that
was different. But it was more like a friendly spirit than like anything
that was a part of herself. She thought everything to it, and it
answered her; happiness consisted of that backward and forward movement
of herself. The something came and went, she never knew how. Sometimes
she hunted for it and could not find it; again, she lifted her eyes from
a book, or stepped out of doors, or wakened in the morning, and it was
there,--under her cheek, it usually seemed to be, or over her breast,--a
kind of warm sureness. And when it was there, everything was more
interesting and beautiful, even people. When this companion was with
her, she could get the most wonderful things out of Spanish Johnny, or
Wunsch, or Dr. Archie.

On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand
ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly-pear
blossoms with their thousand stamens. She looked at the sand hills until
she wished she WERE a sand hill. And yet she knew that she was going to
leave them all behind some day. They would be changing all day long,
yellow and purple and lavender, and she would not be there. From that
day on, she felt there was a secret between her and Wunsch. Together
they had lifted a lid, pulled out a drawer, and looked at something.
They hid it away and never spoke of what they had seen; but neither of
them forgot it.



XII


One July night, when the moon was full, Dr. Archie was coming up from
the depot, restless and discontented, wishing there were something to
do. He carried his straw hat in his hand, and kept brushing his hair
back from his forehead with a purposeless, unsatisfied gesture. After he
passed Uncle Billy Beemer's cottonwood grove, the sidewalk ran out of
the shadow into the white moonlight and crossed the sand gully on high
posts, like a bridge. As the doctor approached this trestle, he saw a
white figure, and recognized Thea Kronborg. He quickened his pace and
she came to meet him.

"What are you doing out so late, my girl?" he asked as he took her hand.

"Oh, I don't know. What do people go to bed so early for? I'd like to
run along before the houses and screech at them. Isn't it glorious out
here?"

The young doctor gave a melancholy laugh and pressed her hand.

"Think of it," Thea snorted impatiently. "Nobody up but us and the
rabbits! I've started up half a dozen of 'em. Look at that little one
down there now,"--she stooped and pointed. In the gully below them there
was, indeed, a little rabbit with a white spot of a tail, crouching down
on the sand, quite motionless. It seemed to be lapping up the moonlight
like cream. On the other side of the walk, down in the ditch, there was
a patch of tall, rank sunflowers, their shaggy leaves white with dust.
The moon stood over the cottonwood grove. There was no wind, and no
sound but the wheezing of an engine down on the tracks.

"Well, we may as well watch the rabbits." Dr. Archie sat down on the
sidewalk and let his feet hang over the edge. He pulled out a smooth
linen handkerchief that smelled of German cologne water. "Well, how goes
it? Working hard? You must know about all Wunsch can teach you by this
time."

Thea shook her head. "Oh, no, I don't, Dr. Archie. He's hard to get at,
but he's been a real musician in his time. Mother says she believes he's
forgotten more than the music-teachers down in Denver ever knew."

"I'm afraid he won't be around here much longer," said Dr. Archie. "He's
been making a tank of himself lately. He'll be pulling his freight one
of these days. That's the way they do, you know. I'll be sorry on your
account." He paused and ran his fresh handkerchief over his face. "What
the deuce are we all here for anyway, Thea?" he said abruptly.

"On earth, you mean?" Thea asked in a low voice.

"Well, primarily, yes. But secondarily, why are we in Moonstone? It
isn't as if we'd been born here. You were, but Wunsch wasn't, and I
wasn't. I suppose I'm here because I married as soon as I got out of
medical school and had to get a practice quick. If you hurry things, you
always get left in the end. I don't learn anything here, and as for the
people--In my own town in Michigan, now, there were people who liked me
on my father's account, who had even known my grandfather. That meant
something. But here it's all like the sand: blows north one day and
south the next. We're all a lot of gamblers without much nerve, playing
for small stakes. The railroad is the one real fact in this country.
That has to be; the world has to be got back and forth. But the rest of
us are here just because it's the end of a run and the engine has to
have a drink. Some day I'll get up and find my hair turning gray, and
I'll have nothing to show for it."

Thea slid closer to him and caught his arm. "No, no. I won't let you get
gray. You've got to stay young for me. I'm getting young now, too."

Archie laughed. "Getting?"

"Yes. People aren't young when they're children. Look at Thor, now; he's
just a little old man. But Gus has a sweetheart, and he's young!"

"Something in that!" Dr. Archie patted her head, and then felt the shape
of her skull gently, with the tips of his fingers. "When you were
little, Thea, I used always to be curious about the shape of your head.
You seemed to have more inside it than most youngsters. I haven't
examined it for a long time. Seems to be the usual shape, but uncommonly
hard, some how. What are you going to do with yourself, anyway?"

"I don't know."

"Honest, now?" He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

Thea laughed and edged away from him.

"You've got something up your sleeve, haven't you? Anything you like;
only don't marry and settle down here without giving yourself a chance,
will you?"

"Not much. See, there's another rabbit!"

"That's all right about the rabbits, but I don't want you to get tied
up. Remember that."

Thea nodded. "Be nice to Wunsch, then. I don't know what I'd do if he
went away."

"You've got older friends than Wunsch here, Thea."

"I know." Thea spoke seriously and looked up at the moon, propping her
chin on her hand. "But Wunsch is the only one that can teach me what I
want to know. I've got to learn to do something well, and that's the
thing I can do best."

"Do you want to be a music-teacher?"

"Maybe, but I want to be a good one. I'd like to go to Germany to study,
some day. Wunsch says that's the best place,--the only place you can
really learn." Thea hesitated and then went on nervously, "I've got a
book that says so, too. It's called `My Musical Memories.' It made me
want to go to Germany even before Wunsch said anything. Of course it's a
secret. You're the first one I've told."

Dr. Archie smiled indulgently. "That's a long way off. Is that what
you've got in your hard noddle?" He put his hand on her hair, but this
time she shook him off.

"No, I don't think much about it. But you talk about going, and a body
has to have something to go TO!"

"That's so." Dr. Archie sighed. "You're lucky if you have. Poor Wunsch,
now, he hasn't. What do such fellows come out here for? He's been asking
me about my mining stock, and about mining towns. What would he do in a
mining town? He wouldn't know a piece of ore if he saw one. He's got
nothing to sell that a mining town wants to buy. Why don't those old
fellows stay at home? We won't need them for another hundred years. An
engine wiper can get a job, but a piano player! Such people can't make
good."

"My grandfather Alstrom was a musician, and he made good."

Dr. Archie chuckled. "Oh, a Swede can make good anywhere, at anything!
You've got that in your favor, miss. Come, you must be getting home."

Thea rose. "Yes, I used to be ashamed of being a Swede, but I'm not any
more. Swedes are kind of common, but I think it's better to be
SOMETHING."

"It surely is! How tall you are getting. You come above my shoulder
now."

"I'll keep on growing, don't you think? I particularly want to be tall.
Yes, I guess I must go home. I wish there'd be a fire."

"A fire?"

"Yes, so the fire-bell would ring and the roundhouse whistle would blow,
and everybody would come running out. Sometime I'm going to ring the
fire-bell myself and stir them all up."

"You'd be arrested."

"Well, that would be better than going to bed."

"I'll have to lend you some more books."

Thea shook herself impatiently. "I can't read every night."

Dr. Archie gave one of his low, sympathetic chuckles as he opened the
gate for her. "You're beginning to grow up, that's what's the matter
with you. I'll have to keep an eye on you. Now you'll have to say
good-night to the moon."

"No, I won't. I sleep on the floor now, right in the moonlight. My
window comes down to the floor, and I can look at the sky all night."

She shot round the house to the kitchen door, and Dr. Archie watched her
disappear with a sigh. He thought of the hard, mean, frizzy little woman
who kept his house for him; once the belle of a Michigan town, now dry
and withered up at thirty. "If I had a daughter like Thea to watch," he
reflected, "I wouldn't mind anything. I wonder if all of my life's going
to be a mistake just because I made a big one then? Hardly seems fair."

Howard Archie was "respected" rather than popular in Moonstone. Everyone
recognized that he was a good physician, and a progressive Western town
likes to be able to point to a handsome, well-set-up, well-dressed man
among its citizens. But a great many people thought Archie "distant,"
and they were right. He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among
his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all
people are in some sense his own kind. He knew that every one was
curious about his wife, that she played a sort of character part in
Moonstone, and that people made fun of her, not very delicately. Her own
friends--most of them women who were distasteful to Archie--liked to ask
her to contribute to church charities, just to see how mean she could
be. The little, lop-sided cake at the church supper, the cheapest
pincushion, the skimpiest apron at the bazaar, were always Mrs. Archie's
contribution.

All this hurt the doctor's pride. But if there was one thing he had
learned, it was that there was no changing Belle's nature. He had
married a mean woman; and he must accept the consequences. Even in
Colorado he would have had no pretext for divorce, and, to do him
justice, he had never thought of such a thing. The tenets of the
Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though he had long ceased
to believe in them, still influenced his conduct and his conception of
propriety. To him there was something vulgar about divorce. A divorced
man was a disgraced man; at least, he had exhibited his hurt, and made
it a matter for common gossip. Respectability was so necessary to Archie
that he was willing to pay a high price for it. As long as he could keep
up a decent exterior, he could manage to get on; and if he could have
concealed his wife's littleness from all his friends, he would scarcely
have complained. He was more afraid of pity than he was of any
unhappiness. Had there been another woman for whom he cared greatly, he
might have had plenty of courage; but he was not likely to meet such a
woman in Moonstone.

There was a puzzling timidity in Archie's make-up. The thing that held
his shoulders stiff, that made him resort to a mirthless little laugh
when he was talking to dull people, that made him sometimes stumble over
rugs and carpets, had its counterpart in his mind. He had not the
courage to be an honest thinker. He could comfort himself by evasions
and compromises. He consoled himself for his own marriage by telling
himself that other people's were not much better. In his work he saw
pretty deeply into marital relations in Moonstone, and he could honestly
say that there were not many of his friends whom he envied. Their wives
seemed to suit them well enough, but they would never have suited him.

Although Dr. Archie could not bring himself to regard marriage merely as
a social contract, but looked upon it as somehow made sacred by a church
in which he did not believe,--as a physician he knew that a young man
whose marriage is merely nominal must yet go on living his life. When he
went to Denver or to Chicago, he drifted about in careless company where
gayety and good-humor can be bought, not because he had any taste for
such society, but because he honestly believed that anything was better
than divorce. He often told himself that "hanging and wiving go by
destiny." If wiving went badly with a man,--and it did oftener than
not,--then he must do the best he could to keep up appearances and help
the tradition of domestic happiness along. The Moonstone gossips,
assembled in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, often discussed
Dr. Archie's politeness to his wife, and his pleasant manner of speaking
about her. "Nobody has ever got a thing out of him yet," they agreed.
And it was certainly not because no one had ever tried.

When he was down in Denver, feeling a little jolly, Archie could forget
how unhappy he was at home, and could even make himself believe that he
missed his wife. He always bought her presents, and would have liked to
send her flowers if she had not repeatedly told him never to send her
anything but bulbs,--which did not appeal to him in his expansive
moments. At the Denver Athletic Club banquets, or at dinner with his
colleagues at the Brown Palace Hotel, he sometimes spoke sentimentally
about "little Mrs. Archie," and he always drank the toast "to our wives,
God bless them!" with gusto.

The determining factor about Dr. Archie was that he was romantic. He had
married Belle White because he was romantic--too romantic to know
anything about women, except what he wished them to be, or to repulse a
pretty girl who had set her cap for him. At medical school, though he
was a rather wild boy in behavior, he had always disliked coarse jokes
and vulgar stories. In his old Flint's Physiology there was still a poem
he had pasted there when he was a student; some verses by Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes about the ideals of the medical profession. After so much
and such disillusioning experience with it, he still had a romantic
feeling about the human body; a sense that finer things dwelt in it than
could be explained by anatomy. He never jested about birth or death or
marriage, and did not like to hear other doctors do it. He was a good
nurse, and had a reverence for the bodies of women and children. When he
was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then his constraint and
self-consciousness fell away from him. He was easy, gentle, competent,
master of himself and of other people. Then the idealist in him was not
afraid of being discovered and ridiculed.

In his tastes, too, the doctor was romantic. Though he read Balzac all
the year through, he still enjoyed the Waverley Novels as much as when
he had first come upon them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his
grandfather's library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and
holidays, because it brought back the pleasures of his boyhood so
vividly. He liked Scott's women. Constance de Beverley and the minstrel
girl in "The Fair Maid of Perth," not the Duchesse de Langeais, were his
heroines. But better than anything that ever got from the heart of a man
into printer's ink, he loved the poetry of Robert Burns. "Death and Dr.
Hornbook" and "The Jolly Beggars," Burns's "Reply to his Tailor," he
often read aloud to himself in his office, late at night, after a glass
of hot toddy. He used to read "Tam o'Shanter" to Thea Kronborg, and he
got her some of the songs, set to the old airs for which they were
written. He loved to hear her sing them. Sometimes when she sang, "Oh,
wert thou in the cauld blast," the doctor and even Mr. Kronborg joined
in. Thea never minded if people could not sing; she directed them with
her head and somehow carried them along. When her father got off the
pitch she let her own voice out and covered him.



XIII


At the beginning of June, when school closed, Thea had told Wunsch that
she didn't know how much practicing she could get in this summer because
Thor had his worst teeth still to cut.

"My God! all last summer he was doing that!" Wunsch exclaimed furiously.

"I know, but it takes them two years, and Thor is slow," Thea answered
reprovingly.

The summer went well beyond her hopes, however. She told herself that it
was the best summer of her life, so far. Nobody was sick at home, and
her lessons were uninterrupted. Now that she had four pupils of her own
and made a dollar a week, her practicing was regarded more seriously by
the household. Her mother had always arranged things so that she could
have the parlor four hours a day in summer. Thor proved a friendly ally.
He behaved handsomely about his molars, and never objected to being
pulled off into remote places in his cart. When Thea dragged him over
the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or a bank, he would
waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his monkey in the sand
and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the cactus and set up a
howl, but usually he let his sister read peacefully, while he coated his
hands and face, first with an all-day sucker and then with gravel.

Life was pleasant and uneventful until the first of September, when
Wunsch began to drink so hard that he was unable to appear when Thea
went to take her mid-week lesson, and Mrs. Kohler had to send her home
after a tearful apology. On Saturday morning she set out for the
Kohlers' again, but on her way, when she was crossing the ravine, she
noticed a woman sitting at the bottom of the gulch, under the railroad
trestle. She turned from her path and saw that it was Mrs. Tellamantez,
and she seemed to be doing drawn-work. Then Thea noticed that there was
something beside her, covered up with a purple and yellow Mexican
blanket. She ran up the gulch and called to Mrs. Tellamantez. The
Mexican woman held up a warning finger. Thea glanced at the blanket and
recognized a square red hand which protruded. The middle finger twitched
slightly.

"Is he hurt?" she gasped.

Mrs. Tellamantez shook her head. "No; very sick. He knows nothing," she
said quietly, folding her hands over her drawn-work.

Thea learned that Wunsch had been out all night, that this morning Mrs.
Kohler had gone to look for him and found him under the trestle covered
with dirt and cinders. Probably he had been trying to get home and had
lost his way. Mrs. Tellamantez was watching beside the unconscious man
while Mrs. Kohler and Johnny went to get help.

"You better go home now, I think," said Mrs. Tellamantez, in closing her
narration.

Thea hung her head and looked wistfully toward the blanket.

"Couldn't I just stay till they come?" she asked. "I'd like to know if
he's very bad."

"Bad enough," sighed Mrs. Tellamantez, taking up her work again.

Thea sat down under the narrow shade of one of the trestle posts and
listened to the locusts rasping in the hot sand while she watched Mrs.
Tellamantez evenly draw her threads. The blanket looked as if it were
over a heap of bricks.

"I don't see him breathing any," she said anxiously.

"Yes, he breathes," said Mrs. Tellamantez, not lifting her eyes.

It seemed to Thea that they waited for hours. At last they heard voices,
and a party of men came down the hill and up the gulch. Dr. Archie and
Fritz Kohler came first; behind were Johnny and Ray, and several men
from the roundhouse. Ray had the canvas litter that was kept at the
depot for accidents on the road. Behind them trailed half a dozen boys
who had been hanging round the depot.

When Ray saw Thea, he dropped his canvas roll and hurried forward.
"Better run along home, Thee. This is ugly business." Ray was indignant
that anybody who gave Thea music lessons should behave in such a manner.

Thea resented both his proprietary tone and his superior virtue. "I
won't. I want to know how bad he is. I'm not a baby!" she exclaimed
indignantly, stamping her foot into the sand.

Dr. Archie, who had been kneeling by the blanket, got up and came toward
Thea, dusting his knees. He smiled and nodded confidentially. "He'll be
all right when we get him home. But he wouldn't want you to see him like
this, poor old chap! Understand? Now, skip!"

Thea ran down the gulch and looked back only once, to see them lifting
the canvas litter with Wunsch upon it, still covered with the blanket.

The men carried Wunsch up the hill and down the road to the Kohlers'.
Mrs. Kohler had gone home and made up a bed in the sitting-room, as she
knew the litter could not be got round the turn in the narrow stairway.
Wunsch was like a dead man. He lay unconscious all day. Ray Kennedy
stayed with him till two o'clock in the afternoon, when he had to go out
on his run. It was the first time he had ever been inside the Kohlers'
house, and he was so much impressed by Napoleon that the piece-picture
formed a new bond between him and Thea.

Dr. Archie went back at six o'clock, and found Mrs. Kohler and Spanish
Johnny with Wunsch, who was in a high fever, muttering and groaning.

"There ought to be some one here to look after him to-night, Mrs.
Kohler," he said. "I'm on a confinement case, and I can't be here, but
there ought to be somebody. He may get violent."

Mrs. Kohler insisted that she could always do anything with Wunsch, but
the doctor shook his head and Spanish Johnny grinned. He said he would
stay. The doctor laughed at him. "Ten fellows like you couldn't hold
him, Spanish, if he got obstreperous; an Irishman would have his hands
full. Guess I'd better put the soft pedal on him." He pulled out his
hypodermic.

Spanish Johnny stayed, however, and the Kohlers went to bed. At about
two o'clock in the morning Wunsch rose from his ignominious cot. Johnny,
who was dozing on the lounge, awoke to find the German standing in the
middle of the room in his undershirt and drawers, his arms bare, his
heavy body seeming twice its natural girth. His face was snarling and
savage, and his eyes were crazy. He had risen to avenge himself, to wipe
out his shame, to destroy his enemy. One look was enough for Johnny.
Wunsch raised a chair threateningly, and Johnny, with the lightness of a
PICADOR, darted under the missile and out of the open window. He shot
across the gully to get help, meanwhile leaving the Kohlers to their
fate.

Fritz, upstairs, heard the chair crash upon the stove. Then he heard
doors opening and shutting, and some one stumbling about in the
shrubbery of the garden. He and Paulina sat up in bed and held a
consultation. Fritz slipped from under the covers, and going cautiously
over to the window, poked out his head. Then he rushed to the door and
bolted it.

"MEIN GOTT, Paulina," he gasped, "he has the axe, he will kill us!"

"The dresser," cried Mrs. Kohler; "push the dresser before the door.
ACH, if you had your rabbit gun, now!"

"It is in the barn," said Fritz sadly. "It would do no good; he would
not be afraid of anything now. Stay you in the bed, Paulina." The
dresser had lost its casters years ago, but he managed to drag it in
front of the door. "He is in the garden. He makes nothing. He will get
sick again, may-be."

Fritz went back to bed and his wife pulled the quilt over him and made
him lie down. They heard stumbling in the garden again, then a smash of
glass.

"ACH, DAS MISTBEET!" gasped Paulina, hearing her hotbed shivered. "The
poor soul, Fritz, he will cut himself. ACH! what is that?" They both sat
up in bed. "WIEDER! ACH, What is he doing?"

The noise came steadily, a sound of chopping. Paulina tore off her
night-cap. "DIE BAUME, DIE BAUME! He is cutting our trees, Fritz!" Before
her husband could prevent her, she had sprung from the bed and rushed to
the window. "DER TAUBENSCHLAG! GERECHTER HIMMEL, he is chopping the
dove-house down!"

Fritz reached her side before she had got her breath again, and poked
his head out beside hers. There, in the faint starlight, they saw a
bulky man, barefoot, half dressed, chopping away at the white post that
formed the pedestal of the dove-house. The startled pigeons were
croaking and flying about his head, even beating their wings in his
face, so that he struck at them furiously with the axe. In a few seconds
there was a crash, and Wunsch had actually felled the dove-house.

"Oh, if only it is not the trees next!" prayed Paulina. "The dove-house
you can make new again, but not DIE BAUME."

They watched breathlessly. In the garden below Wunsch stood in the
attitude of a woodman, contemplating the fallen cote. Suddenly he threw
the axe over his shoulder and went out of the front gate toward the
town.

"The poor soul, he will meet his death!" Mrs. Kohler wailed. She ran
back to her feather bed and hid her face in the pillow.

Fritz kept watch at the window. "No, no, Paulina," he called presently;
"I see lanterns coming. Johnny must have gone for somebody. Yes, four
lanterns, coming along the gulch. They stop; they must have seen him
already. Now they are under the hill and I cannot see them, but I think
they have him. They will bring him back. I must dress and go down." He
caught his trousers and began pulling them on by the window. "Yes, here
they come, half a dozen men. And they have tied him with a rope,
Paulina!"

"ACH, the poor man! To be led like a cow," groaned Mrs. Kohler. "Oh, it
is good that he has no wife!" She was reproaching herself for nagging
Fritz when he drank himself into foolish pleasantry or mild sulks, and
felt that she had never before appreciated her blessings.


Wunsch was in bed for ten days, during which time he was gossiped about
and even preached about in Moonstone. The Baptist preacher took a shot
at the fallen man from his pulpit, Mrs. Livery Johnson nodding
approvingly from her pew. The mothers of Wunsch's pupils sent him notes
informing him that their daughters would discontinue their
music-lessons. The old maid who had rented him her piano sent the town
dray for her contaminated instrument, and ever afterward declared that
Wunsch had ruined its tone and scarred its glossy finish. The Kohlers
were unremitting in their kindness to their friend. Mrs. Kohler made him
soups and broths without stint, and Fritz repaired the dove-house and
mounted it on a new post, lest it might be a sad reminder.

As soon as Wunsch was strong enough to sit about in his slippers and
wadded jacket, he told Fritz to bring him some stout thread from the
shop. When Fritz asked what he was going to sew, he produced the
tattered score of "Orpheus" and said he would like to fix it up for a
little present. Fritz carried it over to the shop and stitched it into
pasteboards, covered with dark suiting-cloth. Over the stitches he glued
a strip of thin red leather which he got from his friend, the
harness-maker. After Paulina had cleaned the pages with fresh bread,
Wunsch was amazed to see what a fine book he had. It opened stiffly, but
that was no matter.

Sitting in the arbor one morning, under the ripe grapes and the brown,
curling leaves, with a pen and ink on the bench beside him and the Gluck
score on his knee, Wunsch pondered for a long while. Several times he
dipped the pen in the ink, and then put it back again in the cigar box
in which Mrs. Kohler kept her writing utensils. His thoughts wandered
over a wide territory; over many countries and many years. There was no
order or logical sequence in his ideas. Pictures came and went without
reason. Faces, mountains, rivers, autumn days in other vineyards far
away. He thought of a FUSZREISE he had made through the Hartz Mountains
in his student days; of the innkeeper's pretty daughter who had lighted
his pipe for him in the garden one summer evening, of the woods above
Wiesbaden, haymakers on an island in the river. The roundhouse whistle
woke him from his reveries. Ah, yes, he was in Moonstone, Colorado. He
frowned for a moment and looked at the book on his knee. He had thought
of a great many appropriate things to write in it, but suddenly he
rejected all of them, opened the book, and at the top of the
much-engraved title-page he wrote rapidly in purple ink:--

EINST, O WUNDER!--

A. WUNSCH.
MOONSTONE, COLO.
SEPTEMBER 30, 18--


Nobody in Moonstone ever found what Wunsch's first name was. That "A"
may have stood for Adam, or August, or even Amadeus; he got very angry
if any one asked him.

He remained A. Wunsch to the end of his chapter there. When he presented
this score to Thea, he told her that in ten years she would either know
what the inscription meant, or she would not have the least idea, in
which case it would not matter.

When Wunsch began to pack his trunk, both the Kohlers were very unhappy.
He said he was coming back some day, but that for the present, since he
had lost all his pupils, it would be better for him to try some "new
town." Mrs. Kohler darned and mended all his clothes, and gave him two
new shirts she had made for Fritz. Fritz made him a new pair of trousers
and would have made him an overcoat but for the fact that overcoats were
so easy to pawn.

Wunsch would not go across the ravine to the town until he went to take
the morning train for Denver. He said that after he got to Denver he
would "look around." He left Moonstone one bright October morning,
without telling any one good-bye. He bought his ticket and went directly
into the smoking-car. When the train was beginning to pull out, he heard
his name called frantically, and looking out of the window he saw Thea
Kronborg standing on the siding, bareheaded and panting. Some boys had
brought word to school that they saw Wunsch's trunk going over to the
station, and Thea had run away from school. She was at the end of the
station platform, her hair in two braids, her blue gingham dress wet to
the knees because she had run across lots through the weeds. It had
rained during the night, and the tall sunflowers behind her were fresh
and shining.

"Good-bye, Herr Wunsch, good-bye!" she called waving to him.

He thrust his head out at the car window and called back, "LEBEN SIE
WOHL, LEBEN SIE WOHL, MEIN KIND!" He watched her until the train swept
around the curve beyond the roundhouse, and then sank back into his
seat, muttering, "She had been running. Ah, she will run a long way;
they cannot stop her!"

What was it about the child that one believed in? Was it her dogged
industry, so unusual in this free-and-easy country? Was it her
imagination? More likely it was because she had both imagination and a
stubborn will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other.
There was something unconscious and unawakened about her, that tempted
curiosity. She had a kind of seriousness that he had not met with in a
pupil before. She hated difficult things, and yet she could never pass
one by. They seemed to challenge her; she had no peace until she
mastered them. She had the power to make a great effort, to lift a
weight heavier than herself. Wunsch hoped he would always remember her
as she stood by the track, looking up at him; her broad eager face, so
fair in color, with its high cheek-bones, yellow eyebrows and
greenishhazel eyes. It was a face full of light and energy, of the
unquestioning hopefulness of first youth. Yes, she was like a flower
full of sun, but not the soft German flowers of his childhood. He had it
now, the comparison he had absently reached for before: she was like the
yellow prickly pear blossoms that open there in the desert; thornier and
sturdier than the maiden flowers he remembered; not so sweet, but
wonderful.


That night Mrs. Kohler brushed away many a tear as she got supper and
set the table for two. When they sat down, Fritz was more silent than
usual. People who have lived long together need a third at table: they
know each other's thoughts so well that they have nothing left to say.
Mrs. Kohler stirred and stirred her coffee and clattered the spoon, but
she had no heart for her supper. She felt, for the first time in years,
that she was tired of her own cooking. She looked across the glass lamp
at her husband and asked him if the butcher liked his new overcoat, and
whether he had got the shoulders right in a ready-made suit he was
patching over for Ray Kennedy. After supper Fritz offered to wipe the
dishes for her, but she told him to go about his business, and not to
act as if she were sick or getting helpless.

When her work in the kitchen was all done, she went out to cover the
oleanders against frost, and to take a last look at her chickens. As she
came back from the hen-house she stopped by one of the linden trees and
stood resting her hand on the trunk. He would never come back, the poor
man; she knew that. He would drift on from new town to new town, from
catastrophe to catastrophe. He would hardly find a good home for himself
again. He would die at last in some rough place, and be buried in the
desert or on the wild prairie, far enough from any linden tree!

Fritz, smoking his pipe on the kitchen doorstep, watched his Paulina and
guessed her thoughts. He, too, was sorry to lose his friend. But Fritz
was getting old; he had lived a long while and had learned to lose
without struggle.



XIV


"Mother," said Peter Kronborg to his wife one morning about two weeks
after Wunsch's departure, "how would you like to drive out to Copper
Hole with me to-day?"

Mrs. Kronborg said she thought she would enjoy the drive. She put on her
gray cashmere dress and gold watch and chain, as befitted a minister's
wife, and while her husband was dressing she packed a black oilcloth
satchel with such clothing as she and Thor would need overnight.

Copper Hole was a settlement fifteen miles northwest of Moonstone where
Mr. Kronborg preached every Friday evening. There was a big spring there
and a creek and a few irrigating ditches. It was a community of
discouraged agriculturists who had disastrously experimented with dry
farming. Mr. Kronborg always drove out one day and back the next,
spending the night with one of his parishioners. Often, when the weather
was fine, his wife accompanied him. To-day they set out from home after
the midday meal, leaving Tillie in charge of the house. Mrs. Kronborg's
maternal feeling was always garnered up in the baby, whoever the baby
happened to be. If she had the baby with her, the others could look out
for themselves. Thor, of course, was not, accurately speaking, a baby
any longer. In the matter of nourishment he was quite independent of his
mother, though this independence had not been won without a struggle.
Thor was conservative in all things, and the whole family had anguished
with him when he was being weaned. Being the youngest, he was still the
baby for Mrs. Kronborg, though he was nearly four years old and sat up
boldly on her lap this afternoon, holding on to the ends of the lines
and shouting "`mup, 'mup, horsey." His father watched him affectionately
and hummed hymn tunes in the jovial way that was sometimes such a trial
to Thea.

Mrs. Kronborg was enjoying the sunshine and the brilliant sky and all
the faintly marked features of the dazzling, monotonous landscape. She
had a rather unusual capacity for getting the flavor of places and of
people. Although she was so enmeshed in family cares most of the time,
she could emerge serene when she was away from them. For a mother of
seven, she had a singularly unprejudiced point of view. She was,
moreover, a fatalist, and as she did not attempt to direct things beyond
her control, she found a good deal of time to enjoy the ways of man and
nature.

When they were well upon their road, out where the first lean pasture
lands began and the sand grass made a faint showing between the
sagebrushes, Mr. Kronborg dropped his tune and turned to his wife.
"Mother, I've been thinking about something."

"I guessed you had. What is it?" She shifted Thor to her left knee,
where he would be more out of the way.

"Well, it's about Thea. Mr. Follansbee came to my study at the church
the other day and said they would like to have their two girls take
lessons of Thea. Then I sounded Miss Meyers" (Miss Meyers was the
organist in Mr. Kronborg's church) "and she said there was a good deal
of talk about whether Thea wouldn't take over Wunsch's pupils. She said
if Thea stopped school she wouldn't wonder if she could get pretty much
all Wunsch's class. People think Thea knows about all Wunsch could
teach."

Mrs. Kronborg looked thoughtful. "Do you think we ought to take her out
of school so young?"

"She is young, but next year would be her last year anyway. She's far
along for her age. And she can't learn much under the principal we've
got now, can she?"

"No, I'm afraid she can't," his wife admitted. "She frets a good deal
and says that man always has to look in the back of the book for the
answers. She hates all that diagramming they have to do, and I think
myself it's a waste of time."

Mr. Kronborg settled himself back into the seat and slowed the mare to a
walk. "You see, it occurs to me that we might raise Thea's prices, so it
would be worth her while. Seventy-five cents for hour lessons, fifty
cents for half-hour lessons. If she got, say two thirds of Wunsch's
class, that would bring her in upwards of ten dollars a week. Better pay
than teaching a country school, and there would be more work in vacation
than in winter. Steady work twelve months in the year; that's an
advantage. And she'd be living at home, with no expenses."

"There'd be talk if you raised her prices," said Mrs. Kronborg
dubiously.

"At first there would. But Thea is so much the best musician in town
that they'd all come into line after a while. A good many people in
Moonstone have been making money lately, and have bought new pianos.
There were ten new pianos shipped in here from Denver in the last year.
People ain't going to let them stand idle; too much money invested. I
believe Thea can have as many scholars as she can handle, if we set her
up a little."

"How set her up, do you mean?" Mrs. Kronborg felt a certain reluctance
about accepting this plan, though she had not yet had time to think out
her reasons.

"Well, I've been thinking for some time we could make good use of
another room. We couldn't give up the parlor to her all the time. If we
built another room on the ell and put the piano in there, she could give
lessons all day long and it wouldn't bother us. We could build a
clothes-press in it, and put in a bed-lounge and a dresser and let Anna
have it for her sleeping-room. She needs a place of her own, now that
she's beginning to be dressy."

"Seems like Thea ought to have the choice of the room, herself," said
Mrs. Kronborg.

"But, my dear, she don't want it. Won't have it. I sounded her coming
home from church on Sunday; asked her if she would like to sleep in a
new room, if we built on. She fired up like a little wild-cat and said
she'd made her own room all herself, and she didn't think anybody ought
to take it away from her."

"She don't mean to be impertinent, father. She's made decided that way,
like my father." Mrs. Kronborg spoke warmly. "I never have any trouble
with the child. I remember my father's ways and go at her carefully.
Thea's all right."

Mr. Kronborg laughed indulgently and pinched Thor's full cheek. "Oh, I
didn't mean anything against your girl, mother! She's all right, but
she's a little wild-cat, just the same. I think Ray Kennedy's planning
to spoil a born old maid."

"Huh! She'll get something a good sight better than Ray Kennedy, you
see! Thea's an awful smart girl. I've seen a good many girls take music
lessons in my time, but I ain't seen one that took to it so. Wunsch said
so, too. She's got the making of something in her."

"I don't deny that, and the sooner she gets at it in a businesslike way,
the better. She's the kind that takes responsibility, and it'll be good
for her."

Mrs. Kronborg was thoughtful. "In some ways it will, maybe. But there's
a good deal of strain about teaching youngsters, and she's always worked
so hard with the scholars she has. I've often listened to her pounding
it into 'em. I don't want to work her too hard. She's so serious that
she's never had what you might call any real childhood. Seems like she
ought to have the next few years sort of free and easy. She'll be tied
down with responsibilities soon enough."

Mr. Kronborg patted his wife's arm. "Don't you believe it, mother. Thea
is not the marrying kind. I've watched 'em. Anna will marry before long
and make a good wife, but I don't see Thea bringing up a family. She's
got a good deal of her mother in her, but she hasn't got all. She's too
peppery and too fond of having her own way. Then she's always got to be
ahead in everything. That kind make good church-workers and missionaries
and school teachers, but they don't make good wives. They fret all their
energy away, like colts, and get cut on the wire."

Mrs. Kronborg laughed. "Give me the graham crackers I put in your pocket
for Thor. He's hungry. You're a funny man, Peter. A body wouldn't think,
to hear you, you was talking about your own daughters. I guess you see
through 'em. Still, even if Thea ain't apt to have children of her own,
I don't know as that's a good reason why she should wear herself out on
other people's."

"That's just the point, mother. A girl with all that energy has got to
do something, same as a boy, to keep her out of mischief. If you don't
want her to marry Ray, let her do something to make herself
independent."

"Well, I'm not against it. It might be the best thing for her. I wish I
felt sure she wouldn't worry. She takes things hard. She nearly cried
herself sick about Wunsch's going away. She's the smartest child of 'em
all, Peter, by a long ways."

Peter Kronborg smiled. "There you go, Anna. That's you all over again.
Now, I have no favorites; they all have their good points. But you,"
with a twinkle, "always did go in for brains."

Mrs. Kronborg chuckled as she wiped the cracker crumbs from Thor's chin
and fists. "Well, you're mighty conceited, Peter! But I don't know as I
ever regretted it. I prefer having a family of my own to fussing with
other folks' children, that's the truth."

Before the Kronborgs reached Copper Hole, Thea's destiny was pretty well
mapped out for her. Mr. Kronborg was always delighted to have an excuse
for enlarging the house.

Mrs. Kronborg was quite right in her conjecture that there would be
unfriendly comment in Moonstone when Thea raised her prices for
music-lessons. People said she was getting too conceited for anything.
Mrs. Livery Johnson put on a new bonnet and paid up all her back calls
to have the pleasure of announcing in each parlor she entered that her
daughters, at least, would "never pay professional prices to Thea
Kronborg."

Thea raised no objection to quitting school. She was now in the "high
room," as it was called, in next to the highest class, and was studying
geometry and beginning Caesar. She no longer recited her lessons to the
teacher she liked, but to the Principal, a man who belonged, like Mrs.
Livery Johnson, to the camp of Thea's natural enemies. He taught school
because he was too lazy to work among grown-up people, and he made an
easy job of it. He got out of real work by inventing useless activities
for his pupils, such as the "tree-diagramming system." Thea had spent
hours making trees out of "Thanatopsis," Hamlet's soliloquy, Cato on
"Immortality." She agonized under this waste of time, and was only too
glad to accept her father's offer of liberty.

So Thea left school the first of November. By the first of January she
had eight one-hour pupils and ten half-hour pupils, and there would be
more in the summer. She spent her earnings generously. She bought a new
Brussels carpet for the parlor, and a rifle for Gunner and Axel, and an
imitation tiger-skin coat and cap for Thor. She enjoyed being able to
add to the family possessions, and thought Thor looked quite as handsome
in his spots as the rich children she had seen in Denver. Thor was most
complacent in his conspicuous apparel. He could walk anywhere by this
time--though he always preferred to sit, or to be pulled in his cart. He
was a blissfully lazy child, and had a number of long, dull plays, such
as making nests for his china duck and waiting for her to lay him an
egg. Thea thought him very intelligent, and she was proud that he was so
big and burly. She found him restful, loved to hear him call her
"sitter," and really liked his companionship, especially when she was
tired. On Saturday, for instance, when she taught from nine in the
morning until five in the afternoon, she liked to get off in a corner
with Thor after supper, away from all the bathing and dressing and
joking and talking that went on in the house, and ask him about his
duck, or hear him tell one of his rambling stories.



XV


By the time Thea's fifteenth birthday came round, she was established as
a music teacher in Moonstone. The new room had been added to the house
early in the spring, and Thea had been giving her lessons there since
the middle of May. She liked the personal independence which was
accorded her as a wage-earner. The family questioned her comings and
goings very little. She could go buggy-riding with Ray Kennedy, for
instance, without taking Gunner or Axel. She could go to Spanish
Johnny's and sing part songs with the Mexicans, and nobody objected.

Thea was still under the first excitement of teaching, and was terribly
in earnest about it. If a pupil did not get on well, she fumed and
fretted. She counted until she was hoarse. She listened to scales in her
sleep. Wunsch had taught only one pupil seriously, but Thea taught
twenty. The duller they were, the more furiously she poked and prodded
them. With the little girls she was nearly always patient, but with
pupils older than herself, she sometimes lost her temper. One of her
mistakes was to let herself in for a calling-down from Mrs. Livery
Johnson. That lady appeared at the Kronborgs' one morning and announced
that she would allow no girl to stamp her foot at her daughter Grace.
She added that Thea's bad manners with the older girls were being talked
about all over town, and that if her temper did not speedily improve she
would lose all her advanced pupils. Thea was frightened. She felt she
could never bear the disgrace, if such a thing happened. Besides, what
would her father say, after he had gone to the expense of building an
addition to the house? Mrs. Johnson demanded an apology to Grace. Thea
said she was willing to make it. Mrs. Johnson said that hereafter, since
she had taken lessons of the best piano teacher in Grinnell, Iowa, she
herself would decide what pieces Grace should study. Thea readily
consented to that, and Mrs. Johnson rustled away to tell a neighbor
woman that Thea Kronborg could be meek enough when you went at her
right.

Thea was telling Ray about this unpleasant encounter as they were
driving out to the sand hills the next Sunday.

"She was stuffing you, all right, Thee," Ray reassured her. "There's no
general dissatisfaction among your scholars. She just wanted to get in a
knock. I talked to the piano tuner the last time he was here, and he
said all the people he tuned for expressed themselves very favorably
about your teaching. I wish you didn't take so much pains with them,
myself."

"But I have to, Ray. They're all so dumb. They've got no ambition," Thea
exclaimed irritably. "Jenny Smiley is the only one who isn't stupid. She
can read pretty well, and she has such good hands. But she don't care a
rap about it. She has no pride."

Ray's face was full of complacent satisfaction as he glanced sidewise at
Thea, but she was looking off intently into the mirage, at one of those
mammoth cattle that are nearly always reflected there. "Do you find it
easier to teach in your new room?" he asked.

"Yes; I'm not interrupted so much. Of course, if I ever happen to want
to practice at night, that's always the night Anna chooses to go to bed
early."

"It's a darned shame, Thee, you didn't cop that room for yourself. I'm
sore at the PADRE about that. He ought to give you that room. You could
fix it up so pretty."

"I didn't want it, honest I didn't. Father would have let me have it. I
like my own room better. Somehow I can think better in a little room.
Besides, up there I am away from everybody, and I can read as late as I
please and nobody nags me."

"A growing girl needs lots of sleep," Ray providently remarked.

Thea moved restlessly on the buggy cushions. "They need other things
more," she muttered. "Oh, I forgot. I brought something to show you.
Look here, it came on my birthday. Wasn't it nice of him to remember?"
She took from her pocket a postcard, bent in the middle and folded, and
handed it to Ray. On it was a white dove, perched on a wreath of very
blue forget-me-nots, and "Birthday Greetings" in gold letters. Under
this was written, "From A. Wunsch."

Ray turned the card over, examined the postmark, and then began to
laugh.

"Concord, Kansas. He has my sympathy!"

"Why, is that a poor town?"

"It's the jumping-off place, no town at all. Some houses dumped down in
the middle of a cornfield. You get lost in the corn. Not even a saloon
to keep things going; sell whiskey without a license at the butcher
shop, beer on ice with the liver and beefsteak. I wouldn't stay there
over Sunday for a ten-dollar bill."

"Oh, dear! What do you suppose he's doing there? Maybe he just stopped
off there a few days to tune pianos," Thea suggested hopefully.

Ray gave her back the card. "He's headed in the wrong direction. What
does he want to get back into a grass country for? Now, there are lots
of good live towns down on the Santa Fe, and everybody down there is
musical. He could always get a job playing in saloons if he was
dead broke. I've figured out that I've got no years of my life to waste
in a Methodist country where they raise pork."

"We must stop on our way back and show this card to Mrs. Kohler. She
misses him so."

"By the way, Thee, I hear the old woman goes to church every Sunday to
hear you sing. Fritz tells me he has to wait till two o'clock for his
Sunday dinner these days. The church people ought to give you credit for
that, when they go for you."

Thea shook her head and spoke in a tone of resignation. "They'll always
go for me, just as they did for Wunsch. It wasn't because he drank they
went for him; not really. It was something else."

"You want to salt your money down, Thee, and go to Chicago and take some
lessons. Then you come back, and wear a long feather and high heels and
put on a few airs, and that'll fix 'em. That's what they like."

"I'll never have money enough to go to Chicago. Mother meant to lend me
some, I think, but now they've got hard times back in Nebraska, and her
farm don't bring her in anything. Takes all the tenant can raise to pay
the taxes. Don't let's talk about that. You promised to tell me about
the play you went to see in Denver."

Any one would have liked to hear Ray's simple and clear account of the
performance he had seen at the Tabor Grand Opera House--Maggie Mitchell
in LITTLE BAREFOOT--and any one would have liked to watch his kind face.
Ray looked his best out of doors, when his thick red hands were covered
by gloves, and the dull red of his sunburned face somehow seemed right
in the light and wind. He looked better, too, with his hat on; his hair
was thin and dry, with no particular color or character, "regular
Willy-boy hair," as he himself described it. His eyes were pale beside
the reddish bronze of his skin. They had the faded look often seen in
the eyes of men who have lived much in the sun and wind and who have
been accustomed to train their vision upon distant objects.

Ray realized that Thea's life was dull and exacting, and that she missed
Wunsch. He knew she worked hard, that she put up with a great many
little annoyances, and that her duties as a teacher separated her more
than ever from the boys and girls of her own age. He did everything he
could to provide recreation for her. He brought her candy and magazines
and pineapples--of which she was very fond--from Denver, and kept his
eyes and ears open for anything that might interest her. He was, of
course, living for Thea. He had thought it all out carefully and had
made up his mind just when he would speak to her. When she was
seventeen, then he would tell her his plan and ask her to marry him. He
would be willing to wait two, or even three years, until she was twenty,
if she thought best. By that time he would surely have got in on
something: copper, oil, gold, silver, sheep,--something.

Meanwhile, it was pleasure enough to feel that she depended on him more
and more, that she leaned upon his steady kindness. He never broke faith
with himself about her; he never hinted to her of his hopes for the
future, never suggested that she might be more intimately confidential
with him, or talked to her of the thing he thought about so constantly.
He had the chivalry which is perhaps the proudest possession of his
race. He had never embarrassed her by so much as a glance. Sometimes,
when they drove out to the sand hills, he let his left arm lie along the
back of the buggy seat, but it never came any nearer to Thea than that,
never touched her. He often turned to her a face full of pride, and
frank admiration, but his glance was never so intimate or so penetrating
as Dr. Archie's. His blue eyes were clear and shallow, friendly,
uninquiring. He rested Thea because he was so different; because, though
he often told her interesting things, he never set lively fancies going
in her head; because he never misunderstood her, and because he never,
by any chance, for a single instant, understood her! Yes, with Ray she
was safe; by him she would never be discovered!



XVI


The pleasantest experience Thea had that summer was a trip that she and
her mother made to Denver in Ray Kennedy's caboose. Mrs. Kronborg had
been looking forward to this excursion for a long while, but as Ray
never knew at what hour his freight would leave Moonstone, it was
difficult to arrange. The call-boy was as likely to summon him to start
on his run at twelve o'clock midnight as at twelve o'clock noon. The
first week in June started out with all the scheduled trains running on
time, and a light freight business. Tuesday evening Ray, after
consulting with the dispatcher, stopped at the Kronborgs' front gate to
tell Mrs. Kronborg--who was helping Tillie water the flowers--that if
she and Thea could be at the depot at eight o'clock the next morning, he
thought he could promise them a pleasant ride and get them into Denver
before nine o'clock in the evening. Mrs. Kronborg told him cheerfully,
across the fence, that she would "take him up on it," and Ray hurried
back to the yards to scrub out his car.

The one complaint Ray's brakemen had to make of him was that he was too
fussy about his caboose. His former brakeman had asked to be transferred
because, he said, "Kennedy was as fussy about his car as an old maid
about her bird-cage." Joe Giddy, who was braking with Ray now, called
him "the bride," because he kept the caboose and bunks so clean.

It was properly the brakeman's business to keep the car clean, but when
Ray got back to the depot, Giddy was nowhere to be found. Muttering that
all his brakemen seemed to consider him "easy," Ray went down to his car
alone. He built a fire in the stove and put water on to heat while he
got into his overalls and jumper. Then he set to work with a
scrubbing-brush and plenty of soap and "cleaner." He scrubbed the floor
and seats, blacked the stove, put clean sheets on the bunks, and then
began to demolish Giddy's picture gallery. Ray found that his brakemen
were likely to have what he termed "a taste for the nude in art," and
Giddy was no exception. Ray took down half a dozen girls in tights and
ballet skirts,--premiums for cigarette coupons,--and some racy calendars
advertising saloons and sporting clubs, which had cost Giddy both time
and trouble; he even removed Giddy's particular pet, a naked girl lying
on a couch with her knee carelessly poised in the air. Underneath the
picture was printed the title, "The Odalisque." Giddy was under the
happy delusion that this title meant something wicked,--there was a
wicked look about the consonants,--but Ray, of course, had looked it up,
and Giddy was indebted to the dictionary for the privilege of keeping
his lady. If "odalisque" had been what Ray called an objectionable word,
he would have thrown the picture out in the first place. Ray even took
down a picture of Mrs. Langtry in evening dress, because it was entitled
the "Jersey Lily," and because there was a small head of Edward VII,
then Prince of Wales, in one corner. Albert Edward's conduct was a
popular subject of discussion among railroad men in those days, and as
Ray pulled the tacks out of this lithograph he felt more indignant with
the English than ever. He deposited all these pictures under the
mattress of Giddy's bunk, and stood admiring his clean car in the
lamplight; the walls now exhibited only a wheatfield, advertising
agricultural implements, a map of Colorado, and some pictures of
race-horses and hunting-dogs. At this moment Giddy, freshly shaved and
shampooed, his shirt shining with the highest polish known to Chinese
laundrymen, his straw hat tipped over his right eye, thrust his head in
at the door.

"What in hell--" he brought out furiously. His good humored, sunburned
face seemed fairly to swell with amazement and anger.

"That's all right, Giddy," Ray called in a conciliatory tone. "Nothing
injured. I'll put 'em all up again as I found 'em. Going to take some
ladies down in the car to-morrow."

Giddy scowled. He did not dispute the propriety of Ray's measures, if
there were to be ladies on board, but he felt injured. "I suppose you'll
expect me to behave like a Y.M.C.A. secretary," he growled. "I can't do
my work and serve tea at the same time."

"No need to have a tea-party," said Ray with determined cheerfulness.
"Mrs. Kronborg will bring the lunch, and it will be a darned good one."

Giddy lounged against the car, holding his cigar between two thick
fingers. "Then I guess she'll get it," he observed knowingly. "I don't
think your musical friend is much on the grub-box. Has to keep her hands
white to tickle the ivories." Giddy had nothing against Thea, but he
felt cantankerous and wanted to get a rise out of Kennedy.

"Every man to his own job," Ray replied agreeably, pulling his white
shirt on over his head.

Giddy emitted smoke disdainfully. "I suppose so. The man that gets her
will have to wear an apron and bake the pancakes. Well, some men like to
mess about the kitchen." He paused, but Ray was intent on getting into
his clothes as quickly as possible. Giddy thought he could go a little
further. "Of course, I don't dispute your right to haul women in this
car if you want to; but personally, so far as I'm concerned, I'd a good
deal rather drink a can of tomatoes and do without the women AND their
lunch. I was never much enslaved to hard-boiled eggs, anyhow."

"You'll eat 'em to-morrow, all the same." Ray's tone had a steely
glitter as he jumped out of the car, and Giddy stood aside to let him
pass. He knew that Kennedy's next reply would be delivered by hand. He
had once seen Ray beat up a nasty fellow for insulting a Mexican woman
who helped about the grub-car in the work train, and his fists had
worked like two steel hammers. Giddy wasn't looking for trouble.

At eight o'clock the next morning Ray greeted his ladies and helped them
into the car. Giddy had put on a clean shirt and yellow pig-skin gloves
and was whistling his best. He considered Kennedy a fluke as a ladies'
man, and if there was to be a party, the honors had to be done by some
one who wasn't a blacksmith at small-talk. Giddy had, as Ray
sarcastically admitted, "a local reputation as a jollier," and he was
fluent in gallant speeches of a not too-veiled nature. He insisted that
Thea should take his seat in the cupola, opposite Ray's, where she could
look out over the country. Thea told him, as she clambered up, that she
cared a good deal more about riding in that seat than about going to
Denver. Ray was never so companionable and easy as when he sat chatting
in the lookout of his little house on wheels. Good stories came to him,
and interesting recollections. Thea had a great respect for the reports
he had to write out, and for the telegrams that were handed to him at
stations; for all the knowledge and experience it must take to run a
freight train.

Giddy, down in the car, in the pauses of his work, made himself
agreeable to Mrs. Kronborg.

"It's a great rest to be where my family can't get at me, Mr. Giddy,"
she told him. "I thought you and Ray might have some housework here for
me to look after, but I couldn't improve any on this car."

"Oh, we like to keep her neat," returned Giddy glibly, winking up at
Ray's expressive back. "If you want to see a clean ice-box, look at this
one. Yes, Kennedy always carries fresh cream to eat on his oatmeal. I'm
not particular. The tin cow's good enough for me."

"Most of you boys smoke so much that all victuals taste alike to you,"
said Mrs. Kronborg. "I've got no religious scruples against smoking, but
I couldn't take as much interest cooking for a man that used tobacco. I
guess it's all right for bachelors who have to eat round."

Mrs. Kronborg took off her hat and veil and made herself comfortable.
She seldom had an opportunity to be idle, and she enjoyed it. She could
sit for hours and watch the sage-hens fly up and the jack-rabbits dart
away from the track, without being bored. She wore a tan bombazine
dress, made very plainly, and carried a roomy, worn, mother-of-the-family
handbag.

Ray Kennedy always insisted that Mrs. Kronborg was "a fine-looking
lady," but this was not the common opinion in Moonstone. Ray had lived
long enough among the Mexicans to dislike fussiness, to feel that there
was something more attractive in ease of manner than in absentminded
concern about hairpins and dabs of lace. He had learned to think that
the way a woman stood, moved, sat in her chair, looked at you, was more
important than the absence of wrinkles from her skirt. Ray had, indeed,
such unusual perceptions in some directions, that one could not help
wondering what he would have been if he had ever, as he said, had "half
a chance."

He was right; Mrs. Kronborg was a fine-looking woman. She was short and
square, but her head was a real head, not a mere jerky termination of
the body. It had some individuality apart from hats and hairpins. Her
hair, Moonstone women admitted, would have been very pretty "on anybody
else." Frizzy bangs were worn then, but Mrs. Kronborg always dressed her
hair in the same way, parted in the middle, brushed smoothly back from
her low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her head in two
thick braids. It was growing gray about the temples, but after the
manner of yellow hair it seemed only to have grown paler there, and had
taken on a color like that of English primroses. Her eyes were clear and
untroubled; her face smooth and calm, and, as Ray said, "strong."

Thea and Ray, up in the sunny cupola, were laughing and talking. Ray got
great pleasure out of seeing her face there in the little box where he
so often imagined it. They were crossing a plateau where great red
sandstone boulders lay about, most of them much wider at the top than at
the base, so that they looked like great toadstools.

"The sand has been blowing against them for a good many hundred years,"
Ray explained, directing Thea's eyes with his gloved hand. "You see the
sand blows low, being so heavy, and cuts them out underneath. Wind and
sand are pretty high-class architects. That's the principle of most of
the Cliff-Dweller remains down at Canyon de Chelly. The sandstorms had
dug out big depressions in the face of a cliff, and the Indians built
their houses back in that depression."

"You told me that before, Ray, and of course you know. But the geography
says their houses were cut out of the face of the living rock, and I
like that better."

Ray sniffed. "What nonsense does get printed! It's enough to give a man
disrespect for learning. How could them Indians cut houses out of the
living rock, when they knew nothing about the art of forging metals?"
Ray leaned back in his chair, swung his foot, and looked thoughtful and
happy. He was in one of his favorite fields of speculation, and nothing
gave him more pleasure than talking these things over with Thea
Kronborg. "I'll tell you, Thee, if those old fellows had learned to work
metals once, your ancient Egyptians and Assyrians wouldn't have beat
them very much. Whatever they did do, they did well. Their masonry's
standing there to-day, the corners as true as the Denver Capitol. They
were clever at most everything but metals; and that one failure kept
them from getting across. It was the quicksand that swallowed 'em up, as
a race. I guess civilization proper began when men mastered metals."

Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not use them to show
off, but because they seemed to him more adequate than colloquial
speech. He felt strongly about these things, and groped for words, as he
said, "to express himself." He had the lamentable American belief that
"expression" is obligatory. He still carried in his trunk, among the
unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the title-page of
which was written "Impressions on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H.
Kennedy." The pages of that book were like a battlefield; the laboring
author had fallen back from metaphor after metaphor, abandoned position
after position. He would have admitted that the art of forging metals
was nothing to this treacherous business of recording impressions, in
which the material you were so full of vanished mysteriously under your
striving hand. "Escaping steam!" he had said to himself, the last time
he tried to read that notebook.

Thea didn't mind Ray's travel-lecture expressions. She dodged them,
unconsciously, as she did her father's professional palaver. The light
in Ray's pale-blue eyes and the feeling in his voice more than made up
for the stiffness of his language.

"Were the Cliff-Dwellers really clever with their hands, Ray, or do you
always have to make allowance and say, 'That was pretty good for an
Indian'?" she asked.

Ray went down into the car to give some instructions to Giddy. "Well,"
he said when he returned, "about the aborigines: once or twice I've been
with some fellows who were cracking burial mounds. Always felt a little
ashamed of it, but we did pull out some remarkable things. We got some
pottery out whole; seemed pretty fine to me. I guess their women were
their artists. We found lots of old shoes and sandals made out of yucca
fiber, neat and strong; and feather blankets, too."

"Feather blankets? You never told me about them."

"Didn't I? The old fellows--or the squaws--wove a close netting of yucca
fiber, and then tied on little bunches of down feathers, overlapping,
just the way feathers grow on a bird. Some of them were feathered on
both sides. You can't get anything warmer than that, now, can you?--or
prettier. What I like about those old aborigines is, that they got all
their ideas from nature."

Thea laughed. "That means you're going to say something about girls'
wearing corsets. But some of your Indians flattened their babies' heads,
and that's worse than wearing corsets."

"Give me an Indian girl's figure for beauty," Ray insisted. "And a girl
with a voice like yours ought to have plenty of lung-action. But you
know my sentiments on that subject. I was going to tell you about the
handsomest thing we ever looted out of those burial mounds. It was on a
woman, too, I regret to say. She was preserved as perfect as any mummy
that ever came out of the pyramids. She had a big string of turquoises
around her neck, and she was wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with
little yellow feathers that must have come off wild canaries. Can you
beat that, now? The fellow that claimed it sold it to a Boston man for a
hundred and fifty dollars."

Thea looked at him admiringly. "Oh, Ray, and didn't you get anything off
her, to remember her by, even? She must have been a princess."

Ray took a wallet from the pocket of the coat that was hanging beside
him, and drew from it a little lump wrapped in worn tissue paper. In a
moment a stone, soft and blue as a robin's egg, lay in the hard palm of
his hand. It was a turquoise, rubbed smooth in the Indian finish, which
is so much more beautiful than the incongruous high polish the white man
gives that tender stone. "I got this from her necklace. See the hole
where the string went through? You know how the Indians drill them? Work
the drill with their teeth. You like it, don't you? They're just right
for you. Blue and yellow are the Swedish colors." Ray looked intently at
her head, bent over his hand, and then gave his whole attention to the
track.

"I'll tell you, Thee," he began after a pause, "I'm going to form a
camping party one of these days and persuade your PADRE to take you and
your mother down to that country, and we'll live in the rock
houses--they're as comfortable as can be--and start the cook fires up in
'em once again. I'll go into the burial mounds and get you more
keepsakes than any girl ever had before." Ray had planned such an
expedition for his wedding journey, and it made his heart thump to see
how Thea's eyes kindled when he talked about it. "I've learned more down
there about what makes history," he went on, "than in all the books I've
ever read. When you sit in the sun and let your heels hang out of a
doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas come to you. You begin to feel
what the human race has been up against from the beginning. There's
something mighty elevating about those old habitations. You feel like
it's up to you to do your best, on account of those fellows having it so
hard. You feel like you owed them something."

At Wassiwappa, Ray got instructions to sidetrack until Thirty-six went
by. After reading the message, he turned to his guests. "I'm afraid this
will hold us up about two hours, Mrs. Kronborg, and we won't get into
Denver till near midnight."

"That won't trouble me," said Mrs. Kronborg contentedly. "They know me
at the Y.W.C.A., and they'll let me in any time of night. I came to see
the country, not to make time. I've always wanted to get out at this
white place and look around, and now I'll have a chance. What makes it
so white?"

"Some kind of chalky rock." Ray sprang to the ground and gave Mrs.
Kronborg his hand. "You can get soil of any color in Colorado; match
most any ribbon."

While Ray was getting his train on to a side track, Mrs. Kronborg
strolled off to examine the post-office and station house; these, with
the water tank, made up the town. The station agent "batched" and raised
chickens. He ran out to meet Mrs. Kronborg, clutched at her feverishly,
and began telling her at once how lonely he was and what bad luck he was
having with his poultry. She went to his chicken yard with him, and
prescribed for gapes.

Wassiwappa seemed a dreary place enough to people who looked for
verdure, a brilliant place to people who liked color. Beside the station
house there was a blue-grass plot, protected by a red plank fence, and
six fly-bitten box-elder trees, not much larger than bushes, were kept
alive by frequent hosings from the water plug. Over the windows some
dusty morning-glory vines were trained on strings. All the country about
was broken up into low chalky hills, which were so intensely white, and
spotted so evenly with sage, that they looked like white leopards
crouching. White dust powdered everything, and the light was so intense
that the station agent usually wore blue glasses. Behind the station
there was a water course, which roared in flood time, and a basin in the
soft white rock where a pool of alkali water flashed in the sun like a
mirror. The agent looked almost as sick as his chickens, and Mrs.
Kronborg at once invited him to lunch with her party. He had, he
confessed, a distaste for his own cooking, and lived mainly on soda
crackers and canned beef. He laughed apologetically when Mrs. Kronborg
said she guessed she'd look about for a shady place to eat lunch.

She walked up the track to the water tank, and there, in the narrow
shadows cast by the uprights on which the tank stood, she found two
tramps. They sat up and stared at her, heavy with sleep. When she asked
them where they were going, they told her "to the coast." They rested by
day and traveled by night; walked the ties unless they could steal a
ride, they said; adding that "these Western roads were getting strict."
Their faces were blistered, their eyes blood-shot, and their shoes
looked fit only for the trash pile.

"I suppose you're hungry?" Mrs. Kronborg asked. "I suppose you both
drink?" she went on thoughtfully, not censoriously.

The huskier of the two hoboes, a bushy, bearded fellow, rolled his eyes
and said, "I wonder?" But the other, who was old and spare, with a sharp
nose and watery eyes, sighed. "Some has one affliction, some another,"
he said.

Mrs. Kronborg reflected. "Well," she said at last, "you can't get liquor
here, anyway. I am going to ask you to vacate, because I want to have a
little picnic under this tank for the freight crew that brought me
along. I wish I had lunch enough to provide you, but I ain't. The
station agent says he gets his provisions over there at the post office
store, and if you are hungry you can get some canned stuff there." She
opened her handbag and gave each of the tramps a half-dollar.

The old man wiped his eyes with his forefinger. "Thank 'ee, ma'am. A can
of tomatters will taste pretty good to me. I wasn't always walkin' ties;
I had a good job in Cleveland before--"

The hairy tramp turned on him fiercely. "Aw, shut up on that, grandpaw!
Ain't you got no gratitude? What do you want to hand the lady that fur?"

The old man hung his head and turned away. As he went off, his comrade
looked after him and said to Mrs. Kronborg: "It's true, what he says. He
had a job in the car shops; but he had bad luck." They both limped away
toward the store, and Mrs. Kronborg sighed. She was not afraid of
tramps. She always talked to them, and never turned one away. She hated
to think how many of them there were, crawling along the tracks over
that vast country.

Her reflections were cut short by Ray and Giddy and Thea, who came
bringing the lunch box and water bottles. Although there was not shadow
enough to accommodate all the party at once, the air under the tank was
distinctly cooler than the surrounding air, and the drip made a pleasant
sound in that breathless noon. The station agent ate as if he had never
been fed before, apologizing every time he took another piece of fried
chicken. Giddy was unabashed before the devilled eggs of which he had
spoken so scornfully last night. After lunch the men lit their pipes and
lay back against the uprights that supported the tank.

"This is the sunny side of railroading, all right," Giddy drawled
luxuriously.

"You fellows grumble too much," said Mrs. Kronborg as she corked the
pickle jar. "Your job has its drawbacks, but it don't tie you down. Of
course there's the risk; but I believe a man's watched over, and he
can't be hurt on the railroad or anywhere else if it's intended he
shouldn't be."

Giddy laughed. "Then the trains must be operated by fellows the Lord has
it in for, Mrs. Kronborg. They figure it out that a railroad man's only
due to last eleven years; then it's his turn to be smashed."

"That's a dark Providence, I don't deny," Mrs. Kronborg admitted. "But
there's lots of things in life that's hard to understand."

"I guess!" murmured Giddy, looking off at the spotted white hills.

Ray smoked in silence, watching Thea and her mother clear away the
lunch. He was thinking that Mrs. Kronborg had in her face the same
serious look that Thea had; only hers was calm and satisfied, and Thea's
was intense and questioning. But in both it was a large kind of look,
that was not all the time being broken up and convulsed by trivial
things. They both carried their heads like Indian women, with a kind of
noble unconsciousness. He got so tired of women who were always nodding
and jerking; apologizing, deprecating, coaxing, insinuating with their
heads.

When Ray's party set off again that afternoon the sun beat fiercely into
the cupola, and Thea curled up in one of the seats at the back of the
car and had a nap.

As the short twilight came on, Giddy took a turn in the cupola, and Ray
came down and sat with Thea on the rear platform of the caboose and
watched the darkness come in soft waves over the plain. They were now
about thirty miles from Denver, and the mountains looked very near. The
great toothed wall behind which the sun had gone down now separated into
four distinct ranges, one behind the other. They were a very pale blue,
a color scarcely stronger than wood smoke, and the sunset had left
bright streaks in the snow-filled gorges. In the clear, yellowstreaked
sky the stars were coming out, flickering like newly lighted lamps,
growing steadier and more golden as the sky darkened and the land
beneath them fell into complete shadow. It was a cool, restful darkness
that was not black or forbidding, but somehow open and free; the night
of high plains where there is no moistness or mistiness in the
atmosphere.

Ray lit his pipe. "I never get tired of them old stars, Thee. I miss 'em
up in Washington and Oregon where it's misty. Like 'em best down in
Mother Mexico, where they have everything their own way. I'm not for any
country where the stars are dim." Ray paused and drew on his pipe. "I
don't know as I ever really noticed 'em much till that first year I
herded sheep up in Wyoming. That was the year the blizzard caught me."

"And you lost all your sheep, didn't you, Ray?" Thea spoke
sympathetically. "Was the man who owned them nice about it?"

"Yes, he was a good loser. But I didn't get over it for a long while.
Sheep are so damned resigned. Sometimes, to this day, when I'm
dog-tired, I try to save them sheep all night long. It comes kind of
hard on a boy when he first finds out how little he is, and how big
everything else is."

Thea moved restlessly toward him and dropped her chin on her hand,
looking at a low star that seemed to rest just on the rim of the earth.
"I don't see how you stood it. I don't believe I could. I don't see how
people can stand it to get knocked out, anyhow!" She spoke with such
fierceness that Ray glanced at her in surprise. She was sitting on the
floor of the car, crouching like a little animal about to spring.

"No occasion for you to see," he said warmly. "There'll always be plenty
of other people to take the knocks for you."

"That's nonsense, Ray." Thea spoke impatiently and leaned lower still,
frowning at the red star. "Everybody's up against it for himself,
succeeds or fails--himself."

"In one way, yes," Ray admitted, knocking the sparks from his pipe out
into the soft darkness that seemed to flow like a river beside the car.
"But when you look at it another way, there are a lot of halfway people
in this world who help the winners win, and the failers fail. If a man
stumbles, there's plenty of people to push him down. But if he's like
`the youth who bore,' those same people are foreordained to help him
along. They may hate to, worse than blazes, and they may do a lot of
cussin' about it, but they have to help the winners and they can't dodge
it. It's a natural law, like what keeps the big clock up there going,
little wheels and big, and no mix-up." Ray's hand and his pipe were
suddenly outlined against the sky. "Ever occur to you, Thee, that they
have to be on time close enough to MAKE TIME? The Dispatcher up there
must have a long head." Pleased with his similitude, Ray went back to
the lookout. Going into Denver, he had to keep a sharp watch.

Giddy came down, cheerful at the prospect of getting into port, and
singing a new topical ditty that had come up from the Santa Fe by way of
La Junta. Nobody knows who makes these songs; they seem to follow events
automatically. Mrs. Kronborg made Giddy sing the whole twelve verses of
this one, and laughed until she wiped her eyes. The story was that of
Katie Casey, head diningroom girl at Winslow, Arizona, who was unjustly
discharged by the Harvey House manager. Her suitor, the yardmaster, took
the switchmen out on a strike until she was reinstated. Freight trains
from the east and the west piled up at Winslow until the yards looked
like a log-jam. The division superintendent, who was in California, had
to wire instructions for Katie Casey's restoration before he could get
his trains running. Giddy's song told all this with much detail, both
tender and technical, and after each of the dozen verses came the
refrain:--


"Oh, who would think that Katie Casey owned the Santa Fe?
But it really looks that way,
The dispatcher's turnin' gray,
All the crews is off their pay;
She can hold the freight from Albuquerq' to Needles any day;
The division superintendent, he come home from Monterey,
Just to see if things was pleasin' Katie Ca--a--a--sey."


Thea laughed with her mother and applauded Giddy.
Everything was so kindly and comfortable; Giddy and
Ray, and their hospitable little house, and the easy-going
country, and the stars.  She curled up on the seat again
with that warm, sleepy feeling of the friendliness of the
world--which nobody keeps very long, and which she
was to lose early and irrevocably.



XVII


The summer flew by. Thea was glad when Ray Kennedy had a Sunday in town
and could take her driving. Out among the sand hills she could forget
the "new room" which was the scene of wearing and fruitless labor. Dr.
Archie was away from home a good deal that year. He had put all his
money into mines above Colorado Springs, and he hoped for great returns
from them.

In the fall of that year, Mr. Kronborg decided that Thea ought to show
more interest in church work. He put it to her frankly, one night at
supper, before the whole family. "How can I insist on the other girls in
the congregation being active in the work, when one of my own daughters
manifests so little interest?"

"But I sing every Sunday morning, and I have to give up one night a week
to choir practice," Thea declared rebelliously, pushing back her plate
with an angry determination to eat nothing more.

"One night a week is not enough for the pastor's daughter," her father
replied. "You won't do anything in the sewing society, and you won't
take part in the Christian Endeavor or the Band of Hope. Very well, you
must make it up in other ways. I want some one to play the organ and
lead the singing at prayer-meeting this winter. Deacon Potter told me
some time ago that he thought there would be more interest in our
prayer-meetings if we had the organ. Miss Meyers don't feel that she can
play on Wednesday nights. And there ought to be somebody to start the
hymns. Mrs. Potter is getting old, and she always starts them too high.
It won't take much of your time, and it will keep people from talking."

This argument conquered Thea, though she left the table sullenly. The
fear of the tongue, that terror of little towns, is usually felt more
keenly by the minister's family than by other households. Whenever the
Kronborgs wanted to do anything, even to buy a new carpet, they had to
take counsel together as to whether people would talk. Mrs. Kronborg had
her own conviction that people talked when they felt like it, and said
what they chose, no matter how the minister's family conducted
themselves. But she did not impart these dangerous ideas to her
children. Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be
placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you
for one of themselves.

Mrs. Kronborg did not have any particular zest for prayer-meetings, and
she stayed at home whenever she had a valid excuse. Thor was too old to
furnish such an excuse now, so every Wednesday night, unless one of the
children was sick, she trudged off with Thea, behind Mr. Kronborg. At
first Thea was terribly bored. But she got used to prayermeeting, got
even to feel a mournful interest in it.

The exercises were always pretty much the same. After the first hymn her
father read a passage from the Bible, usually a Psalm. Then there was
another hymn, and then her father commented upon the passage he had read
and, as he said, "applied the Word to our necessities." After a third
hymn, the meeting was declared open, and the old men and women took
turns at praying and talking. Mrs. Kronborg never spoke in meeting. She
told people firmly that she had been brought up to keep silent and let
the men talk, but she gave respectful attention to the others, sitting
with her hands folded in her lap.

The prayer-meeting audience was always small. The young and energetic
members of the congregation came only once or twice a year, "to keep
people from talking." The usual Wednesday night gathering was made up of
old women, with perhaps six or eight old men, and a few sickly girls who
had not much interest in life; two of them, indeed, were already
preparing to die. Thea accepted the mournfulness of the prayer-meetings
as a kind of spiritual discipline, like funerals. She always read late
after she went home and felt a stronger wish than usual to live and to
be happy.

The meetings were conducted in the Sunday-School room, where there were
wooden chairs instead of pews; an old map of Palestine hung on the wall,
and the bracket lamps gave out only a dim light. The old women sat
motionless as Indians in their shawls and bonnets; some of them wore
long black mourning veils. The old men drooped in their chairs. Every
back, every face, every head said "resignation." Often there were long
silences, when you could hear nothing but the crackling of the soft coal
in the stove and the muffled cough of one of the sick girls.

There was one nice old lady,--tall, erect, self-respecting, with a
delicate white face and a soft voice. She never whined, and what she
said was always cheerful, though she spoke so nervously that Thea knew
she dreaded getting up, and that she made a real sacrifice to, as she
said, "testify to the goodness of her Saviour." She was the mother of
the girl who coughed, and Thea used to wonder how she explained things
to herself. There was, indeed, only one woman who talked because she
was, as Mr. Kronborg said, "tonguey." The others were somehow
impressive. They told about the sweet thoughts that came to them while
they were at their work; how, amid their household tasks, they were
suddenly lifted by the sense of a divine Presence. Sometimes they told
of their first conversion, of how in their youth that higher Power had
made itself known to them. Old Mr. Carsen, the carpenter, who gave his
services as janitor to the church, used often to tell how, when he was a
young man and a scoffer, bent on the destruction of both body and soul,
his Saviour had come to him in the Michigan woods and had stood, it
seemed to him, beside the tree he was felling; and how he dropped his
axe and knelt in prayer "to Him who died for us upon the tree." Thea
always wanted to ask him more about it; about his mysterious wickedness,
and about the vision.

Sometimes the old people would ask for prayers for their absent
children. Sometimes they asked their brothers and sisters in Christ to
pray that they might be stronger against temptations. One of the sick
girls used to ask them to pray that she might have more faith in the
times of depression that came to her, "when all the way before seemed
dark." She repeated that husky phrase so often, that Thea always
remembered it.

One old woman, who never missed a Wednesday night, and who nearly always
took part in the meeting, came all the way up from the depot settlement.
She always wore a black crocheted "fascinator" over her thin white hair,
and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She
had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always
prayed "for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may
be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may
they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to
Eternity." She used to speak, too, of "the engines that race with
death"; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her
knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and
danger in them; they made one think of the deep black canyons, the
slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken
eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too
long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face
was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways
of describing that color of age, but in reality it is not like
parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That
brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old
human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

One bitterly cold night in December the prayer-meeting seemed to Thea
longer than usual. The prayers and the talks went on and on. It was as
if the old people were afraid to go out into the cold, or were stupefied
by the hot air of the room. She had left a book at home that she was
impatient to get back to. At last the Doxology was sung, but the old
people lingered about the stove to greet each other, and Thea took her
mother's arm and hurried out to the frozen sidewalk, before her father
could get away. The wind was whistling up the street and whipping the
naked cottonwood trees against the telegraph poles and the sides of the
houses. Thin snow clouds were flying overhead, so that the sky looked
gray, with a dull phosphorescence. The icy streets and the shingle roofs
of the houses were gray, too. All along the street, shutters banged or
windows rattled, or gates wobbled, held by their latch but shaking on
loose hinges. There was not a cat or a dog in Moonstone that night that
was not given a warm shelter; the cats under the kitchen stove, the dogs
in barns or coal-sheds. When Thea and her mother reached home, their
mufflers were covered with ice, where their breath had frozen. They
hurried into the house and made a dash for the parlor and the hard-coal
burner, behind which Gunner was sitting on a stool, reading his Jules
Verne book. The door stood open into the dining-room, which was heated
from the parlor. Mr. Kronborg always had a lunch when he came home from
prayer-meeting, and his pumpkin pie and milk were set out on the
dining-table. Mrs. Kronborg said she thought she felt hungry, too, and
asked Thea if she didn't want something to eat.

"No, I'm not hungry, mother. I guess I'll go upstairs."

"I expect you've got some book up there," said Mrs. Kronborg, bringing
out another pie. "You'd better bring it down here and read. Nobody'll
disturb you, and it's terrible cold up in that loft."

Thea was always assured that no one would disturb her if she read
downstairs, but the boys talked when they came in, and her father fairly
delivered discourses after he had been renewed by half a pie and a
pitcher of milk.

"I don't mind the cold. I'll take a hot brick up for my feet. I put one
in the stove before I left, if one of the boys hasn't stolen it.
Good-night, mother." Thea got her brick and lantern, and dashed upstairs
through the windy loft. She undressed at top speed and got into bed with
her brick. She put a pair of white knitted gloves on her hands, and
pinned over her head a piece of soft flannel that had been one of Thor's
long petticoats when he was a baby. Thus equipped, she was ready for
business. She took from her table a thick paper-backed volume, one of
the "line" of paper novels the druggist kept to sell to traveling men.
She had bought it, only yesterday, because the first sentence interested
her very much, and because she saw, as she glanced over the pages, the
magical names of two Russian cities. The book was a poor translation of
"Anna Karenina." Thea opened it at a mark, and fixed her eyes intently
upon the small print. The hymns, the sick girl, the resigned black
figures were forgotten. It was the night of the ball in Moscow.

Thea would have been astonished if she could have known how, years
afterward, when she had need of them, those old faces were to come back
to her, long after they were hidden away under the earth; that they
would seem to her then as full of meaning, as mysteriously marked by
Destiny, as the people who danced the mazurka under the elegant
Korsunsky.



XVIII


Mr. Kronborg was too fond of his ease and too sensible to worry his
children much about religion. He was more sincere than many preachers,
but when he spoke to his family about matters of conduct it was usually
with a regard for keeping up appearances. The church and church work
were discussed in the family like the routine of any other business.
Sunday was the hard day of the week with them, just as Saturday was the
busy day with the merchants on Main Street. Revivals were seasons of
extra work and pressure, just as threshing-time was on the farms.
Visiting elders had to be lodged and cooked for, the folding-bed in the
parlor was let down, and Mrs. Kronborg had to work in the kitchen all
day long and attend the night meetings.

During one of these revivals Thea's sister Anna professed religion with,
as Mrs. Kronborg said, "a good deal of fluster." While Anna was going up
to the mourners' bench nightly and asking for the prayers of the
congregation, she disseminated general gloom throughout the household,
and after she joined the church she took on an air of "set-apartness"
that was extremely trying to her brothers and her sister, though they
realized that Anna's sanctimoniousness was perhaps a good thing for
their father. A preacher ought to have one child who did more than
merely acquiesce in religious observances, and Thea and the boys were
glad enough that it was Anna and not one of themselves who assumed this
obligation.

"Anna, she's American," Mrs. Kronborg used to say. The Scandinavian
mould of countenance, more or less marked in each of the other children,
was scarcely discernible in her, and she looked enough like other
Moonstone girls to be thought pretty. Anna's nature was conventional, like
her face. Her position as the minister's eldest daughter was important
to her, and she tried to live up to it. She read sentimental religious
story-books and emulated the spiritual struggles and magnanimous
behavior of their persecuted heroines. Everything had to be interpreted
for Anna. Her opinions about the smallest and most commonplace things
were gleaned from the Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons
and Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attractive to her in
its natural state--indeed, scarcely anything was decent until it was
clothed by the opinion of some authority. Her ideas about habit,
character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book
of popular quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies of
human living. She discussed all these subjects with other Methodist
girls of her age. They would spend hours, for instance, in deciding what
they would or would not tolerate in a suitor or a husband, and the
frailties of masculine nature were too often a subject of discussion
among them. In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except where
her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious, with no graver
fault than priggishness; but her mind had really shocking habits of
classification. The wickedness of Denver and of Chicago, and even of
Moonstone, occupied her thoughts too much. She had none of the delicacy
that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy
curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.

Thea, and all Thea's ways and friends, seemed indecorous to Anna. She
not only felt a grave social discrimination against the Mexicans; she
could not forget that Spanish Johnny was a drunkard and that "nobody
knew what he did when he ran away from home." Thea pretended, of course,
that she liked the Mexicans because they were fond of music; but every
one knew that music was nothing very real, and that it did not matter in
a girl's relations with people. What was real, then, and what did
matter? Poor Anna!

Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of steady habits and
blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist, and that he
was not a passenger conductor with brass buttons on his coat. On the
whole, she wondered what such an exemplary young man found to like in
Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his position in
Moonstone, but she KNEW he had kissed the Mexican barytone's pretty
daughter, and she had a whole DOSSIER of evidence about his behavior in
his hours of relaxation in Denver. He was "fast," and it was because he
was "fast" that Thea liked him. Thea always liked that kind of people.
Dr. Archie's whole manner with Thea, Anna often told her mother, was too
free. He was always putting his hand on Thea's head, or holding her hand
while he laughed and looked down at her. The kindlier manifestation of
human nature (about which Anna sang and talked, in the interests of
which she went to conventions and wore white ribbons) were never
realities to her after all. She did not believe in them. It was only in
attitudes of protest or reproof, clinging to the cross, that human
beings could be even temporarily decent.

Preacher Kronborg's secret convictions were very much like Anna's. He
believed that his wife was absolutely good, but there was not a man or
woman in his congregation whom he trusted all the way.

Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find something to admire
in almost any human conduct that was positive and energetic. She could
always be taken in by the stories of tramps and runaway boys. She went
to the circus and admired the bareback riders, who were "likely good
enough women in their way." She admired Dr. Archie's fine physique and
well-cut clothes as much as Thea did, and said she "felt it was a
privilege to be handled by such a gentleman when she was sick."

Soon after Anna became a church member she began to remonstrate with
Thea about practicing--playing "secular music"--on Sunday. One Sunday
the dispute in the parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in
the kitchen. She listened judicially and told Anna to read the chapter
about how Naaman the leper was permitted to bow down in the house of
Rimmon. Thea went back to the piano, and Anna lingered to say that,
since she was in the right, her mother should have supported her.

"No," said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, "I can't see it that
way, Anna. I never forced you to practice, and I don't see as I should
keep Thea from it. I like to hear her, and I guess your father does. You
and Thea will likely follow different lines, and I don't see as I'm
called upon to bring you up alike."

Anna looked meek and abused. "Of course all the church people must hear
her. Ours is the only noisy house on this street. You hear what she's
playing now, don't you?"

Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. "Yes; it's the Blue Danube
waltzes. I'm familiar with 'em. If any of the church people come at you,
you just send 'em to me. I ain't afraid to speak out on occasion, and I
wouldn't mind one bit telling the Ladies' Aid a few things about
standard composers." Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and added thoughtfully, "No,
I wouldn't mind that one bit."

Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a week, and Mrs.
Kronborg suspected that she held a larger place than usual in her
daughter's prayers; but that was another thing she didn't mind.


Although revivals were merely a part of the year's work, like
examination week at school, and although Anna's piety impressed her very
little, a time came when Thea was perplexed about religion. A scourge of
typhoid broke out in Moonstone and several of Thea's schoolmates died of
it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the ground, and
wondered a good deal about them. But a certain grim incident, which
caused the epidemic, troubled her even more than the death of her
friends.

Early in July, soon after Thea's fifteenth birthday, a particularly
disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone in an empty box car. Thea
was sitting in the hammock in the front yard when he first crawled up to
the town from the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking
under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty screening
nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry face covered with black hair.
It was just before suppertime when he came along, and the street smelled
of fried potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing the
air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked over the fence.
She hoped he would not stop at their gate, for her mother never turned
any one away, and this was the dirtiest and most utterly
wretched-looking tramp she had ever seen. There was a terrible odor
about him, too. She caught it even at that distance, and put her
handkerchief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she knew
that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled a little faster.

A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped in an empty shack
over on the east edge of town, beside the ravine, and was trying to give
a miserable sort of show there. He told the boys who went to see what he
was doing, that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained a
filthy clown's suit, and his box held half a dozen rattlesnakes.

Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to get the chickens
for Sunday, she heard the whine of an accordion and saw a crowd before
one of the saloons. There she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely
attired in the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the
sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--and his eyes
wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in and out seemed to be almost
too great an effort for him, and he panted to the tune of "Marching
through Georgia." After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp
exhibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now pass the hat,
and that when the onlookers had contributed the sum of one dollar, he
would eat "one of these living reptiles." The crowd began to cough and
murmur, and the saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested
the wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried him away to
the calaboose.

The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,--an old hut with a barred
window and a padlock on the door. The tramp was utterly filthy and there
was no way to give him a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake
vagrants, so after the constable had detained the tramp for twentyfour
hours, he released him and told him to "get out of town, and get quick."
The fellow's rattlesnakes had been killed by the saloon keeper. He hid
in a box car in the freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the
next station, but he was found and put out. After that he was seen no
more. He had disappeared and left no trace except an ugly, stupid word,
chalked on the black paint of the seventy-five-foot standpipe which was
the reservoir for the Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another
tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to the English
officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a comment on life which the
defeated, along the hard roads of the world, sometimes bawl at the
victorious.

A week after the tramp excitement had passed over, the city water began
to smell and to taste. The Kronborgs had a well in their back yard and
did not use city water, but they heard the complaints of their
neighbors. At first people said that the town well was full of rotting
cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumpingstation convinced the
mayor that the water left the well untainted. Mayors reason slowly, but,
the well being eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the
standpipe--there was no other track for it to go in. The standpipe amply
rewarded investigation. The tramp had got even with Moonstone. He had
climbed the standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into
seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and roll of
ticking. The city council had a mild panic and passed a new ordinance
about tramps. But the fever had already broken out, and several adults
and half a dozen children died of it.

Thea had always found everything that happened in Moonstone exciting,
disasters particularly so. It was gratifying to read sensational
Moonstone items in the Denver paper. But she wished she had not chanced
to see the tramp as he came into town that evening, sniffing the
supper-laden air. His face remained unpleasantly clear in her memory,
and her mind struggled with the problem of his behavior as if it were a
hard page in arithmetic. Even when she was practicing, the drama of the
tramp kept going on in the back of her head, and she was constantly
trying to make herself realize what pitch of hatred or despair could
drive a man to do such a hideous thing. She kept seeing him in his
bedraggled clown suit, the white paint on his roughly shaven face,
playing his accordion before the saloon. She had noticed his lean body,
his high, bald forehead that sloped back like a curved metal lid. How
could people fall so far out of fortune? She tried to talk to Ray
Kennedy about her perplexity, but Ray would not discuss things of that
sort with her. It was in his sentimental conception of women that they
should be deeply religious, though men were at liberty to doubt and
finally to deny. A picture called "The Soul Awakened," popular in
Moonstone parlors, pretty well interpreted Ray's idea of woman's
spiritual nature.

One evening when she was haunted by the figure of the tramp, Thea went
up to Dr. Archie's office. She found him sewing up two bad gashes in the
face of a little boy who had been kicked by a mule. After the boy had
been bandaged and sent away with his father, Thea helped the doctor wash
and put away the surgical instruments. Then she dropped into her
accustomed seat beside his desk and began to talk about the tramp. Her
eyes were hard and green with excitement, the doctor noticed.

"It seems to me, Dr. Archie, that the whole town's to blame. I'm to
blame, myself. I know he saw me hold my nose when he went by. Father's
to blame. If he believes the Bible, he ought to have gone to the
calaboose and cleaned that man up and taken care of him. That's what I
can't understand; do people believe the Bible, or don't they? If the
next life is all that matters, and we're put here to get ready for it,
then why do we try to make money, or learn things, or have a good time?
There's not one person in Moonstone that really lives the way the New
Testament says. Does it matter, or don't it?"

Dr. Archie swung round in his chair and looked at her, honestly and
leniently. "Well, Thea, it seems to me like this. Every people has had
its religion. All religions are good, and all are pretty much alike. But
I don't see how we could live up to them in the sense you mean. I've
thought about it a good deal, and I can't help feeling that while we are
in this world we have to live for the best things of this world, and
those things are material and positive. Now, most religions are passive,
and they tell us chiefly what we should not do." The doctor moved
restlessly, and his eyes hunted for something along the opposite wall:
"See here, my girl, take out the years of early childhood and the time
we spend in sleep and dull old age, and we only have about twenty able,
waking years. That's not long enough to get acquainted with half the
fine things that have been done in the world, much less to do anything
ourselves. I think we ought to keep the Commandments and help other
people all we can; but the main thing is to live those twenty splendid
years; to do all we can and enjoy all we can."

Dr. Archie met his little friend's searching gaze, the look of acute
inquiry which always touched him.

"But poor fellows like that tramp--" she hesitated and wrinkled her
forehead.

The doctor leaned forward and put his hand protectingly over hers, which
lay clenched on the green felt desktop. "Ugly accidents happen, Thea;
always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the
pile and forgotten. They don't leave any lasting scar in the world, and
they don't affect the future. The things that last are the good things.
The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count." He saw
tears on her cheeks, and he remembered that he had never seen her cry
before, not even when she crushed her finger when she was little. He
rose and walked to the window, came back and sat down on the edge of his
chair.

"Forget the tramp, Thea. This is a great big world, and I want you to
get about and see it all. You're going to Chicago some day, and do
something with that fine voice of yours. You're going to be a number one
musician and make us proud of you. Take Mary Anderson, now; even the
tramps are proud of her. There isn't a tramp along the 'Q' system who
hasn't heard of her. We all like people who do things, even if we only
see their faces on a cigar-box lid."

They had a long talk. Thea felt that Dr. Archie had never let himself
out to her so much before. It was the most grown-up conversation she had
ever had with him. She left his office happy, flattered and stimulated.
She ran for a long while about the white, moonlit streets, looking up at
the stars and the bluish night, at the quiet houses sunk in black shade,
the glittering sand hills. She loved the familiar trees, and the people
in those little houses, and she loved the unknown world beyond Denver.
She felt as if she were being pulled in two, between the desire to go
away forever and the desire to stay forever. She had only twenty
years--no time to lose.

Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to
run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or
wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as
if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it
was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low
window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a
machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that
window--or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within,
not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it
was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which
lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.
It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old
Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed
but one passion and four walls.



XIX


It is well for its peace of mind that the traveling public takes
railroads so much for granted. The only men who are incurably nervous
about railway travel are the railroad operatives. A railroad man never
forgets that the next run may be his turn.

On a single-track road, like that upon which Ray Kennedy worked, the
freight trains make their way as best they can between passenger trains.
Even when there is such a thing as a freight time-schedule, it is merely
a form. Along the one track dozens of fast and slow trains dash in both
directions, kept from collision only by the brains in the dispatcher's
office. If one passenger train is late, the whole schedule must be
revised in an instant; the trains following must be warned, and those
moving toward the belated train must be assigned new meeting-places.

Between the shifts and modifications of the passenger schedule, the
freight trains play a game of their own. They have no right to the track
at any given time, but are supposed to be on it when it is free, and to
make the best time they can between passenger trains. A freight train,
on a single-track road, gets anywhere at all only by stealing bases.

Ray Kennedy had stuck to the freight service, although he had had
opportunities to go into the passenger service at higher pay. He always
regarded railroading as a temporary makeshift, until he "got into
something," and he disliked the passenger service. No brass buttons for
him, he said; too much like a livery. While he was railroading he would
wear a jumper, thank you!

The wreck that "caught" Ray was a very commonplace one; nothing
thrilling about it, and it got only six lines in the Denver papers. It
happened about daybreak one morning, only thirty-two miles from home.

At four o'clock in the morning Ray's train had stopped to take water at
Saxony, having just rounded the long curve which lies south of that
station. It was Joe Giddy's business to walk back along the curve about
three hundred yards and put out torpedoes to warn any train which might
be coming up from behind--a freight crew is not notified of trains
following, and the brakeman is supposed to protect his train. Ray was so
fussy about the punctilious observance of orders that almost any
brakeman would take a chance once in a while, from natural perversity.

When the train stopped for water that morning, Ray was at the desk in
his caboose, making out his report. Giddy took his torpedoes, swung off
the rear platform, and glanced back at the curve. He decided that he
would not go back to flag this time. If anything was coming up behind,
he could hear it in plenty of time. So he ran forward to look after a
hot journal that had been bothering him. In a general way, Giddy's
reasoning was sound. If a freight train, or even a passenger train, had
been coming up behind them, he could have heard it in time. But as it
happened, a light engine, which made no noise at all, was
coming,--ordered out to help with the freight that was piling up at the
other end of the division. This engine got no warning, came round the
curve, struck the caboose, went straight through it, and crashed into
the heavy lumber car ahead.


The Kronborgs were just sitting down to breakfast, when the night
telegraph operator dashed into the yard at a run and hammered on the
front door. Gunner answered the knock, and the telegraph operator told
him he wanted to see his father a minute, quick. Mr. Kronborg appeared
at the door, napkin in hand. The operator was pale and panting.

"Fourteen was wrecked down at Saxony this morning," he shouted, "and
Kennedy's all broke up. We're sending an engine down with the doctor,
and the operator at Saxony says Kennedy wants you to come along with us
and bring your girl." He stopped for breath.

Mr. Kronborg took off his glasses and began rubbing them with his
napkin.

"Bring--I don't understand," he muttered. "How did this happen?"

"No time for that, sir. Getting the engine out now. Your girl, Thea.
You'll surely do that for the poor chap. Everybody knows he thinks the
world of her." Seeing that Mr. Kronborg showed no indication of having
made up his mind, the operator turned to Gunner. "Call your sister, kid.
I'm going to ask the girl herself," he blurted out.

"Yes, yes, certainly. Daughter," Mr. Kronborg called. He had somewhat
recovered himself and reached to the hall hatrack for his hat.

Just as Thea came out on the front porch, before the operator had had
time to explain to her, Dr. Archie's ponies came up to the gate at a
brisk trot. Archie jumped out the moment his driver stopped the team and
came up to the bewildered girl without so much as saying good-morning to
any one. He took her hand with the sympathetic, reassuring graveness
which had helped her at more than one hard time in her life. "Get your
hat, my girl. Kennedy's hurt down the road, and he wants you to run down
with me. They'll have a car for us. Get into my buggy, Mr. Kronborg.
I'll drive you down, and Larry can come for the team."

The driver jumped out of the buggy and Mr. Kronborg and the doctor got
in. Thea, still bewildered, sat on her father's knee. Dr. Archie gave
his ponies a smart cut with the whip.

When they reached the depot, the engine, with one car attached, was
standing on the main track. The engineer had got his steam up, and was
leaning out of the cab impatiently. In a moment they were off. The run
to Saxony took forty minutes. Thea sat still in her seat while Dr.
Archie and her father talked about the wreck. She took no part in the
conversation and asked no questions, but occasionally she looked at Dr.
Archie with a frightened, inquiring glance, which he answered by an
encouraging nod. Neither he nor her father said anything about how badly
Ray was hurt. When the engine stopped near Saxony, the main track was
already cleared. As they got out of the car, Dr. Archie pointed to a
pile of ties.

"Thea, you'd better sit down here and watch the wreck crew while your
father and I go up and look Kennedy over. I'll come back for you when I
get him fixed up."

The two men went off up the sand gulch, and Thea sat down and looked at
the pile of splintered wood and twisted iron that had lately been Ray's
caboose. She was frightened and absent-minded. She felt that she ought
to be thinking about Ray, but her mind kept racing off to all sorts of
trivial and irrelevant things. She wondered whether Grace Johnson would
be furious when she came to take her music lesson and found nobody there
to give it to her; whether she had forgotten to close the piano last
night and whether Thor would get into the new room and mess the keys all
up with his sticky fingers; whether Tillie would go upstairs and make
her bed for her. Her mind worked fast, but she could fix it upon
nothing. The grasshoppers, the lizards, distracted her attention and
seemed more real to her than poor Ray.

On their way to the sand bank where Ray had been carried, Dr. Archie and
Mr. Kronborg met the Saxony doctor. He shook hands with them.

"Nothing you can do, doctor. I couldn't count the fractures. His back's
broken, too. He wouldn't be alive now if he weren't so confoundedly
strong, poor chap. No use bothering him. I've given him morphia, one and
a half, in eighths."

Dr. Archie hurried on. Ray was lying on a flat canvas litter, under the
shelter of a shelving bank, lightly shaded by a slender cottonwood tree.
When the doctor and the preacher approached, he looked at them intently.

"Didn't--" he closed his eyes to hide his bitter disappointment.

Dr. Archie knew what was the matter. "Thea's back there, Ray. I'll bring
her as soon as I've had a look at you."

Ray looked up. "You might clean me up a trifle, doc. Won't need you for
anything else, thank you all the same."

However little there was left of him, that little was certainly Ray
Kennedy. His personality was as positive as ever, and the blood and dirt
on his face seemed merely accidental, to have nothing to do with the man
himself. Dr. Archie told Mr. Kronborg to bring a pail of water, and he
began to sponge Ray's face and neck. Mr. Kronborg stood by, nervously
rubbing his hands together and trying to think of something to say.
Serious situations always embarrassed him and made him formal, even when
he felt real sympathy.

"In times like this, Ray," he brought out at last, crumpling up his
handkerchief in his long fingers,--"in times like this, we don't want to
forget the Friend that sticketh closer than a brother."

Ray looked up at him; a lonely, disconsolate smile played over his mouth
and his square cheeks. "Never mind about all that, PADRE," he said
quietly. "Christ and me fell out long ago."

There was a moment of silence. Then Ray took pity on Mr. Kronborg's
embarrassment. "You go back for the little girl, PADRE. I want a word
with the doc in private."

Ray talked to Dr. Archie for a few moments, then stopped suddenly, with
a broad smile. Over the doctor's shoulder he saw Thea coming up the
gulch, in her pink chambray dress, carrying her sun-hat by the strings.
Such a yellow head! He often told himself that he "was perfectly
foolish about her hair." The sight of her, coming, went through
him softly, like the morphia. "There she is," he whispered. "Get the old
preacher out of the way, doc. I want to have a little talk with her."

Dr. Archie looked up. Thea was hurrying and yet hanging back. She was
more frightened than he had thought she would be. She had gone with him
to see very sick people and had always been steady and calm. As she came
up, she looked at the ground, and he could see that she had been crying.

Ray Kennedy made an unsuccessful effort to put out his hand. "Hello,
little kid, nothing to be afraid of. Darned if I don't believe they've
gone and scared you! Nothing to cry about. I'm the same old goods, only
a little dented. Sit down on my coat there, and keep me company. I've
got to lay still a bit."

Dr. Archie and Mr. Kronborg disappeared. Thea cast a timid glance after
them, but she sat down resolutely and took Ray's hand.

"You ain't scared now, are you?" he asked affectionately. "You were a
regular brick to come, Thee. Did you get any breakfast?"

"No, Ray, I'm not scared. Only I'm dreadful sorry you're hurt, and I
can't help crying."

His broad, earnest face, languid from the opium and smiling with such
simple happiness, reassured her. She drew nearer to him and lifted his
hand to her knee. He looked at her with his clear, shallow blue eyes.
How he loved everything about that face and head! How many nights in his
cupola, looking up the track, he had seen that face in the darkness;
through the sleet and snow, or in the soft blue air when the moonlight
slept on the desert.

"You needn't bother to talk, Thee. The doctor's medicine makes me sort
of dopey. But it's nice to have company. Kind of cozy, don't you think?
Pull my coat under you more. It's a darned shame I can't wait on you."

"No, no, Ray. I'm all right. Yes, I like it here. And I guess you ought
not to talk much, ought you? If you can sleep, I'll stay right here, and
be awful quiet. I feel just as much at home with you as ever, now."

That simple, humble, faithful something in Ray's eyes went straight to
Thea's heart. She did feel comfortable with him, and happy to give him
so much happiness. It was the first time she had ever been conscious of
that power to bestow intense happiness by simply being near any one. She
always remembered this day as the beginning of that knowledge. She bent
over him and put her lips softly to his cheek.

Ray's eyes filled with light. "Oh, do that again, kid!" he said
impulsively. Thea kissed him on the forehead, blushing faintly. Ray held
her hand fast and closed his eyes with a deep sigh of happiness. The
morphia and the sense of her nearness filled him with content. The gold
mine, the oil well, the copper ledge--all pipe dreams, he mused, and
this was a dream, too. He might have known it before. It had always been
like that; the things he admired had always been away out of his reach:
a college education, a gentleman's manner, an Englishman's
accent--things over his head. And Thea was farther out of his reach than
all the rest put together. He had been a fool to imagine it, but he was
glad he had been a fool. She had given him one grand dream. Every mile
of his run, from Moonstone to Denver, was painted with the colors of
that hope. Every cactus knew about it. But now that it was not to be, he
knew the truth. Thea was never meant for any rough fellow like
him--hadn't he really known that all along, he asked himself? She wasn't
meant for common men. She was like wedding cake, a thing to dream on. He
raised his eyelids a little. She was stroking his hand and looking off
into the distance. He felt in her face that look of unconscious power
that Wunsch had seen there. Yes, she was bound for the big terminals of
the world; no way stations for her. His lids drooped. In the dark he
could see her as she would be after a while; in a box at the Tabor Grand
in Denver, with diamonds on her neck and a tiara in her yellow hair,
with all the people looking at her through their opera-glasses, and a
United States Senator, maybe, talking to her. "Then you'll remember me!"
He opened his eyes, and they were full of tears.

Thea leaned closer. "What did you say, Ray? I couldn't hear."

"Then you'll remember me," he whispered.

The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the spark in hers
that was herself, and for a moment they looked into each other's
natures. Thea realized how good and how great-hearted he was, and he
realized about her many things. When that elusive spark of personality
retreated in each of them, Thea still saw in his wet eyes her own face,
very small, but much prettier than the cracked glass at home had ever
shown it. It was the first time she had seen her face in that kindest
mirror a woman can ever find.

Ray had felt things in that moment when he seemed to be looking into the
very soul of Thea Kronborg. Yes, the gold mine, the oil well, the copper
ledge, they'd all got away from him, as things will; but he'd backed a
winner once in his life! With all his might he gave his faith to the
broad little hand he held. He wished he could leave her the rugged
strength of his body to help her through with it all. He would have
liked to tell her a little about his old dream,--there seemed long years
between him and it already,--but to tell her now would somehow be
unfair; wouldn't be quite the straightest thing in the world. Probably
she knew, anyway. He looked up quickly. "You know, don't you, Thee, that
I think you are just the finest thing I've struck in this world?"

The tears ran down Thea's cheeks. "You're too good to me, Ray. You're a
lot too good to me," she faltered.

"Why, kid," he murmured, "everybody in this world's going to be good to
you!"

Dr. Archie came to the gulch and stood over his patient. "How's it
going?"

"Can't you give me another punch with your pacifier, doc? The little
girl had better run along now." Ray released Thea's hand. "See you
later, Thee."

She got up and moved away aimlessly, carrying her hat by the strings.
Ray looked after her with the exaltation born of bodily pain and said
between his teeth, "Always look after that girl, doc. She's a queen!"

Thea and her father went back to Moonstone on the one-o'clock passenger.
Dr. Archie stayed with Ray Kennedy until he died, late in the afternoon.



XX


On Monday morning, the day after Ray Kennedy's funeral, Dr. Archie
called at Mr. Kronborg's study, a little room behind the church. Mr.
Kronborg did not write out his sermons, but spoke from notes jotted upon
small pieces of cardboard in a kind of shorthand of his own. As sermons
go, they were not worse than most. His conventional rhetoric pleased the
majority of his congregation, and Mr. Kronborg was generally regarded as
a model preacher. He did not smoke, he never touched spirits. His
indulgence in the pleasures of the table was an endearing bond between
him and the women of his congregation. He ate enormously, with a zest
which seemed incongruous with his spare frame.

This morning the doctor found him opening his mail and reading a pile of
advertising circulars with deep attention.

"Good-morning, Mr. Kronborg," said Dr. Archie, sitting down. "I came to
see you on business. Poor Kennedy asked me to look after his affairs for
him. Like most railroad men he spent his wages, except for a few
investments in mines which don't look to me very promising. But his life
was insured for six hundred dollars in Thea's favor."

Mr. Kronborg wound his feet about the standard of his desk-chair. "I
assure you, doctor, this is a complete surprise to me."

"Well, it's not very surprising to me," Dr. Archie went on. "He talked
to me about it the day he was hurt. He said he wanted the money to be
used in a particular way, and in no other." Dr. Archie paused meaningly.

Mr. Kronborg fidgeted. "I am sure Thea would observe his wishes in every
respect."

"No doubt; but he wanted me to see that you agreed to his plan. It seems
that for some time Thea has wanted to go away to study music. It was
Kennedy's wish that she should take this money and go to Chicago this
winter. He felt that it would be an advantage to her in a business way:
that even if she came back here to teach, it would give her more
authority and make her position here more comfortable."

Mr. Kronborg looked a little startled. "She is very young," he
hesitated; "she is barely seventeen. Chicago is a long way from home. We
would have to consider. I think, Dr. Archie, we had better consult Mrs.
Kronborg."

"I think I can bring Mrs. Kronborg around, if I have your consent. I've
always found her pretty level-headed. I have several old classmates
practicing in Chicago. One is a throat specialist. He has a good deal to
do with singers. He probably knows the best piano teachers and could
recommend a boarding-house where music students stay. I think Thea needs
to get among a lot of young people who are clever like herself. Here she
has no companions but old fellows like me. It's not a natural life for a
young girl. She'll either get warped, or wither up before her time. If
it will make you and Mrs. Kronborg feel any easier, I'll be glad to take
Thea to Chicago and see that she gets started right. This throat man I
speak of is a big fellow in his line, and if I can get him interested,
he may be able to put her in the way of a good many things. At any rate,
he'll know the right teachers. Of course, six hundred dollars won't take
her very far, but even half the winter there would be a great advantage.
I think Kennedy sized the situation up exactly."

"Perhaps; I don't doubt it. You are very kind, Dr. Archie." Mr. Kronborg
was ornamenting his desk-blotter with hieroglyphics. "I should think
Denver might be better. There we could watch over her. She is very
young."

Dr. Archie rose. "Kennedy didn't mention Denver. He said Chicago,
repeatedly. Under the circumstances, it seems to me we ought to try to
carry out his wishes exactly, if Thea is willing."

"Certainly, certainly. Thea is conscientious. She would not waste her
opportunities." Mr. Kronborg paused. "If Thea were your own daughter,
doctor, would you consent to such a plan, at her present age?"

"I most certainly should. In fact, if she were my daughter, I'd have
sent her away before this. She's a most unusual child, and she's only
wasting herself here. At her age she ought to be learning, not teaching.
She'll never learn so quickly and easily as she will right now."

"Well, doctor, you had better talk it over with Mrs. Kronborg. I make it
a point to defer to her wishes in such matters. She understands all her
children perfectly. I may say that she has all a mother's insight, and
more."

Dr. Archie smiled. "Yes, and then some. I feel quite confident about
Mrs. Kronborg. We usually agree. Goodmorning."

Dr. Archie stepped out into the hot sunshine and walked rapidly toward
his office, with a determined look on his face. He found his
waiting-room full of patients, and it was one o'clock before he had
dismissed the last one. Then he shut his door and took a drink before
going over to the hotel for his lunch. He smiled as he locked his
cupboard. "I feel almost as gay as if I were going to get away for a
winter myself," he thought.


Afterward Thea could never remember much about that summer, or how she
lived through her impatience. She was to set off with Dr. Archie on the
fifteenth of October, and she gave lessons until the first of September.
Then she began to get her clothes ready, and spent whole afternoons in
the village dressmaker's stuffy, littered little sewing-room. Thea and
her mother made a trip to Denver to buy the materials for her dresses.
Ready-made clothes for girls were not to be had in those days. Miss
Spencer, the dressmaker, declared that she could do handsomely by Thea
if they would only let her carry out her own ideas. But Mrs. Kronborg
and Thea felt that Miss Spencer's most daring productions might seem out
of place in Chicago, so they restrained her with a firm hand. Tillie,
who always helped Mrs. Kronborg with the family sewing, was for letting
Miss Spencer challenge Chicago on Thea's person. Since Ray Kennedy's
death, Thea had become more than ever one of Tillie's heroines. Tillie
swore each of her friends to secrecy, and, coming home from church or
leaning over the fence, told them the most touching stories about Ray's
devotion, and how Thea would "never get over it."

Tillie's confidences stimulated the general discussion of Thea's
venture. This discussion went on, upon front porches and in back yards,
pretty much all summer. Some people approved of Thea's going to Chicago,
but most people did not. There were others who changed their minds about
it every day.

Tillie said she wanted Thea to have a ball dress "above all things." She
bought a fashion book especially devoted to evening clothes and looked
hungrily over the colored plates, picking out costumes that would be
becoming to "a blonde." She wanted Thea to have all the gay clothes she
herself had always longed for; clothes she often told herself she needed
"to recite in."

"Tillie," Thea used to cry impatiently, "can't you see that if Miss
Spencer tried to make one of those things, she'd make me look like a
circus girl? Anyhow, I don't know anybody in Chicago. I won't be going
to parties."

Tillie always replied with a knowing toss of her head, "You see! You'll
be in society before you know it. There ain't many girls as accomplished
as you."

On the morning of the fifteenth of October the Kronborg family, all of
them but Gus, who couldn't leave the store, started for the station an
hour before train time. Charley had taken Thea's trunk and telescope to
the depot in his delivery wagon early that morning. Thea wore her new
blue serge traveling-dress, chosen for its serviceable qualities. She
had done her hair up carefully, and had put a pale-blue ribbon around
her throat, under a little lace collar that Mrs. Kohler had crocheted
for her. As they went out of the gate, Mrs. Kronborg looked her over
thoughtfully. Yes, that blue ribbon went very well with the dress, and
with Thea's eyes. Thea had a rather unusual touch about such things, she
reflected comfortably. Tillie always said that Thea was "so indifferent
to dress," but her mother noticed that she usually put her clothes on
well. She felt the more at ease about letting Thea go away from home,
because she had good sense about her clothes and never tried to dress up
too much. Her coloring was so individual, she was so unusually fair,
that in the wrong clothes she might easily have been "conspicuous."

It was a fine morning, and the family set out from the house in good
spirits. Thea was quiet and calm. She had forgotten nothing, and she
clung tightly to her handbag, which held her trunk-key and all of her
money that was not in an envelope pinned to her chemise. Thea walked
behind the others, holding Thor by the hand, and this time she did not
feel that the procession was too long. Thor was uncommunicative that
morning, and would only talk about how he would rather get a sand bur in
his toe every day than wear shoes and stockings. As they passed the
cottonwood grove where Thea often used to bring him in his cart, she
asked him who would take him for nice long walks after sister went away.

"Oh, I can walk in our yard," he replied unappreciatively. "I guess I
can make a pond for my duck."

Thea leaned down and looked into his face. "But you won't forget about
sister, will you?" Thor shook his head. "And won't you be glad when
sister comes back and can take you over to Mrs. Kohler's to see the
pigeons?"

"Yes, I'll be glad. But I'm going to have a pigeon my own self."

"But you haven't got any little house for one. Maybe Axel would make you
a little house."

"Oh, her can live in the barn, her can," Thor drawled indifferently.

Thea laughed and squeezed his hand. She always liked his sturdy
matter-of-factness. Boys ought to be like that, she thought.

When they reached the depot, Mr. Kronborg paced the platform somewhat
ceremoniously with his daughter. Any member of his flock would have
gathered that he was giving her good counsel about meeting the
temptations of the world. He did, indeed, begin to admonish her not to
forget that talents come from our Heavenly Father and are to be used for
his glory, but he cut his remarks short and looked at his watch. He
believed that Thea was a religious girl, but when she looked at him with
that intent, that passionately inquiring gaze which used to move even
Wunsch, Mr. Kronborg suddenly felt his eloquence fail. Thea was like her
mother, he reflected; you couldn't put much sentiment across with her.
As a usual thing, he liked girls to be a little more responsive. He
liked them to blush at his compliments; as Mrs. Kronborg candidly said,
"Father could be very soft with the girls." But this morning he was
thinking that hard-headedness was a reassuring quality in a daughter who
was going to Chicago alone.

Mr. Kronborg believed that big cities were places where people went to
lose their identity and to be wicked. He himself, when he was a student
at the Seminary--he coughed and opened his watch again. He knew, of
course, that a great deal of business went on in Chicago, that there was
an active Board of Trade, and that hogs and cattle were slaughtered
there. But when, as a young man, he had stopped over in Chicago, he had
not interested himself in the commercial activities of the city. He
remembered it as a place full of cheap shows and dance halls and boys
from the country who were behaving disgustingly.

Dr. Archie drove up to the station about ten minutes before the train
was due. His man tied the ponies and stood holding the doctor's
alligator-skin bag--very elegant, Thea thought it. Mrs. Kronborg did not
burden the doctor with warnings and cautions. She said again that she
hoped he could get Thea a comfortable place to stay, where they had good
beds, and she hoped the landlady would be a woman who'd had children of
her own. "I don't go much on old maids looking after girls," she
remarked as she took a pin out of her own hat and thrust it into Thea's
blue turban. "You'll be sure to lose your hatpins on the train, Thea.
It's better to have an extra one in case." She tucked in a little curl
that had escaped from Thea's careful twist. "Don't forget to brush your
dress often, and pin it up to the curtains of your berth to-night, so it
won't wrinkle. If you get it wet, have a tailor press it before it
draws."

She turned Thea about by the shoulders and looked her over a last time.
Yes, she looked very well. She wasn't pretty, exactly,--her face was too
broad and her nose was too big. But she had that lovely skin, and she
looked fresh and sweet. She had always been a sweet-smelling child. Her
mother had always liked to kiss her, when she happened to think of it.

The train whistled in, and Mr. Kronborg carried the canvas "telescope"
into the car. Thea kissed them all good-bye. Tillie cried, but she was
the only one who did. They all shouted things up at the closed window of
the Pullman car, from which Thea looked down at them as from a frame,
her face glowing with excitement, her turban a little tilted in spite of
three hatpins. She had already taken off her new gloves to save them.
Mrs. Kronborg reflected that she would never see just that same picture
again, and as Thea's car slid off along the rails, she wiped a tear from
her eye. "She won't come back a little girl," Mrs. Kronborg said to her
husband as they turned to go home. "Anyhow, she's been a sweet one."

While the Kronborg family were trooping slowly homeward, Thea was
sitting in the Pullman, her telescope in the seat beside her, her
handbag tightly gripped in her fingers. Dr. Archie had gone into the
smoker. He thought she might be a little tearful, and that it would be
kinder to leave her alone for a while. Her eyes did fill once, when she
saw the last of the sand hills and realized that she was going to leave
them behind for a long while. They always made her think of Ray, too.
She had had such good times with him out there.

But, of course, it was herself and her own adventure that mattered to
her. If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the
heart to go on. Thea was surprised that she did not feel a deeper sense
of loss at leaving her old life behind her. It seemed, on the contrary,
as she looked out at the yellow desert speeding by, that she had left
very little. Everything that was essential seemed to be right there in
the car with her. She lacked nothing. She even felt more compact and
confident than usual. She was all there, and something else was there,
too,--in her heart, was it, or under her cheek? Anyhow, it was about her
somewhere, that warm sureness, that sturdy little companion with whom
she shared a secret.

When Dr. Archie came in from the smoker, she was sitting still, looking
intently out of the window and smiling, her lips a little parted, her
hair in a blaze of sunshine. The doctor thought she was the prettiest
thing he had ever seen, and very funny, with her telescope and big
handbag. She made him feel jolly, and a little mournful, too. He knew
that the splendid things of life are few, after all, and so very easy to
miss.




PART II



THE SONG OF THE LARK


I


THEA and Dr. Archie had been gone from Moonstone four days. On the
afternoon of the nineteenth of October they were in a street-car, riding
through the depressing, unkept wastes of North Chicago, on their way to
call upon the Reverend Lars Larsen, a friend to whom Mr. Kronborg had
written. Thea was still staying at the rooms of the Young Women's
Christian Association, and was miserable and homesick there. The
housekeeper watched her in a way that made her uncomfortable. Things had
not gone very well, so far. The noise and confusion of a big city tired
and disheartened her. She had not had her trunk sent to the Christian
Association rooms because she did not want to double cartage charges,
and now she was running up a bill for storage on it. The contents of her
gray telescope were becoming untidy, and it seemed impossible to keep
one's face and hands clean in Chicago. She felt as if she were still on
the train, traveling without enough clothes to keep clean. She wanted
another nightgown, and it did not occur to her that she could buy one.
There were other clothes in her trunk that she needed very much, and she
seemed no nearer a place to stay than when she arrived in the rain, on
that first disillusioning morning.

Dr. Archie had gone at once to his friend Hartley Evans, the throat
specialist, and had asked him to tell him of a good piano teacher and
direct him to a good boarding-house. Dr. Evans said he could easily tell
him who was the best piano teacher in Chicago, but that most students'
boarding-houses were "abominable places, where girls got poor food for body
and mind." He gave Dr. Archie several addresses, however, and the doctor
went to look the places over. He left Thea in her room, for she seemed
tired and was not at all like herself. His inspection of boardinghouses
was not encouraging. The only place that seemed to him at all desirable
was full, and the mistress of the house could not give Thea a room in
which she could have a piano. She said Thea might use the piano in her
parlor; but when Dr. Archie went to look at the parlor he found a girl
talking to a young man on one of the corner sofas. Learning that the
boarders received all their callers there, he gave up that house, too,
as hopeless.

So when they set out to make the acquaintance of Mr. Larsen on the
afternoon he had appointed, the question of a lodging was still
undecided. The Swedish Reform Church was in a sloughy, weedy district,
near a group of factories. The church itself was a very neat little
building. The parsonage, next door, looked clean and comfortable, and
there was a well-kept yard about it, with a picket fence. Thea saw
several little children playing under a swing, and wondered why
ministers always had so many. When they rang at the parsonage door, a
capable-looking Swedish servant girl answered the bell and told them
that Mr. Larsen's study was in the church, and that he was waiting for
them there.

Mr. Larsen received them very cordially. The furniture in his study was
so new and the pictures were so heavily framed, that Thea thought it
looked more like the waiting-room of the fashionable Denver dentist to
whom Dr. Archie had taken her that summer, than like a preacher's study.
There were even flowers in a glass vase on the desk. Mr. Larsen was a
small, plump man, with a short, yellow beard, very white teeth, and a
little turned-up nose on which he wore gold-rimmed eye-glasses. He
looked about thirty-five, but he was growing bald, and his thin, hair
was parted above his left ear and brought up over the bare spot on the
top of his head. He looked cheerful and agreeable. He wore a blue coat
and no cuffs.

After Dr. Archie and Thea sat down on a slippery leather couch, the
minister asked for an outline of Thea's plans. Dr. Archie explained that
she meant to study piano with Andor Harsanyi; that they had already seen
him, that Thea had played for him and he said he would be glad to teach
her.

Mr. Larsen lifted his pale eyebrows and rubbed his plump white hands
together. "But he is a concert pianist already. He will be very
expensive."

"That's why Miss Kronborg wants to get a church position if possible.
She has not money enough to see her through the winter. There's no use
her coming all the way from Colorado and studying with a second-rate
teacher. My friends here tell me Harsanyi is the best."

"Oh, very likely! I have heard him play with Thomas. You Western people
do things on a big scale. There are half a dozen teachers that I should
think--However, you know what you want." Mr. Larsen showed his contempt
for such extravagant standards by a shrug. He felt that Dr. Archie was
trying to impress him. He had succeeded, indeed, in bringing out the
doctor's stiffest manner. Mr. Larsen went on to explain that he managed
the music in his church himself, and drilled his choir, though the tenor
was the official choirmaster. Unfortunately there were no vacancies in
his choir just now. He had his four voices, very good ones. He looked
away from Dr. Archie and glanced at Thea. She looked troubled, even a
little frightened when he said this, and drew in her lower lip. She,
certainly, was not pretentious, if her protector was. He continued to
study her. She was sitting on the lounge, her knees far apart, her
gloved hands lying stiffly in her lap, like a country girl. Her turban,
which seemed a little too big for her, had got tilted in the wind,--it
was always windy in that part of Chicago,--and she looked tired. She
wore no veil, and her hair, too, was the worse for the wind and dust.
When he said he had all the voices he required, he noticed that her
gloved hands shut tightly. Mr. Larsen reflected that she was not, after
all, responsible for the lofty manner of her father's physician; that
she was not even responsible for her father, whom he remembered as a
tiresome fellow. As he watched her tired, worried face, he felt sorry
for her.

"All the same, I would like to try your voice," he said, turning
pointedly away from her companion. "I am interested in voices. Can you
sing to the violin?"

"I guess so," Thea replied dully. "I don't know. I never tried."

Mr. Larsen took his violin out of the case and began to tighten the
keys. "We might go into the lecture-room and see how it goes. I can't
tell much about a voice by the organ. The violin is really the proper
instrument to try a voice." He opened a door at the back of his study,
pushed Thea gently through it, and looking over his shoulder to Dr.
Archie said, "Excuse us, sir. We will be back soon."

Dr. Archie chuckled. All preachers were alike, officious and on their
dignity; liked to deal with women and girls, but not with men. He took
up a thin volume from the minister's desk. To his amusement it proved to
be a book of "Devotional and Kindred Poems; by Mrs. Aurelia S. Larsen."
He looked them over, thinking that the world changed very little. He
could remember when the wife of his father's minister had published a
volume of verses, which all the church members had to buy and all the
children were encouraged to read. His grandfather had made a face at the
book and said, "Puir body!" Both ladies seemed to have chosen the same
subjects, too: Jephthah's Daughter, Rizpah, David's Lament for Absalom,
etc. The doctor found the book very amusing.

The Reverend Lars Larsen was a reactionary Swede. His father came to
Iowa in the sixties, married a Swedish girl who was ambitious, like
himself, and they moved to Kansas and took up land under the Homestead
Act. After that, they bought land and leased it from the Government,
acquired land in every possible way. They worked like horses, both of
them; indeed, they would never have used any horse-flesh they owned as
they used themselves. They reared a large family and worked their sons
and daughters as mercilessly as they worked themselves; all of them but
Lars. Lars was the fourth son, and he was born lazy. He seemed to bear
the mark of overstrain on the part of his parents. Even in his cradle he
was an example of physical inertia; anything to lie still. When he was a
growing boy his mother had to drag him out of bed every morning, and he
had to be driven to his chores. At school he had a model "attendance
record," because he found getting his lessons easier than farm work. He
was the only one of the family who went through the high school, and by
the time he graduated he had already made up his mind to study for the
ministry, because it seemed to him the least laborious of all callings.
In so far as he could see, it was the only business in which there was
practically no competition, in which a man was not all the time pitted
against other men who were willing to work themselves to death. His
father stubbornly opposed Lars's plan, but after keeping the boy at home
for a year and finding how useless he was on the farm, he sent him to a
theological seminary--as much to conceal his laziness from the neighbors
as because he did not know what else to do with him.

Larsen, like Peter Kronborg, got on well in the ministry, because he got
on well with the women. His English was no worse than that of most young
preachers of American parentage, and he made the most of his skill with
the violin. He was supposed to exert a very desirable influence over
young people and to stimulate their interest in church work. He married
an American girl, and when his father died he got his share of the
property--which was very considerable. He invested his money carefully
and was that rare thing, a preacher of independent means. His white,
well-kept hands were his result,--the evidence that he had worked out
his life successfully in the way that pleased him. His Kansas brothers
hated the sight of his hands.

Larsen liked all the softer things of life,--in so far as he knew about
them. He slept late in the morning, was fussy about his food, and read a
great many novels, preferring sentimental ones. He did not smoke, but he
ate a great deal of candy "for his throat," and always kept a box of
chocolate drops in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. He always
bought season tickets for the symphony concerts, and he played his
violin for women's culture clubs. He did not wear cuffs, except on
Sunday, because he believed that a free wrist facilitated his violin
practice. When he drilled his choir he always held his hand with the
little and index fingers curved higher than the other two, like a noted
German conductor he had seen. On the whole, the Reverend Larsen was not
an insincere man; he merely spent his life resting and playing, to make
up for the time his forebears had wasted grubbing in the earth. He was
simple-hearted and kind; he enjoyed his candy and his children and his
sacred cantatas. He could work energetically at almost any form of play.

Dr. Archie was deep in "The Lament of Mary Magdalen," when Mr. Larsen
and Thea came back to the study. From the minister's expression he
judged that Thea had succeeded in interesting him.

Mr. Larsen seemed to have forgotten his hostility toward him, and
addressed him frankly as soon as he entered. He stood holding his
violin, and as Thea sat down he pointed to her with his bow:--

"I have just been telling Miss Kronborg that though I cannot promise her
anything permanent, I might give her something for the next few months.
My soprano is a young married woman and is temporarily indisposed. She
would be glad to be excused from her duties for a while. I like Miss
Kronborg's singing very much, and I think she would benefit by the
instruction in my choir. Singing here might very well lead to something
else. We pay our soprano only eight dollars a Sunday, but she always
gets ten dollars for singing at funerals. Miss Kronborg has a
sympathetic voice, and I think there would be a good deal of demand for
her at funerals. Several American churches apply to me for a soloist on
such occasions, and I could help her to pick up quite a little money
that way."

This sounded lugubrious to Dr. Archie, who had a physician's dislike of
funerals, but he tried to accept the suggestion cordially.

"Miss Kronborg tells me she is having some trouble getting located," Mr.
Larsen went on with animation, still holding his violin. "I would advise
her to keep away from boarding-houses altogether. Among my parishioners
there are two German women, a mother and daughter. The daughter is a
Swede by marriage, and clings to the Swedish Church. They live near
here, and they rent some of their rooms. They have now a large room
vacant, and have asked me to recommend some one. They have never taken
boarders, but Mrs. Lorch, the mother, is a good cook,--at least, I am
always glad to take supper with her,--and I think I could persuade her
to let this young woman partake of the family table. The daughter, Mrs.
Andersen, is musical, too, and sings in the Mozart Society. I think they
might like to have a music student in the house. You speak German, I
suppose?" he turned to Thea.

"Oh, no; a few words. I don't know the grammar," she murmured.

Dr. Archie noticed that her eyes looked alive again, not frozen as they
had looked all morning. "If this fellow can help her, it's not for me to
be stand-offish," he said to himself.

"Do you think you would like to stay in such a quiet place, with
old-fashioned people?" Mr. Larsen asked. "I shouldn't think you could
find a better place to work, if that's what you want."

"I think mother would like to have me with people like that," Thea
replied. "And I'd be glad to settle down most anywhere. I'm losing
time."

"Very well, there's no time like the present. Let us go to see Mrs.
Lorch and Mrs. Andersen."

The minister put his violin in its case and caught up a black-and-white
checked traveling-cap that he wore when he rode his high Columbia wheel.
The three left the church together.



II


SO Thea did not go to a boarding-house after all. When Dr. Archie left
Chicago she was comfortably settled with Mrs. Lorch, and her happy
reunion with her trunk somewhat consoled her for his departure.

Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the Swedish Reform
Church, in an old square frame house, with a porch supported by frail
pillars, set in a damp yard full of big lilac bushes. The house, which
had been left over from country times, needed paint badly, and looked
gloomy and despondent among its smart Queen Anne neighbors. There was a
big back yard with two rows of apple trees and a grape arbor, and a
warped walk, two planks wide, which led to the coal bins at the back of
the lot. Thea's room was on the second floor, overlooking this back
yard, and she understood that in the winter she must carry up her own
coal and kindling from the bin. There was no furnace in the house, no
running water except in the kitchen, and that was why the room rent was
small. All the rooms were heated by stoves, and the lodgers pumped the
water they needed from the cistern under the porch, or from the well at
the entrance of the grape arbor. Old Mrs. Lorch could never bring
herself to have costly improvements made in her house; indeed she had
very little money. She preferred to keep the house just as her husband
built it, and she thought her way of living good enough for plain
people.

Thea's room was large enough to admit a rented upright piano without
crowding. It was, the widowed daughter said, "a double room that had
always before been occupied by two gentlemen"; the piano now took the
place of a second occupant. There was an ingrain carpet on the floor,
green ivy leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned walnut
furniture. The bed was very wide, and the mattress thin and hard. Over
the fat pillows were "shams" embroidered in Turkey red, each with a
flowering scroll--one with "Gute' Nacht," the other with "Guten Morgen."
The dresser was so big that Thea wondered how it had ever been got into
the house and up the narrow stairs. Besides an old horsehair armchair,
there were two low plush "spring-rockers," against the massive pedestals
of which one was always stumbling in the dark. Thea sat in the dark a
good deal those first weeks, and sometimes a painful bump against one of
those brutally immovable pedestals roused her temper and pulled her out
of a heavy hour. The wall-paper was brownish yellow, with blue flowers.
When it was put on, the carpet, certainly, had not been consulted. There
was only one picture on the wall when Thea moved in: a large colored
print of a brightly lighted church in a snow-storm, on Christmas Eve,
with greens hanging about the stone doorway and arched windows. There
was something warm and home, like about this picture, and Thea grew fond
of it. One day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped at
a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples bust of Julius Caesar.
This she had framed, and hung it on the big bare wall behind her stove.
It was a curious choice, but she was at the age when people do
inexplicable things. She had been interested in Caesar's "Commentaries"
when she left school to begin teaching, and she loved to read about
great generals; but these facts would scarcely explain her wanting that
grim bald head to share her daily existence. It seemed a strange freak,
when she bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen said
to Mrs. Lorch, "no pictures of the composers at all."

Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the mother better. Old
Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a red face, always shining as if she
had just come from the stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several
colors. Her own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another, and
her false front still another. Her clothes always smelled of savory
cooking, except when she was dressed for church or KAFFEEKLATSCH, and
then she smelled of bay rum or of the lemon-verbena sprig which she
tucked inside her puffy black kid glove. Her cooking justified all that
Mr. Larsen had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished
before.

The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,--Irene, her mother called her,--was a
different sort of woman altogether. She was perhaps forty years old,
angular, big-boned, with large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry,
yellow hair, the bang tightly frizzed. She was pale, anaemic, and
sentimental. She had married the youngest son of a rich, arrogant
Swedish family who were lumber merchants in St. Paul. There she dwelt
during her married life. Oscar Andersen was a strong, full-blooded
fellow who had counted on a long life and had been rather careless about
his business affairs. He was killed by the explosion of a steam boiler
in the mills, and his brothers managed to prove that he had very little
stock in the big business. They had strongly disapproved of his marriage
and they agreed among themselves that they were entirely justified in
defrauding his widow, who, they said, "would only marry again and give
some fellow a good thing of it." Mrs. Andersen would not go to law with
the family that had always snubbed and wounded her--she felt the
humiliation of being thrust out more than she felt her impoverishment;
so she went back to Chicago to live with her widowed mother on an income
of five hundred a year. This experience had given her sentimental nature
an incurable hurt. Something withered away in her. Her head had a
downward droop; her step was soft and apologetic, even in her mother's
house, and her smile had the sickly, uncertain flicker that so often
comes from a secret humiliation. She was affable and yet shrinking, like
one who has come down in the world, who has known better clothes, better
carpets, better people, brighter hopes. Her husband was buried in the
Andersen lot in St. Paul, with a locked iron fence around it. She had to
go to his eldest brother for the key when she went to say good-bye to
his grave. She clung to the Swedish Church because it had been her
husband's church.

As her mother had no room for her household belongings, Mrs. Andersen
had brought home with her only her bedroom set, which now furnished her
own room at Mrs. Lorch's. There she spent most of her time, doing
fancywork or writing letters to sympathizing German friends in St. Paul,
surrounded by keepsakes and photographs of the burly Oscar Andersen.
Thea, when she was admitted to this room, and shown these photographs,
found herself wondering, like the Andersen family, why such a lusty,
gay-looking fellow ever thought he wanted this pallid, long-cheeked
woman, whose manner was always that of withdrawing, and who must have
been rather thin-blooded even as a girl.

Mrs. Andersen was certainly a depressing person. It sometimes annoyed
Thea very much to hear her insinuating knock on the door, her flurried
explanation of why she had come, as she backed toward the stairs. Mrs.
Andersen admired Thea greatly. She thought it a distinction to be even a
"temporary soprano"--Thea called herself so quite seriously--in the
Swedish Church. She also thought it distinguished to be a pupil of
Harsanyi's. She considered Thea very handsome, very Swedish, very
talented. She fluttered about the upper floor when Thea was practicing.
In short, she tried to make a heroine of her, just as Tillie Kronborg
had always done, and Thea was conscious of something of the sort. When
she was working and heard Mrs. Andersen tip-toeing past her door, she
used to shrug her shoulders and wonder whether she was always to have a
Tillie diving furtively about her in some disguise or other.

At the dressmaker's Mrs. Andersen recalled Tillie even more painfully.
After her first Sunday in Mr. Larsen's choir, Thea saw that she must
have a proper dress for morning service. Her Moonstone party dress might
do to wear in the evening, but she must have one frock that could stand
the light of day. She, of course, knew nothing about Chicago
dressmakers, so she let Mrs. Andersen take her to a German woman whom
she recommended warmly. The German dressmaker was excitable and
dramatic. Concert dresses, she said, were her specialty. In her
fitting-room there were photographs of singers in the dresses she had
made them for this or that SANGERFEST. She and Mrs. Andersen together
achieved a costume which would have warmed Tillie Kronborg's heart. It
was clearly intended for a woman of forty, with violent tastes. There
seemed to be a piece of every known fabric in it somewhere. When it came
home, and was spread out on her huge bed, Thea looked it over and told
herself candidly that it was "a horror." However, her money was gone,
and there was nothing to do but make the best of the dress. She never
wore it except, as she said, "to sing in," as if it were an unbecoming
uniform. When Mrs. Lorch and Irene told her that she "looked like a
little bird-of-Paradise in it," Thea shut her teeth and repeated to
herself words she had learned from Joe Giddy and Spanish Johnny.

In these two good women Thea found faithful friends, and in their house
she found the quiet and peace which helped her to support the great
experiences of that winter.



III


ANDOR HARSANYI had never had a pupil in the least like Thea Kronborg. He
had never had one more intelligent, and he had never had one so
ignorant. When Thea sat down to take her first lesson from him, she had
never heard a work by Beethoven or a composition by Chopin. She knew
their names vaguely. Wunsch had been a musician once, long before he
wandered into Moonstone, but when Thea awoke his interest there was not
much left of him. From him Thea had learned something about the works of
Gluck and Bach, and he used to play her some of the compositions of
Schumann. In his trunk he had a mutilated score of the F sharp minor
sonata, which he had heard Clara Schumann play at a festival in Leipsic.
Though his powers of execution were at such a low ebb, he used to play
at this sonata for his pupil and managed to give her some idea of its
beauty. When Wunsch was a young man, it was still daring to like
Schumann; enthusiasm for his work was considered an expression of
youthful waywardness. Perhaps that was why Wunsch remembered him best.
Thea studied some of the KINDERSZENEN with him, as well as some little
sonatas by Mozart and Clementi. But for the most part Wunsch stuck to
Czerny and Hummel.

Harsanyi found in Thea a pupil with sure, strong hands, one who read
rapidly and intelligently, who had, he felt, a richly gifted nature. But
she had been given no direction, and her ardor was unawakened. She had
never heard a symphony orchestra. The literature of the piano was an
undiscovered world to her. He wondered how she had been able to work so
hard when she knew so little of what she was working toward. She had
been taught according to the old Stuttgart method; stiff back, stiff
elbows, a very formal position of the hands. The best thing about her
preparation was that she had developed an unusual power of work. He
noticed at once her way of charging at difficulties. She ran to meet
them as if they were foes she had long been seeking, seized them as if
they were destined for her and she for them. Whatever she did well, she
took for granted. Her eagerness aroused all the young Hungarian's
chivalry. Instinctively one went to the rescue of a creature who had so
much to overcome and who struggled so hard. He used to tell his wife
that Miss Kronborg's hour took more out of him than half a dozen other
lessons. He usually kept her long over time; he changed her lessons
about so that he could do so, and often gave her time at the end of the
day, when he could talk to her afterward and play for her a little from
what he happened to be studying. It was always interesting to play for
her. Sometimes she was so silent that he wondered, when she left him,
whether she had got anything out of it. But a week later, two weeks
later, she would give back his idea again in a way that set him
vibrating.

All this was very well for Harsanyi; an interesting variation in the
routine of teaching. But for Thea Kronborg, that winter was almost
beyond enduring. She always remembered it as the happiest and wildest
and saddest of her life. Things came too fast for her; she had not had
enough preparation. There were times when she came home from her lesson
and lay upon her bed hating Wunsch and her family, hating a world that
had let her grow up so ignorant; when she wished that she could die then
and there, and be born over again to begin anew. She said something of
this kind once to her teacher, in the midst of a bitter struggle.
Harsanyi turned the light of his wonderful eye upon her--poor fellow, he
had but one, though that was set in such a handsome head--and said
slowly: "Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than
the other time, and longer. Your mother did not bring anything into the
world to play piano. That you must bring into the world yourself."

This comforted Thea temporarily, for it seemed to give her a chance. But
a great deal of the time she was comfortless. Her letters to Dr. Archie
were brief and businesslike. She was not apt to chatter much, even in
the stimulating company of people she liked, and to chatter on paper was
simply impossible for her. If she tried to write him anything definite
about her work, she immediately scratched it out as being only partially
true, or not true at all. Nothing that she could say about her studies
seemed unqualifiedly true, once she put it down on paper.

Late one afternoon, when she was thoroughly tired and wanted to struggle
on into the dusk, Harsanyi, tired too, threw up his hands and laughed at
her. "Not to-day, Miss Kronborg. That sonata will keep; it won't run
away. Even if you and I should not waken up to-morrow, it will be
there."

Thea turned to him fiercely. "No, it isn't here unless I have it--not
for me," she cried passionately. "Only what I hold in my two hands is
there for me!"

Harsanyi made no reply. He took a deep breath and sat down again. "The
second movement now, quietly, with the shoulders relaxed."

There were hours, too, of great exaltation; when she was at her best and
became a part of what she was doing and ceased to exist in any other
sense. There were other times when she was so shattered by ideas that
she could do nothing worth while; when they trampled over her like an
army and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them. She
sometimes came home from a late lesson so exhausted that she could eat
no supper. If she tried to eat, she was ill afterward. She used to throw
herself upon the bed and lie there in the dark, not thinking, not
feeling, but evaporating. That same night, perhaps, she would waken up
rested and calm, and as she went over her work in her mind, the passages
seemed to become something of themselves, to take a sort of pattern in
the darkness. She had never learned to work away from the piano until
she came to Harsanyi, and it helped her more than anything had ever
helped her before.

She almost never worked now with the sunny, happy contentment that had
filled the hours when she worked with Wunsch--"like a fat horse turning
a sorgum mill," she said bitterly to herself. Then, by sticking to it,
she could always do what she set out to do. Now, everything that she
really wanted was impossible; a CANTABILE like Harsanyi's, for instance,
instead of her own cloudy tone. No use telling her she might have it in
ten years. She wanted it now. She wondered how she had ever found other
things interesting: books, "Anna Karenina"--all that seemed so unreal
and on the outside of things. She was not born a musician, she decided;
there was no other way of explaining it.

Sometimes she got so nervous at the piano that she left it, and
snatching up her hat and cape went out and walked, hurrying through the
streets like Christian fleeing from the City of Destruction. And while
she walked she cried. There was scarcely a street in the neighborhood
that she had not cried up and down before that winter was over. The
thing that used to lie under her cheek, that sat so warmly over her
heart when she glided away from the sand hills that autumn morning, was
far from her. She had come to Chicago to be with it, and it had deserted
her, leaving in its place a painful longing, an unresigned despair.


Harsanyi knew that his interesting pupil--"the savage blonde," one of
his male students called her--was sometimes very unhappy. He saw in her
discontent a curious definition of character. He would have said that a
girl with so much musical feeling, so intelligent, with good training of
eye and hand, would, when thus suddenly introduced to the great
literature of the piano, have found boundless happiness. But he soon
learned that she was not able to forget her own poverty in the richness
of the world he opened to her. Often when he played to her, her face was
the picture of restless misery. She would sit crouching forward, her
elbows on her knees, her brows drawn together and her gray-green eyes
smaller than ever, reduced to mere pin-points of cold, piercing light.
Sometimes, while she listened, she would swallow hard, two or three
times, and look nervously from left to right, drawing her shoulders
together. "Exactly," he thought, "as if she were being watched, or as if
she were naked and heard some one coming."

On the other hand, when she came several times to see Mrs. Harsanyi and
the two babies, she was like a little girl, jolly and gay and eager to
play with the children, who loved her. The little daughter, Tanya, liked
to touch Miss Kronborg's yellow hair and pat it, saying, "Dolly, dolly,"
because it was of a color much oftener seen on dolls than on people. But
if Harsanyi opened the piano and sat down to play, Miss Kronborg
gradually drew away from the children, retreated to a corner and became
sullen or troubled. Mrs. Harsanyi noticed this, also, and thought it
very strange behavior.

Another thing that puzzled Harsanyi was Thea's apparent lack of
curiosity. Several times he offered to give her tickets to concerts, but
she said she was too tired or that it "knocked her out to be up late."
Harsanyi did not know that she was singing in a choir, and had often to
sing at funerals, neither did he realize how much her work with him
stirred her and exhausted her. Once, just as she was leaving his studio,
he called her back and told her he could give her some tickets that had
been sent him for Emma Juch that evening. Thea fingered the black wool
on the edge of her plush cape and replied, "Oh, thank you, Mr. Harsanyi,
but I have to wash my hair to-night."

Mrs. Harsanyi liked Miss Kronborg thoroughly. She saw in her the making
of a pupil who would reflect credit upon Harsanyi. She felt that the
girl could be made to look strikingly handsome, and that she had the
kind of personality which takes hold of audiences. Moreover, Miss
Kronborg was not in the least sentimental about her husband. Sometimes
from the show pupils one had to endure a good deal. "I like that girl,"
she used to say, when Harsanyi told her of one of Thea's GAUCHERIES.
"She doesn't sigh every time the wind blows. With her one swallow
doesn't make a summer."

Thea told them very little about herself. She was not naturally
communicative, and she found it hard to feel confidence in new people.
She did not know why, but she could not talk to Harsanyi as she could to
Dr. Archie, or to Johnny and Mrs. Tellamantez. With Mr. Larsen she felt
more at home, and when she was walking she sometimes stopped at his
study to eat candy with him or to hear the plot of the novel he happened
to be reading.

One evening toward the middle of December Thea was to dine with the
Harsanyis. She arrived early, to have time to play with the children
before they went to bed. Mrs. Harsanyi took her into her own room and
helped her take off her country "fascinator" and her clumsy plush cape.
Thea had bought this cape at a big department store and had paid $16.50
for it. As she had never paid more than ten dollars for a coat before,
that seemed to her a large price. It was very heavy and not very warm,
ornamented with a showy pattern in black disks, and trimmed around the
collar and the edges with some kind of black wool that "crocked" badly
in snow or rain. It was lined with a cotton stuff called "farmer's
satin." Mrs. Harsanyi was one woman in a thousand. As she lifted this
cape from Thea's shoulders and laid it on her white bed, she wished that
her husband did not have to charge pupils like this one for their
lessons. Thea wore her Moonstone party dress, white organdie, made with
a "V" neck and elbow sleeves, and a blue sash. She looked very pretty in
it, and around her throat she had a string of pink coral and tiny white
shells that Ray once brought her from Los Angeles. Mrs. Harsanyi noticed
that she wore high heavy shoes which needed blacking. The choir in Mr.
Larsen's church stood behind a railing, so Thea did not pay much
attention to her shoes.

"You have nothing to do to your hair," Mrs. Harsanyi said kindly, as
Thea turned to the mirror. "However it happens to lie, it's always
pretty. I admire it as much as Tanya does."

Thea glanced awkwardly away from her and looked stern, but Mrs. Harsanyi
knew that she was pleased. They went into the living-room, behind the
studio, where the two children were playing on the big rug before the
coal grate. Andor, the boy, was six, a sturdy, handsome child, and the
little girl was four. She came tripping to meet Thea, looking like a
little doll in her white net dress--her mother made all her clothes.
Thea picked her up and hugged her. Mrs. Harsanyi excused herself and
went to the dining-room. She kept only one maid and did a good deal of
the housework herself, besides cooking her husband's favorite dishes for
him. She was still under thirty, a slender, graceful woman, gracious,
intelligent, and capable. She adapted herself to circumstances with a
well-bred ease which solved many of her husband's difficulties, and kept
him, as he said, from feeling cheap and down at the heel. No musician
ever had a better wife. Unfortunately her beauty was of a very frail and
impressionable kind, and she was beginning to lose it. Her face was too
thin now, and there were often dark circles under her eyes.

Left alone with the children, Thea sat down on Tanya's little chair--she
would rather have sat on the floor, but was afraid of rumpling her
dress--and helped them play "cars" with Andor's iron railway set. She
showed him new ways to lay his tracks and how to make switches, set up
his Noah's ark village for stations and packed the animals in the open
coal cars to send them to the stockyards. They worked out their shipment
so realistically that when Andor put the two little reindeer into the
stock car, Tanya snatched them out and began to cry, saying she wasn't
going to have all their animals killed.

Harsanyi came in, jaded and tired, and asked Thea to go on with her
game, as he was not equal to talking much before dinner. He sat down and
made pretense of glancing at the evening paper, but he soon dropped it.
After the railroad began to grow tiresome, Thea went with the children
to the lounge in the corner, and played for them the game with which she
used to amuse Thor for hours together behind the parlor stove at home,
making shadow pictures against the wall with her hands. Her fingers were
very supple, and she could make a duck and a cow and a sheep and a fox
and a rabbit and even an elephant. Harsanyi, from his low chair, watched
them, smiling. The boy was on his knees, jumping up and down with the
excitement of guessing the beasts, and Tanya sat with her feet tucked
under her and clapped her frail little hands. Thea's profile, in the
lamplight, teased his fancy. Where had he seen a head like it before?

When dinner was announced, little Andor took Thea's hand and walked to
the dining-room with her. The children always had dinner with their
parents and behaved very nicely at table. "Mamma," said Andor seriously
as he climbed into his chair and tucked his napkin into the collar of
his blouse, "Miss Kronborg's hands are every kind of animal there is."

His father laughed. "I wish somebody would say that about my hands,
Andor."

When Thea dined at the Harsanyis before, she noticed that there was an
intense suspense from the moment they took their places at the table
until the master of the house had tasted the soup. He had a theory that
if the soup went well, the dinner would go well; but if the soup was
poor, all was lost. To-night he tasted his soup and smiled, and Mrs.
Harsanyi sat more easily in her chair and turned her attention to Thea.
Thea loved their dinner table, because it was lighted by candles in
silver candle-sticks, and she had never seen a table so lighted anywhere
else. There were always flowers, too. To-night there was a little orange
tree, with oranges on it, that one of Harsanyi's pupils had sent him at
Thanksgiving time. After Harsanyi had finished his soup and a glass of
red Hungarian wine, he lost his fagged look and became cordial and
witty. He persuaded Thea to drink a little wine to-night. The first time
she dined with them, when he urged her to taste the glass of sherry
beside her plate, she astonished them by telling them that she "never
drank."

Harsanyi was then a man of thirty-two. He was to have a very brilliant
career, but he did not know it then. Theodore Thomas was perhaps the
only man in Chicago who felt that Harsanyi might have a great future.
Harsanyi belonged to the softer Slavic type, and was more like a Pole
than a Hungarian. He was tall, slender, active, with sloping, graceful
shoulders and long arms. His head was very fine, strongly and delicately
modelled, and, as Thea put it, "so independent." A lock of his thick
brown hair usually hung over his forehead. His eye was wonderful; full
of light and fire when he was interested, soft and thoughtful when he
was tired or melancholy. The meaning and power of two very fine eyes
must all have gone into this one--the right one, fortunately, the one
next his audience when he played. He believed that the glass eye which
gave one side of his face such a dull, blind look, had ruined his
career, or rather had made a career impossible for him. Harsanyi lost
his eye when he was twelve years old, in a Pennsylvania mining town
where explosives happened to be kept too near the frame shanties in
which the company packed newly arrived Hungarian families.

His father was a musician and a good one, but he had cruelly over-worked
the boy; keeping him at the piano for six hours a day and making him
play in cafes and dance halls for half the night. Andor ran away and
crossed the ocean with an uncle, who smuggled him through the port as
one of his own many children. The explosion in which Andor was hurt
killed a score of people, and he was thought lucky to get off with an
eye. He still had a clipping from a Pittsburg paper, giving a list of
the dead and injured. He appeared as "Harsanyi, Andor, left eye and
slight injuries about the head." That was his first American "notice";
and he kept it. He held no grudge against the coal company; he
understood that the accident was merely one of the things that are bound
to happen in the general scramble of American life, where every one
comes to grab and takes his chance.

While they were eating dessert, Thea asked Harsanyi if she could change
her Tuesday lesson from afternoon to morning. "I have to be at a choir
rehearsal in the afternoon, to get ready for the Christmas music, and I
expect it will last until late."

Harsanyi put down his fork and looked up. "A choir rehearsal? You sing
in a church?"

"Yes. A little Swedish church, over on the North side."

"Why did you not tell us?"

"Oh, I'm only a temporary. The regular soprano is not well."

"How long have you been singing there?"

"Ever since I came. I had to get a position of some kind," Thea
explained, flushing, "and the preacher took me on. He runs the choir
himself. He knew my father, and I guess he took me to oblige."

Harsanyi tapped the tablecloth with the ends of his fingers. "But why
did you never tell us? Why are you so reticent with us?"

Thea looked shyly at him from under her brows. "Well, it's certainly not
very interesting. It's only a little church. I only do it for business
reasons."

"What do you mean? Don't you like to sing? Don't you sing well?"

"I like it well enough, but, of course, I don't know anything about
singing. I guess that's why I never said anything about it. Anybody
that's got a voice can sing in a little church like that."

Harsanyi laughed softly--a little scornfully, Thea thought. "So you have
a voice, have you?"

Thea hesitated, looked intently at the candles and then at Harsanyi.
"Yes," she said firmly; "I have got some, anyway."

"Good girl," said Mrs. Harsanyi, nodding and smiling at Thea. "You must
let us hear you sing after dinner."

This remark seemingly closed the subject, and when the coffee was
brought they began to talk of other things. Harsanyi asked Thea how she
happened to know so much about the way in which freight trains are
operated, and she tried to give him some idea of how the people in
little desert towns live by the railway and order their lives by the
coming and going of the trains. When they left the diningroom the
children were sent to bed and Mrs. Harsanyi took Thea into the studio.
She and her husband usually sat there in the evening.

Although their apartment seemed so elegant to Thea, it was small and
cramped. The studio was the only spacious room. The Harsanyis were poor,
and it was due to Mrs. Harsanyi's good management that their lives, even
in hard times, moved along with dignity and order. She had long ago
found out that bills or debts of any kind frightened her husband and
crippled his working power. He said they were like bars on the windows,
and shut out the future; they meant that just so many hundred dollars'
worth of his life was debilitated and exhausted before he got to it. So
Mrs. Harsanyi saw to it that they never owed anything. Harsanyi was not
extravagant, though he was sometimes careless about money. Quiet and
order and his wife's good taste were the things that meant most to him.
After these, good food, good cigars, a little good wine. He wore his
clothes until they were shabby, until his wife had to ask the tailor to
come to the house and measure him for new ones. His neckties she usually
made herself, and when she was in shops she always kept her eye open for
silks in very dull or pale shades, grays and olives, warm blacks and
browns.

When they went into the studio Mrs. Harsanyi took up her embroidery and
Thea sat down beside her on a low stool, her hands clasped about her
knees. While his wife and his pupil talked, Harsanyi sank into a CHAISE
LONGUE in which he sometimes snatched a few moments' rest between his
lessons, and smoked. He sat well out of the circle of the lamplight, his
feet to the fire. His feet were slender and well shaped, always
elegantly shod. Much of the grace of his movements was due to the fact
that his feet were almost as sure and flexible as his hands. He listened
to the conversation with amusement. He admired his wife's tact and
kindness with crude young people; she taught them so much without
seeming to be instructing. When the clock struck nine, Thea said she
must be going home.

Harsanyi rose and flung away his cigarette. "Not yet. We have just begun
the evening. Now you are going to sing for us. I have been waiting for
you to recover from dinner. Come, what shall it be?" he crossed to the
piano.

Thea laughed and shook her head, locking her elbows still tighter about
her knees. "Thank you, Mr. Harsanyi, but if you really make me sing,
I'll accompany myself. You couldn't stand it to play the sort of things
I have to sing."

As Harsanyi still pointed to the chair at the piano, she left her stool
and went to it, while he returned to his CHAISE LONGUE. Thea looked at
the keyboard uneasily for a moment, then she began "Come, ye
Disconsolate," the hymn Wunsch had always liked to hear her sing. Mrs.
Harsanyi glanced questioningly at her husband, but he was looking
intently at the toes of his boots, shading his forehead with his long
white hand. When Thea finished the hymn she did not turn around, but
immediately began "The Ninety and Nine." Mrs. Harsanyi kept trying to
catch her husband's eye; but his chin only sank lower on his collar.


"There were ninety and nine that safely lay In the shelter of the fold,
But one was out on the hills away, Far off from the gates of gold."


Harsanyi looked at her, then back at the fire.

"Rejoice, for the Shepherd has found his sheep."

Thea turned on the chair and grinned. "That's about enough, isn't it?
That song got me my job. The preacher said it was sympathetic," she
minced the word, remembering Mr. Larsen's manner.

Harsanyi drew himself up in his chair, resting his elbows on the low
arms. "Yes? That is better suited to your voice. Your upper tones are
good, above G. I must teach you some songs. Don't you know
anything--pleasant?"

Thea shook her head ruefully. "I'm afraid I don't. Let me see--Perhaps,"
she turned to the piano and put her hands on the keys. "I used to sing
this for Mr. Wunsch a long while ago. It's for contralto, but I'll try
it." She frowned at the keyboard a moment, played the few introductory
measures, and began:

"ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN,"

She had not sung it for a long time, and it came back like an old
friendship. When she finished, Harsanyi sprang from his chair and
dropped lightly upon his toes, a kind of ENTRE-CHAT that he sometimes
executed when he formed a sudden resolution, or when he was about to
follow a pure intuition, against reason. His wife said that when he gave
that spring he was shot from the bow of his ancestors, and now when he
left his chair in that manner she knew he was intensely interested. He
went quickly to the piano.

"Sing that again. There is nothing the matter with your low voice, my
girl. I will play for you. Let your voice out." Without looking at her
he began the accompaniment. Thea drew back her shoulders, relaxed them
instinctively, and sang.

When she finished the aria, Harsanyi beckoned her nearer. "Sing AH--AH
for me, as I indicate." He kept his right hand on the keyboard and put
his left to her throat, placing the tips of his delicate fingers over
her larynx. "Again,--until your breath is gone.--Trill between the two
tones, always; good! Again; excellent!--Now up,--stay there. E and F.
Not so good, is it? F is always a hard one.--Now, try the
half-tone.--That's right, nothing difficult about it.--Now, pianissimo,
AH--AH. Now, swell it, AH--AH.--Again, follow my hand.--Now, carry it
down.--Anybody ever tell you anything about your breathing?"

"Mr. Larsen says I have an unusually long breath," Thea replied with
spirit.

Harsanyi smiled. "So you have, so you have. That was what I meant. Now,
once more; carry it up and then down, AH--AH." He put his hand back to
her throat and sat with his head bent, his one eye closed. He loved to
hear a big voice throb in a relaxed, natural throat, and he was thinking
that no one had ever felt this voice vibrate before. It was like a wild
bird that had flown into his studio on Middleton Street from goodness
knew how far! No one knew that it had come, or even that it existed;
least of all the strange, crude girl in whose throat it beat its
passionate wings. What a simple thing it was, he reflected; why had he
never guessed it before? Everything about her indicated it,--the big
mouth, the wide jaw and chin, the strong white teeth, the deep laugh.
The machine was so simple and strong, seemed to be so easily operated.
She sang from the bottom of herself. Her breath came from down where her
laugh came from, the deep laugh which Mrs. Harsanyi had once called "the
laugh of the people." A relaxed throat, a voice that lay on the breath,
that had never been forced off the breath; it rose and fell in the
air-column like the little balls which are put to shine in the jet of a
fountain. The voice did not thin as it went up; the upper tones were as
full and rich as the lower, produced in the same way and as
unconsciously, only with deeper breath.

At last Harsanyi threw back his head and rose. "You must be tired, Miss
Kronborg."

When she replied, she startled him; he had forgotten how hard and full
of burs her speaking voice was. "No," she said, "singing never tires
me."

Harsanyi pushed back his hair with a nervous hand. "I don't know much
about the voice, but I shall take liberties and teach you some good
songs. I think you have a very interesting voice."

"I'm glad if you like it. Good-night, Mr. Harsanyi." Thea went with Mrs.
Harsanyi to get her wraps.

When Mrs. Harsanyi came back to her husband, she found him walking
restlessly up and down the room.

"Don't you think her voice wonderful, dear?" she asked.

"I scarcely know what to think. All I really know about that girl is
that she tires me to death. We must not have her often. If I did not
have my living to make, then--" he dropped into a chair and closed his
eyes. "How tired I am. What a voice!"



IV


AFTER that evening Thea's work with Harsanyi changed somewhat. He
insisted that she should study some songs with him, and after almost
every lesson he gave up half an hour of his own time to practicing them
with her. He did not pretend to know much about voice production, but so
far, he thought, she had acquired no really injurious habits. A healthy
and powerful organ had found its own method, which was not a bad one. He
wished to find out a good deal before he recommended a vocal teacher. He
never told Thea what he thought about her voice, and made her general
ignorance of anything worth singing his pretext for the trouble he took.
That was in the beginning. After the first few lessons his own pleasure
and hers were pretext enough. The singing came at the end of the lesson
hour, and they both treated it as a form of relaxation.

Harsanyi did not say much even to his wife about his discovery. He
brooded upon it in a curious way. He found that these unscientific
singing lessons stimulated him in his own study. After Miss Kronborg
left him he often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with
his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his brain which
he had sometimes lost for weeks together under the grind of teaching. He
had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from
Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her
personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way
toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She
lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and
reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why all this was true,
he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when
one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination;
that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never
bored him. Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt there was a
nature quite different, of which he never got so much as a hint except
when she was at the piano, or when she sang. It was toward this hidden
creature that he was trying, for his own pleasure, to find his way. In
short, Harsanyi looked forward to his hour with Thea for the same reason
that poor Wunsch had sometimes dreaded his; because she stirred him more
than anything she did could adequately explain.

One afternoon Harsanyi, after the lesson, was standing by the window
putting some collodion on a cracked finger, and Thea was at the piano
trying over "Die Lorelei" which he had given her last week to practice.
It was scarcely a song which a singing master would have given her, but
he had his own reasons. How she sang it mattered only to him and to her.
He was playing his own game now, without interference; he suspected that
he could not do so always.

When she finished the song, she looked back over her shoulder at him and
spoke thoughtfully. "That wasn't right, at the end, was it?"

"No, that should be an open, flowing tone, something like this,"--he
waved his fingers rapidly in the air. "You get the idea?"

"No, I don't. Seems a queer ending, after the rest."

Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the pocket of his
velvet coat. "Why so? Shipwrecks come and go, MARCHEN come and go, but
the river keeps right on. There you have your open, flowing tone."

Thea looked intently at the music. "I see," she said dully. "Oh, I see!"
she repeated quickly and turned to him a glowing countenance. "It is the
river.--Oh, yes, I get it now!" She looked at him but long enough to
catch his glance, then turned to the piano again. Harsanyi was never
quite sure where the light came from when her face suddenly flashed out
at him in that way. Her eyes were too small to account for it, though
they glittered like green ice in the sun. At such moments her hair was
yellower, her skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly
been turned up inside of her. She went at the song again:


"ICH WEISS NICHT, WAS SOLL ES BEDEUTEN, DAS ICH SO TRAURIG BIN."


A kind of happiness vibrated in her voice. Harsanyi noticed how much and
how unhesitatingly she changed her delivery of the whole song, the first
part as well as the last. He had often noticed that she could not think
a thing out in passages. Until she saw it as a whole, she wandered like
a blind man surrounded by torments. After she once had her "revelation,"
after she got the idea that to her--not always to him--explained
everything, then she went forward rapidly. But she was not always easy
to help. She was sometimes impervious to suggestion; she would stare at
him as if she were deaf and ignore everything he told her to do. Then,
all at once, something would happen in her brain and she would begin to
do all that he had been for weeks telling her to do, without realizing
that he had ever told her.

To-night Thea forgot Harsanyi and his finger. She finished the song only
to begin it with fresh enthusiasm.


"UND DAS HAT MIT IHREM SINGEN DIE LORELEI GETHAN."


She sat there singing it until the darkening room was so flooded with it
that Harsanyi threw open a window.

"You really must stop it, Miss Kronborg. I shan't be able to get it out
of my head to-night."

Thea laughed tolerantly as she began to gather up her music. "Why, I
thought you had gone, Mr. Harsanyi. I like that song."

That evening at dinner Harsanyi sat looking intently into a glass of
heavy yellow wine; boring into it, indeed, with his one eye, when his
face suddenly broke into a smile.

"What is it, Andor?" his wife asked.

He smiled again, this time at her, and took up the nutcrackers and a
Brazil nut. "Do you know," he said in a tone so intimate and
confidential that he might have been speaking to himself,--"do you know,
I like to see Miss Kronborg get hold of an idea. In spite of being so
talented, she's not quick. But when she does get an idea, it fills her
up to the eyes. She had my room so reeking of a song this afternoon that
I couldn't stay there."

Mrs. Harsanyi looked up quickly, "`Die Lorelei,' you mean? One couldn't
think of anything else anywhere in the house. I thought she was
possessed. But don't you think her voice is wonderful sometimes?"

Harsanyi tasted his wine slowly. "My dear, I've told you before that I
don't know what I think about Miss Kronborg, except that I'm glad there
are not two of her. I sometimes wonder whether she is not glad. Fresh as
she is at it all, I've occasionally fancied that, if she knew how, she
would like to--diminish." He moved his left hand out into the air as if
he were suggesting a DIMINUENDO to an orchestra.



V


BY the first of February Thea had been in Chicago almost four months,
and she did not know much more about the city than if she had never
quitted Moonstone. She was, as Harsanyi said, incurious. Her work took
most of her time, and she found that she had to sleep a good deal. It
had never before been so hard to get up in the morning. She had the
bother of caring for her room, and she had to build her fire and bring
up her coal. Her routine was frequently interrupted by a message from
Mr. Larsen summoning her to sing at a funeral. Every funeral took half a
day, and the time had to be made up. When Mrs. Harsanyi asked her if it
did not depress her to sing at funerals, she replied that she "had been
brought up to go to funerals and didn't mind."

Thea never went into shops unless she had to, and she felt no interest
in them. Indeed, she shunned them, as places where one was sure to be
parted from one's money in some way. She was nervous about counting her
change, and she could not accustom herself to having her purchases sent
to her address. She felt much safer with her bundles under her arm.

During this first winter Thea got no city consciousness. Chicago was
simply a wilderness through which one had to find one's way. She felt no
interest in the general briskness and zest of the crowds. The crash and
scramble of that big, rich, appetent Western city she did not take in at
all, except to notice that the noise of the drays and street-cars tired
her. The brilliant window displays, the splendid furs and stuffs, the
gorgeous flower-shops, the gay candy-shops, she scarcely noticed. At
Christmas-time she did feel some curiosity about the toy-stores, and she
wished she held Thor's little mittened fist in her hand as she stood
before the windows. The jewelers' windows, too, had a strong attraction
for her--she had always liked bright stones. When she went into the city
she used to brave the biting lake winds and stand gazing in at the
displays of diamonds and pearls and emeralds; the tiaras and necklaces
and earrings, on white velvet. These seemed very well worth while to
her, things worth coveting.

Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen often told each other it was strange that
Miss Kronborg had so little initiative about "visiting points of
interest." When Thea came to live with them she had expressed a wish to
see two places: Montgomery Ward and Company's big mail-order store, and
the packing-houses, to which all the hogs and cattle that went through
Moonstone were bound. One of Mrs. Lorch's lodgers worked in a
packing-house, and Mrs. Andersen brought Thea word that she had spoken
to Mr. Eckman and he would gladly take her to Packingtown. Eckman was a
toughish young Swede, and he thought it would be something of a lark to
take a pretty girl through the slaughter-houses. But he was
disappointed. Thea neither grew faint nor clung to the arm he kept
offering her. She asked innumerable questions and was impatient because
he knew so little of what was going on outside of his own department.
When they got off the street-car and walked back to Mrs. Lorch's house
in the dusk, Eckman put her hand in his overcoat pocket--she had no
muff--and kept squeezing it ardently until she said, "Don't do that; my
ring cuts me." That night he told his roommate that he "could have
kissed her as easy as rolling off a log, but she wasn't worth the
trouble." As for Thea, she had enjoyed the afternoon very much, and
wrote her father a brief but clear account of what she had seen.

One night at supper Mrs. Andersen was talking about the exhibit of
students' work she had seen at the Art Institute that afternoon. Several
of her friends had sketches in the exhibit. Thea, who always felt that
she was behindhand in courtesy to Mrs. Andersen, thought that here was
an opportunity to show interest without committing herself to anything.
"Where is that, the Institute?" she asked absently.

Mrs. Andersen clasped her napkin in both hands. "The Art Institute? Our
beautiful Art Institute on Michigan Avenue? Do you mean to say you have
never visited it?"

"Oh, is it the place with the big lions out in front? I remember; I saw
it when I went to Montgomery Ward's. Yes, I thought the lions were
beautiful."

"But the pictures! Didn't you visit the galleries?"

"No. The sign outside said it was a pay-day. I've always meant to go
back, but I haven't happened to be down that way since."

Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen looked at each other. The old mother spoke,
fixing her shining little eyes upon Thea across the table. "Ah, but Miss
Kronborg, there are old masters! Oh, many of them, such as you could not
see anywhere out of Europe."

"And Corots," breathed Mrs. Andersen, tilting her head feelingly. "Such
examples of the Barbizon school!" This was meaningless to Thea, who did
not read the art columns of the Sunday INTER-OCEAN as Mrs. Andersen did.

"Oh, I'm going there some day," she reassured them. "I like to look at
oil paintings."

One bleak day in February, when the wind was blowing clouds of dirt like
a Moonstone sandstorm, dirt that filled your eyes and ears and mouth,
Thea fought her way across the unprotected space in front of the Art
Institute and into the doors of the building. She did not come out again
until the closing hour. In the street-car, on the long cold ride home,
while she sat staring at the waistcoat buttons of a fat strap-hanger,
she had a serious reckoning with herself. She seldom thought about her
way of life, about what she ought or ought not to do; usually there was
but one obvious and important thing to be done. But that afternoon she
remonstrated with herself severely. She told herself that she was
missing a great deal; that she ought to be more willing to take advice
and to go to see things. She was sorry that she had let months pass
without going to the Art Institute. After this she would go once a week.

The Institute proved, indeed, a place of retreat, as the sand hills or
the Kohlers' garden used to be; a place where she could forget Mrs.
Andersen's tiresome overtures of friendship, the stout contralto in the
choir whom she so unreasonably hated, and even, for a little while, the
torment of her work. That building was a place in which she could relax
and play, and she could hardly ever play now. On the whole, she spent
more time with the casts than with the pictures. They were at once more
simple and more perplexing; and some way they seemed more important,
harder to overlook. It never occurred to her to buy a catalogue, so she
called most of the casts by names she made up for them. Some of them she
knew; the Dying Gladiator she had read about in "Childe Harold" almost
as long ago as she could remember; he was strongly associated with Dr.
Archie and childish illnesses. The Venus di Milo puzzled her; she could
not see why people thought her so beautiful. She told herself over and
over that she did not think the Apollo Belvedere "at all handsome."
Better than anything else she liked a great equestrian statue of an
evil, cruel-looking general with an unpronounceable name. She used to
walk round and round this terrible man and his terrible horse, frowning
at him, brooding upon him, as if she had to make some momentous decision
about him.

The casts, when she lingered long among them, always made her gloomy. It
was with a lightening of the heart, a feeling of throwing off the old
miseries and old sorrows of the world, that she ran up the wide
staircase to the pictures. There she liked best the ones that told
stories. There was a painting by Gerome called "The Pasha's Grief" which
always made her wish for Gunner and Axel. The Pasha was seated on a rug,
beside a green candle almost as big as a telegraph pole, and before him
was stretched his dead tiger, a splendid beast, and there were pink
roses scattered about him. She loved, too, a picture of some boys
bringing in a newborn calf on a litter, the cow walking beside it and
licking it. The Corot which hung next to this painting she did not like
or dislike; she never saw it.

But in that same room there was a picture--oh, that was the thing she
ran upstairs so fast to see! That was her picture. She imagined that
nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her. That was a
picture indeed. She liked even the name of it, "The Song of the Lark."
The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in
the girl's heavy face--well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was
there. She told herself that that picture was "right." Just what she
meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain. But to her the
word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked
at the picture.


Before Thea had any idea how fast the weeks were flying, before Mr.
Larsen's "permanent" soprano had returned to her duties, spring came;
windy, dusty, strident, shrill; a season almost more violent in Chicago
than the winter from which it releases one, or the heat to which it
eventually delivers one. One sunny morning the apple trees in Mrs.
Lorch's back yard burst into bloom, and for the first time in months
Thea dressed without building a fire. The morning shone like a holiday,
and for her it was to be a holiday. There was in the air that sudden,
treacherous softness which makes the Poles who work in the
packing-houses get drunk. At such times beauty is necessary, and in
Packingtown there is no place to get it except at the saloons, where one
can buy for a few hours the illusion of comfort, hope, love,--whatever
one most longs for.

Harsanyi had given Thea a ticket for the symphony concert that
afternoon, and when she looked out at the white apple trees her doubts
as to whether she ought to go vanished at once. She would make her work
light that morning, she told herself. She would go to the concert full
of energy. When she set off, after dinner, Mrs. Lorch, who knew Chicago
weather, prevailed upon her to take her cape. The old lady said that
such sudden mildness, so early in April, presaged a sharp return of
winter, and she was anxious about her apple trees.

The concert began at two-thirty, and Thea was in her seat in the
Auditorium at ten minutes after two--a fine seat in the first row of the
balcony, on the side, where she could see the house as well as the
orchestra. She had been to so few concerts that the great house, the
crowd of people, and the lights, all had a stimulating effect. She was
surprised to see so many men in the audience, and wondered how they
could leave their business in the afternoon. During the first number
Thea was so much interested in the orchestra itself, in the men, the
instruments, the volume of sound, that she paid little attention to what
they were playing. Her excitement impaired her power of listening. She
kept saying to herself, "Now I must stop this foolishness and listen; I
may never hear this again"; but her mind was like a glass that is hard
to focus. She was not ready to listen until the second number, Dvorak's
Symphony in E minor, called on the programme, "From the New World." The
first theme had scarcely been given out when her mind became clear;
instant composure fell upon her, and with it came the power of
concentration. This was music she could understand, music from the New
World indeed! Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought
back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon
trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles,
that old man and the first telegraph message.

When the first movement ended, Thea's hands and feet were cold as ice.
She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted
something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of
the Largo, she knew that what she wanted was exactly that. Here were the
sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened
and chirped in the early morning; the reaching and reaching of high
plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in
it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement of a new
soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something
despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born; a soul
obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not
recall.

If Thea had had much experience in concert-going, and had known her own
capacity, she would have left the hall when the symphony was over. But
she sat still, scarcely knowing where she was, because her mind had been
far away and had not yet come back to her. She was startled when the
orchestra began to play again--the entry of the gods into Walhalla. She
heard it as people hear things in their sleep. She knew scarcely
anything about the Wagner operas. She had a vague idea that "Rhinegold"
was about the strife between gods and men; she had read something about
it in Mr. Haweis's book long ago. Too tired to follow the orchestra with
much understanding, she crouched down in her seat and closed her eyes.
The cold, stately measures of the Walhalla music rang out, far away; the
rainbow bridge throbbed out into the air, under it the wailing of the
Rhine daughters and the singing of the Rhine. But Thea was sunk in
twilight; it was all going on in another world. So it happened that with
a dull, almost listless ear she heard for the first time that troubled
music, ever-darkening, ever-brightening, which was to flow through so
many years of her life.

When Thea emerged from the concert hall, Mrs. Lorch's predictions had
been fulfilled. A furious gale was beating over the city from Lake
Michigan. The streets were full of cold, hurrying, angry people, running
for street-cars and barking at each other. The sun was setting in a
clear, windy sky, that flamed with red as if there were a great fire
somewhere on the edge of the city. For almost the first time Thea was
conscious of the city itself, of the congestion of life all about her,
of the brutality and power of those streams that flowed in the streets,
threatening to drive one under. People jostled her, ran into her, poked
her aside with their elbows, uttering angry exclamations. She got on the
wrong car and was roughly ejected by the conductor at a windy corner, in
front of a saloon. She stood there dazed and shivering. The cars passed,
screaming as they rounded curves, but either they were full to the
doors, or were bound for places where she did not want to go. Her hands
were so cold that she took off her tight kid gloves. The street lights
began to gleam in the dusk. A young man came out of the saloon and stood
eyeing her questioningly while he lit a cigarette. "Looking for a friend
to-night?" he asked. Thea drew up the collar of her cape and walked on a
few paces. The young man shrugged his shoulders and drifted away.

Thea came back to the corner and stood there irresolutely. An old man
approached her. He, too, seemed to be waiting for a car. He wore an
overcoat with a black fur collar, his gray mustache was waxed into
little points, and his eyes were watery. He kept thrusting his face up
near hers. Her hat blew off and he ran after it--a stiff, pitiful skip
he had--and brought it back to her. Then, while she was pinning her hat
on, her cape blew up, and he held it down for her, looking at her
intently. His face worked as if he were going to cry or were frightened.
He leaned over and whispered something to her. It struck her as curious
that he was really quite timid, like an old beggar. "Oh, let me ALONE!"
she cried miserably between her teeth. He vanished, disappeared like the
Devil in a play. But in the mean time something had got away from her;
she could not remember how the violins came in after the horns, just
there. When her cape blew up, perhaps--Why did these men torment her? A
cloud of dust blew in her face and blinded her. There was some power
abroad in the world bent upon taking away from her that feeling with
which she had come out of the concert hall. Everything seemed to sweep
down on her to tear it out from under her cape. If one had that, the
world became one's enemy; people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one
to crush it under, to make one let go of it. Thea glared round her at
the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines of lights, and
she was not crying now. Her eyes were brighter than even Harsanyi had
ever seen them. All these things and people were no longer remote and
negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they
were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have
it. They might trample her to death, but they should never have it. As
long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for
it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after
time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra
again, and she rose on the brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets
were singing! She would have it, have it,--it! Under the old cape she
pressed her hands upon her heaving bosom, that was a little girl's no
longer.



VI


ONE afternoon in April, Theodore Thomas, the conductor of the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, had turned out his desk light and was about to leave
his office in the Auditorium Building, when Harsanyi appeared in the
doorway. The conductor welcomed him with a hearty hand-grip and threw
off the overcoat he had just put on. He pushed Harsanyi into a chair and
sat down at his burdened desk, pointing to the piles of papers and
railway folders upon it.

"Another tour, clear to the coast. This traveling is the part of my work
that grinds me, Andor. You know what it means: bad food, dirt, noise,
exhaustion for the men and for me. I'm not so young as I once was. It's
time I quit the highway. This is the last tour, I swear!"

"Then I'm sorry for the `highway.' I remember when I first heard you in
Pittsburg, long ago. It was a life-line you threw me. It's about one of
the people along your highway that I've come to see you. Whom do you
consider the best teacher for voice in Chicago?"

Mr. Thomas frowned and pulled his heavy mustache. "Let me see; I suppose
on the whole Madison Bowers is the best. He's intelligent, and he had
good training. I don't like him."

Harsanyi nodded. "I thought there was no one else. I don't like him,
either, so I hesitated. But I suppose he must do, for the present."

"Have you found anything promising? One of your own students?"

"Yes, sir. A young Swedish girl from somewhere in Colorado. She is very
talented, and she seems to me to have a remarkable voice."

"High voice?"

"I think it will be; though her low voice has a beautiful quality, very
individual. She has had no instruction in voice at all, and I shrink
from handing her over to anybody; her own instinct about it has been so
good. It is one of those voices that manages itself easily, without
thinning as it goes up; good breathing and perfect relaxation. But she
must have a teacher, of course. There is a break in the middle voice, so
that the voice does not all work together; an unevenness."

Thomas looked up. "So? Curious; that cleft often happens with the
Swedes. Some of their best singers have had it. It always reminds me of
the space you so often see between their front teeth. Is she strong
physically?"

Harsanyi's eye flashed. He lifted his hand before him and clenched it.
"Like a horse, like a tree! Every time I give her a lesson, I lose a
pound. She goes after what she wants."

"Intelligent, you say? Musically intelligent?"

"Yes; but no cultivation whatever. She came to me like a fine young
savage, a book with nothing written in it. That is why I feel the
responsibility of directing her." Harsanyi paused and crushed his soft
gray hat over his knee. "She would interest you, Mr. Thomas," he added
slowly. "She has a quality--very individual."

"Yes; the Scandinavians are apt to have that, too. She can't go to
Germany, I suppose?"

"Not now, at any rate. She is poor."

Thomas frowned again "I don't think Bowers a really first-rate man. He's
too petty to be really first-rate; in his nature, I mean. But I dare say
he's the best you can do, if you can't give her time enough yourself."

Harsanyi waved his hand. "Oh, the time is nothing--she may have all she
wants. But I cannot teach her to sing."

"Might not come amiss if you made a musician of her, however," said Mr.
Thomas dryly.

"I have done my best. But I can only play with a voice, and this is not
a voice to be played with. I think she will be a musician, whatever
happens. She is not quick, but she is solid, real; not like these
others. My wife says that with that girl one swallow does not make a
summer."

Mr. Thomas laughed. "Tell Mrs. Harsanyi that her remark conveys
something to me. Don't let yourself get too much interested. Voices are
so often disappointing; especially women's voices. So much chance about
it, so many factors."

"Perhaps that is why they interest one. All the intelligence and talent
in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be
bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens."

Mr. Thomas smiled into Harsanyi's gleaming eye. "Why haven't you brought
her to sing for me?"

"I've been tempted to, but I knew you were driven to death, with this
tour confronting you."

"Oh, I can always find time to listen to a girl who has a voice, if she
means business. I'm sorry I'm leaving so soon. I could advise you better
if I had heard her. I can sometimes give a singer suggestions. I've
worked so much with them."

"You're the only conductor I know who is not snobbish about singers."
Harsanyi spoke warmly.

"Dear me, why should I be? They've learned from me, and I've learned
from them." As they rose, Thomas took the younger man affectionately by
the arm. "Tell me about that wife of yours. Is she well, and as lovely
as ever? And such fine children! Come to see me oftener, when I get
back. I miss it when you don't."

The two men left the Auditorium Building together. Harsanyi walked home.
Even a short talk with Thomas always stimulated him. As he walked he was
recalling an evening they once spent together in Cincinnati.

Harsanyi was the soloist at one of Thomas's concerts there, and after
the performance the conductor had taken him off to a RATHSKELLER where
there was excellent German cooking, and where the proprietor saw to it
that Thomas had the best wines procurable. Thomas had been working with
the great chorus of the Festival Association and was speaking of it with
enthusiasm when Harsanyi asked him how it was that he was able to feel
such an interest in choral directing and in voices generally. Thomas
seldom spoke of his youth or his early struggles, but that night he
turned back the pages and told Harsanyi a long story.

He said he had spent the summer of his fifteenth year wandering about
alone in the South, giving violin concerts in little towns. He traveled
on horseback. When he came into a town, he went about all day tacking up
posters announcing his concert in the evening. Before the concert, he
stood at the door taking in the admission money until his audience had
arrived, and then he went on the platform and played. It was a lazy,
hand-to-mouth existence, and Thomas said he must have got to like that
easy way of living and the relaxing Southern atmosphere. At any rate,
when he got back to New York in the fall, he was rather torpid; perhaps
he had been growing too fast. From this adolescent drowsiness the lad
was awakened by two voices, by two women who sang in New York in 1851,
--Jenny Lind and Henrietta Sontag. They were the first great artists he
had ever heard, and he never forgot his debt to them.

As he said, "It was not voice and execution alone. There was a greatness
about them. They were great women, great artists. They opened a new
world to me." Night after night he went to hear them, striving to
reproduce the quality of their tone upon his violin. From that time his
idea about strings was completely changed, and on his violin he tried
always for the singing, vibrating tone, instead of the loud and somewhat
harsh tone then prevalent among even the best German violinists. In
later years he often advised violinists to study singing, and singers to
study violin. He told Harsanyi that he got his first conception of tone
quality from Jenny Lind.

"But, of course," he added, "the great thing I got from Lind and Sontag
was the indefinite, not the definite, thing. For an impressionable boy,
their inspiration was incalculable. They gave me my first feeling for
the Italian style--but I could never say how much they gave me. At that
age, such influences are actually creative. I always think of my
artistic consciousness as beginning then."

All his life Thomas did his best to repay what he felt he owed to the
singer's art. No man could get such singing from choruses, and no man
worked harder to raise the standard of singing in schools and churches
and choral societies.



VII


All through the lesson Thea had felt that Harsanyi was restless and
abstracted. Before the hour was over, he pushed back his chair and said
resolutely, "I am not in the mood, Miss Kronborg. I have something on my
mind, and I must talk to you. When do you intend to go home?"

Thea turned to him in surprise. "The first of June, about. Mr. Larsen
will not need me after that, and I have not much money ahead. I shall
work hard this summer, though."

"And to-day is the first of May; May-day." Harsanyi leaned forward, his
elbows on his knees, his hands locked between them. "Yes, I must talk to
you about something. I have asked Madison Bowers to let me bring you to
him on Thursday, at your usual lesson-time. He is the best vocal teacher
in Chicago, and it is time you began to work seriously with your voice."

Thea's brow wrinkled. "You mean take lessons of Bowers?"

Harsanyi nodded, without lifting his head.

"But I can't, Mr. Harsanyi. I haven't got the time, and, besides--" she
blushed and drew her shoulders up stiffly--"besides, I can't afford to
pay two teachers." Thea felt that she had blurted this out in the worst
possible way, and she turned back to the keyboard to hide her chagrin.

"I know that. I don't mean that you shall pay two teachers. After you go
to Bowers you will not need me. I need scarcely tell you that I shan't
be happy at losing you."

Thea turned to him, hurt and angry. "But I don't want to go to Bowers. I
don't want to leave you. What's the matter? Don't I work hard enough?
I'm sure you teach people that don't try half as hard."

Harsanyi rose to his feet. "Don't misunderstand me, Miss Kronborg. You
interest me more than any pupil I have. I have been thinking for months
about what you ought to do, since that night when you first sang for
me." He walked over to the window, turned, and came toward her again. "I
believe that your voice is worth all that you can put into it. I have
not come to this decision rashly. I have studied you, and I have become
more and more convinced, against my own desires. I cannot make a singer
of you, so it was my business to find a man who could. I have even
consulted Theodore Thomas about it."

"But suppose I don't want to be a singer? I want to study with you.
What's the matter? Do you really think I've no talent? Can't I be a
pianist?"

Harsanyi paced up and down the long rug in front of her. "My girl, you
are very talented. You could be a pianist, a good one. But the early
training of a pianist, such a pianist as you would want to be, must be
something tremendous. He must have had no other life than music. At your
age he must be the master of his instrument. Nothing can ever take the
place of that first training. You know very well that your technique is
good, but it is not remarkable. It will never overtake your
intelligence. You have a fine power of work, but you are not by nature a
student. You are not by nature, I think, a pianist. You would never find
yourself. In the effort to do so, I'm afraid your playing would become
warped, eccentric." He threw back his head and looked at his pupil
intently with that one eye which sometimes seemed to see deeper than any
two eyes, as if its singleness gave it privileges. "Oh, I have watched
you very carefully, Miss Kronborg. Because you had had so little and had
yet done so much for yourself, I had a great wish to help you. I believe
that the strongest need of your nature is to find yourself, to emerge AS
yourself. Until I heard you sing I wondered how you were to do this, but
it has grown clearer to me every day."

Thea looked away toward the window with hard, narrow eyes. "You mean I
can be a singer because I haven't brains enough to be a pianist."

"You have brains enough and talent enough. But to do what you will want
to do, it takes more than these--it takes vocation. Now, I think you
have vocation, but for the voice, not for the piano. If you knew,"--he
stopped and sighed,--"if you knew how fortunate I sometimes think you.
With the voice the way is so much shorter, the rewards are more easily
won. In your voice I think Nature herself did for you what it would take
you many years to do at the piano. Perhaps you were not born in the
wrong place after all. Let us talk frankly now. We have never done so
before, and I have respected your reticence. What you want more than
anything else in the world is to be an artist; is that true?"

She turned her face away from him and looked down at the keyboard. Her
answer came in a thickened voice. "Yes, I suppose so."

"When did you first feel that you wanted to be an artist?"

"I don't know. There was always--something."

"Did you never think that you were going to sing?"

"Yes."

"How long ago was that?"

"Always, until I came to you. It was you who made me want to play
piano." Her voice trembled. "Before, I tried to think I did, but I was
pretending."

Harsanyi reached out and caught the hand that was hanging at her side.
He pressed it as if to give her something. "Can't you see, my dear girl,
that was only because I happened to be the first artist you have ever
known? If I had been a trombone player, it would have been the same; you
would have wanted to play trombone. But all the while you have been
working with such good-will, something has been struggling against me.
See, here we were, you and I and this instrument,"--he tapped the
piano,--"three good friends, working so hard. But all the while there
was something fighting us: your gift, and the woman you were meant to
be. When you find your way to that gift and to that woman, you will be
at peace. In the beginning it was an artist that you wanted to be; well,
you may be an artist, always."

Thea drew a long breath. Her hands fell in her lap. "So I'm just where I
began. No teacher, nothing done. No money."

Harsanyi turned away. "Feel no apprehension about the money, Miss
Kronborg. Come back in the fall and we shall manage that. I shall even
go to Mr. Thomas if necessary. This year will not be lost. If you but
knew what an advantage this winter's study, all your study of the piano,
will give you over most singers. Perhaps things have come out better for
you than if we had planned them knowingly."

"You mean they have IF I can sing."

Thea spoke with a heavy irony, so heavy, indeed, that it was coarse. It
grated upon Harsanyi because he felt that it was not sincere, an awkward
affectation.

He wheeled toward her. "Miss Kronborg, answer me this. YOU KNOW THAT YOU
CAN SING, do you not? You have always known it. While we worked here
together you sometimes said to yourself, `I have something you know
nothing about; I could surprise you.' Is that also true?"

Thea nodded and hung her head.

"Why were you not frank with me? Did I not deserve it?"

She shuddered. Her bent shoulders trembled. "I don't know," she
muttered. "I didn't mean to be like that. I couldn't. I can't. It's
different."

"You mean it is very personal?" he asked kindly.

She nodded. "Not at church or funerals, or with people like Mr. Larsen.
But with you it was--personal. I'm not like you and Mrs. Harsanyi. I
come of rough people. I'm rough. But I'm independent, too. It was--all I
had. There is no use my talking, Mr. Harsanyi. I can't tell you."

"You needn't tell me. I know. Every artist knows." Harsanyi stood
looking at his pupil's back, bent as if she were pushing something, at
her lowered head. "You can sing for those people because with them you
do not commit yourself. But the reality, one cannot uncover THAT until
one is sure. One can fail one's self, but one must not live to see that
fail; better never reveal it. Let me help you to make yourself sure of
it. That I can do better than Bowers."

Thea lifted her face and threw out her hands.

Harsanyi shook his head and smiled. "Oh, promise nothing! You will have
much to do. There will not be voice only, but French, German, Italian.
You will have work enough. But sometimes you will need to be understood;
what you never show to any one will need companionship. And then you
must come to me." He peered into her face with that searching, intimate
glance. "You know what I mean, the thing in you that has no business
with what is little, that will have to do only with beauty and power."

Thea threw out her hands fiercely, as if to push him away. She made a
sound in her throat, but it was not articulate. Harsanyi took one of her
hands and kissed it lightly upon the back. His salute was one of
greeting, not of farewell, and it was for some one he had never seen.

When Mrs. Harsanyi came in at six o'clock, she found her husband sitting
listlessly by the window. "Tired?" she asked.

"A little. I've just got through a difficulty. I've sent Miss Kronborg
away; turned her over to Bowers, for voice."

"Sent Miss Kronborg away? Andor, what is the matter with you?"

"It's nothing rash. I've known for a long while I ought to do it. She is
made for a singer, not a pianist."

Mrs. Harsanyi sat down on the piano chair. She spoke a little bitterly:
"How can you be sure of that? She was, at least, the best you had. I
thought you meant to have her play at your students' recital next fall.
I am sure she would have made an impression. I could have dressed her so
that she would have been very striking. She had so much individuality."

Harsanyi bent forward, looking at the floor. "Yes, I know. I shall miss
her, of course."

Mrs. Harsanyi looked at her husband's fine head against the gray window.
She had never felt deeper tenderness for him than she did at that
moment. Her heart ached for him. "You will never get on, Andor," she
said mournfully.

Harsanyi sat motionless. "No, I shall never get on," he repeated
quietly. Suddenly he sprang up with that light movement she knew so
well, and stood in the window, with folded arms. "But some day I shall
be able to look her in the face and laugh because I did what I could for
her. I believe in her. She will do nothing common. She is uncommon, in a
common, common world. That is what I get out of it. It means more to me
than if she played at my concert and brought me a dozen pupils. All this
drudgery will kill me if once in a while I cannot hope something, for
somebody! If I cannot sometimes see a bird fly and wave my hand to it."

His tone was angry and injured. Mrs. Harsanyi understood that this was
one of the times when his wife was a part of the drudgery, of the
"common, common world."

He had let something he cared for go, and he felt bitterly about
whatever was left. The mood would pass, and he would be sorry. She knew
him. It wounded her, of course, but that hurt was not new. It was as old
as her love for him. She went out and left him alone.



VIII


ONE warm damp June night the Denver Express was speeding westward across
the earthy-smelling plains of Iowa. The lights in the day-coach were
turned low and the ventilators were open, admitting showers of soot and
dust upon the occupants of the narrow green plush chairs which were
tilted at various angles of discomfort. In each of these chairs some
uncomfortable human being lay drawn up, or stretched out, or writhing
from one position to another. There were tired men in rumpled shirts,
their necks bare and their suspenders down; old women with their heads
tied up in black handkerchiefs; bedraggled young women who went to sleep
while they were nursing their babies and forgot to button up their
dresses; dirty boys who added to the general discomfort by taking off
their boots. The brakeman, when he came through at midnight, sniffed the
heavy air disdainfully and looked up at the ventilators. As he glanced
down the double rows of contorted figures, he saw one pair of eyes that
were wide open and bright, a yellow head that was not overcome by the
stupefying heat and smell in the car. "There's a girl for you," he
thought as he stopped by Thea's chair.

"Like to have the window up a little?" he asked.

Thea smiled up at him, not misunderstanding his friendliness. "The girl
behind me is sick; she can't stand a draft. What time is it, please?"

He took out his open-faced watch and held it before her eyes with a
knowing look. "In a hurry?" he asked. "I'll leave the end door open and
air you out. Catch a wink; the time'll go faster."

Thea nodded good-night to him and settled her head back on her pillow,
looking up at the oil lamps. She was going back to Moonstone for her
summer vacation, and she was sitting up all night in a day-coach because
that seemed such an easy way to save money. At her age discomfort was a
small matter, when one made five dollars a day by it. She had
confidently expected to sleep after the car got quiet, but in the two
chairs behind her were a sick girl and her mother, and the girl had been
coughing steadily since ten o'clock. They had come from somewhere in
Pennsylvania, and this was their second night on the road. The mother
said they were going to Colorado "for her daughter's lungs." The
daughter was a little older than Thea, perhaps nineteen, with patient
dark eyes and curly brown hair. She was pretty in spite of being so
sooty and travel-stained. She had put on an ugly figured satine kimono
over her loosened clothes. Thea, when she boarded the train in Chicago,
happened to stop and plant her heavy telescope on this seat. She had not
intended to remain there, but the sick girl had looked up at her with an
eager smile and said, "Do sit there, miss. I'd so much rather not have a
gentleman in front of me."

After the girl began to cough there were no empty seats left, and if
there had been Thea could scarcely have changed without hurting her
feelings. The mother turned on her side and went to sleep; she was used
to the cough. But the girl lay wide awake, her eyes fixed on the roof of
the car, as Thea's were. The two girls must have seen very different
things there.

Thea fell to going over her winter in Chicago. It was only under unusual
or uncomfortable conditions like these that she could keep her mind
fixed upon herself or her own affairs for any length of time. The rapid
motion and the vibration of the wheels under her seemed to give her
thoughts rapidity and clearness. She had taken twenty very expensive
lessons from Madison Bowers, but she did not yet know what he thought of
her or of her ability. He was different from any man with whom she had
ever had to do. With her other teachers she had felt a personal
relation; but with him she did not. Bowers was a cold, bitter,
avaricious man, but he knew a great deal about voices. He worked with a
voice as if he were in a laboratory, conducting a series of experiments.
He was conscientious and industrious, even capable of a certain cold
fury when he was working with an interesting voice, but Harsanyi
declared that he had the soul of a shrimp, and could no more make an
artist than a throat specialist could. Thea realized that he had taught
her a great deal in twenty lessons.

Although she cared so much less for Bowers than for Harsanyi, Thea was,
on the whole, happier since she had been studying with him than she had
been before. She had always told herself that she studied piano to fit
herself to be a music teacher. But she never asked herself why she was
studying voice. Her voice, more than any other part of her, had to do
with that confidence, that sense of wholeness and inner well-being that
she had felt at moments ever since she could remember.

Of this feeling Thea had never spoken to any human being until that day
when she told Harsanyi that "there had always been--something." Hitherto
she had felt but one obligation toward it--secrecy; to protect it even
from herself. She had always believed that by doing all that was
required of her by her family, her teachers, her pupils, she kept that
part of herself from being caught up in the meshes of common things. She
took it for granted that some day, when she was older, she would know a
great deal more about it. It was as if she had an appointment to meet
the rest of herself sometime, somewhere. It was moving to meet her and
she was moving to meet it. That meeting awaited her, just as surely as,
for the poor girl in the seat behind her, there awaited a hole in the
earth, already dug.

For Thea, so much had begun with a hole in the earth. Yes, she
reflected, this new part of her life had all begun that morning when she
sat on the clay bank beside Ray Kennedy, under the flickering shade of
the cottonwood tree. She remembered the way Ray had looked at her that
morning. Why had he cared so much? And Wunsch, and Dr. Archie, and
Spanish Johnny, why had they? It was something that had to do with her
that made them care, but it was not she. It was something they believed
in, but it was not she. Perhaps each of them concealed another person in
himself, just as she did. Why was it that they seemed to feel and to
hunt for a second person in her and not in each other? Thea frowned up
at the dull lamp in the roof of the car. What if one's second self could
somehow speak to all these second selves? What if one could bring them
out, as whiskey did Spanish Johnny's? How deep they lay, these second
persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them
fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden
things in people responded. Her mother--even her mother had something of
that sort which replied to music.

Thea found herself listening for the coughing behind her and not hearing
it. She turned cautiously and looked back over the head-rest of her
chair. The poor girl had fallen asleep. Thea looked at her intently. Why
was she so afraid of men? Why did she shrink into herself and avert her
face whenever a man passed her chair? Thea thought she knew; of course,
she knew. How horrible to waste away like that, in the time when one
ought to be growing fuller and stronger and rounder every day. Suppose
there were such a dark hole open for her, between to-night and that
place where she was to meet herself? Her eyes narrowed. She put her hand
on her breast and felt how warm it was; and within it there was a full,
powerful pulsation. She smiled--though she was ashamed of it--with the
natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical
security which makes the savage merciless. Nobody could die while they
felt like that inside. The springs there were wound so tight that it
would be a long while before there was any slack in them. The life in
there was rooted deep. She was going to have a few things before she
died. She realized that there were a great many trains dashing east and
west on the face of the continent that night, and that they all carried
young people who meant to have things. But the difference was that SHE
WAS GOING TO GET THEM! That was all. Let people try to stop her! She
glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that lay sprawled in the chairs.
Let them try it once! Along with the yearning that came from some deep
part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of
cockiness, a determination to get ahead. Well, there are passages in
life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground
after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and beaten under.

Having told herself once more that she meant to grab a few things, Thea
went to sleep.

She was wakened in the morning by the sunlight, which beat fiercely
through the glass of the car window upon her face. She made herself as
clean as she could, and while the people all about her were getting cold
food out of their lunch-baskets she escaped into the dining-car. Her
thrift did not go to the point of enabling her to carry a lunchbasket.
At that early hour there were few people in the dining-car. The linen
was white and fresh, the darkies were trim and smiling, and the sunlight
gleamed pleasantly upon the silver and the glass water-bottles. On each
table there was a slender vase with a single pink rose in it. When Thea
sat down she looked into her rose and thought it the most beautiful
thing in the world; it was wide open, recklessly offering its yellow
heart, and there were drops of water on the petals. All the future was
in that rose, all that one would like to be. The flower put her in an
absolutely regal mood. She had a whole pot of coffee, and scrambled eggs
with chopped ham, utterly disregarding the astonishing price they cost.
She had faith enough in what she could do, she told herself, to have
eggs if she wanted them. At the table opposite her sat a man and his
wife and little boy--Thea classified them as being "from the East."
They spoke in that quick, sure staccato, which Thea, like Ray Kennedy,
pretended to scorn and secretly admired. People who could use words in
that confident way, and who spoke them elegantly, had a great advantage
in life, she reflected. There were so many words which she could not
pronounce in speech as she had to do in singing. Language was like
clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away. But the
most important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was
not.

When she paid her check she consulted the waiter. "Waiter, do you
suppose I could buy one of those roses? I'm out of the day-coach, and
there is a sick girl in there. I'd like to take her a cup of coffee and
one of those flowers."

The waiter liked nothing better than advising travelers less
sophisticated than himself. He told Thea there were a few roses left in
the icebox and he would get one. He took the flower and the coffee into
the day-coach. Thea pointed out the girl, but she did not accompany him.
She hated thanks and never received them gracefully. She stood outside
on the platform to get some fresh air into her lungs. The train was
crossing the Platte River now, and the sunlight was so intense that it
seemed to quiver in little flames on the glittering sandbars, the scrub
willows, and the curling, fretted shallows.

Thea felt that she was coming back to her own land. She had often heard
Mrs. Kronborg say that she "believed in immigration," and so did Thea
believe in it. This earth seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a
place where refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance.
The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and
generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a
wider range. Wire fences might mark the end of a man's pasture, but they
could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over
flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks
sang--and one's heart sang there, too. Thea was glad that this was her
country, even if one did not learn to speak elegantly there. It was,
somehow, an honest country, and there was a new song in that blue air
which had never been sung in the world before. It was hard to tell about
it, for it had nothing to do with words; it was like the light of the
desert at noon, or the smell of the sagebrush after rain; intangible but
powerful. She had the sense of going back to a friendly soil, whose
friendship was somehow going to strengthen her; a naive, generous
country that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike
power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant flowers.

As she drew in that glorious air Thea's mind went back to Ray Kennedy.
He, too, had that feeling of empire; as if all the Southwest really
belonged to him because he had knocked about over it so much, and knew
it, as he said, "like the blisters on his own hands." That feeling, she
reflected, was the real element of companionship between her and Ray.
Now that she was going back to Colorado, she realized this as she had
not done before.



IX

THEA reached Moonstone in the late afternoon, and all the Kronborgs were
there to meet her except her two older brothers. Gus and Charley were
young men now, and they had declared at noon that it would "look silly
if the whole bunch went down to the train." "There's no use making a
fuss over Thea just because she's been to Chicago," Charley warned his
mother. "She's inclined to think pretty well of herself, anyhow, and if
you go treating her like company, there'll be no living in the house
with her." Mrs. Kronborg simply leveled her eyes at Charley, and he
faded away, muttering. She had, as Mr. Kronborg always said with an
inclination of his head, good control over her children. Anna, too,
wished to absent herself from the party, but in the end her curiosity
got the better of her. So when Thea stepped down from the porter's
stool, a very creditable Kronborg representation was grouped on the
platform to greet her. After they had all kissed her (Gunner and Axel
shyly), Mr. Kronborg hurried his flock into the hotel omnibus, in which
they were to be driven ceremoniously home, with the neighbors looking
out of their windows to see them go by.

All the family talked to her at once, except Thor,--impressive in new
trousers,--who was gravely silent and who refused to sit on Thea's lap.
One of the first things Anna told her was that Maggie Evans, the girl
who used to cough in prayer meeting, died yesterday, and had made a
request that Thea sing at her funeral.

Thea's smile froze. "I'm not going to sing at all this summer, except my
exercises. Bowers says I taxed my voice last winter, singing at funerals
so much. If I begin the first day after I get home, there'll be no end
to it. You can tell them I caught cold on the train, or something."

Thea saw Anna glance at their mother. Thea remembered having seen that
look on Anna's face often before, but she had never thought anything
about it because she was used to it. Now she realized that the look was
distinctly spiteful, even vindictive. She suddenly realized that Anna
had always disliked her.

Mrs. Kronborg seemed to notice nothing, and changed the trend of the
conversation, telling Thea that Dr. Archie and Mr. Upping, the jeweler,
were both coming in to see her that evening, and that she had asked
Spanish Johnny to come, because he had behaved well all winter and ought
to be encouraged.

The next morning Thea wakened early in her own room up under the eaves
and lay watching the sunlight shine on the roses of her wall-paper. She
wondered whether she would ever like a plastered room as well as this
one lined with scantlings. It was snug and tight, like the cabin of a
little boat. Her bed faced the window and stood against the wall, under
the slant of the ceiling. When she went away she could just touch the
ceiling with the tips of her fingers; now she could touch it with the
palm of her hand. It was so little that it was like a sunny cave, with
roses running all over the roof. Through the low window, as she lay
there, she could watch people going by on the farther side of the
street; men, going downtown to open their stores. Thor was over there,
rattling his express wagon along the sidewalk. Tillie had put a bunch of
French pinks in a tumbler of water on her dresser, and they gave out a
pleasant perfume. The blue jays were fighting and screeching in the
cottonwood tree outside her window, as they always did, and she could
hear the old Baptist deacon across the street calling his chickens, as
she had heard him do every summer morning since she could remember. It
was pleasant to waken up in that bed, in that room, and to feel the
brightness of the morning, while light quivered about the low, papered
ceiling in golden spots, refracted by the broken mirror and the glass of
water that held the pinks. "IM LEUCHTENDEN SOMMERMORGEN"; those lines,
and the face of her old teacher, came back to Thea, floated to her out
of sleep, perhaps. She had been dreaming something pleasant, but she
could not remember what. She would go to call upon Mrs. Kohler to-day,
and see the pigeons washing their pink feet in the drip under the water
tank, and flying about their house that was sure to have a fresh coat of
white paint on it for summer. On the way home she would stop to see Mrs.
Tellamantez. On Sunday she would coax Gunner to take her out to the sand
hills. She had missed them in Chicago; had been homesick for their
brilliant morning gold and for their soft colors at evening. The Lake,
somehow, had never taken their place.

While she lay planning, relaxed in warm drowsiness, she heard a knock at
her door. She supposed it was Tillie, who sometimes fluttered in on her
before she was out of bed to offer some service which the family would
have ridiculed. But instead, Mrs. Kronborg herself came in, carrying a
tray with Thea's breakfast set out on one of the best white napkins.
Thea sat up with some embarrassment and pulled her nightgown together
across her chest. Mrs. Kronborg was always busy downstairs in the
morning, and Thea could not remember when her mother had come to her
room before.

"I thought you'd be tired, after traveling, and might like to take it
easy for once." Mrs. Kronborg put the tray on the edge of the bed. "I
took some thick cream for you before the boys got at it. They raised a
howl." She chuckled and sat down in the big wooden rocking chair. Her
visit made Thea feel grown-up, and, somehow, important.

Mrs. Kronborg asked her about Bowers and the Harsanyis. She felt a great
change in Thea, in her face and in her manner. Mr. Kronborg had noticed
it, too, and had spoken of it to his wife with great satisfaction while
they were undressing last night. Mrs. Kronborg sat looking at her
daughter, who lay on her side, supporting herself on her elbow and
lazily drinking her coffee from the tray before her. Her short-sleeved
nightgown had come open at the throat again, and Mrs. Kronborg noticed
how white her arms and shoulders were, as if they had been dipped in new
milk. Her chest was fuller than when she went away, her breasts rounder
and firmer, and though she was so white where she was uncovered, they
looked rosy through the thin muslin. Her body had the elasticity that
comes of being highly charged with the desire to live. Her hair, hanging
in two loose braids, one by either cheek, was just enough disordered to
catch the light in all its curly ends.

Thea always woke with a pink flush on her cheeks, and this morning her
mother thought she had never seen her eyes so wide-open and bright; like
clear green springs in the wood, when the early sunlight sparkles in
them. She would make a very handsome woman, Mrs. Kronborg said to
herself, if she would only get rid of that fierce look she had
sometimes. Mrs. Kronborg took great pleasure in good looks, wherever she
found them. She still remembered that, as a baby, Thea had been the
"best-formed" of any of her children.

"I'll have to get you a longer bed," she remarked, as she put the tray
on the table. "You're getting too long for that one."

Thea looked up at her mother and laughed, dropping back on her pillow
with a magnificent stretch of her whole body. Mrs. Kronborg sat down
again.

"I don't like to press you, Thea, but I think you'd better sing at that
funeral to-morrow. I'm afraid you'll always be sorry if you don't.
Sometimes a little thing like that, that seems nothing at the time,
comes back on one afterward and troubles one a good deal. I don't mean
the church shall run you to death this summer, like they used to. I've
spoken my mind to your father about that, and he's very reasonable. But
Maggie talked a good deal about you to people this winter; always asked
what word we'd had, and said how she missed your singing and all. I
guess you ought to do that much for her."

"All right, mother, if you think so." Thea lay looking at her mother
with intensely bright eyes.

"That's right, daughter." Mrs. Kronborg rose and went over to get the
tray, stopping to put her hand on Thea's chest. "You're filling out
nice," she said, feeling about. "No, I wouldn't bother about the
buttons. Leave 'em stay off. This is a good time to harden your chest."

Thea lay still and heard her mother's firm step receding along the bare
floor of the trunk loft. There was no sham about her mother, she
reflected. Her mother knew a great many things of which she never
talked, and all the church people were forever chattering about things
of which they knew nothing. She liked her mother.

Now for Mexican Town and the Kohlers! She meant to run in on the old
woman without warning, and hug her.



X


SPANISH JOHNNY had no shop of his own, but he kept a table and an
order-book in one corner of the drug store where paints and wall-paper
were sold, and he was sometimes to be found there for an hour or so
about noon. Thea had gone into the drug store to have a friendly chat
with the proprietor, who used to lend her books from his shelves. She
found Johnny there, trimming rolls of wall-paper for the parlor of
Banker Smith's new house. She sat down on the top of his table and
watched him.

"Johnny," she said suddenly, "I want you to write down the words of that
Mexican serenade you used to sing; you know, `ROSA DE NOCHE.' It's an
unusual song. I'm going to study it. I know enough Spanish for that."

Johnny looked up from his roller with his bright, affable smile. "SI,
but it is low for you, I think; VOZ CONTRALTO. It is low for me."

"Nonsense. I can do more with my low voice than I used to. I'll show
you. Sit down and write it out for me, please." Thea beckoned him with
the short yellow pencil tied to his order-book.

Johnny ran his fingers through his curly black hair. "If you wish. I do
not know if that SERENATA all right for young ladies. Down there it is
more for married ladies. They sing it for husbands--or somebody else,
may-bee." Johnny's eyes twinkled and he apologized gracefully with his
shoulders. He sat down at the table, and while Thea looked over his arm,
began to write the song down in a long, slanting script, with highly
ornamental capitals. Presently he looked up. "This-a song not exactly
Mexican," he said thoughtfully. "It come from farther down; Brazil,
Venezuela, may-bee. I learn it from some fellow down there, and he learn
it from another fellow. It is-a most like Mexican, but not quite." Thea
did not release him, but pointed to the paper. There were three verses
of the song in all, and when Johnny had written them down, he sat
looking at them meditatively, his head on one side. "I don' think for a
high voice, SENORITA," he objected with polite persistence. "How you
accompany with piano?"

"Oh, that will be easy enough."

"For you, may-bee!" Johnny smiled and drummed on the table with the tips
of his agile brown fingers. "You know something? Listen, I tell you." He
rose and sat down on the table beside her, putting his foot on the
chair. He loved to talk at the hour of noon. "When you was a little
girl, no bigger than that, you come to my house one day 'bout noon, like
this, and I was in the door, playing guitar. You was barehead, barefoot;
you run away from home. You stand there and make a frown at me an'
listen. By 'n by you say for me to sing. I sing some lil' ting, and then
I say for you to sing with me. You don' know no words, of course, but
you take the air and you sing it justa beauti-ful! I never see a child
do that, outside Mexico. You was, oh, I do' know--seven year, may-bee.
By 'n by the preacher come look for you and begin for scold. I say,
`Don' scold, Meester Kronborg. She come for hear guitar. She gotta some
music in her, that child. Where she get?' Then he tell me 'bout your
gran'papa play oboe in the old country. I never forgetta that time."
Johnny chuckled softly.

Thea nodded. "I remember that day, too. I liked your music better than
the church music. When are you going to have a dance over there,
Johnny?"

Johnny tilted his head. "Well, Saturday night the Spanish boys have a
lil' party, some DANZA. You know Miguel Ramas? He have some young
cousins, two boys, very nice-a, come from Torreon. They going to Salt
Lake for some job-a, and stay off with him two-three days, and he mus'
have a party. You like to come?"

That was how Thea came to go to the Mexican ball. Mexican Town had been
increased by half a dozen new families during the last few years, and
the Mexicans had put up an adobe dance-hall, that looked exactly like
one of their own dwellings, except that it was a little longer, and was
so unpretentious that nobody in Moonstone knew of its existence. The
"Spanish boys" are reticent about their own affairs. Ray Kennedy used to
know about all their little doings, but since his death there was no one
whom the Mexicans considered SIMPATICO.

On Saturday evening after supper Thea told her mother that she was going
over to Mrs. Tellamantez's to watch the Mexicans dance for a while, and
that Johnny would bring her home.

Mrs. Kronborg smiled. She noticed that Thea had put on a white dress and
had done her hair up with unusual care, and that she carried her best
blue scarf. "Maybe you'll take a turn yourself, eh? I wouldn't mind
watching them Mexicans. They're lovely dancers."

Thea made a feeble suggestion that her mother might go with her, but
Mrs. Kronborg was too wise for that. She knew that Thea would have a
better time if she went alone, and she watched her daughter go out of
the gate and down the sidewalk that led to the depot.

Thea walked slowly. It was a soft, rosy evening. The sand hills were
lavender. The sun had gone down a glowing copper disk, and the fleecy
clouds in the east were a burning rose-color, flecked with gold. Thea
passed the cottonwood grove and then the depot, where she left the
sidewalk and took the sandy path toward Mexican Town. She could hear the
scraping of violins being tuned, the tinkle of mandolins, and the growl
of a double bass. Where had they got a double bass? She did not know
there was one in Moonstone. She found later that it was the property
of one of Ramas's young cousins, who was taking it to Utah with him
to cheer him at his "job-a."

The Mexicans never wait until it is dark to begin to dance, and Thea had
no difficulty in finding the new hall, because every other house in the
town was deserted. Even the babies had gone to the ball; a neighbor was
always willing to hold the baby while the mother danced. Mrs.
Tellamantez came out to meet Thea and led her in. Johnny bowed to her
from the platform at the end of the room, where he was playing the
mandolin along with two fiddles and the bass. The hall was a long low
room, with whitewashed walls, a fairly tight plank floor, wooden benches
along the sides, and a few bracket lamps screwed to the frame timbers.
There must have been fifty people there, counting the children. The
Mexican dances were very much family affairs. The fathers always danced
again and again with their little daughters, as well as with their
wives. One of the girls came up to greet Thea, her dark cheeks glowing
with pleasure and cordiality, and introduced her brother, with whom she
had just been dancing. "You better take him every time he asks you," she
whispered. "He's the best dancer here, except Johnny."

Thea soon decided that the poorest dancer was herself. Even Mrs.
Tellamantez, who always held her shoulders so stiffly, danced better
than she did. The musicians did not remain long at their post. When one
of them felt like dancing, he called some other boy to take his
instrument, put on his coat, and went down on the floor. Johnny, who
wore a blousy white silk shirt, did not even put on his coat.

The dances the railroad men gave in Firemen's Hall were the only dances
Thea had ever been allowed to go to, and they were very different from
this. The boys played rough jokes and thought it smart to be clumsy and
to run into each other on the floor. For the square dances there was
always the bawling voice of the caller, who was also the county
auctioneer.

This Mexican dance was soft and quiet. There was no calling, the
conversation was very low, the rhythm of the music was smooth and
engaging, the men were graceful and courteous. Some of them Thea had
never before seen out of their working clothes, smeared with grease from
the round-house or clay from the brickyard. Sometimes, when the music
happened to be a popular Mexican waltz song, the dancers sang it softly
as they moved. There were three little girls under twelve, in their
first communion dresses, and one of them had an orange marigold in her
black hair, just over her ear. They danced with the men and with each
other. There was an atmosphere of ease and friendly pleasure in the low,
dimly lit room, and Thea could not help wondering whether the Mexicans
had no jealousies or neighborly grudges as the people in Moonstone had.
There was no constraint of any kind there to-night, but a kind of
natural harmony about their movements, their greetings, their low
conversation, their smiles.

Ramas brought up his two young cousins, Silvo and Felipe, and presented
them. They were handsome, smiling youths, of eighteen and twenty, with
pale-gold skins, smooth cheeks, aquiline features, and wavy black hair,
like Johnny's. They were dressed alike, in black velvet jackets and soft
silk shirts, with opal shirt-buttons and flowing black ties looped
through gold rings. They had charming manners, and low, guitar-like
voices. They knew almost no English, but a Mexican boy can pay a great
many compliments with a very limited vocabulary. The Ramas boys thought
Thea dazzlingly beautiful. They had never seen a Scandinavian girl
before, and her hair and fair skin bewitched them. "BLANCO Y ORO,
SEMEJANTE LA PASCUA!" (White and gold, like Easter!) they exclaimed to
each other. Silvo, the younger, declared that he could never go on to
Utah; that he and his double bass had reached their ultimate
destination. The elder was more crafty; he asked Miguel Ramas whether
there would be "plenty more girls like that _A_ Salt Lake, maybee?"

Silvo, overhearing, gave his brother a contemptuous glance. "Plenty more
A PARAISO may-bee!" he retorted. When they were not dancing with her,
their eyes followed her, over the coiffures of their other partners.
That was not difficult; one blonde head moving among so many dark ones.

Thea had not meant to dance much, but the Ramas boys danced so well and
were so handsome and adoring that she yielded to their entreaties. When
she sat out a dance with them, they talked to her about their family at
home, and told her how their mother had once punned upon their name.
RAMA, in Spanish, meant a branch, they explained. Once when they were
little lads their mother took them along when she went to help the women
decorate the church for Easter. Some one asked her whether she had
brought any flowers, and she replied that she had brought her "ramas."
This was evidently a cherished family story.

When it was nearly midnight, Johnny announced that every one was going
to his house to have "some lil' icecream and some lil' MUSICA." He began
to put out the lights and Mrs. Tellamantez led the way across the square
to her CASA. The Ramas brothers escorted Thea, and as they stepped out
of the door, Silvo exclaimed, "HACE FRIO!" and threw his velvet coat
about her shoulders.

Most of the company followed Mrs. Tellamantez, and they sat about on the
gravel in her little yard while she and Johnny and Mrs. Miguel Ramas
served the ice-cream. Thea sat on Felipe's coat, since Silvo's was
already about her shoulders. The youths lay down on the shining gravel
beside her, one on her right and one on her left. Johnny already called
them "LOS ACOLITOS," the altar-boys. The talk all about them was low,
and indolent. One of the girls was playing on Johnny's guitar, another
was picking lightly at a mandolin. The moonlight was so bright that one
could see every glance and smile, and the flash of their teeth. The
moonflowers over Mrs. Tellamantez's door were wide open and of an
unearthly white. The moon itself looked like a great pale flower in the
sky.

After all the ice-cream was gone, Johnny approached Thea, his guitar
under his arm, and the elder Ramas boy politely gave up his place.
Johnny sat down, took a long breath, struck a fierce chord, and then
hushed it with his other hand. "Now we have some lil' SERENATA, eh? You
wan' a try?"

When Thea began to sing, instant silence fell upon the company. She felt
all those dark eyes fix themselves upon her intently. She could see them
shine. The faces came out of the shadow like the white flowers over the
door. Felipe leaned his head upon his hand. Silvo dropped on his back
and lay looking at the moon, under the impression that he was still
looking at Thea. When she finished the first verse, Thea whispered to
Johnny, "Again, I can do it better than that."

She had sung for churches and funerals and teachers, but she had never
before sung for a really musical people, and this was the first time she
had ever felt the response that such a people can give. They turned
themselves and all they had over to her. For the moment they cared about
nothing in the world but what she was doing. Their faces confronted her,
open, eager, unprotected. She felt as if all these warm-blooded people
debouched into her. Mrs. Tellamantez's fateful resignation, Johnny's
madness, the adoration of the boy who lay still in the sand; in an
instant these things seemed to be within her instead of without, as if
they had come from her in the first place.

When she finished, her listeners broke into excited murmur. The men
began hunting feverishly for cigarettes. Famos Serranos the barytone
bricklayer, touched Johnny's arm, gave him a questioning look, then
heaved a deep sigh. Johnny dropped on his elbow, wiping his face and
neck and hands with his handkerchief. "SENORITA," he panted, "if you
sing like that once in the City of Mexico, they just-a go crazy. In the
City of Mexico they ain't-a sit like stumps when they hear that, not-a
much! When they like, they just-a give you the town."

Thea laughed. She, too, was excited. "Think so, Johnny? Come, sing
something with me. EL PARRENO; I haven't sung that for a long time."

Johnny laughed and hugged his guitar. "You not-a forget him?" He began
teasing his strings. "Come!" He threw back his head, "ANOCHE-E-E--"


"ANOCHE ME CONFESSE CON UN PADRE CARMELITE, Y ME DIO PENITENCIA QUE
BESARAS TU BOQUITA."

(Last night I made confession With a Carmelite father, And he gave me
absolution For the kisses you imprinted.)


Johnny had almost every fault that a tenor can have. His voice was thin,
unsteady, husky in the middle tones. But it was distinctly a voice, and
sometimes he managed to get something very sweet out of it. Certainly it
made him happy to sing. Thea kept glancing down at him as he lay there
on his elbow. His eyes seemed twice as large as usual and had lights in
them like those the moonlight makes on black, running water. Thea
remembered the old stories about his "spells." She had never seen him
when his madness was on him, but she felt something tonight at her elbow
that gave her an idea of what it might be like. For the first time she
fully understood the cryptic explanation that Mrs. Tellamantez had made
to Dr. Archie, long ago. There were the same shells along the walk; she
believed she could pick out the very one. There was the same moon up
yonder, and panting at her elbow was the same Johnny--fooled by the same
old things!

When they had finished, Famos, the barytone, murmured something to
Johnny; who replied, "Sure we can sing `Trovatore.' We have no alto, but
all the girls can sing alto and make some noise."

The women laughed. Mexican women of the poorer class do not sing like
the men. Perhaps they are too indolent. In the evening, when the men are
singing their throats dry on the doorstep, or around the camp-fire
beside the work-train, the women usually sit and comb their hair.

While Johnny was gesticulating and telling everybody what to sing and
how to sing it, Thea put out her foot and touched the corpse of Silvo
with the toe of her slipper. "Aren't you going to sing, Silvo?" she
asked teasingly.

The boy turned on his side and raised himself on his elbow for a moment.
"Not this night, SENORITA," he pleaded softly, "not this night!" He
dropped back again, and lay with his cheek on his right arm, the hand
lying passive on the sand above his head.

"How does he flatten himself into the ground like that?" Thea asked
herself. "I wish I knew. It's very effective, somehow."

Across the gulch the Kohlers' little house slept among its trees, a dark
spot on the white face of the desert. The windows of their upstairs
bedroom were open, and Paulina had listened to the dance music for a
long while before she drowsed off. She was a light sleeper, and when she
woke again, after midnight, Johnny's concert was at its height. She lay
still until she could bear it no longer. Then she wakened Fritz and they
went over to the window and leaned out. They could hear clearly there.

"DIE THEA," whispered Mrs. Kohler; "it must be. ACH, WUNDERSCHON!"

Fritz was not so wide awake as his wife. He grunted and scratched on the
floor with his bare foot. They were listening to a Mexican part-song;
the tenor, then the soprano, then both together; the barytone joins
them, rages, is extinguished; the tenor expires in sobs, and the soprano
finishes alone. When the soprano's last note died away, Fritz nodded to
his wife. "JA," he said; "SCHON."

There was silence for a few moments. Then the guitar sounded fiercely,
and several male voices began the sextette from "Lucia." Johnny's reedy
tenor they knew well, and the bricklayer's big, opaque barytone; the
others might be anybody over there--just Mexican voices. Then at the
appointed, at the acute, moment, the soprano voice, like a fountain jet,
shot up into the light. "HORCH! HORCH!" the old people whispered, both
at once. How it leaped from among those dusky male voices! How it played
in and about and around and over them, like a goldfish darting among
creek minnows, like a yellow butterfly soaring above a swarm of dark
ones. "Ah," said Mrs. Kohler softly, "the dear man; if he could hear her
now!"



XI


MRS. KRONBORG had said that Thea was not to be disturbed on Sunday
morning, and she slept until noon. When she came downstairs the family
were just sitting down to dinner, Mr. Kronborg at one end of the long
table, Mrs. Kronborg at the other. Anna, stiff and ceremonious, in her
summer silk, sat at her father's right, and the boys were strung along
on either side of the table. There was a place left for Thea between her
mother and Thor. During the silence which preceded the blessing, Thea
felt something uncomfortable in the air. Anna and her older brothers had
lowered their eyes when she came in. Mrs. Kronborg nodded cheerfully,
and after the blessing, as she began to pour the coffee, turned to her.

"I expect you had a good time at that dance, Thea. I hope you got your
sleep out."

"High society, that," remarked Charley, giving the mashed potatoes a
vicious swat. Anna's mouth and eyebrows became half-moons.

Thea looked across the table at the uncompromising countenances of her
older brothers. "Why, what's the matter with the Mexicans?" she asked,
flushing. "They don't trouble anybody, and they are kind to their
families and have good manners."

"Nice clean people; got some style about them. Do you really like that
kind, Thea, or do you just pretend to? That's what I'd like to know."
Gus looked at her with pained inquiry. But he at least looked at her.

"They're just as clean as white people, and they have a perfect right to
their own ways. Of course I like 'em. I don't pretend things."

"Everybody according to their own taste," remarked Charley bitterly.
"Quit crumbing your bread up, Thor. Ain't you learned how to eat yet?"

"Children, children!" said Mr. Kronborg nervously, looking up from the
chicken he was dismembering. He glanced at his wife, whom he expected to
maintain harmony in the family.

"That's all right, Charley. Drop it there," said Mrs. Kronborg. "No use
spoiling your Sunday dinner with race prejudices. The Mexicans suit me
and Thea very well. They are a useful people. Now you can just talk
about something else."

Conversation, however, did not flourish at that dinner. Everybody ate as
fast as possible. Charley and Gus said they had engagements and left the
table as soon as they finished their apple pie. Anna sat primly and ate
with great elegance. When she spoke at all she spoke to her father,
about church matters, and always in a commiserating tone, as if he had
met with some misfortune. Mr. Kronborg, quite innocent of her
intentions, replied kindly and absent-mindedly. After the dessert he
went to take his usual Sunday afternoon nap, and Mrs. Kronborg carried
some dinner to a sick neighbor. Thea and Anna began to clear the table.

"I should think you would show more consideration for father's position,
Thea," Anna began as soon as she and her sister were alone.

Thea gave her a sidelong glance. "Why, what have I done to father?"

"Everybody at Sunday-School was talking about you going over there and
singing with the Mexicans all night, when you won't sing for the church.
Somebody heard you, and told it all over town. Of course, we all get the
blame for it."

"Anything disgraceful about singing?" Thea asked with a provoking yawn.

"I must say you choose your company! You always had that streak in you,
Thea. We all hoped that going away would improve you. Of course, it
reflects on father when you are scarcely polite to the nice people here
and make up to the rowdies."

"Oh, it's my singing with the Mexicans you object to?" Thea put down a
tray full of dishes. "Well, I like to sing over there, and I don't like
to over here. I'll sing for them any time they ask me to. They know
something about what I'm doing. They're a talented people."

"Talented!" Anna made the word sound like escaping steam. "I suppose you
think it's smart to come home and throw that at your family!"

Thea picked up the tray. By this time she was as white as the Sunday
tablecloth. "Well," she replied in a cold, even tone, "I'll have to
throw it at them sooner or later. It's just a question of when, and it
might as well be now as any time." She carried the tray blindly into the
kitchen.

Tillie, who was always listening and looking out for her, took the
dishes from her with a furtive, frightened glance at her stony face.
Thea went slowly up the back stairs to her loft. Her legs seemed as
heavy as lead as she climbed the stairs, and she felt as if everything
inside her had solidified and grown hard.

After shutting her door and locking it, she sat down on the edge of her
bed. This place had always been her refuge, but there was a hostility in
the house now which this door could not shut out. This would be her last
summer in that room. Its services were over; its time was done. She rose
and put her hand on the low ceiling. Two tears ran down her cheeks, as
if they came from ice that melted slowly. She was not ready to leave her
little shell. She was being pulled out too soon. She would never be able
to think anywhere else as well as here. She would never sleep so well or
have such dreams in any other bed; even last night, such sweet,
breathless dreams--Thea hid her face in the pillow. Wherever she went
she would like to take that little bed with her. When she went away from
it for good, she would leave something that she could never recover;
memories of pleasant excitement, of happy adventures in her mind; of
warm sleep on howling winter nights, and joyous awakenings on summer
mornings. There were certain dreams that might refuse to come to her at
all except in a little morning cave, facing the sun--where they came to
her so powerfully, where they beat a triumph in her!

The room was hot as an oven. The sun was beating fiercely on the
shingles behind the board ceiling. She undressed, and before she threw
herself upon her bed in her chemise, she frowned at herself for a long
while in her looking-glass. Yes, she and It must fight it out together.
The thing that looked at her out of her own eyes was the only friend she
could count on. Oh, she would make these people sorry enough! There
would come a time when they would want to make it up with her. But,
never again! She had no little vanities, only one big one, and she would
never forgive.

Her mother was all right, but her mother was a part of the family, and
she was not. In the nature of things, her mother had to be on both
sides. Thea felt that she had been betrayed. A truce had been broken
behind her back. She had never had much individual affection for any of
her brothers except Thor, but she had never been disloyal, never felt
scorn or held grudges. As a little girl she had always been good friends
with Gunner and Axel, whenever she had time to play. Even before she got
her own room, when they were all sleeping and dressing together, like
little cubs, and breakfasting in the kitchen, she had led an absorbing
personal life of her own. But she had a cub loyalty to the other cubs.
She thought them nice boys and tried to make them get their lessons. She
once fought a bully who "picked on" Axel at school. She never made fun
of Anna's crimpings and curlings and beauty-rites.

Thea had always taken it for granted that her sister and brothers
recognized that she had special abilities, and that they were proud of
it. She had done them the honor, she told herself bitterly, to believe
that though they had no particular endowments, THEY WERE OF HER KIND,
and not of the Moonstone kind. Now they had all grown up and become
persons. They faced each other as individuals, and she saw that Anna and
Gus and Charley were among the people whom she had always recognized as
her natural enemies. Their ambitions and sacred proprieties were
meaningless to her. She had neglected to congratulate Charley upon
having been promoted from the grocery department of Commings's store to
the drygoods department. Her mother had reproved her for this omission.
And how was she to know, Thea asked herself, that Anna expected to be
teased because Bert Rice now came and sat in the hammock with her every
night? No, it was all clear enough. Nothing that she would ever do in
the world would seem important to them, and nothing they would ever do
would seem important to her.

Thea lay thinking intently all through the stifling afternoon. Tillie
whispered something outside her door once, but she did not answer. She
lay on her bed until the second church bell rang, and she saw the family
go trooping up the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, Anna and
her father in the lead. Anna seemed to have taken on a very story-book
attitude toward her father; patronizing and condescending, it seemed to
Thea. The older boys were not in the family band. They now took their
girls to church. Tillie had stayed at home to get supper. Thea got up,
washed her hot face and arms, and put on the white organdie dress she
had worn last night; it was getting too small for her, and she might as
well wear it out. After she was dressed she unlocked her door and went
cautiously downstairs. She felt as if chilling hostilities might be
awaiting her in the trunk loft, on the stairway, almost anywhere. In the
dining-room she found Tillie, sitting by the open window, reading the
dramatic news in a Denver Sunday paper. Tillie kept a scrapbook in which
she pasted clippings about actors and actresses.

"Come look at this picture of Pauline Hall in tights, Thea," she called.
"Ain't she cute? It's too bad you didn't go to the theater more when you
was in Chicago; such a good chance! Didn't you even get to see Clara
Morris or Modjeska?"

"No; I didn't have time. Besides, it costs money, Tillie," Thea replied
wearily, glancing at the paper Tillie held out to her.

Tillie looked up at her niece. "Don't you go and be upset about any of
Anna's notions. She's one of these narrow kind. Your father and mother
don't pay any attention to what she says. Anna's fussy; she is with me,
but I don't mind her."

"Oh, I don't mind her. That's all right, Tillie. I guess I'll take a
walk."

Thea knew that Tillie hoped she would stay and talk to her for a while,
and she would have liked to please her. But in a house as small as that
one, everything was too intimate and mixed up together. The family was
the family, an integral thing. One couldn't discuss Anna there. She felt
differently toward the house and everything in it, as if the battered
old furniture that seemed so kindly, and the old carpets on which she
had played, had been nourishing a secret grudge against her and were not
to be trusted any more.

She went aimlessly out of the front gate, not knowing what to do with
herself. Mexican Town, somehow, was spoiled for her just then, and she
felt that she would hide if she saw Silvo or Felipe coming toward her.
She walked down through the empty main street. All the stores were
closed, their blinds down. On the steps of the bank some idle boys were
sitting, telling disgusting stories because there was nothing else to
do. Several of them had gone to school with Thea, but when she nodded to
them they hung their heads and did not speak. Thea's body was often
curiously expressive of what was going on in her mind, and to-night
there was something in her walk and carriage that made these boys feel
that she was "stuck up." If she had stopped and talked to them, they
would have thawed out on the instant and would have been friendly and
grateful. But Thea was hurt afresh, and walked on, holding her chin
higher than ever. As she passed the Duke Block, she saw a light in Dr.
Archie's office, and she went up the stairs and opened the door into his
study. She found him with a pile of papers and accountbooks before him.
He pointed her to her old chair at the end of his desk and leaned back
in his own, looking at her with satisfaction. How handsome she was
growing!

"I'm still chasing the elusive metal, Thea,"--he pointed to the papers
before him,--"I'm up to my neck in mines, and I'm going to be a rich man
some day."

"I hope you will; awfully rich. That's the only thing that counts." She
looked restlessly about the consultingroom. "To do any of the things one
wants to do, one has to have lots and lots of money."

Dr. Archie was direct. "What's the matter? Do you need some?"

Thea shrugged. "Oh, I can get along, in a little way." She looked
intently out of the window at the arc streetlamp that was just beginning
to sputter. "But it's silly to live at all for little things," she added
quietly. "Living's too much trouble unless one can get something big out
of it."

Dr. Archie rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, dropped his chin
on his clasped hands and looked at her. "Living is no trouble for little
people, believe me!" he exclaimed. "What do you want to get out of it?"

"Oh--so many things!" Thea shivered.

"But what? Money? You mentioned that. Well, you can make money, if you
care about that more than anything else." He nodded prophetically above
his interlacing fingers.

"But I don't. That's only one thing. Anyhow, I couldn't if I did." She
pulled her dress lower at the neck as if she were suffocating. "I only
want impossible things," she said roughly. "The others don't interest
me."

Dr. Archie watched her contemplatively, as if she were a beaker full of
chemicals working. A few years ago, when she used to sit there, the
light from under his green lampshade used to fall full upon her broad
face and yellow pigtails. Now her face was in the shadow and the line of
light fell below her bare throat, directly across her bosom. The
shrunken white organdie rose and fell as if she were struggling to be
free and to break out of it altogether. He felt that her heart must be
laboring heavily in there, but he was afraid to touch her; he was,
indeed. He had never seen her like this before. Her hair, piled high on
her head, gave her a commanding look, and her eyes, that used to be so
inquisitive, were stormy.

"Thea," he said slowly, "I won't say that you can have everything you
want--that means having nothing, in reality. But if you decide what it
is you want most, YOU CAN GET IT." His eye caught hers for a moment.
"Not everybody can, but you can. Only, if you want a big thing, you've
got to have nerve enough to cut out all that's easy, everything that's
to be had cheap." Dr. Archie paused. He picked up a paper-cutter and,
feeling the edge of it softly with his fingers, he added slowly, as if
to himself:--


"He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares
not put it to the touch To win...or lose it all."


Thea's lips parted; she looked at him from under a frown, searching his
face. "Do you mean to break loose, too, and--do something?" she asked
in a low voice.

"I mean to get rich, if you call that doing anything. I've found what I
can do without. You make such bargains in your mind, first."

Thea sprang up and took the paper-cutter he had put down, twisting it in
her hands. "A long while first, sometimes," she said with a short laugh.
"But suppose one can never get out what they've got in them? Suppose
they make a mess of it in the end; then what?" She threw the
paper-cutter on the desk and took a step toward the doctor, until her
dress touched him. She stood looking down at him. "Oh, it's easy to
fail!" She was breathing through her mouth and her throat was throbbing
with excitement.

As he looked up at her, Dr. Archie's hands tightened on the arms of his
chair. He had thought he knew Thea Kronborg pretty well, but he did not
know the girl who was standing there. She was beautiful, as his little
Swede had never been, but she frightened him. Her pale cheeks, her
parted lips, her flashing eyes, seemed suddenly to mean one thing--he
did not know what. A light seemed to break upon her from far away--or
perhaps from far within. She seemed to grow taller, like a scarf drawn
out long; looked as if she were pursued and fleeing, and--yes, she
looked tormented. "It's easy to fail," he heard her say again, "and if I
fail, you'd better forget about me, for I'll be one of the worst women
that ever lived. I'll be an awful woman!"

In the shadowy light above the lampshade he caught her glance again and
held it for a moment. Wild as her eyes were, that yellow gleam at the
back of them was as hard as a diamond drill-point. He rose with a
nervous laugh and dropped his hand lightly on her shoulder. "No, you
won't. You'll be a splendid one!"

She shook him off before he could say anything more, and went out of his
door with a kind of bound. She left so quickly and so lightly that he
could not even hear her footstep in the hallway outside. Archie dropped
back into his chair and sat motionless for a long while.

So it went; one loved a quaint little girl, cheerful, industrious,
always on the run and hustling through her tasks; and suddenly one lost
her. He had thought he knew that child like the glove on his hand. But
about this tall girl who threw up her head and glittered like that all
over, he knew nothing. She was goaded by desires, ambitions, revulsions
that were dark to him. One thing he knew: the old highroad of life, worn
safe and easy, hugging the sunny slopes, would scarcely hold her again.

After that night Thea could have asked pretty much anything of him. He
could have refused her nothing. Years ago a crafty little bunch of hair
and smiles had shown him what she wanted, and he had promptly married
her. To-night a very different sort of girl--driven wild by doubts and
youth, by poverty and riches--had let him see the fierceness of her
nature. She went out still distraught, not knowing or caring what she
had shown him. But to Archie knowledge of that sort was obligation. Oh,
he was the same old Howard Archie!


That Sunday in July was the turning-point; Thea's peace of mind did not
come back. She found it hard even to practice at home. There was
something in the air there that froze her throat. In the morning, she
walked as far as she could walk. In the hot afternoons she lay on her
bed in her nightgown, planning fiercely. She haunted the post-office.
She must have worn a path in the sidewalk that led to the post-office,
that summer. She was there the moment the mail-sacks came up from the
depot, morning and evening, and while the letters were being sorted and
distributed she paced up and down outside, under the cottonwood trees,
listening to the thump, thump, thump of Mr. Thompson's stamp. She hung
upon any sort of word from Chicago; a card from Bowers, a letter from
Mrs. Harsanyi, from Mr. Larsen, from her landlady,--anything to reassure
her that Chicago was still there. She began to feel the same
restlessness that had tortured her the last spring when she was teaching
in Moonstone. Suppose she never got away again, after all? Suppose one
broke a leg and had to lie in bed at home for weeks, or had pneumonia
and died there. The desert was so big and thirsty; if one's foot
slipped, it could drink one up like a drop of water.

This time, when Thea left Moonstone to go back to Chicago, she went
alone. As the train pulled out, she looked back at her mother and father
and Thor. They were calm and cheerful; they did not know, they did not
understand. Something pulled in her--and broke. She cried all the way to
Denver, and that night, in her berth, she kept sobbing and waking
herself. But when the sun rose in the morning, she was far away. It was
all behind her, and she knew that she would never cry like that again.
People live through such pain only once; pain comes again, but it finds
a tougher surface. Thea remembered how she had gone away the first time,
with what confidence in everything, and what pitiful ignorance. Such a
silly! She felt resentful toward that stupid, good-natured child. How
much older she was now, and how much harder! She was going away to
fight, and she was going away forever.



PART III



STUPID FACES


I


So many grinning, stupid faces! Thea was sitting by the window in
Bowers's studio, waiting for him to come back from lunch. On her knee
was the latest number of an illustrated musical journal in which
musicians great and little stridently advertised their wares. Every
afternoon she played accompaniments for people who looked and smiled
like these. She was getting tired of the human countenance.

Thea had been in Chicago for two months. She had a small church position
which partly paid her living expenses, and she paid for her singing
lessons by playing Bowers's accompaniments every afternoon from two
until six. She had been compelled to leave her old friends Mrs. Lorch
and Mrs. Andersen, because the long ride from North Chicago to Bowers's
studio on Michigan Avenue took too much time--an hour in the morning,
and at night, when the cars were crowded, an hour and a half. For the
first month she had clung to her old room, but the bad air in the cars,
at the end of a long day's work, fatigued her greatly and was bad for
her voice. Since she left Mrs. Lorch, she had been staying at a
students' club to which she was introduced by Miss Adler, Bowers's
morning accompanist, an intelligent Jewish girl from Evanston.

Thea took her lesson from Bowers every day from eleven-thirty until
twelve. Then she went out to lunch with an Italian grammar under her
arm, and came back to the studio to begin her work at two. In the
afternoon Bowers coached professionals and taught his advanced pupils.
It was his theory that Thea ought to be able to learn a great deal by
keeping her ears open while she played for him.

The concert-going public of Chicago still remembers the long, sallow,
discontented face of Madison Bowers. He seldom missed an evening
concert, and was usually to be seen lounging somewhere at the back of
the concert hall, reading a newspaper or review, and conspicuously
ignoring the efforts of the performers. At the end of a number he looked
up from his paper long enough to sweep the applauding audience with a
contemptuous eye. His face was intelligent, with a narrow lower jaw, a
thin nose, faded gray eyes, and a close-cut brown mustache. His hair was
iron-gray, thin and dead-looking. He went to concerts chiefly to satisfy
himself as to how badly things were done and how gullible the public
was. He hated the whole race of artists; the work they did, the wages
they got, and the way they spent their money. His father, old Hiram
Bowers, was still alive and at work, a genial old choirmaster in Boston,
full of enthusiasm at seventy. But Madison was of the colder stuff of
his grandfathers, a long line of New Hampshire farmers; hard workers,
close traders, with good minds, mean natures, and flinty eyes. As a boy
Madison had a fine barytone voice, and his father made great sacrifices
for him, sending him to Germany at an early age and keeping him abroad
at his studies for years. Madison worked under the best teachers, and
afterward sang in England in oratorio. His cold nature and academic
methods were against him. His audiences were always aware of the
contempt he felt for them. A dozen poorer singers succeeded, but Bowers
did not.

Bowers had all the qualities which go to make a good teacher--except
generosity and warmth. His intelligence was of a high order, his taste
never at fault. He seldom worked with a voice without improving it, and
in teaching the delivery of oratorio he was without a rival. Singers came
from far and near to study Bach and Handel with him. Even the fashionable
sopranos and contraltos of Chicago, St. Paul, and St. Louis (they were
usually ladies with very rich husbands, and Bowers called them the
"pampered jades of Asia") humbly endured his sardonic humor for the sake
of what he could do for them. He was not at all above helping a very
lame singer across, if her husband's check-book warranted it. He had a
whole bag of tricks for stupid people, "life-preservers," he called
them. "Cheap repairs for a cheap 'un," he used to say, but the husbands
never found the repairs very cheap. Those were the days when lumbermen's
daughters and brewers' wives contended in song; studied in Germany and
then floated from SANGERFEST to SANGERFEST. Choral societies flourished
in all the rich lake cities and river cities. The soloists came to
Chicago to coach with Bowers, and he often took long journeys to hear
and instruct a chorus. He was intensely avaricious, and from these
semi-professionals he reaped a golden harvest. They fed his pockets and
they fed his ever-hungry contempt, his scorn of himself and his
accomplices. The more money he made, the more parsimonious he became.
His wife was so shabby that she never went anywhere with him, which
suited him exactly. Because his clients were luxurious and extravagant,
he took a revengeful pleasure in having his shoes halfsoled a second
time, and in getting the last wear out of a broken collar. He had first
been interested in Thea Kronborg because of her bluntness, her country
roughness, and her manifest carefulness about money. The mention of
Harsanyi's name always made him pull a wry face. For the first time Thea
had a friend who, in his own cool and guarded way, liked her for
whatever was least admirable in her.

Thea was still looking at the musical paper, her grammar unopened on the
window-sill, when Bowers sauntered in a little before two o'clock. He
was smoking a cheap cigarette and wore the same soft felt hat he had
worn all last winter. He never carried a cane or wore gloves.

Thea followed him from the reception-room into the studio. "I may cut my
lesson out to-morrow, Mr. Bowers. I have to hunt a new boarding-place."

Bowers looked up languidly from his desk where he had begun to go over a
pile of letters. "What's the matter with the Studio Club? Been fighting
with them again?"

"The Club's all right for people who like to live that way. I don't."

Bowers lifted his eyebrows. "Why so tempery?" he asked as he drew a
check from an envelope postmarked "Minneapolis."

"I can't work with a lot of girls around. They're too familiar. I never
could get along with girls of my own age. It's all too chummy. Gets on
my nerves. I didn't come here to play kindergarten games." Thea began
energetically to arrange the scattered music on the piano.

Bowers grimaced good-humoredly at her over the three checks he was
pinning together. He liked to play at a rough game of banter with her.
He flattered himself that he had made her harsher than she was when she
first came to him; that he had got off a little of the sugar-coating
Harsanyi always put on his pupils.

"The art of making yourself agreeable never comes amiss, Miss Kronborg.
I should say you rather need a little practice along that line. When you
come to marketing your wares in the world, a little smoothness goes
farther than a great deal of talent sometimes. If you happen to be
cursed with a real talent, then you've got to be very smooth indeed, or
you'll never get your money back." Bowers snapped the elastic band
around his bank-book.

Thea gave him a sharp, recognizing glance. "Well, that's the money I'll
have to go without," she replied.

"Just what do you mean?"

"I mean the money people have to grin for. I used to know a railroad man
who said there was money in every profession that you couldn't take.
He'd tried a good many jobs," Thea added musingly; "perhaps he was too
particular about the kind he could take, for he never picked up much. He
was proud, but I liked him for that."

Bowers rose and closed his desk. "Mrs. Priest is late again. By the way,
Miss Kronborg, remember not to frown when you are playing for Mrs.
Priest. You did not remember yesterday."

"You mean when she hits a tone with her breath like that? Why do you let
her? You wouldn't let me."

"I certainly would not. But that is a mannerism of Mrs. Priest's. The
public like it, and they pay a great deal of money for the pleasure of
hearing her do it. There she is. Remember!"

Bowers opened the door of the reception-room and a tall, imposing woman
rustled in, bringing with her a glow of animation which pervaded the
room as if half a dozen persons, all talking gayly, had come in instead
of one. She was large, handsome, expansive, uncontrolled; one felt this
the moment she crossed the threshold. She shone with care and
cleanliness, mature vigor, unchallenged authority, gracious good-humor,
and absolute confidence in her person, her powers, her position, and her
way of life; a glowing, overwhelming self-satisfaction, only to be found
where human society is young and strong and without yesterdays. Her face
had a kind of heavy, thoughtless beauty, like a pink peony just at the
point of beginning to fade. Her brown hair was waved in front and done
up behind in a great twist, held by a tortoiseshell comb with gold
filigree. She wore a beautiful little green hat with three long green
feathers sticking straight up in front, a little cape made of velvet and
fur with a yellow satin rose on it. Her gloves, her shoes, her veil,
somehow made themselves felt. She gave the impression of wearing a cargo
of splendid merchandise.

Mrs. Priest nodded graciously to Thea, coquettishly to Bowers, and asked
him to untie her veil for her. She threw her splendid wrap on a chair,
the yellow lining out. Thea was already at the piano. Mrs. Priest stood
behind her.

"`Rejoice Greatly' first, please. And please don't hurry it in there,"
she put her arm over Thea's shoulder, and indicated the passage by a
sweep of her white glove. She threw out her chest, clasped her hands
over her abdomen, lifted her chin, worked the muscles of her cheeks back
and forth for a moment, and then began with conviction, "Re-jo-oice!
Re-jo-oice!"

Bowers paced the room with his catlike tread. When he checked Mrs.
Priest's vehemence at all, he handled her roughly; poked and hammered
her massive person with cold satisfaction, almost as if he were taking
out a grudge on this splendid creation. Such treatment the imposing lady
did not at all resent. She tried harder and harder, her eyes growing all
the while more lustrous and her lips redder. Thea played on as she was
told, ignoring the singer's struggles.

When she first heard Mrs. Priest sing in church, Thea admired her. Since
she had found out how dull the goodnatured soprano really was, she felt
a deep contempt for her. She felt that Mrs. Priest ought to be reproved
and even punished for her shortcomings; that she ought to be
exposed,--at least to herself,--and not be permitted to live and shine
in happy ignorance of what a poor thing it was she brought across so
radiantly. Thea's cold looks of reproof were lost upon Mrs. Priest;
although the lady did murmur one day when she took Bowers home in her
carriage, "How handsome your afternoon girl would be if she did not have
that unfortunate squint; it gives her that vacant Swede look, like an
animal." That amused Bowers. He liked to watch the germination and
growth of antipathies.


One of the first disappointments Thea had to face when she returned to
Chicago that fall, was the news that the Harsanyis were not coming back.
They had spent the summer in a camp in the Adirondacks and were moving
to New York. An old teacher and friend of Harsanyi's, one of the
best-known piano teachers in New York, was about to retire because of
failing health and had arranged to turn his pupils over to Harsanyi.
Andor was to give two recitals in New York in November, to devote
himself to his new students until spring, and then to go on a short
concert tour. The Harsanyis had taken a furnished apartment in New York,
as they would not attempt to settle a place of their own until Andor's
recitals were over. The first of December, however, Thea received a note
from Mrs. Harsanyi, asking her to call at the old studio, where she was
packing their goods for shipment.

The morning after this invitation reached her, Thea climbed the stairs
and knocked at the familiar door. Mrs. Harsanyi herself opened it, and
embraced her visitor warmly. Taking Thea into the studio, which was
littered with excelsior and packing-cases, she stood holding her hand
and looking at her in the strong light from the big window before she
allowed her to sit down. Her quick eye saw many changes. The girl was
taller, her figure had become definite, her carriage positive. She had
got used to living in the body of a young woman, and she no longer tried
to ignore it and behave as if she were a little girl. With that
increased independence of body there had come a change in her face; an
indifference, something hard and skeptical. Her clothes, too, were
different, like the attire of a shopgirl who tries to follow the
fashions; a purple suit, a piece of cheap fur, a three-cornered purple
hat with a pompon sticking up in front. The queer country clothes she
used to wear suited her much better, Mrs. Harsanyi thought. But such
trifles, after all, were accidental and remediable. She put her hand on
the girl's strong shoulder.

"How much the summer has done for you! Yes, you are a young lady at
last. Andor will be so glad to hear about you."

Thea looked about at the disorder of the familiar room. The pictures
were piled in a corner, the piano and the CHAISE LONGUE were gone. "I
suppose I ought to be glad you have gone away," she said, "but I'm not.
It's a fine thing for Mr. Harsanyi, I suppose."

Mrs. Harsanyi gave her a quick glance that said more than words. "If you
knew how long I have wanted to get him away from here, Miss Kronborg! He
is never tired, never discouraged, now."

Thea sighed. "I'm glad for that, then." Her eyes traveled over the faint
discolorations on the walls where the pictures had hung. "I may run away
myself. I don't know whether I can stand it here without you."

"We hope that you can come to New York to study before very long. We
have thought of that. And you must tell me how you are getting on with
Bowers. Andor will want to know all about it."

"I guess I get on more or less. But I don't like my work very well. It
never seems serious as my work with Mr. Harsanyi did. I play Bowers's
accompaniments in the afternoons, you know. I thought I would learn a
good deal from the people who work with him, but I don't think I get
much."

Mrs. Harsanyi looked at her inquiringly. Thea took out a carefully
folded handkerchief from the bosom of her dress and began to draw the
corners apart. "Singing doesn't seem to be a very brainy profession,
Mrs. Harsanyi," she said slowly. "The people I see now are not a bit
like the ones I used to meet here. Mr. Harsanyi's pupils, even the dumb
ones, had more--well, more of everything, it seems to me. The people I
have to play accompaniments for are discouraging. The professionals,
like Katharine Priest and Miles Murdstone, are worst of all. If I have
to play `The Messiah' much longer for Mrs. Priest, I'll go out of my
mind!" Thea brought her foot down sharply on the bare floor.

Mrs. Harsanyi looked down at the foot in perplexity. "You mustn't wear
such high heels, my dear. They will spoil your walk and make you mince
along. Can't you at least learn to avoid what you dislike in these
singers? I was never able to care for Mrs. Priest's singing."

Thea was sitting with her chin lowered. Without moving her head she
looked up at Mrs. Harsanyi and smiled; a smile much too cold and
desperate to be seen on a young face, Mrs. Harsanyi felt. "Mrs.
Harsanyi, it seems to me that what I learn is just TO DISLIKE. I dislike
so much and so hard that it tires me out. I've got no heart for
anything." She threw up her head suddenly and sat in defiance, her hand
clenched on the arm of the chair. "Mr. Harsanyi couldn't stand these
people an hour, I know he couldn't. He'd put them right out of the
window there, frizzes and feathers and all. Now, take that new soprano
they're all making such a fuss about, Jessie Darcey. She's going on tour
with a symphony orchestra and she's working up her repertory with
Bowers. She's singing some Schumann songs Mr. Harsanyi used to go over
with me. Well, I don't know what he WOULD do if he heard her."

"But if your own work goes well, and you know these people are wrong,
why do you let them discourage you?"

Thea shook her head. "That's just what I don't understand myself. Only,
after I've heard them all afternoon, I come out frozen up. Somehow it
takes the shine off of everything. People want Jessie Darcey and the
kind of thing she does; so what's the use?"

Mrs. Harsanyi smiled. "That stile you must simply vault over. You must
not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all,
what have they to do with you?"

"Well, if I had somebody like Mr. Harsanyi, perhaps I wouldn't fret
about them. He was the teacher for me. Please tell him so."

Thea rose and Mrs. Harsanyi took her hand again. "I am sorry you have to
go through this time of discouragement. I wish Andor could talk to you,
he would understand it so well. But I feel like urging you to keep clear
of Mrs. Priest and Jessie Darcey and all their works."

Thea laughed discordantly. "No use urging me. I don't get on with them
AT ALL. My spine gets like a steel rail when they come near me. I liked
them at first, you know. Their clothes and their manners were so fine,
and Mrs. Priest IS handsome. But now I keep wanting to tell them how
stupid they are. Seems like they ought to be informed, don't you think
so?" There was a flash of the shrewd grin that Mrs. Harsanyi remembered.
Thea pressed her hand. "I must go now. I had to give my lesson hour this
morning to a Duluth woman who has come on to coach, and I must go and
play `On Mighty Pens' for her. Please tell Mr. Harsanyi that I think
oratorio is a great chance for bluffers."

Mrs. Harsanyi detained her. "But he will want to know much more than
that about you. You are free at seven? Come back this evening, then, and
we will go to dinner somewhere, to some cheerful place. I think you need
a party."

Thea brightened. "Oh, I do! I'll love to come; that will be like old
times. You see," she lingered a moment, softening, "I wouldn't mind if
there were only ONE of them I could really admire."

"How about Bowers?" Mrs. Harsanyi asked as they were approaching the
stairway.

"Well, there's nothing he loves like a good fakir, and nothing he hates
like a good artist. I always remember something Mr. Harsanyi said about
him. He said Bowers was the cold muffin that had been left on the
plate."

Mrs. Harsanyi stopped short at the head of the stairs and said
decidedly: "I think Andor made a mistake. I can't believe that is the
right atmosphere for you. It would hurt you more than most people. It's
all wrong."

"Something's wrong," Thea called back as she clattered down the stairs
in her high heels.



II


DURING that winter Thea lived in so many places that sometimes at night
when she left Bowers's studio and emerged into the street she had to
stop and think for a moment to remember where she was living now and
what was the best way to get there.

When she moved into a new place her eyes challenged the beds, the
carpets, the food, the mistress of the house. The boarding-houses were
wretchedly conducted and Thea's complaints sometimes took an insulting
form. She quarreled with one landlady after another and moved on. When
she moved into a new room, she was almost sure to hate it on sight and
to begin planning to hunt another place before she unpacked her trunk.
She was moody and contemptuous toward her fellow boarders, except toward
the young men, whom she treated with a careless familiarity which they
usually misunderstood. They liked her, however, and when she left the
house after a storm, they helped her to move her things and came to see
her after she got settled in a new place. But she moved so often that
they soon ceased to follow her. They could see no reason for keeping up
with a girl who, under her jocularity, was cold, self-centered, and
unimpressionable. They soon felt that she did not admire them.

Thea used to waken up in the night and wonder why she was so unhappy.
She would have been amazed if she had known how much the people whom she
met in Bowers's studio had to do with her low spirits. She had never
been conscious of those instinctive standards which are called ideals,
and she did not know that she was suffering for them. She often found
herself sneering when she was on a street-car, or when she was brushing
out her hair before her mirror, as some inane remark or too familiar
mannerism flitted across her mind.

She felt no creature kindness, no tolerant good-will for Mrs. Priest or
Jessie Darcey. After one of Jessie Darcey's concerts the glowing press
notices, and the admiring comments that floated about Bowers's studio,
caused Thea bitter unhappiness. It was not the torment of personal
jealousy. She had never thought of herself as even a possible rival of
Miss Darcey. She was a poor music student, and Jessie Darcey was a
popular and petted professional. Mrs. Priest, whatever one held against
her, had a fine, big, showy voice and an impressive presence. She read
indifferently, was inaccurate, and was always putting other people
wrong, but she at least had the material out of which singers can be
made. But people seemed to like Jessie Darcey exactly because she could
not sing; because, as they put it, she was "so natural and
unprofessional." Her singing was pronounced "artless," her voice
"birdlike." Miss Darcey was thin and awkward in person, with a sharp,
sallow face. Thea noticed that her plainness was accounted to her
credit, and that people spoke of it affectionately. Miss Darcey was
singing everywhere just then; one could not help hearing about her. She
was backed by some of the packing-house people and by the Chicago
Northwestern Railroad. Only one critic raised his voice against her.
Thea went to several of Jessie Darcey's concerts. It was the first time
she had had an opportunity to observe the whims of the public which
singers live by interesting. She saw that people liked in Miss Darcey
every quality a singer ought not to have, and especially the nervous
complacency that stamped her as a commonplace young woman. They seemed
to have a warmer feeling for Jessie than for Mrs. Priest, an
affectionate and cherishing regard. Chicago was not so very different
from Moonstone, after all, and Jessie Darcey was only Lily Fisher under
another name.

Thea particularly hated to accompany for Miss Darcey because she sang
off pitch and didn't mind it in the least. It was excruciating to sit
there day after day and hear her; there was something shameless and
indecent about not singing true.

One morning Miss Darcey came by appointment to go over the programme for
her Peoria concert. She was such a frail-looking girl that Thea ought to
have felt sorry for her. True, she had an arch, sprightly little manner,
and a flash of salmon-pink on either brown cheek. But a narrow upper jaw
gave her face a pinched look, and her eyelids were heavy and relaxed. By
the morning light, the purplish brown circles under her eyes were
pathetic enough, and foretold no long or brilliant future. A singer with
a poor digestion and low vitality; she needed no seer to cast her
horoscope. If Thea had ever taken the pains to study her, she would have
seen that, under all her smiles and archness, poor Miss Darcey was
really frightened to death. She could not understand her success any
more than Thea could; she kept catching her breath and lifting her
eyebrows and trying to believe that it was true. Her loquacity was not
natural, she forced herself to it, and when she confided to you how many
defects she could overcome by her unusual command of head resonance, she
was not so much trying to persuade you as to persuade herself.

When she took a note that was high for her, Miss Darcey always put her
right hand out into the air, as if she were indicating height, or giving
an exact measurement. Some early teacher had told her that she could
"place" a tone more surely by the help of such a gesture, and she firmly
believed that it was of great assistance to her. (Even when she was
singing in public, she kept her right hand down with difficulty,
nervously clasping her white kid fingers together when she took a high
note. Thea could always see her elbows stiffen.) She unvaryingly
executed this gesture with a smile of gracious confidence, as if she
were actually putting her finger on the tone: "There it is, friends!"

This morning, in Gounod's "Ave Maria," as Miss Darcey approached her B
natural:--

DANS--NOS--A--LAR--MES!

Out went the hand, with the sure airy gesture, though it was little
above A she got with her voice, whatever she touched with her finger.
Often Bowers let such things pass--with the right people--but this
morning he snapped his jaws together and muttered, "God!" Miss Darcey
tried again, with the same gesture as of putting the crowning touch,
tilting her head and smiling radiantly at Bowers, as if to say, "It is
for you I do all this!"


DANS--NOS A--LAR------MES!

This time she made B flat, and went on in the happy belief that she had
done well enough, when she suddenly found that her accompanist was not
going on with her, and this put her out completely.

She turned to Thea, whose hands had fallen in her lap. "Oh why did you
stop just there! It IS too trying! Now we'd better go back to that other
CRESCENDO and try it from there."

"I beg your pardon," Thea muttered. "I thought you wanted to get that B
natural." She began again, as Miss Darcey indicated.

After the singer was gone, Bowers walked up to Thea and asked languidly,
"Why do you hate Jessie so? Her little variations from pitch are between
her and her public; they don't hurt you. Has she ever done anything to
you except be very agreeable?"

"Yes, she has done things to me," Thea retorted hotly.

Bowers looked interested. "What, for example?"

"I can't explain, but I've got it in for her."

Bowers laughed. "No doubt about that. I'll have to suggest that you
conceal it a little more effectually. That is--necessary, Miss
Kronborg," he added, looking back over the shoulder of the overcoat he
was putting on.

He went out to lunch and Thea thought the subject closed. But late in
the afternoon, when he was taking his dyspepsia tablet and a glass of
water between lessons, he looked up and said in a voice ironically
coaxing:--

"Miss Kronborg, I wish you would tell me why you hate Jessie."

Taken by surprise Thea put down the score she was reading and answered
before she knew what she was saying, "I hate her for the sake of what I
used to think a singer might be."

Bowers balanced the tablet on the end of his long forefinger and
whistled softly. "And how did you form your conception of what a singer
ought to be?" he asked.

"I don't know." Thea flushed and spoke under her breath; "but I suppose
I got most of it from Harsanyi."

Bowers made no comment upon this reply, but opened the door for the next
pupil, who was waiting in the reception-room.

It was dark when Thea left the studio that night. She knew she had
offended Bowers. Somehow she had hurt herself, too. She felt unequal to
the boarding-house table, the sneaking divinity student who sat next her
and had tried to kiss her on the stairs last night. She went over to the
waterside of Michigan Avenue and walked along beside the lake. It was a
clear, frosty winter night. The great empty space over the water was
restful and spoke of freedom. If she had any money at all, she would go
away. The stars glittered over the wide black water. She looked up at
them wearily and shook her head. She believed that what she felt was
despair, but it was only one of the forms of hope. She felt, indeed, as
if she were bidding the stars good-bye; but she was renewing a promise.
Though their challenge is universal and eternal, the stars get no answer
but that,--the brief light flashed back to them from the eyes of the
young who unaccountably aspire.

The rich, noisy, city, fat with food and drink, is a spent thing; its
chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide-and-seek with
the undertaker. Money and office and success are the consolations of
impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck
their bone in peace. She flecks her whip upon flesh that is more alive,
upon that stream of hungry boys and girls who tramp the streets of every
city, recognizable by their pride and discontent, who are the Future,
and who possess the treasure of creative power.



III


WHILE her living arrangements were so casual and fortuitous, Bowers's
studio was the one fixed thing in Thea's life. She went out from it to
uncertainties, and hastened to it from nebulous confusion. She was more
influenced by Bowers than she knew. Unconsciously she began to take on
something of his dry contempt, and to share his grudge without
understanding exactly what it was about. His cynicism seemed to her
honest, and the amiability of his pupils artificial. She admired his
drastic treatment of his dull pupils. The stupid deserved all they got,
and more. Bowers knew that she thought him a very clever man.

One afternoon when Bowers came in from lunch Thea handed him a card on
which he read the name, "Mr. Philip Frederick Ottenburg."

"He said he would be in again to-morrow and that he wanted some time.
Who is he? I like him better than the others."

Bowers nodded. "So do I. He's not a singer. He's a beer prince: son of
the big brewer in St. Louis. He's been in Germany with his mother. I
didn't know he was back."

"Does he take lessons?"

"Now and again. He sings rather well. He's at the head of the Chicago
branch of the Ottenburg business, but he can't stick to work and is
always running away. He has great ideas in beer, people tell me. He's
what they call an imaginative business man; goes over to Bayreuth and
seems to do nothing but give parties and spend money, and brings back
more good notions for the brewery than the fellows who sit tight dig out
in five years. I was born too long ago to be much taken in by these
chesty boys with flowered vests, but I like Fred, all the same."

"So do I," said Thea positively.

Bowers made a sound between a cough and a laugh. "Oh, he's a
lady-killer, all right! The girls in here are always making eyes at him.
You won't be the first." He threw some sheets of music on the piano.
"Better look that over; accompaniment's a little tricky. It's for that
new woman from Detroit. And Mrs. Priest will be in this afternoon."

Thea sighed. "`I Know that my Redeemer Liveth'?"

"The same. She starts on her concert tour next week, and we'll have a
rest. Until then, I suppose we'll have to be going over her programme."

The next day Thea hurried through her luncheon at a German bakery and
got back to the studio at ten minutes past one. She felt sure that the
young brewer would come early, before it was time for Bowers to arrive.
He had not said he would, but yesterday, when he opened the door to go,
he had glanced about the room and at her, and something in his eye had
conveyed that suggestion.

Sure enough, at twenty minutes past one the door of the reception-room
opened, and a tall, robust young man with a cane and an English hat and
ulster looked in expectantly. "Ah--ha!" he exclaimed, "I thought if I
came early I might have good luck. And how are you to-day, Miss
Kronborg?"

Thea was sitting in the window chair. At her left elbow there was a
table, and upon this table the young man sat down, holding his hat and
cane in his hand, loosening his long coat so that it fell back from his
shoulders. He was a gleaming, florid young fellow. His hair, thick and
yellow, was cut very short, and he wore a closely trimmed beard, long
enough on the chin to curl a little. Even his eyebrows were thick and
yellow, like fleece. He had lively blue eyes--Thea looked up at them
with great interest as he sat chatting and swinging his foot
rhythmically. He was easily familiar, and frankly so. Wherever people
met young Ottenburg, in his office, on shipboard, in a foreign hotel or
railway compartment, they always felt (and usually liked) that artless
presumption which seemed to say, "In this case we may waive formalities.
We really haven't time. This is to-day, but it will soon be to-morrow,
and then we may be very different people, and in some other country." He
had a way of floating people out of dull or awkward situations, out of
their own torpor or constraint or discouragement. It was a marked
personal talent, of almost incalculable value in the representative of a
great business founded on social amenities. Thea had liked him yesterday
for the way in which he had picked her up out of herself and her German
grammar for a few exciting moments.

"By the way, will you tell me your first name, please? Thea? Oh, then
you ARE a Swede, sure enough! I thought so. Let me call you Miss Thea,
after the German fashion. You won't mind? Of course not!" He usually
made his assumption of a special understanding seem a tribute to the
other person and not to himself.

"How long have you been with Bowers here? Do you like the old grouch? So
do I. I've come to tell him about a new soprano I heard at Bayreuth.
He'll pretend not to care, but he does. Do you warble with him? Have you
anything of a voice? Honest? You look it, you know. What are you going
in for, something big? Opera?"

Thea blushed crimson. "Oh, I'm not going in for anything. I'm trying to
learn to sing at funerals."

Ottenburg leaned forward. His eyes twinkled. "I'll engage you to sing at
mine. You can't fool me, Miss Thea. May I hear you take your lesson this
afternoon?"

"No, you may not. I took it this morning."

He picked up a roll of music that lay behind him on the table. "Is this
yours? Let me see what you are doing."

He snapped back the clasp and began turning over the songs. "All very
fine, but tame. What's he got you at this Mozart stuff for? I shouldn't
think it would suit your voice. Oh, I can make a pretty good guess at
what will suit you! This from `Gioconda' is more in your line. What's
this Grieg? It looks interesting. TAK FOR DITT ROD. What does that
mean?"

"`Thanks for your Advice.' Don't you know it?"

"No; not at all. Let's try it." He rose, pushed open the door into the
music-room, and motioned Thea to enter before him. She hung back.

"I couldn't give you much of an idea of it. It's a big song."

Ottenburg took her gently by the elbow and pushed her into the other
room. He sat down carelessly at the piano and looked over the music for
a moment. "I think I can get you through it. But how stupid not to have
the German words. Can you really sing the Norwegian? What an infernal
language to sing. Translate the text for me." He handed her the music.

Thea looked at it, then at him, and shook her head. "I can't. The truth
is I don't know either English or Swedish very well, and Norwegian's
still worse," she said confidentially. She not infrequently refused to
do what she was asked to do, but it was not like her to explain her
refusal, even when she had a good reason.

"I understand. We immigrants never speak any language well. But you know
what it means, don't you?"

"Of course I do!"

"Then don't frown at me like that, but tell me."

Thea continued to frown, but she also smiled. She was confused, but not
embarrassed. She was not afraid of Ottenburg. He was not one of those
people who made her spine like a steel rail. On the contrary, he made
one venturesome.

"Well, it goes something like this: Thanks for your advice! But I prefer
to steer my boat into the din of roaring breakers. Even if the journey
is my last, I may find what I have never found before. Onward must I go,
for I yearn for the wild sea. I long to fight my way through the angry
waves, and to see how far, and how long I can make them carry me."

Ottenburg took the music and began: "Wait a moment. Is that too fast?
How do you take it? That right?" He pulled up his cuffs and began the
accompaniment again. He had become entirely serious, and he played with
fine enthusiasm and with understanding.

Fred's talent was worth almost as much to old Otto Ottenburg as the
steady industry of his older sons. When Fred sang the Prize Song at an
interstate meet of the TURNVEREIN, ten thousand TURNERS went forth
pledged to Ottenburg beer.

As Thea finished the song Fred turned back to the first page, without
looking up from the music. "Now, once more," he called. They began
again, and did not hear Bowers when he came in and stood in the doorway.
He stood still, blinking like an owl at their two heads shining in the
sun. He could not see their faces, but there was something about his
girl's back that he had not noticed before: a very slight and yet very
free motion, from the toes up. Her whole back seemed plastic, seemed to
be moulding itself to the galloping rhythm of the song. Bowers perceived
such things sometimes--unwillingly. He had known to-day that there was
something afoot. The river of sound which had its source in his pupil
had caught him two flights down. He had stopped and listened with a kind
of sneering admiration. From the door he watched her with a
half-incredulous, half-malicious smile.

When he had struck the keys for the last time, Ottenburg dropped his
hands on his knees and looked up with a quick breath. "I got you
through. What a stunning song! Did I play it right?"

Thea studied his excited face. There was a good deal of meaning in it,
and there was a good deal in her own as she answered him. "You suited
me," she said ungrudgingly.

After Ottenburg was gone, Thea noticed that Bowers was more agreeable
than usual. She had heard the young brewer ask Bowers to dine with him
at his club that evening, and she saw that he looked forward to the
dinner with pleasure. He dropped a remark to the effect that Fred knew
as much about food and wines as any man in Chicago. He said this
boastfully.

"If he's such a grand business man, how does he have time to run around
listening to singing-lessons?" Thea asked suspiciously.

As she went home to her boarding-house through the February slush, she
wished she were going to dine with them. At nine o'clock she looked up
from her grammar to wonder what Bowers and Ottenburg were having to eat.
At that moment they were talking of her.



IV


THEA noticed that Bowers took rather more pains with her now that Fred
Ottenburg often dropped in at eleven-thirty to hear her lesson. After
the lesson the young man took Bowers off to lunch with him, and Bowers
liked good food when another man paid for it. He encouraged Fred's
visits, and Thea soon saw that Fred knew exactly why.

One morning, after her lesson, Ottenburg turned to Bowers. "If you'll
lend me Miss Thea, I think I have an engagement for her. Mrs. Henry
Nathanmeyer is going to give three musical evenings in April, first
three Saturdays, and she has consulted me about soloists. For the first
evening she has a young violinist, and she would be charmed to have Miss
Kronborg. She will pay fifty dollars. Not much, but Miss Thea would meet
some people there who might be useful. What do you say?"

Bowers passed the question on to Thea. "I guess you could use the fifty,
couldn't you, Miss Kronborg? You can easily work up some songs."

Thea was perplexed. "I need the money awfully," she said frankly; "but I
haven't got the right clothes for that sort of thing. I suppose I'd
better try to get some."

Ottenburg spoke up quickly, "Oh, you'd make nothing out of it if you
went to buying evening clothes. I've thought of that. Mrs. Nathanmeyer
has a troop of daughters, a perfect seraglio, all ages and sizes. She'll
be glad to fit you out, if you aren't sensitive about wearing kosher
clothes. Let me take you to see her, and you'll find that she'll arrange
that easily enough. I told her she must produce something nice, blue or
yellow, and properly cut. I brought half a dozen Worth gowns through the
customs for her two weeks ago, and she's not ungrateful. When can we go
to see her?"

"I haven't any time free, except at night," Thea replied in some
confusion.

"To-morrow evening, then? I shall call for you at eight. Bring all your
songs along; she will want us to give her a little rehearsal, perhaps.
I'll play your accompaniments, if you've no objection. That will save
money for you and for Mrs. Nathanmeyer. She needs it." Ottenburg
chuckled as he took down the number of Thea's boarding-house.

The Nathanmeyers were so rich and great that even Thea had heard of
them, and this seemed a very remarkable opportunity. Ottenburg had
brought it about by merely lifting a finger, apparently. He was a beer
prince sure enough, as Bowers had said.

The next evening at a quarter to eight Thea was dressed and waiting in
the boarding-house parlor. She was nervous and fidgety and found it
difficult to sit still on the hard, convex upholstery of the chairs. She
tried them one after another, moving about the dimly lighted, musty
room, where the gas always leaked gently and sang in the burners. There
was no one in the parlor but the medical student, who was playing one of
Sousa's marches so vigorously that the china ornaments on the top of the
piano rattled. In a few moments some of the pension-office girls would
come in and begin to two-step. Thea wished that Ottenburg would come and
let her escape. She glanced at herself in the long, somber mirror. She
was wearing her pale-blue broadcloth church dress, which was not
unbecoming but was certainly too heavy to wear to anybody's house in the
evening. Her slippers were run over at the heel and she had not had time
to have them mended, and her white gloves were not so clean as they
should be. However, she knew that she would forget these annoying things
as soon as Ottenburg came.

Mary, the Hungarian chambermaid, came to the door, stood between the
plush portieres, beckoned to Thea, and made an inarticulate sound in her
throat. Thea jumped up and ran into the hall, where Ottenburg stood
smiling, his caped cloak open, his silk hat in his white-kid hand. The
Hungarian girl stood like a monument on her flat heels, staring at the
pink carnation in Ottenburg's coat. Her broad, pockmarked face wore the
only expression of which it was capable, a kind of animal wonder. As the
young man followed Thea out, he glanced back over his shoulder through
the crack of the door; the Hun clapped her hands over her stomach,
opened her mouth, and made another raucous sound in her throat.

"Isn't she awful?" Thea exclaimed. "I think she's half-witted. Can you
understand her?"

Ottenburg laughed as he helped her into the carriage. "Oh, yes; I can
understand her!" He settled himself on the front seat opposite Thea.
"Now, I want to tell you about the people we are going to see. We may
have a musical public in this country some day, but as yet there are
only the Germans and the Jews. All the other people go to hear Jessie
Darcey sing, `O, Promise Me!' The Nathanmeyers are the finest kind of
Jews. If you do anything for Mrs. Henry Nathanmeyer, you must put
yourself into her hands. Whatever she says about music, about clothes,
about life, will be correct. And you may feel at ease with her. She
expects nothing of people; she has lived in Chicago twenty years. If you
were to behave like the Magyar who was so interested in my buttonhole,
she would not be surprised. If you were to sing like Jessie Darcey, she
would not be surprised; but she would manage not to hear you again."

"Would she? Well, that's the kind of people I want to find." Thea felt
herself growing bolder.

"You will be all right with her so long as you do not try to be anything
that you are not. Her standards have nothing to do with Chicago. Her
perceptions--or her grandmother's, which is the same thing--were keen
when all this was an Indian village. So merely be yourself, and you will
like her. She will like you because the Jews always sense talent, and,"
he added ironically, "they admire certain qualities of feeling that are
found only in the whiteskinned races."

Thea looked into the young man's face as the light of a street lamp
flashed into the carriage. His somewhat academic manner amused her.

"What makes you take such an interest in singers?" she asked curiously.
"You seem to have a perfect passion for hearing music-lessons. I wish I
could trade jobs with you!"

"I'm not interested in singers." His tone was offended. "I am interested
in talent. There are only two interesting things in the world, anyhow;
and talent is one of them."

"What's the other?" The question came meekly from the figure opposite
him. Another arc-light flashed in at the window.

Fred saw her face and broke into a laugh. "Why, you're guying me, you
little wretch! You won't let me behave properly." He dropped his gloved
hand lightly on her knee, took it away and let it hang between his own.
"Do you know," he said confidentially, "I believe I'm more in earnest
about all this than you are."

"About all what?"

"All you've got in your throat there."

"Oh! I'm in earnest all right; only I never was much good at talking.
Jessie Darcey is the smooth talker. `You notice the effect I get
there--' If she only got 'em, she'd be a wonder, you know!"

Mr. and Mrs. Nathanmeyer were alone in their great library. Their three
unmarried daughters had departed in successive carriages, one to a
dinner, one to a Nietszche club, one to a ball given for the girls
employed in the big department stores. When Ottenburg and Thea entered,
Henry Nathanmeyer and his wife were sitting at a table at the farther
end of the long room, with a reading-lamp and a tray of cigarettes and
cordial-glasses between them. The overhead lights were too soft to bring
out the colors of the big rugs, and none of the picture lights were on.
One could merely see that there were pictures there. Fred whispered that
they were Rousseaus and Corots, very fine ones which the old banker had
bought long ago for next to nothing. In the hall Ottenburg had stopped
Thea before a painting of a woman eating grapes out of a paper bag, and
had told her gravely that there was the most beautiful Manet in the
world. He made her take off her hat and gloves in the hall, and looked
her over a little before he took her in. But once they were in the
library he seemed perfectly satisfied with her and led her down the long
room to their hostess.

Mrs. Nathanmeyer was a heavy, powerful old Jewess, with a great
pompadour of white hair, a swarthy complexion, an eagle nose, and sharp,
glittering eyes. She wore a black velvet dress with a long train, and a
diamond necklace and earrings. She took Thea to the other side of the
table and presented her to Mr. Nathanmeyer, who apologized for not
rising, pointing to a slippered foot on a cushion; he said that he
suffered from gout. He had a very soft voice and spoke with an accent
which would have been heavy if it had not been so caressing. He kept
Thea standing beside him for some time. He noticed that she stood
easily, looked straight down into his face, and was not embarrassed.
Even when Mrs. Nathanmeyer told Ottenburg to bring a chair for Thea, the
old man did not release her hand, and she did not sit down. He admired
her just as she was, as she happened to be standing, and she felt it. He
was much handsomer than his wife, Thea thought. His forehead was high,
his hair soft and white, his skin pink, a little puffy under his clear
blue eyes. She noticed how warm and delicate his hands were, pleasant to
touch and beautiful to look at. Ottenburg had told her that Mr.
Nathanmeyer had a very fine collection of medals and cameos, and his
fingers looked as if they had never touched anything but delicately cut
surfaces.

He asked Thea where Moonstone was; how many inhabitants it had; what her
father's business was; from what part of Sweden her grandfather came;
and whether she spoke Swedish as a child. He was interested to hear that
her mother's mother was still living, and that her grandfather had
played the oboe. Thea felt at home standing there beside him; she felt
that he was very wise, and that he some way took one's life up and
looked it over kindly, as if it were a story. She was sorry when they
left him to go into the music-room.

As they reached the door of the music-room, Mrs. Nathanmeyer turned a
switch that threw on many lights. The room was even larger than the
library, all glittering surfaces, with two Steinway pianos.

Mrs. Nathanmeyer rang for her own maid. "Selma will take you upstairs,
Miss Kronborg, and you will find some dresses on the bed. Try several of
them, and take the one you like best. Selma will help you. She has a
great deal of taste. When you are dressed, come down and let us go over
some of your songs with Mr. Ottenburg."

After Thea went away with the maid, Ottenburg came up to Mrs.
Nathanmeyer and stood beside her, resting his hand on the high back of
her chair.

"Well, GNADIGE FRAU, do you like her?"

"I think so. I liked her when she talked to father. She will always get
on better with men."

Ottenburg leaned over her chair. "Prophetess! Do you see what I meant?"

"About her beauty? She has great possibilities, but you can never tell
about those Northern women. They look so strong, but they are easily
battered. The face falls so early under those wide cheek-bones. A single
idea--hate or greed, or even love--can tear them to shreds. She is
nineteen? Well, in ten years she may have quite a regal beauty, or she
may have a heavy, discontented face, all dug out in channels. That will
depend upon the kind of ideas she lives with."

"Or the kind of people?" Ottenburg suggested.

The old Jewess folded her arms over her massive chest, drew back her
shoulders, and looked up at the young man. "With that hard glint in her
eye? The people won't matter much, I fancy. They will come and go. She
is very much interested in herself--as she should be."

Ottenburg frowned. "Wait until you hear her sing. Her eyes are different
then. That gleam that comes in them is curious, isn't it? As you say,
it's impersonal."

The object of this discussion came in, smiling. She had chosen neither
the blue nor the yellow gown, but a pale rose-color, with silver
butterflies. Mrs. Nathanmeyer lifted her lorgnette and studied her as
she approached. She caught the characteristic things at once: the free,
strong walk, the calm carriage of the head, the milky whiteness of the
girl's arms and shoulders.

"Yes, that color is good for you," she said approvingly. "The yellow one
probably killed your hair? Yes; this does very well indeed, so we need
think no more about it."

Thea glanced questioningly at Ottenburg. He smiled and bowed, seemed
perfectly satisfied. He asked her to stand in the elbow of the piano, in
front of him, instead of behind him as she had been taught to do.

"Yes," said the hostess with feeling. "That other position is
barbarous."

Thea sang an aria from `Gioconda,' some songs by Schumann which she had
studied with Harsanyi, and the "TAK FOR DIT ROD," which Ottenburg liked.

"That you must do again," he declared when they finished this song. "You
did it much better the other day. You accented it more, like a dance or
a galop. How did you do it?"

Thea laughed, glancing sidewise at Mrs. Nathanmeyer. "You want it
rough-house, do you? Bowers likes me to sing it more seriously, but it
always makes me think about a story my grandmother used to tell."

Fred pointed to the chair behind her. "Won't you rest a moment and tell
us about it? I thought you had some notion about it when you first sang
it for me."

Thea sat down. "In Norway my grandmother knew a girl who was awfully in
love with a young fellow. She went into service on a big dairy farm to
make enough money for her outfit. They were married at Christmastime,
and everybody was glad, because they'd been sighing around about each
other for so long. That very summer, the day before St. John's Day, her
husband caught her carrying on with another farm-hand. The next night
all the farm people had a bonfire and a big dance up on the mountain,
and everybody was dancing and singing. I guess they were all a little
drunk, for they got to seeing how near they could make the girls dance
to the edge of the cliff. Ole--he was the girl's husband--seemed the
jolliest and the drunkest of anybody. He danced his wife nearer and
nearer the edge of the rock, and his wife began to scream so that the
others stopped dancing and the music stopped; but Ole went right on
singing, and he danced her over the edge of the cliff and they fell
hundreds of feet and were all smashed to pieces."

Ottenburg turned back to the piano. "That's the idea! Now, come Miss
Thea. Let it go!"

Thea took her place. She laughed and drew herself up out of her corsets,
threw her shoulders high and let them drop again. She had never sung in
a low dress before, and she found it comfortable. Ottenburg jerked his
head and they began the song. The accompaniment sounded more than ever
like the thumping and scraping of heavy feet.

When they stopped, they heard a sympathetic tapping at the end of the
room. Old Mr. Nathanmeyer had come to the door and was sitting back in
the shadow, just inside the library, applauding with his cane. Thea
threw him a bright smile. He continued to sit there, his slippered foot
on a low chair, his cane between his fingers, and she glanced at him
from time to time. The doorway made a frame for him, and he looked like
a man in a picture, with the long, shadowy room behind him.

Mrs. Nathanmeyer summoned the maid again. "Selma will pack that gown in
a box for you, and you can take it home in Mr. Ottenburg's carriage."

Thea turned to follow the maid, but hesitated. "Shall I wear gloves?"
she asked, turning again to Mrs. Nathanmeyer.

"No, I think not. Your arms are good, and you will feel freer without.
You will need light slippers, pink--or white, if you have them, will do
quite as well."

Thea went upstairs with the maid and Mrs. Nathanmeyer rose, took
Ottenburg's arm, and walked toward her husband. "That's the first real
voice I have heard in Chicago," she said decidedly. "I don't count that
stupid Priest woman. What do you say, father?"

Mr. Nathanmeyer shook his white head and smiled softly, as if he were
thinking about something very agreeable. "SVENSK SOMMAR," he murmured.
"She is like a Swedish summer. I spent nearly a year there when I was a
young man," he explained to Ottenburg.

When Ottenburg got Thea and her big box into the carriage, it occurred
to him that she must be hungry, after singing so much. When he asked
her, she admitted that she was very hungry, indeed.

He took out his watch. "Would you mind stopping somewhere with me? It's
only eleven."

"Mind? Of course, I wouldn't mind. I wasn't brought up like that. I can
take care of myself."

Ottenburg laughed. "And I can take care of myself, so we can do lots of
jolly things together." He opened the carriage door and spoke to the
driver. "I'm stuck on the way you sing that Grieg song," he declared.

When Thea got into bed that night she told herself that this was the
happiest evening she had had in Chicago. She had enjoyed the
Nathanmeyers and their grand house, her new dress, and Ottenburg, her
first real carriage ride, and the good supper when she was so hungry.
And Ottenburg WAS jolly! He made you want to come back at him. You
weren't always being caught up and mystified. When you started in with
him, you went; you cut the breeze, as Ray used to say. He had some go in
him.


Philip Frederick Ottenburg was the third son of the great brewer. His
mother was Katarina Furst, the daughter and heiress of a brewing
business older and richer than Otto Ottenburg's. As a young woman she
had been a conspicuous figure in German-American society in New York,
and not untouched by scandal. She was a handsome, headstrong girl, a
rebellious and violent force in a provincial society. She was brutally
sentimental and heavily romantic. Her free speech, her Continental
ideas, and her proclivity for championing new causes, even when she did
not know much about them, made her an object of suspicion. She was
always going abroad to seek out intellectual affinities, and was one of
the group of young women who followed Wagner about in his old age,
keeping at a respectful distance, but receiving now and then a gracious
acknowledgment that he appreciated their homage. When the composer died,
Katarina, then a matron with a family, took to her bed and saw no one
for a week.

After having been engaged to an American actor, a Welsh socialist
agitator, and a German army officer, Fraulein Furst at last placed
herself and her great brewery interests into the trustworthy hands of
Otto Ottenburg, who had been her suitor ever since he was a clerk,
learning his business in her father's office.

Her first two sons were exactly like their father. Even as children they
were industrious, earnest little tradesmen. As Frau Ottenburg said, "she
had to wait for her Fred, but she got him at last," the first man who
had altogether pleased her. Frederick entered Harvard when he was
eighteen. When his mother went to Boston to visit him, she not only got
him everything he wished for, but she made handsome and often
embarrassing presents to all his friends. She gave dinners and supper
parties for the Glee Club, made the crew break training, and was a
generally disturbing influence. In his third year Fred left the
university because of a serious escapade which had somewhat hampered his
life ever since. He went at once into his father's business, where, in
his own way, he had made himself very useful.

Fred Ottenburg was now twenty-eight, and people could only say of him
that he had been less hurt by his mother's indulgence than most boys
would have been. He had never wanted anything that he could not have it,
and he might have had a great many things that he had never wanted. He
was extravagant, but not prodigal. He turned most of the money his
mother gave him into the business, and lived on his generous salary.

Fred had never been bored for a whole day in his life. When he was in
Chicago or St. Louis, he went to ballgames, prize-fights, and
horse-races. When he was in Germany, he went to concerts and to the
opera. He belonged to a long list of sporting-clubs and huntingclubs,
and was a good boxer. He had so many natural interests that he had no
affectations. At Harvard he kept away from the aesthetic circle that had
already discovered Francis Thompson. He liked no poetry but German
poetry. Physical energy was the thing he was full to the brim of, and
music was one of its natural forms of expression. He had a healthy love
of sport and art, of eating and drinking. When he was in Germany, he
scarcely knew where the soup ended and the symphony began.



V


MARCH began badly for Thea. She had a cold during the first week, and
after she got through her church duties on Sunday she had to go to bed
with tonsilitis. She was still in the boarding-house at which young
Ottenburg had called when he took her to see Mrs. Nathanmeyer. She had
stayed on there because her room, although it was inconvenient and very
small, was at the corner of the house and got the sunlight.

Since she left Mrs. Lorch, this was the first place where she had got
away from a north light. Her rooms had all been as damp and mouldy as
they were dark, with deep foundations of dirt under the carpets, and
dirty walls. In her present room there was no running water and no
clothes closet, and she had to have the dresser moved out to make room
for her piano. But there were two windows, one on the south and one on
the west, a light wall-paper with morning-glory vines, and on the floor
a clean matting. The landlady had tried to make the room look cheerful,
because it was hard to let. It was so small that Thea could keep it
clean herself, after the Hun had done her worst. She hung her dresses on
the door under a sheet, used the washstand for a dresser, slept on a
cot, and opened both the windows when she practiced. She felt less
walled in than she had in the other houses.

Wednesday was her third day in bed. The medical student who lived in the
house had been in to see her, had left some tablets and a foamy gargle,
and told her that she could probably go back to work on Monday. The
landlady stuck her head in once a day, but Thea did not encourage her
visits. The Hungarian chambermaid brought her soup and toast. She made a
sloppy pretense of putting the room in order, but she was such a dirty
creature that Thea would not let her touch her cot; she got up every
morning and turned the mattress and made the bed herself. The exertion
made her feel miserably ill, but at least she could lie still
contentedly for a long while afterward. She hated the poisoned feeling
in her throat, and no matter how often she gargled she felt unclean and
disgusting. Still, if she had to be ill, she was almost glad that she
had a contagious illness. Otherwise she would have been at the mercy of
the people in the house. She knew that they disliked her, yet now that
she was ill, they took it upon themselves to tap at her door, send her
messages, books, even a miserable flower or two. Thea knew that their
sympathy was an expression of self-righteousness, and she hated them for
it. The divinity student, who was always whispering soft things to her,
sent her "The Kreutzer Sonata."

The medical student had been kind to her: he knew that she did not want
to pay a doctor. His gargle had helped her, and he gave her things to
make her sleep at night. But he had been a cheat, too. He had exceeded
his rights. She had no soreness in her chest, and had told him so
clearly. All this thumping of her back, and listening to her breathing,
was done to satisfy personal curiosity. She had watched him with a
contemptuous smile. She was too sick to care; if it amused him--She made
him wash his hands before he touched her; he was never very clean. All
the same, it wounded her and made her feel that the world was a pretty
disgusting place. "The Kreutzer Sonata" did not make her feel any more
cheerful. She threw it aside with hatred. She could not believe it was
written by the same man who wrote the novel that had thrilled her.

Her cot was beside the south window, and on Wednesday afternoon she lay
thinking about the Harsanyis, about old Mr. Nathanmeyer, and about how
she was missing Fred Ottenburg's visits to the studio. That was much the
worst thing about being sick. If she were going to the studio every day,
she might be having pleasant encounters with Fred. He was always running
away, Bowers said, and he might be planning to go away as soon as Mrs.
Nathanmeyer's evenings were over. And here she was losing all this time!

After a while she heard the Hun's clumsy trot in the hall, and then a
pound on the door. Mary came in, making her usual uncouth sounds,
carrying a long box and a big basket. Thea sat up in bed and tore off
the strings and paper. The basket was full of fruit, with a big Hawaiian
pineapple in the middle, and in the box there were layers of pink roses
with long, woody stems and dark-green leaves. They filled the room with
a cool smell that made another air to breathe. Mary stood with her apron
full of paper and cardboard. When she saw Thea take an envelope out from
under the flowers, she uttered an exclamation, pointed to the roses, and
then to the bosom of her own dress, on the left side. Thea laughed and
nodded. She understood that Mary associated the color with Ottenburg's
BOUTONNIERE. She pointed to the water pitcher,--she had nothing else big
enough to hold the flowers,--and made Mary put it on the window sill
beside her.

After Mary was gone Thea locked the door. When the landlady knocked, she
pretended that she was asleep. She lay still all afternoon and with
drowsy eyes watched the roses open. They were the first hothouse flowers
she had ever had. The cool fragrance they released was soothing, and as
the pink petals curled back, they were the only things between her and
the gray sky. She lay on her side, putting the room and the
boarding-house behind her. Fred knew where all the pleasant things in
the world were, she reflected, and knew the road to them. He had keys to
all the nice places in his pocket, and seemed to jingle them from time
to time. And then, he was young; and her friends had always been old.
Her mind went back over them. They had all been teachers; wonderfully
kind, but still teachers. Ray Kennedy, she knew, had wanted to marry
her, but he was the most protecting and teacher-like of them all. She
moved impatiently in her cot and threw her braids away from her hot
neck, over her pillow. "I don't want him for a teacher," she thought,
frowning petulantly out of the window. "I've had such a string of them.
I want him for a sweetheart."



VI


"THEA," said Fred Ottenburg one drizzly afternoon in April, while they
sat waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building,
overlooking the lake, "what are you going to do this summer?"

"I don't know. Work, I suppose."

"With Bowers, you mean? Even Bowers goes fishing for a month. Chicago's
no place to work, in the summer. Haven't you made any plans?"

Thea shrugged her shoulders. "No use having any plans when you haven't
any money. They are unbecoming."

"Aren't you going home?"

She shook her head. "No. It won't be comfortable there till I've got
something to show for myself. I'm not getting on at all, you know. This
year has been mostly wasted."

"You're stale; that's what's the matter with you. And just now you're
dead tired. You'll talk more rationally after you've had some tea. Rest
your throat until it comes." They were sitting by a window. As Ottenburg
looked at her in the gray light, he remembered what Mrs. Nathanmeyer had
said about the Swedish face "breaking early." Thea was as gray as the
weather. Her skin looked sick. Her hair, too, though on a damp day it
curled charmingly about her face, looked pale.

Fred beckoned the waiter and increased his order for food. Thea did not
hear him. She was staring out of the window, down at the roof of the Art
Institute and the green lions, dripping in the rain. The lake was all
rolling mist, with a soft shimmer of robin's-egg blue in the gray. A
lumber boat, with two very tall masts, was emerging gaunt and black out
of the fog. When the tea came Thea ate hungrily, and Fred watched her.
He thought her eyes became a little less bleak. The kettle sang
cheerfully over the spirit lamp, and she seemed to concentrate her
attention upon that pleasant sound. She kept looking toward it
listlessly and indulgently, in a way that gave him a realization of her
loneliness. Fred lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. He and Thea
were alone in the quiet, dusky room full of white tables. In those days
Chicago people never stopped for tea. "Come," he said at last, "what
would you do this summer, if you could do whatever you wished?"

"I'd go a long way from here! West, I think. Maybe I could get some of
my spring back. All this cold, cloudy weather,"--she looked out at the
lake and shivered,--"I don't know, it does things to me," she ended
abruptly.

Fred nodded. "I know. You've been going down ever since you had
tonsilitis. I've seen it. What you need is to sit in the sun and bake
for three months. You've got the right idea. I remember once when we
were having dinner somewhere you kept asking me about the Cliff-Dweller
ruins. Do they still interest you?"

"Of course they do. I've always wanted to go down there--long before I
ever got in for this."

"I don't think I told you, but my father owns a whole canyon full of
Cliff-Dweller ruins. He has a big worthless ranch down in Arizona, near
a Navajo reservation, and there's a canyon on the place they call
Panther Canyon, chock full of that sort of thing. I often go down there
to hunt. Henry Biltmer and his wife live there and keep a tidy place.
He's an old German who worked in the brewery until he lost his health.
Now he runs a few cattle. Henry likes to do me a favor. I've done a few
for him." Fred drowned his cigarette in his saucer and studied Thea's
expression, which was wistful and intent, envious and admiring. He
continued with satisfaction: "If you went down there and stayed with
them for two or three months, they wouldn't let you pay anything. I
might send Henry a new gun, but even I couldn't offer him money for
putting up a friend of mine. I'll get you transportation. It would make
a new girl of you. Let me write to Henry, and you pack your trunk.
That's all that's necessary. No red tape about it. What do you say,
Thea?"

She bit her lip, and sighed as if she were waking up.

Fred crumpled his napkin impatiently. "Well, isn't it easy enough?"

"That's the trouble; it's TOO easy. Doesn't sound probable. I'm not used
to getting things for nothing."

Ottenburg laughed. "Oh, if that's all, I'll show you how to begin. You
won't get this for nothing, quite. I'll ask you to let me stop off and
see you on my way to California. Perhaps by that time you will be glad
to see me. Better let me break the news to Bowers. I can manage him. He
needs a little transportation himself now and then. You must get
corduroy riding-things and leather leggings. There are a few snakes
about. Why do you keep frowning?"

"Well, I don't exactly see why you take the trouble. What do you get out
of it? You haven't liked me so well the last two or three weeks."

Fred dropped his third cigarette and looked at his watch. "If you don't
see that, it's because you need a tonic. I'll show you what I'll get out
of it. Now I'm going to get a cab and take you home. You are too tired
to walk a step. You'd better get to bed as soon as you get there. Of
course, I don't like you so well when you're half anaesthetized all the
time. What have you been doing to yourself?"

Thea rose. "I don't know. Being bored eats the heart out of me, I
guess." She walked meekly in front of him to the elevator. Fred noticed
for the hundredth time how vehemently her body proclaimed her state of
feeling. He remembered how remarkably brilliant and beautiful she had
been when she sang at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's: flushed and gleaming, round
and supple, something that couldn't be dimmed or downed. And now she
seemed a moving figure of discouragement. The very waiters glanced at
her apprehensively. It was not that she made a fuss, but her back was
most extraordinarily vocal. One never needed to see her face to know
what she was full of that day. Yet she was certainly not mercurial. Her
flesh seemed to take a mood and to "set," like plaster. As he put her
into the cab, Fred reflected once more that he "gave her up." He would
attack her when his lance was brighter.



PART IV



THE ANCIENT PEOPLE


I

THE San Francisco Mountain lies in Northern Arizona, above Flagstaff,
and its blue slopes and snowy summit entice the eye for a hundred miles
across the desert. About its base lie the pine forests of the Navajos,
where the great red-trunked trees live out their peaceful centuries in
that sparkling air. The PINONS and scrub begin only where the forest
ends, where the country breaks into open, stony clearings and the
surface of the earth cracks into deep canyons. The great pines stand at
a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs
alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos
are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is
not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of
personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable
reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

That was the first thing Thea Kronborg felt about the forest, as she
drove through it one May morning in Henry Biltmer's democrat wagon--and
it was the first great forest she had ever seen. She had got off the
train at Flagstaff that morning, rolled off into the high, chill air
when all the pines on the mountain were fired by sunrise, so that she
seemed to fall from sleep directly into the forest.

Old Biltmer followed a faint wagon trail which ran southeast, and which,
as they traveled, continually dipped lower, falling away from the high
plateau on the slope of which Flagstaff sits. The white peak of the
mountain, the snow gorges above the timber, now disappeared from time to
time as the road dropped and dropped, and the forest closed behind the
wagon. More than the mountain disappeared as the forest closed thus.
Thea seemed to be taking very little through the wood with her. The
personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her. The high,
sparkling air drank it up like blotting-paper. It was lost in the
thrilling blue of the new sky and the song of the thin wind in the
PINONS. The old, fretted lines which marked one off, which defined
her,--made her Thea Kronborg, Bowers's accompanist, a soprano with a
faulty middle voice,--were all erased.

So far she had failed. Her two years in Chicago had not resulted in
anything. She had failed with Harsanyi, and she had made no great
progress with her voice. She had come to believe that whatever Bowers
had taught her was of secondary importance, and that in the essential
things she had made no advance. Her student life closed behind her, like
the forest, and she doubted whether she could go back to it if she
tried. Probably she would teach music in little country towns all her
life. Failure was not so tragic as she would have supposed; she was
tired enough not to care.

She was getting back to the earliest sources of gladness that she could
remember. She had loved the sun, and the brilliant solitudes of sand and
sun, long before these other things had come along to fasten themselves
upon her and torment her. That night, when she clambered into her big
German feather bed, she felt completely released from the enslaving
desire to get on in the world. Darkness had once again the sweet wonder
that it had in childhood.



II


THEA'S life at the Ottenburg ranch was simple and full of light, like
the days themselves. She awoke every morning when the first fierce
shafts of sunlight darted through the curtainless windows of her room at
the ranch house. After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went down
to the canyon. Usually she did not return until sunset.

Panther Canyon was like a thousand others--one of those abrupt fissures
with which the earth in the Southwest is riddled; so abrupt that you
might walk over the edge of any one of them on a dark night and never
know what had happened to you. This canyon headed on the Ottenburg
ranch, about a mile from the ranch house, and it was accessible only at
its head. The canyon walls, for the first two hundred feet below the
surface, were perpendicular cliffs, striped with even-running strata of
rock. From there on to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were
shelving, and lightly fringed with PINONS and dwarf cedars. The effect
was that of a gentler canyon within a wilder one. The dead city lay at
the point where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped
inner gorge began. There a stratum of rock, softer than those above, had
been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like a deep groove
running along the sides of the canyon. In this hollow (like a great fold
in the rock) the Ancient People had built their houses of yellowish
stone and mortar. The over-hanging cliff above made a roof two hundred
feet thick. The hard stratum below was an everlasting floor. The houses
stood along in a row, like the buildings in a city block, or like a
barracks.

In both walls of the canyon the same streak of soft rock had been washed
out, and the long horizontal groove had been built up with houses. The
dead city had thus two streets, one set in either cliff, facing each
other across the ravine, with a river of blue air between them.

The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these two streets went on
for four miles or more, interrupted by the abrupt turnings of the gorge,
but beginning again within each turn. The canyon had a dozen of these
false endings near its head. Beyond, the windings were larger and less
perceptible, and it went on for a hundred miles, too narrow,
precipitous, and terrible for man to follow it. The Cliff Dwellers liked
wide canyons, where the great cliffs caught the sun. Panther Canyon had
been deserted for hundreds of years when the first Spanish missionaries
came into Arizona, but the masonry of the houses was still wonderfully
firm; had crumbled only where a landslide or a rolling boulder had torn
it.

All the houses in the canyon were clean with the cleanness of sun-baked,
wind-swept places, and they all smelled of the tough little cedars that
twisted themselves into the very doorways. One of these rock-rooms Thea
took for her own. Fred had told her how to make it comfortable. The day
after she came old Henry brought over on one of the pack-ponies a roll
of Navajo blankets that belonged to Fred, and Thea lined her cave with
them. The room was not more than eight by ten feet, and she could touch
the stone roof with her finger-tips. This was her old idea: a nest in a
high cliff, full of sun. All morning long the sun beat upon her cliff,
while the ruins on the opposite side of the canyon were in shadow. In
the afternoon, when she had the shade of two hundred feet of rock wall,
the ruins on the other side of the gulf stood out in the blazing
sunlight. Before her door ran the narrow, winding path that had been the
street of the Ancient People. The yucca and niggerhead cactus grew
everywhere. From her doorstep she looked out on the ocher-colored slope
that ran down several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was
sparsely grown with dwarf trees. Their colors were so pale that the
shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out sharper than the trees
themselves. When Thea first came, the chokecherry bushes were in
blossom, and the scent of them was almost sickeningly sweet after a
shower. At the very bottom of the canyon, along the stream, there was a
thread of bright, flickering, golden-green,--cottonwood seedlings. They
made a living, chattering screen behind which she took her bath every
morning.

Thea went down to the stream by the Indian water trail. She had found a
bathing-pool with a sand bottom, where the creek was damned by fallen
trees. The climb back was long and steep, and when she reached her
little house in the cliff she always felt fresh delight in its comfort
and inaccessibility. By the time she got there, the woolly red-and-gray
blankets were saturated with sunlight, and she sometimes fell asleep as
soon as she stretched her body on their warm surfaces. She used to
wonder at her own inactivity. She could lie there hour after hour in the
sun and listen to the strident whir of the big locusts, and to the
light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps. All her life she had been
hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had
been trying to catch up. Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out
long upon the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to catch
up with her. She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of
meaningless activity and undirected effort.

Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and
incomplete conceptions in her mind--almost in her hands. They were
scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with
fragrance and color and sound, but almost nothing to do with words. She
was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head all
morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was like a pleasant
sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than
like an idea, or an act of remembering. Music had never come to her in
that sensuous form before. It had always been a thing to be struggled
with, had always brought anxiety and exaltation and chagrin--never
content and indolence. Thea began to wonder whether people could not
utterly lose the power to work, as they can lose their voice or their
memory. She had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to
another--as if it mattered! And now her power to think seemed converted
into a power of sustained sensation. She could become a mere receptacle
for heat, or become a color, like the bright lizards that darted about
on the hot stones outside her door; or she could become a continuous
repetition of sound, like the cicadas.



III


THE faculty of observation was never highly developed in Thea Kronborg.
A great deal escaped her eye as she passed through the world. But the
things which were for her, she saw; she experienced them physically and
remembered them as if they had once been a part of herself. The roses
she used to see in the florists' shops in Chicago were merely roses. But
when she thought of the moonflowers that grew over Mrs. Tellamantez's
door, it was as if she had been that vine and had opened up in white
flowers every night. There were memories of light on the sand hills, of
masses of prickly-pear blossoms she had found in the desert in early
childhood, of the late afternoon sun pouring through the grape leaves
and the mint bed in Mrs. Kohler's garden, which she would never lose.
These recollection