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, _señorita_,” 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,
semjante 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 Paraíso_ 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. “_Señorita_,” 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 Parreño;_ 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, _señorita_,” 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, wunderschön!_”
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; “_schön_.”
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 consulting-room. “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.