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 _piñons_ 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

_piñons_. 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 _piñons_ 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 recollections were a part of her mind and

personality. In Chicago she had got almost nothing that went into her

subconscious self and took root there. But here, in Panther Canyon,

there were again things which seemed destined for her.

Panther Canyon was the home of innumerable swallows. They built nests

in the wall far above the hollow groove in which Thea’s own rock

chamber lay. They seldom ventured above the rim of the canyon, to the

flat, wind-swept tableland. Their world was the blue air-river between

the canyon walls. In that blue gulf the arrow-shaped birds swam all day

long, with only an occasional movement of the wings. The only sad thing

about them was their timidity; the way in which they lived their lives

between the echoing cliffs and never dared to rise out of the shadow of

the canyon walls. As they swam past her door, Thea often felt how easy

it would be to dream one’s life out in some cleft in the world.

From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive

sadness; now stronger, now fainter,—like the aromatic smell which the

dwarf cedars gave out in the sun,—but always present, a part of the air

one breathed. At night, when Thea dreamed about the canyon,—or in the

early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it,—her

conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in sunlight, the swallows,

the cedar smell, and that peculiar sadness—a voice out of the past, not

very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude

eternally.

Standing up in her lodge, Thea could with her thumb nail dislodge

flakes of carbon from the rock roof—the cooking-smoke of the Ancient

People. They were that near! A timid, nest-building folk, like the

swallows. How often Thea remembered Ray Kennedy’s moralizing about the

cliff cities. He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the

human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those

ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do

one’s best. On the first day that Thea climbed the water trail she

began to have intuitions about the women who had worn the path, and who

had spent so great a part of their lives going up and down it. She

found herself trying to walk as they must have walked, with a feeling

in her feet and knees and loins which she had never known before,—which

must have come up to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky

trail. She could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her back

as she climbed.

The empty houses, among which she wandered in the afternoon, the

blanketed one in which she lay all morning, were haunted by certain

fears and desires; feelings about warmth and cold and water and

physical strength. It seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of

those old people came up to her out of the rock shelf on which she lay;

that certain feelings were transmitted to her, suggestions that were

simple, insistent, and monotonous, like the beating of Indian drums.

They were not expressible in words, but seemed rather to translate

themselves into attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or

relaxation; the naked strength of youth, sharp as the sunshafts; the

crouching timorousness of age, the sullenness of women who waited for

their captors. At the first turning of the canyon there was a

half-ruined tower of yellow masonry, a watch-tower upon which the young

men used to entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes for a

whole morning Thea could see the coppery breast and shoulders of an

Indian youth there against the sky; see him throw the net, and watch

the struggle with the eagle.

Old Henry Biltmer, at the ranch, had been a great deal among the Pueblo

Indians who are the descendants of the Cliff-Dwellers. After supper he

used to sit and smoke his pipe by the kitchen stove and talk to Thea

about them. He had never found any one before who was interested in his

ruins. Every Sunday the old man prowled about in the canyon, and he had

come to know a good deal more about it than he could account for. He

had gathered up a whole chestful of Cliff-Dweller relics which he meant

to take back to Germany with him some day. He taught Thea how to find

things among the ruins: grinding-stones, and drills and needles made of

turkey-bones. There were fragments of pottery everywhere. Old Henry

explained to her that the Ancient People had developed masonry and

pottery far beyond any other crafts. After they had made houses for

themselves, the next thing was to house the precious water. He

explained to her how all their customs and ceremonies and their

religion went back to water. The men provided the food, but water was

the care of the women. The stupid women carried water for most of their

lives; the cleverer ones made the vessels to hold it. Their pottery was

their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the

precious element itself. The strongest Indian need was expressed in

those graceful jars, fashioned slowly by hand, without the aid of a

wheel.

When Thea took her bath at the bottom of the canyon, in the sunny pool

behind the screen of cottonwoods, she sometimes felt as if the water

must have sovereign qualities, from having been the object of so much

service and desire. That stream was the only living thing left of the

drama that had been played out in the canyon centuries ago. In the

rapid, restless heart of it, flowing swifter than the rest, there was a

continuity of life that reached back into the old time. The glittering

thread of current had a kind of lightly worn, loosely knit personality,

graceful and laughing. Thea’s bath came to have a ceremonial gravity.

The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic.

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water

between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed

through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until

the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the

broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a

mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element

which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too

strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in

their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had

been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a

vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught

the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

IV

Thea had a superstitious feeling about the potsherds, and liked better

to leave them in the dwellings where she found them. If she took a few

bits back to her own lodge and hid them under the blankets, she did it

guiltily, as if she were being watched. She was a guest in these

houses, and ought to behave as such. Nearly every afternoon she went to

the chambers which contained the most interesting fragments of pottery,

sat and looked at them for a while. Some of them were beautifully

decorated. This care, expended upon vessels that could not hold food or

water any better for the additional labor put upon them, made her heart

go out to those ancient potters. They had not only expressed their

desire, but they had expressed it as beautifully as they could. Food,

fire, water, and something else—even here, in this crack in the world,

so far back in the night of the past! Down here at the beginning that

painful thing was already stirring; the seed of sorrow, and of so much

delight.

There were jars done in a delicate overlay, like pine cones; and there

were many patterns in a low relief, like basket-work. Some of the

pottery was decorated in color, red and brown, black and white, in

graceful geometrical patterns. One day, on a fragment of a shallow

bowl, she found a crested serpent’s head, painted in red on

terra-cotta. Again she found half a bowl with a broad band of white

cliff-houses painted on a black ground. They were scarcely

conventionalized at all; there they were in the black border, just as

they stood in the rock before her. It brought her centuries nearer to

these people to find that they saw their houses exactly as she saw

them.

Yes, Ray Kennedy was right. All these things made one feel that one

ought to do one’s best, and help to fulfill some desire of the dust

that slept there. A dream had been dreamed there long ago, in the night

of ages, and the wind had whispered some promise to the sadness of the

savage. In their own way, those people had felt the beginnings of what

was to come. These potsherds were like fetters that bound one to a long

chain of human endeavor.

Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she

herself seemed older. She had never been alone for so long before, or

thought so much. Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily

contemplation of that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the

wrinkle of the cliff. Moonstone and Chicago had become vague. Here

everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood.

Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically

thrusting whatever she could grab. And here she must throw this lumber

away. The things that were really hers separated themselves from the

rest. Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer. She felt

united and strong.

When Thea had been at the Ottenburg ranch for two months, she got a

letter from Fred announcing that he “might be along at almost any time

now.” The letter came at night, and the next morning she took it down

into the canyon with her. She was delighted that he was coming soon.

She had never felt so grateful to any one, and she wanted to tell him

everything that had happened to her since she had been there—more than

had happened in all her life before. Certainly she liked Fred better

than any one else in the world. There was Harsanyi, of course—but

Harsanyi was always tired. Just now, and here, she wanted some one who

had never been tired, who could catch an idea and run with it.

She was ashamed to think what an apprehensive drudge she must always

have seemed to Fred, and she wondered why he had concerned himself

about her at all. Perhaps she would never be so happy or so

good-looking again, and she would like Fred to see her, for once, at

her best. She had not been singing much, but she knew that her voice

was more interesting than it had ever been before. She had begun to

understand that—with her, at least—voice was, first of all, vitality; a

lightness in the body and a driving power in the blood. If she had

that, she could sing. When she felt so keenly alive, lying on that

insensible shelf of stone, when her body bounded like a rubber ball

away from its hardness, then she could sing. This, too, she could

explain to Fred. He would know what she meant.

Another week passed. Thea did the same things as before, felt the same

influences, went over the same ideas; but there was a livelier movement

in her thoughts, and a freshening of sensation, like the brightness

which came over the underbrush after a shower. A persistent

affirmation—or denial—was going on in her, like the tapping of the

woodpecker in the one tall pine tree across the chasm. Musical phrases

drove each other rapidly through her mind, and the song of the cicada

was now too long and too sharp. Everything seemed suddenly to take the

form of a desire for action.

It was while she was in this abstracted state, waiting for the clock to

strike, that Thea at last made up her mind what she was going to try to

do in the world, and that she was going to Germany to study without

further loss of time. Only by the merest chance had she ever got to

Panther Canyon. There was certainly no kindly Providence that directed

one’s life; and one’s parents did not in the least care what became of

one, so long as one did not misbehave and endanger their comfort. One’s

life was at the mercy of blind chance. She had better take it in her

own hands and lose everything than meekly draw the plough under the rod

of parental guidance. She had seen it when she was at home last

summer,—the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward any

serious effort. Even to her father it seemed indecorous. Whenever she

spoke seriously, he looked apologetic. Yet she had clung fast to

whatever was left of Moonstone in her mind. No more of that! The

Cliff-Dwellers had lengthened her past. She had older and higher

obligations.

V

One Sunday afternoon late in July old Henry Biltmer was rheumatically

descending into the head of the canyon. The Sunday before had been one

of those cloudy days—fortunately rare—when the life goes out of that

country and it becomes a gray ghost, an empty, shivering uncertainty.

Henry had spent the day in the barn; his canyon was a reality only when

it was flooded with the light of its great lamp, when the yellow rocks

cast purple shadows, and the resin was fairly cooking in the corkscrew

cedars. The yuccas were in blossom now. Out of each clump of sharp

bayonet leaves rose a tall stalk hung with greenish-white bells with

thick, fleshy petals. The niggerhead cactus was thrusting its crimson

blooms up out of every crevice in the rocks.

Henry had come out on the pretext of hunting a spade and pick-axe that

young Ottenburg had borrowed, but he was keeping his eyes open. He was

really very curious about the new occupants of the canyon, and what

they found to do there all day long. He let his eye travel along the

gulf for a mile or so to the first turning, where the fissure zigzagged

out and then receded behind a stone promontory on which stood the

yellowish, crumbling ruin of the old watch-tower.

From the base of this tower, which now threw its shadow forward, bits

of rock kept flying out into the open gulf—skating upon the air until

they lost their momentum, then falling like chips until they rang upon

the ledges at the bottom of the gorge or splashed into the stream.

Biltmer shaded his eyes with his hand. There on the promontory, against

the cream-colored cliff, were two figures nimbly moving in the light,

both slender and agile, entirely absorbed in their game. They looked

like two boys. Both were hatless and both wore white shirts.

Henry forgot his pick-axe and followed the trail before the

cliff-houses toward the tower. Behind the tower, as he well knew, were

heaps of stones, large and small, piled against the face of the cliff.

He had always believed that the Indian watchmen piled them there for

ammunition. Thea and Fred had come upon these missiles and were

throwing them for distance. As Biltmer approached he could hear them

laughing, and he caught Thea’s voice, high and excited, with a ring of

vexation in it. Fred was teaching her to throw a heavy stone like a

discus. When it was Fred’s turn, he sent a triangular-shaped stone out

into the air with considerable skill. Thea watched it enviously,

standing in a half-defiant posture, her sleeves rolled above her elbows

and her face flushed with heat and excitement. After Fred’s third

missile had rung upon the rocks below, she snatched up a stone and

stepped impatiently out on the ledge in front of him. He caught her by

the elbows and pulled her back.

“Not so close, you silly! You’ll spin yourself off in a minute.”

“You went that close. There’s your heel-mark,” she retorted.

“Well, I know how. That makes a difference.” He drew a mark in the dust

with his toe. “There, that’s right. Don’t step over that. Pivot

yourself on your spine, and make a half turn. When you’ve swung your

length, let it go.”

Thea settled the flat piece of rock between her wrist and fingers,

faced the cliff wall, stretched her arm in position, whirled round on

her left foot to the full stretch of her body, and let the missile spin

out over the gulf. She hung expectantly in the air, forgetting to draw

back her arm, her eyes following the stone as if it carried her

fortunes with it. Her comrade watched her; there weren’t many girls who

could show a line like that from the toe to the thigh, from the

shoulder to the tip of the outstretched hand. The stone spent itself

and began to fall. Thea drew back and struck her knee furiously with

her palm.

“There it goes again! Not nearly so far as yours. What _is_ the matter

with me? Give me another.” She faced the cliff and whirled again. The

stone spun out, not quite so far as before.

Ottenburg laughed. “Why do you keep on working _after_ you’ve thrown

it? You can’t help it along then.”

Without replying, Thea stooped and selected another stone, took a deep

breath and made another turn. Fred watched the disk, exclaiming, “Good

girl! You got past the pine that time. That’s a good throw.”

She took out her handkerchief and wiped her glowing face and throat,

pausing to feel her right shoulder with her left hand.

“Ah—ha, you’ve made yourself sore, haven’t you? What did I tell you?

You go at things too hard. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Thea,”

Fred dusted his hands and began tucking in the blouse of his shirt,

“I’m going to make some single-sticks and teach you to fence. You’d be

all right there. You’re light and quick and you’ve got lots of drive in

you. I’d like to have you come at me with foils; you’d look so fierce,”

he chuckled.

She turned away from him and stubbornly sent out another stone, hanging

in the air after its flight. Her fury amused Fred, who took all games

lightly and played them well. She was breathing hard, and little beads

of moisture had gathered on her upper lip. He slipped his arm about

her. “If you will look as pretty as that—” he bent his head and kissed

her. Thea was startled, gave him an angry push, drove at him with her

free hand in a manner quite hostile. Fred was on his mettle in an

instant. He pinned both her arms down and kissed her resolutely.

When he released her, she turned away and spoke over her shoulder.

“That was mean of you, but I suppose I deserved what I got.”

“I should say you did deserve it,” Fred panted, “turning savage on me

like that! I should say you did deserve it!”

He saw her shoulders harden. “Well, I just said I deserved it, didn’t

I? What more do you want?”

“I want you to tell me why you flew at me like that! You weren’t

playing; you looked as if you’d like to murder me.”

She brushed back her hair impatiently. “I didn’t mean anything, really.

You interrupted me when I was watching the stone. I can’t jump from one

thing to another. I pushed you without thinking.”

Fred thought her back expressed contrition. He went up to her, stood

behind her with his chin above her shoulder, and said something in her

ear. Thea laughed and turned toward him. They left the stone-pile

carelessly, as if they had never been interested in it, rounded the

yellow tower, and disappeared into the second turn of the canyon, where

the dead city, interrupted by the jutting promontory, began again.

Old Biltmer had been somewhat embarrassed by the turn the game had

taken. He had not heard their conversation, but the pantomime against

the rocks was clear enough. When the two young people disappeared,

their host retreated rapidly toward the head of the canyon.

“I guess that young lady can take care of herself,” he chuckled. “Young

Fred, though, he has quite a way with them.”

VI

Day was breaking over Panther Canyon. The gulf was cold and full of

heavy, purplish twilight. The wood smoke which drifted from one of the

cliff-houses hung in a blue scarf across the chasm, until the draft

caught it and whirled it away. Thea was crouching in the doorway of her

rock house, while Ottenburg looked after the crackling fire in the next

cave. He was waiting for it to burn down to coals before he put the

coffee on to boil.

They had left the ranch house that morning a little after three

o’clock, having packed their camp equipment the day before, and had

crossed the open pasture land with their lantern while the stars were

still bright. During the descent into the canyon by lantern-light, they

were chilled through their coats and sweaters. The lantern crept slowly

along the rock trail, where the heavy air seemed to offer resistance.

The voice of the stream at the bottom of the gorge was hollow and

threatening, much louder and deeper than it ever was by day—another

voice altogether. The sullenness of the place seemed to say that the

world could get on very well without people, red or white; that under

the human world there was a geological world, conducting its silent,

immense operations which were indifferent to man. Thea had often seen

the desert sunrise,—a lighthearted affair, where the sun springs out of

bed and the world is golden in an instant. But this canyon seemed to

waken like an old man, with rheum and stiffness of the joints, with

heaviness, and a dull, malignant mind. She crouched against the wall

while the stars faded, and thought what courage the early races must

have had to endure so much for the little they got out of life.

At last a kind of hopefulness broke in the air. In a moment the pine

trees up on the edge of the rim were flashing with coppery fire. The

thin red clouds which hung above their pointed tops began to boil and

move rapidly, weaving in and out like smoke. The swallows darted out of

their rock houses as at a signal, and flew upward, toward the rim.

Little brown birds began to chirp in the bushes along the watercourse

down at the bottom of the ravine, where everything was still dusky and

pale. At first the golden light seemed to hang like a wave upon the rim

of the canyon; the trees and bushes up there, which one scarcely

noticed at noon, stood out magnified by the slanting rays. Long, thin

streaks of light began to reach quiveringly down into the canyon. The

red sun rose rapidly above the tops of the blazing pines, and its glow

burst into the gulf, about the very doorstep on which Thea sat. It

bored into the wet, dark underbrush. The dripping cherry bushes, the

pale aspens, and the frosty _piñons_ were glittering and trembling,

swimming in the liquid gold. All the pale, dusty little herbs of the

bean family, never seen by any one but a botanist, became for a moment

individual and important, their silky leaves quite beautiful with dew

and light. The arch of sky overhead, heavy as lead a little while

before, lifted, became more and more transparent, and one could look up

into depths of pearly blue.

The savor of coffee and bacon mingled with the smell of wet cedars

drying, and Fred called to Thea that he was ready for her. They sat

down in the doorway of his kitchen, with the warmth of the live coals

behind them and the sunlight on their faces, and began their breakfast,

Mrs. Biltmer’s thick coffee cups and the cream bottle between them, the

coffee-pot and frying-pan conveniently keeping hot among the embers.

“I thought you were going back on the whole proposition, Thea, when you

were crawling along with that lantern. I couldn’t get a word out of

you.”

“I know. I was cold and hungry, and I didn’t believe there was going to

be any morning, anyway. Didn’t you feel queer, at all?”

Fred squinted above his smoking cup. “Well, I am never strong for

getting up before the sun. The world looks unfurnished. When I first

lit the fire and had a square look at you, I thought I’d got the wrong

girl. Pale, grim—you were a sight!”

Thea leaned back into the shadow of the rock room and warmed her hands

over the coals. “It was dismal enough. How warm these walls are, all

the way round; and your breakfast is so good. I’m all right now, Fred.”

“Yes, you’re all right now.” Fred lit a cigarette and looked at her

critically as her head emerged into the sun again. “You get up every

morning just a little bit handsomer than you were the day before. I’d

love you just as much if you were not turning into one of the loveliest

women I’ve ever seen; but you are, and that’s a fact to be reckoned

with.” He watched her across the thin line of smoke he blew from his

lips. “What are you going to do with all that beauty and all that

talent, Miss Kronborg?”

She turned away to the fire again. “I don’t know what you’re talking

about,” she muttered with an awkwardness which did not conceal her

pleasure.

Ottenburg laughed softly. “Oh, yes, you do! Nobody better! You’re a

close one, but you give yourself away sometimes, like everybody else.

Do you know, I’ve decided that you never do a single thing without an

ulterior motive.” He threw away his cigarette, took out his

tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe. “You ride and fence and walk

and climb, but I know that all the while you’re getting somewhere in

your mind. All these things are instruments; and I, too, am an

instrument.” He looked up in time to intercept a quick, startled glance

from Thea. “Oh, I don’t mind,” he chuckled; “not a bit. Every woman,

every interesting woman, has ulterior motives, many of ’em less

creditable than yours. It’s your constancy that amuses me. You must

have been doing it ever since you were two feet high.”

Thea looked slowly up at her companion’s good-humored face. His eyes,

sometimes too restless and sympathetic in town, had grown steadier and

clearer in the open air. His short curly beard and yellow hair had

reddened in the sun and wind. The pleasant vigor of his person was

always delightful to her, something to signal to and laugh with in a

world of negative people. With Fred she was never becalmed. There was

always life in the air, always something coming and going, a rhythm of

feeling and action,—stronger than the natural accord of youth. As she

looked at him, leaning against the sunny wall, she felt a desire to be

frank with him. She was not willfully holding anything back. But, on

the other hand, she could not force things that held themselves back.

“Yes, it was like that when I was little,” she said at last. “I had to

be close, as you call it, or go under. But I didn’t know I had been

like that since you came. I’ve had nothing to be close about. I haven’t

thought about anything but having a good time with you. I’ve just

drifted.”

Fred blew a trail of smoke out into the breeze and looked knowing.

“Yes, you drift like a rifle ball, my dear. It’s your—your direction

that I like best of all. Most fellows wouldn’t, you know. I’m unusual.”

They both laughed, but Thea frowned questioningly. “Why wouldn’t most

fellows? Other fellows have liked me.”

“Yes, serious fellows. You told me yourself they were all old, or

solemn. But jolly fellows want to be the whole target. They would say

you were all brain and muscle; that you have no feeling.”

She glanced at him sidewise. “Oh, they would, would they?”

“Of course they would,” Fred continued blandly. “Jolly fellows have no

imagination. They want to be the animating force. When they are not

around, they want a girl to be—extinct,” he waved his hand. “Old

fellows like Mr. Nathanmeyer understand your kind; but among the young

ones, you are rather lucky to have found me. Even I wasn’t always so

wise. I’ve had my time of thinking it would not bore me to be the

Apollo of a homey flat, and I’ve paid out a trifle to learn better. All

those things get very tedious unless they are hooked up with an idea of

some sort. It’s because we _don’t_ come out here only to look at each

other and drink coffee that it’s so pleasant to—look at each other.”

Fred drew on his pipe for a while, studying Thea’s abstraction. She was

staring up at the far wall of the canyon with a troubled expression

that drew her eyes narrow and her mouth hard. Her hands lay in her lap,

one over the other, the fingers interlacing. “Suppose,” Fred came out

at length,—“suppose I were to offer you what most of the young men I

know would offer a girl they’d been sitting up nights about: a

comfortable flat in Chicago, a summer camp up in the woods, musical

evenings, and a family to bring up. Would it look attractive to you?”

Thea sat up straight and stared at him in alarm, glared into his eyes.

“Perfectly hideous!” she exclaimed.

Fred dropped back against the old stonework and laughed deep in his

chest. “Well, don’t be frightened. I won’t offer them. You’re not a

nest-building bird. You know I always liked your song, ‘Me for the jolt

of the breakers!’ I understand.”

She rose impatiently and walked to the edge of the cliff. “It’s not

that so much. It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your

life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is

your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you.” She stood

for a moment as if she were tortured by uncertainty, then turned

suddenly back to him. “Don’t talk about these things any more now,” she

entreated. “It isn’t that I want to keep anything from you. The trouble

is that I’ve got nothing to keep—except (you know as well as I) that

feeling. I told you about it in Chicago once. But it always makes me

unhappy to talk about it. It will spoil the day. Will you go for a

climb with me?” She held out her hands with a smile so eager that it

made Ottenburg feel how much she needed to get away from herself.

He sprang up and caught the hands she put out so cordially, and stood

swinging them back and forth. “I won’t tease you. A word’s enough to

me. But I love it, all the same. Understand?” He pressed her hands and

dropped them. “Now, where are you going to drag me?”

“I want you to drag me. Over there, to the other houses. They are more

interesting than these.” She pointed across the gorge to the row of

white houses in the other cliff. “The trail is broken away, but I got

up there once. It’s possible. You have to go to the bottom of the

canyon, cross the creek, and then go up hand-over-hand.”

Ottenburg, lounging against the sunny wall, his hands in the pockets of

his jacket, looked across at the distant dwellings. “It’s an awful

climb,” he sighed, “when I could be perfectly happy here with my pipe.

However—” He took up his stick and hat and followed Thea down the water

trail. “Do you climb this path every day? You surely earn your bath. I

went down and had a look at your pool the other afternoon. Neat place,

with all those little cottonwoods. Must be very becoming.”

“Think so?” Thea said over her shoulder, as she swung round a turn.

“Yes, and so do you, evidently. I’m becoming expert at reading your

meaning in your back. I’m behind you so much on these single-foot

trails. You don’t wear stays, do you?”

“Not here.”

“I wouldn’t, anywhere, if I were you. They will make you less elastic.

The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there’s a fortune

in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when

they’re well set up.”

Thea switched a _piñon_ branch back at him. “Oh, I’ll never get fat!

That I can promise you.”

Fred smiled, looking after her. “Keep that promise, no matter how many

others you break,” he drawled.

The upward climb, after they had crossed the stream, was at first a

breathless scramble through underbrush. When they reached the big

boulders, Ottenburg went first because he had the longer leg-reach, and

gave Thea a hand when the step was quite beyond her, swinging her up

until she could get a foothold. At last they reached a little platform

among the rocks, with only a hundred feet of jagged, sloping wall

between them and the cliff-houses.

Ottenburg lay down under a pine tree and declared that he was going to

have a pipe before he went any farther. “It’s a good thing to know when

to stop, Thea,” he said meaningly.

“I’m not going to stop now until I get there,” Thea insisted. “I’ll go

on alone.”

Fred settled his shoulder against the tree-trunk. “Go on if you like,

but I’m here to enjoy myself. If you meet a rattler on the way, have it

out with him.”

She hesitated, fanning herself with her felt hat. “I never have met

one.”

“There’s reasoning for you,” Fred murmured languidly.

Thea turned away resolutely and began to go up the wall, using an

irregular cleft in the rock for a path. The cliff, which looked almost

perpendicular from the bottom, was really made up of ledges and

boulders, and behind these she soon disappeared. For a long while Fred

smoked with half-closed eyes, smiling to himself now and again.

Occasionally he lifted an eyebrow as he heard the rattle of small

stones among the rocks above. “In a temper,” he concluded; “do her

good.” Then he subsided into warm drowsiness and listened to the

locusts in the yuccas, and the tap-tap of the old woodpecker that was

never weary of assaulting the big pine.

Fred had finished his pipe and was wondering whether he wanted another,

when he heard a call from the cliff far above him. Looking up, he saw

Thea standing on the edge of a projecting crag. She waved to him and

threw her arm over her head, as if she were snapping her fingers in the

air.

As he saw her there between the sky and the gulf, with that great wash

of air and the morning light about her, Fred recalled the brilliant

figure at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s. Thea was one of those people who emerge,

unexpectedly, larger than we are accustomed to see them. Even at this

distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity,—a kind

of brilliancy of motion,—of a personality that carried across big

spaces and expanded among big things. Lying still, with his hands under

his head, Ottenburg rhetorically addressed the figure in the air. “You

are the sort that used to run wild in Germany, dressed in their hair

and a piece of skin. Soldiers caught ’em in nets. Old Nathanmeyer,” he

mused, “would like a peep at her now. Knowing old fellow. Always buying

those Zorn etchings of peasant girls bathing. No sag in them either.

Must be the cold climate.” He sat up. “She’ll begin to pitch rocks on

me if I don’t move.” In response to another impatient gesture from the

crag, he rose and began swinging slowly up the trail.

It was the afternoon of that long day. Thea was lying on a blanket in

the door of her rock house. She and Ottenburg had come back from their

climb and had lunch, and he had gone off for a nap in one of the

cliff-houses farther down the path. He was sleeping peacefully, his

coat under his head and his face turned toward the wall.

Thea, too, was drowsy, and lay looking through halfclosed eyes up at

the blazing blue arch over the rim of the canyon. She was thinking of

nothing at all. Her mind, like her body, was full of warmth, lassitude,

physical content. Suddenly an eagle, tawny and of great size, sailed

over the cleft in which she lay, across the arch of sky. He dropped for

a moment into the gulf between the walls, then wheeled, and mounted

until his plumage was so steeped in light that he looked like a golden

bird. He swept on, following the course of the canyon a little way and

then disappearing beyond the rim. Thea sprang to her feet as if she had

been thrown up from the rock by volcanic action. She stood rigid on the

edge of the stone shelf, straining her eyes after that strong, tawny

flight. O eagle of eagles! Endeavor, achievement, desire, glorious

striving of human art! From a cleft in the heart of the world she

saluted it...It had come all the way; when men lived in caves, it was

there. A vanished race; but along the trails, in the stream, under the

spreading cactus, there still glittered in the sun the bits of their

frail clay vessels, fragments of their desire.

VII

From the day of Fred’s arrival, he and Thea were unceasingly active.

They took long rides into the Navajo pine forests, bought turquoises

and silver bracelets from the wandering Indian herdsmen, and rode

twenty miles to Flagstaff upon the slightest pretext. Thea had never

felt this pleasant excitement about any man before, and she found

herself trying very hard to please young Ottenburg. She was never

tired, never dull. There was a zest about waking up in the morning and

dressing, about walking, riding, even about sleep.

One morning when Thea came out from her room at seven o’clock, she

found Henry and Fred on the porch, looking up at the sky. The day was

already hot and there was no breeze. The sun was shining, but heavy

brown clouds were hanging in the west, like the smoke of a forest fire.

She and Fred had meant to ride to Flagstaff that morning, but Biltmer

advised against it, foretelling a storm. After breakfast they lingered

about the house, waiting for the weather to make up its mind. Fred had

brought his guitar, and as they had the dining-room to themselves, he

made Thea go over some songs with him. They got interested and kept it

up until Mrs. Biltmer came to set the table for dinner. Ottenburg knew

some of the Mexican things Spanish Johnny used to sing. Thea had never

before happened to tell him about Spanish Johnny, and he seemed more

interested in Johnny than in Dr. Archie or Wunsch.

After dinner they were too restless to endure the ranch house any

longer, and ran away to the canyon to practice with single-sticks. Fred

carried a slicker and a sweater, and he made Thea wear one of the

rubber hats that hung in Biltmer’s gun-room. As they crossed the

pasture land the clumsy slicker kept catching in the lacings of his

leggings.

“Why don’t you drop that thing?” Thea asked. “I won’t mind a shower.

I’ve been wet before.”

“No use taking chances.”

From the canyon they were unable to watch the sky, since only a strip

of the zenith was visible. The flat ledge about the watch-tower was the

only level spot large enough for single-stick exercise, and they were

still practicing there when, at about four o’clock, a tremendous roll

of thunder echoed between the cliffs and the atmosphere suddenly became

thick.

Fred thrust the sticks in a cleft in the rock. “We’re in for it, Thea.

Better make for your cave where there are blankets.” He caught her

elbow and hurried her along the path before the cliff-houses. They made

the half-mile at a quick trot, and as they ran the rocks and the sky

and the air between the cliffs turned a turbid green, like the color in

a moss agate. When they reached the blanketed rock room, they looked at

each other and laughed. Their faces had taken on a greenish pallor.

Thea’s hair, even, was green.

“Dark as pitch in here,” Fred exclaimed as they hurried over the old

rock doorstep. “But it’s warm. The rocks hold the heat. It’s going to

be terribly cold outside, all right.” He was interrupted by a deafening

peal of thunder. “Lord, what an echo! Lucky you don’t mind. It’s worth

watching out there. We needn’t come in yet.”

The green light grew murkier and murkier. The smaller vegetation was

blotted out. The yuccas, the cedars, and _piñons_ stood dark and rigid,

like bronze. The swallows flew up with sharp, terrified twitterings.

Even the quaking asps were still. While Fred and Thea watched from the

doorway, the light changed to purple. Clouds of dark vapor, like

chlorine gas, began to float down from the head of the canyon and hung

between them and the cliff-houses in the opposite wall. Before they

knew it, the wall itself had disappeared. The air was positively

venomous-looking, and grew colder every minute. The thunder seemed to

crash against one cliff, then against the other, and to go shrieking

off into the inner canyon.

The moment the rain broke, it beat the vapors down. In the gulf before

them the water fell in spouts, and dashed from the high cliffs

overhead. It tore aspens and chokecherry bushes out of the ground and

left the yuccas hanging by their tough roots. Only the little cedars

stood black and unmoved in the torrents that fell from so far above.

The rock chamber was full of fine spray from the streams of water that

shot over the doorway. Thea crept to the back wall and rolled herself

in a blanket, and Fred threw the heavier blankets over her. The wool of

the Navajo sheep was soon kindled by the warmth of her body, and was

impenetrable to dampness. Her hair, where it hung below the rubber hat,

gathered the moisture like a sponge. Fred put on the slicker, tied the

sweater about his neck, and settled himself cross-legged beside her.

The chamber was so dark that, although he could see the outline of her

head and shoulders, he could not see her face. He struck a wax match to

light his pipe. As he sheltered it between his hands, it sizzled and

sputtered, throwing a yellow flicker over Thea and her blankets.

“You look like a gypsy,” he said as he dropped the match. “Any one

you’d rather be shut up with than me? No? Sure about that?”

“I think I am. Aren’t you cold?”

“Not especially.” Fred smoked in silence, listening to the roar of the

water outside. “We may not get away from here right away,” he remarked.

“I shan’t mind. Shall you?”

He laughed grimly and pulled on his pipe. “Do you know where you’re at,

Miss Thea Kronborg?” he said at last. “You’ve got me going pretty hard,

I suppose you know. I’ve had a lot of sweethearts, but I’ve never been

so much—engrossed before. What are you going to do about it?” He heard

nothing from the blankets. “Are you going to play fair, or is it about

my cue to cut away?”

“I’ll play fair. I don’t see why you want to go.”

“What do you want me around for?—to play with?”

Thea struggled up among the blankets. “I want you for everything. I

don’t know whether I’m what people call in love with you or not. In

Moonstone that meant sitting in a hammock with somebody. I don’t want

to sit in a hammock with you, but I want to do almost everything else.

Oh, hundreds of things!”

“If I run away, will you go with me?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. Maybe I would.” She freed

herself from her wrappings and stood up. “It’s not raining so hard now.

Hadn’t we better start this minute? It will be night before we get to

Biltmer’s.”

Fred struck another match. “It’s seven. I don’t know how much of the

path may be washed away. I don’t even know whether I ought to let you

try it without a lantern.”

Thea went to the doorway and looked out. “There’s nothing else to do.

The sweater and the slicker will keep me dry, and this will be my

chance to find out whether these shoes are really water-tight. They

cost a week’s salary.” She retreated to the back of the cave. “It’s

getting blacker every minute.”

Ottenburg took a brandy flask from his coat pocket. “Better have some

of this before we start. Can you take it without water?”

Thea lifted it obediently to her lips. She put on the sweater and Fred

helped her to get the clumsy slicker on over it. He buttoned it and

fastened the high collar. She could feel that his hands were hurried

and clumsy. The coat was too big, and he took off his necktie and

belted it in at the waist. While she tucked her hair more securely

under the rubber hat he stood in front of her, between her and the gray

doorway, without moving.

“Are you ready to go?” she asked carelessly.

“If you are,” he spoke quietly, without moving, except to bend his head

forward a little.

Thea laughed and put her hands on his shoulders. “You know how to

handle me, don’t you?” she whispered. For the first time, she kissed

him without constraint or embarrassment.

“Thea, Thea, Thea!” Fred whispered her name three times, shaking her a

little as if to waken her. It was too dark to see, but he could feel

that she was smiling.

When she kissed him she had not hidden her face on his shoulder,—she

had risen a little on her toes, and stood straight and free. In that

moment when he came close to her actual personality, he felt in her the

same expansion that he had noticed at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s. She became

freer and stronger under impulses. When she rose to meet him like that,

he felt her flash into everything that she had ever suggested to him,

as if she filled out her own shadow.

She pushed him away and shot past him out into the rain. “Now for it,

Fred,” she called back exultantly. The rain was pouring steadily down

through the dying gray twilight, and muddy streams were spouting and

foaming over the cliff.

Fred caught her and held her back. “Keep behind me, Thea. I don’t know

about the path. It may be gone altogether. Can’t tell what there is

under this water.”

But the path was older than the white man’s Arizona. The rush of water

had washed away the dust and stones that lay on the surface, but the

rock skeleton of the Indian trail was there, ready for the foot. Where

the streams poured down through gullies, there was always a cedar or a

_piñon_ to cling to. By wading and slipping and climbing, they got

along. As they neared the head of the canyon, where the path lifted and

rose in steep loops to the surface of the plateau, the climb was more

difficult. The earth above had broken away and washed down over the

trail, bringing rocks and bushes and even young trees with it. The last

ghost of daylight was dying and there was no time to lose. The canyon

behind them was already black.

“We’ve got to go right through the top of this pine tree, Thea. No time

to hunt a way around. Give me your hand.” After they had crashed

through the mass of branches, Fred stopped abruptly. “Gosh, what a

hole! Can you jump it? Wait a minute.”

He cleared the washout, slipped on the wet rock at the farther side,

and caught himself just in time to escape a tumble. “If I could only

find something to hold to, I could give you a hand. It’s so cursed

dark, and there are no trees here where they’re needed. Here’s

something; it’s a root. It will hold all right.” He braced himself on

the rock, gripped the crooked root with one hand and swung himself

across toward Thea, holding out his arm. “Good jump! I must say you

don’t lose your nerve in a tight place. Can you keep at it a little

longer? We’re almost out. Have to make that next ledge. Put your foot

on my knee and catch something to pull by.”

Thea went up over his shoulder. “It’s hard ground up here,” she panted.

“Did I wrench your arm when I slipped then? It was a cactus I grabbed,

and it startled me.”

“Now, one more pull and we’re on the level.”

They emerged gasping upon the black plateau. In the last five minutes

the darkness had solidified and it seemed as if the skies were pouring

black water. They could not see where the sky ended or the plain began.

The light at the ranch house burned a steady spark through the rain.

Fred drew Thea’s arm through his and they struck off toward the light.

They could not see each other, and the rain at their backs seemed to

drive them along. They kept laughing as they stumbled over tufts of

grass or stepped into slippery pools. They were delighted with each

other and with the adventure which lay behind them.

“I can’t even see the whites of your eyes, Thea. But I’d know who was

here stepping out with me, anywhere. Part coyote you are, by the feel

of you. When you make up your mind to jump, you jump! My gracious,

what’s the matter with your hand?”

“Cactus spines. Didn’t I tell you when I grabbed the cactus? I thought

it was a root. Are we going straight?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere near it, I think. I’m very comfortable, aren’t

you? You’re warm, except your cheeks. How funny they are when they’re

wet. Still, you always feel like you. I like this. I could walk to

Flagstaff. It’s fun, not being able to see anything. I feel surer of

you when I can’t see you. Will you run away with me?”

Thea laughed. “I won’t run far to-night. I’ll think about it. Look,

Fred, there’s somebody coming.”

“Henry, with his lantern. Good enough! Halloo! Hallo—o—o!” Fred

shouted.

The moving light bobbed toward them. In half an hour Thea was in her

big feather bed, drinking hot lentil soup, and almost before the soup

was swallowed she was asleep.

VIII

On the first day of September Fred Ottenburg and Thea Kronborg left

Flagstaff by the east-bound express. As the bright morning advanced,

they sat alone on the rear platform of the observation car, watching

the yellow miles unfold and disappear. With complete content they saw

the brilliant, empty country flash by. They were tired of the desert

and the dead races, of a world without change or ideas. Fred said he

was glad to sit back and let the Santa Fé do the work for a while.

“And where are we going, anyhow?” he added.

“To Chicago, I suppose. Where else would we be going?” Thea hunted for

a handkerchief in her handbag.

“I wasn’t sure, so I had the trunks checked to Albuquerque. We can

recheck there to Chicago, if you like. Why Chicago? You’ll never go

back to Bowers. Why wouldn’t this be a good time to make a run for it?

We could take the southern branch at Albuquerque, down to El Paso, and

then over into Mexico. We are exceptionally free. Nobody waiting for us

anywhere.”

Thea sighted along the steel rails that quivered in the light behind

them. “I don’t see why I couldn’t marry you in Chicago, as well as any

place,” she brought out with some embarrassment.

Fred took the handbag out of her nervous clasp and swung it about on

his finger. “You’ve no particular love for that spot, have you?

Besides, as I’ve told you, my family would make a row. They are an

excitable lot. They discuss and argue everlastingly. The only way I can

ever put anything through is to go ahead, and convince them afterward.”

“Yes; I understand. I don’t mind that. I don’t want to marry your

family. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to marry mine. But I don’t see why

we have to go so far.”

“When we get to Winslow, you look about the freight yards and you’ll

probably see several yellow cars with my name on them. That’s why, my

dear. When your visiting-card is on every beer bottle, you can’t do

things quietly. Things get into the papers.” As he watched her troubled

expression, he grew anxious. He leaned forward on his camp-chair, and

kept twirling the handbag between his knees. “Here’s a suggestion,

Thea,” he said presently. “Dismiss it if you don’t like it: suppose we

go down to Mexico on the chance. You’ve never seen anything like Mexico

City; it will be a lark for you, anyhow. If you change your mind, and

don’t want to marry me, you can go back to Chicago, and I’ll take a

steamer from Vera Cruz and go up to New York. When I get to Chicago,

you’ll be at work, and nobody will ever be the wiser. No reason why we

shouldn’t both travel in Mexico, is there? You’ll be traveling alone.

I’ll merely tell you the right places to stop, and come to take you

driving. I won’t put any pressure on you. Have I ever?” He swung the

bag toward her and looked up under her hat.

“No, you haven’t,” she murmured. She was thinking that her own position

might be less difficult if he had used what he called pressure. He

clearly wished her to take the responsibility.

“You have your own future in the back of your mind all the time,” Fred

began, “and I have it in mine. I’m not going to try to carry you off,

as I might another girl. If you wanted to quit me, I couldn’t hold you,

no matter how many times you had married me. I don’t want to

overpersuade you. But I’d like mighty well to get you down to that

jolly old city, where everything would please you, and give myself a

chance. Then, if you thought you could have a better time with me than

without me, I’d try to grab you before you changed your mind. You are

not a sentimental person.”

Thea drew her veil down over her face. “I think I am, a little; about

you,” she said quietly. Fred’s irony somehow hurt her.

“What’s at the bottom of your mind, Thea?” he asked hurriedly. “I can’t

tell. Why do you consider it at all, if you’re not sure? Why are you

here with me now?”

Her face was half-averted. He was thinking that it looked older and

more firm—almost hard—under a veil.

“Isn’t it possible to do things without having any very clear reason?”

she asked slowly. “I have no plan in the back of my mind. Now that I’m

with you, I want to be with you; that’s all. I can’t settle down to

being alone again. I am here to-day because I want to be with you

to-day.” She paused. “One thing, though; if I gave you my word, I’d

keep it. And you could hold me, though you don’t seem to think so.

Maybe I’m not sentimental, but I’m not very light, either. If I went

off with you like this, it wouldn’t be to amuse myself.”

Ottenburg’s eyes fell. His lips worked nervously for a moment. “Do you

mean that you really care for me, Thea Kronborg?” he asked unsteadily.

“I guess so. It’s like anything else. It takes hold of you and you’ve

got to go through with it, even if you’re afraid. I was afraid to leave

Moonstone, and afraid to leave Harsanyi. But I had to go through with

it.”

“And are you afraid now?” Fred asked slowly.

“Yes; more than I’ve ever been. But I don’t think I could go back. The

past closes up behind one, somehow. One would rather have a new kind of

misery. The old kind seems like death or unconsciousness. You can’t

force your life back into that mould again. No, one can’t go back.” She

rose and stood by the back grating of the platform, her hand on the

brass rail.

Fred went to her side. She pushed up her veil and turned her most

glowing face to him. Her eyes were wet and there were tears on her

lashes, but she was smiling the rare, whole-hearted smile he had seen

once or twice before. He looked at her shining eyes, her parted lips,

her chin a little lifted. It was as if they were colored by a sunrise

he could not see. He put his hand over hers and clasped it with a

strength she felt. Her eyelashes trembled, her mouth softened, but her

eyes were still brilliant.

“Will you always be like you were down there, if I go with you?” she

asked under her breath.

His fingers tightened on hers. “By God, I will!” he muttered.

“That’s the only promise I’ll ask you for. Now go away for a while and

let me think about it. Come back at lunchtime and I’ll tell you. Will

that do?”

“Anything will do, Thea, if you’ll only let me keep an eye on you. The

rest of the world doesn’t interest me much. You’ve got me in deep.”

Fred dropped her hand and turned away. As he glanced back from the

front end of the observation car, he saw that she was still standing

there, and any one would have known that she was brooding over

something. The earnestness of her head and shoulders had a certain

nobility. He stood looking at her for a moment.

When he reached the forward smoking-car, Fred took a seat at the end,

where he could shut the other passengers from his sight. He put on his

traveling-cap and sat down wearily, keeping his head near the window.

“In any case, I shall help her more than I shall hurt her,” he kept

saying to himself. He admitted that this was not the only motive which

impelled him, but it was one of them. “I’ll make it my business in life

to get her on. There’s nothing else I care about so much as seeing her

have her chance. She hasn’t touched her real force yet. She isn’t even

aware of it. Lord, don’t I know something about them? There isn’t one

of them that has such a depth to draw from. She’ll be one of the great

artists of our time. Playing accompaniments for that cheese-faced

sneak! I’ll get her off to Germany this winter, or take her. She hasn’t

got any time to waste now. I’ll make it up to her, all right.”

Ottenburg certainly meant to make it up to her, in so far as he could.

His feeling was as generous as strong human feelings are likely to be.

The only trouble was, that he was married already, and had been since

he was twenty.

His older friends in Chicago, people who had been friends of his

family, knew of the unfortunate state of his personal affairs; but they

were people whom in the natural course of things Thea Kronborg would

scarcely meet. Mrs. Frederick Ottenburg lived in California, at Santa

Barbara, where her health was supposed to be better than elsewhere, and

her husband lived in Chicago. He visited his wife every winter to

reinforce her position, and his devoted mother, although her hatred for

her daughter-inlaw was scarcely approachable in words, went to Santa

Barbara every year to make things look better and to relieve her son.

When Frederick Ottenburg was beginning his junior year at Harvard, he

got a letter from Dick Brisbane, a Kansas City boy he knew, telling him

that his _fiancée_, Miss Edith Beers, was going to New York to buy her

trousseau. She would be at the Holland House, with her aunt and a girl

from Kansas City who was to be a bridesmaid, for two weeks or more. If

Ottenburg happened to be going down to New York, would he call upon

Miss Beers and “show her a good time”?

Fred did happen to be going to New York. He was going down from New

Haven, after the Thanksgiving game. He called on Miss Beers and found

her, as he that night telegraphed Brisbane, a “ripping beauty, no

mistake.” He took her and her aunt and her uninteresting friend to the

theater and to the opera, and he asked them to lunch with him at the

Waldorf. He took no little pains in arranging the luncheon with the

head waiter. Miss Beers was the sort of girl with whom a young man

liked to seem experienced. She was dark and slender and fiery. She was

witty and slangy; said daring things and carried them off with

_nonchalance_. Her childish extravagance and contempt for all the

serious facts of life could be charged to her father’s generosity and

his long packing-house purse. Freaks that would have been vulgar and

ostentatious in a more simpleminded girl, in Miss Beers seemed

whimsical and picturesque. She darted about in magnificent furs and

pumps and close-clinging gowns, though that was the day of full skirts.

Her hats were large and floppy. When she wriggled out of her moleskin

coat at luncheon, she looked like a slim black weasel. Her satin dress

was a mere sheath, so conspicuous by its severity and scantness that

every one in the dining-room stared. She ate nothing but alligator-pear

salad and hothouse grapes, drank a little champagne, and took cognac in

her coffee. She ridiculed, in the raciest slang, the singers they had

heard at the opera the night before, and when her aunt pretended to

reprove her, she murmured indifferently, “What’s the matter with you,

old sport?” She rattled on with a subdued loquaciousness, always

keeping her voice low and monotonous, always looking out of the corner

of her eye and speaking, as it were, in asides, out of the corner of

her mouth. She was scornful of everything,—which became her eyebrows.

Her face was mobile and discontented, her eyes quick and black. There

was a sort of smouldering fire about her, young Ottenburg thought. She

entertained him prodigiously.

After luncheon Miss Beers said she was going uptown to be fitted, and

that she would go alone because her aunt made her nervous. When Fred

held her coat for her, she murmured, “Thank you, Alphonse,” as if she

were addressing the waiter. As she stepped into a hansom, with a long

stretch of thin silk stocking, she said negligently, over her fur

collar, “Better let me take you along and drop you somewhere.” He

sprang in after her, and she told the driver to go to the Park.

It was a bright winter day, and bitterly cold. Miss Beers asked Fred to

tell her about the game at New Haven, and when he did so paid no

attention to what he said. She sank back into the hansom and held her

muff before her face, lowering it occasionally to utter laconic remarks

about the people in the carriages they passed, interrupting Fred’s

narrative in a disconcerting manner. As they entered the Park he

happened to glance under her wide black hat at her black eyes and

hair—the muff hid everything else—and discovered that she was crying.

To his solicitous inquiry she replied that it “was enough to make you

damp, to go and try on dresses to marry a man you weren’t keen about.”

Further explanations followed. She had thought she was “perfectly

cracked” about Brisbane, until she met Fred at the Holland House three

days ago. Then she knew she would scratch Brisbane’s eyes out if she

married him. What was she going to do?

Fred told the driver to keep going. What did she want to do? Well, she

didn’t know. One had to marry somebody, after all the machinery had

been put in motion. Perhaps she might as well scratch Brisbane as

anybody else; for scratch she would, if she didn’t get what she wanted.

Of course, Fred agreed, one had to marry somebody. And certainly this

girl beat anything he had ever been up against before. Again he told

the driver to go ahead. Did she mean that she would think of marrying

him, by any chance? Of course she did, Alphonse. Hadn’t he seen that

all over her face three days ago? If he hadn’t, he was a snowball.

By this time Fred was beginning to feel sorry for the driver. Miss

Beers, however, was compassionless. After a few more turns, Fred

suggested tea at the Casino. He was very cold himself, and remembering

the shining silk hose and pumps, he wondered that the girl was not

frozen. As they got out of the hansom, he slipped the driver a bill and

told him to have something hot while he waited.

At the tea-table, in a snug glass enclosure, with the steam sputtering

in the pipes beside them and a brilliant winter sunset without, they

developed their plan. Miss Beers had with her plenty of money, destined

for tradesmen, which she was quite willing to divert into other

channels—the first excitement of buying a trousseau had worn off,

anyway. It was very much like any other shopping. Fred had his

allowance and a few hundred he had won on the game. She would meet him

to-morrow morning at the Jersey ferry. They could take one of the

west-bound Pennsylvania trains and go—anywhere, some place where the

laws weren’t too fussy.—Fred had not even thought about the laws!—It

would be all right with her father; he knew Fred’s family.

Now that they were engaged, she thought she would like to drive a

little more. They were jerked about in the cab for another hour through

the deserted Park. Miss Beers, having removed her hat, reclined upon

Fred’s shoulder.

The next morning they left Jersey City by the latest fast train out.

They had some misadventures, crossed several States before they found a

justice obliging enough to marry two persons whose names automatically

instigated inquiry. The bride’s family were rather pleased with her

originality; besides, any one of the Ottenburg boys was clearly a

better match than young Brisbane. With Otto Ottenburg, however, the

affair went down hard, and to his wife, the once proud Katarina Fürst,

such a disappointment was almost unbearable. Her sons had always been

clay in her hands, and now the _geliebter Sohn_ had escaped her.

Beers, the packer, gave his daughter a house in St. Louis, and Fred

went into his father’s business. At the end of a year, he was mutely

appealing to his mother for sympathy. At the end of two, he was

drinking and in open rebellion. He had learned to detest his wife. Her

wastefulness and cruelty revolted him. The ignorance and the fatuous

conceit which lay behind her grimacing mask of slang and ridicule

humiliated him so deeply that he became absolutely reckless. Her grace

was only an uneasy wriggle, her audacity was the result of insolence

and envy, and her wit was restless spite. As her personal mannerisms

grew more and more odious to him, he began to dull his perceptions with

champagne. He had it for tea, he drank it with dinner, and during the

evening he took enough to insure that he would be well insulated when

he got home. This behavior spread alarm among his friends. It was

scandalous, and it did not occur among brewers. He was violating the

_noblesse oblige_ of his guild. His father and his father’s partners

looked alarmed.

When Fred’s mother went to him and with clasped hands entreated an

explanation, he told her that the only trouble was that he couldn’t

hold enough wine to make life endurable, so he was going to get out

from under and enlist in the navy. He didn’t want anything but the

shirt on his back and clean salt air. His mother could look out; he was

going to make a scandal.

Mrs. Otto Ottenburg went to Kansas City to see Mr. Beers, and had the

satisfaction of telling him that he had brought up his daughter like a

savage, _eine Ungebildete_. All the Ottenburgs and all the Beers, and

many of their friends, were drawn into the quarrel. It was to public

opinion, however and not to his mother’s activities, that Fred owed his

partial escape from bondage. The cosmopolitan brewing world of St.

Louis had conservative standards. The Ottenburgs’ friends were not

predisposed in favor of the plunging Kansas City set, and they disliked

young Fred’s wife from the day that she was brought among them. They

found her ignorant and ill-bred and insufferably impertinent. When they

became aware of how matters were going between her and Fred, they

omitted no opportunity to snub her. Young Fred had always been popular,

and St. Louis people took up his cause with warmth. Even the younger

men, among whom Mrs. Fred tried to draft a following, at first avoided

and then ignored her. Her defeat was so conspicuous, her life became

such a desert, that she at last consented to accept the house in Santa

Barbara which Mrs. Otto Ottenburg had long owned and cherished. This

villa, with its luxuriant gardens, was the price of Fred’s furlough.

His mother was only too glad to offer it in his behalf. As soon as his

wife was established in California, Fred was transferred from St. Louis

to Chicago.

A divorce was the one thing Edith would never, never, give him. She

told him so, and she told his family so, and her father stood behind

her. She would enter into no arrangement that might eventually lead to

divorce. She had insulted her husband before guests and servants, had

scratched his face, thrown hand-mirrors and hairbrushes and

nail-scissors at him often enough, but she knew that Fred was hardly

the fellow who would go into court and offer that sort of evidence. In

her behavior with other men she was discreet.

After Fred went to Chicago, his mother visited him often, and dropped a

word to her old friends there, who were already kindly disposed toward

the young man. They gossiped as little as was compatible with the

interest they felt, undertook to make life agreeable for Fred, and told

his story only where they felt it would do good: to girls who seemed to

find the young brewer attractive. So far, he had behaved well, and had

kept out of entanglements.

Since he was transferred to Chicago, Fred had been abroad several

times, and had fallen more and more into the way of going about among

young artists,—people with whom personal relations were incidental.

With women, and even girls, who had careers to follow, a young man

might have pleasant friendships without being regarded as a prospective

suitor or lover. Among artists his position was not irregular, because

with them his marriageableness was not an issue. His tastes, his

enthusiasm, and his agreeable personality made him welcome.

With Thea Kronborg he had allowed himself more liberty than he usually

did in his friendships or gallantries with young artists, because she

seemed to him distinctly not the marrying kind. She impressed him as

equipped to be an artist, and to be nothing else; already directed,

concentrated, formed as to mental habit. He was generous and

sympathetic, and she was lonely and needed friendship; needed

cheerfulness. She had not much power of reaching out toward useful

people or useful experiences, did not see opportunities. She had no

tact about going after good positions or enlisting the interest of

influential persons. She antagonized people rather than conciliated

them. He discovered at once that she had a merry side, a robust humor

that was deep and hearty, like her laugh, but it slept most of the time

under her own doubts and the dullness of her life. She had not what is

called a “sense of humor.” That is, she had no intellectual humor; no

power to enjoy the absurdities of people, no relish of their

pretentiousness and inconsistencies—which only depressed her. But her

joviality, Fred felt, was an asset, and ought to be developed. He

discovered that she was more receptive and more effective under a

pleasant stimulus than she was under the gray grind which she

considered her salvation. She was still Methodist enough to believe

that if a thing were hard and irksome, it must be good for her. And

yet, whatever she did well was spontaneous. Under the least glow of

excitement, as at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s, he had seen the apprehensive,

frowning drudge of Bowers’s studio flash into a resourceful and

consciously beautiful woman.

His interest in Thea was serious, almost from the first, and so sincere

that he felt no distrust of himself. He believed that he knew a great

deal more about her possibilities than Bowers knew, and he liked to

think that he had given her a stronger hold on life. She had never seen

herself or known herself as she did at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s musical

evenings. She had been a different girl ever since. He had not

anticipated that she would grow more fond of him than his immediate

usefulness warranted. He thought he knew the ways of artists, and, as

he said, she must have been “at it from her cradle.” He had imagined,

perhaps, but never really believed, that he would find her waiting for

him sometime as he found her waiting on the day he reached the Biltmer

ranch. Once he found her so—well, he did not pretend to be anything

more or less than a reasonably well-intentioned young man. A lovesick

girl or a flirtatious woman he could have handled easily enough. But a

personality like that, unconsciously revealing itself for the first

time under the exaltation of a personal feeling,—what could one do but

watch it? As he used to say to himself, in reckless moments back there

in the canyon, “You can’t put out a sunrise.” He had to watch it, and

then he had to share it.

Besides, was he really going to do her any harm? The Lord knew he would

marry her if he could! Marriage would be an incident, not an end with

her; he was sure of that. If it were not he, it would be some one else;

some one who would be a weight about her neck, probably; who would hold

her back and beat her down and divert her from the first plunge for

which he felt she was gathering all her energies. He meant to help her,

and he could not think of another man who would. He went over his

unmarried friends, East and West, and he could not think of one who

would know what she was driving at—or care. The clever ones were

selfish, the kindly ones were stupid.

“Damn it, if she’s going to fall in love with somebody, it had better

be me than any of the others—of the sort she’d find. Get her tied up

with some conceited ass who’d try to make her over, train her like a

puppy! Give one of ’em a big nature like that, and he’d be horrified.

He wouldn’t show his face in the clubs until he’d gone after her and

combed her down to conform to some fool idea in his own head—put there

by some other woman, too, his first sweetheart or his grandmother or a

maiden aunt. At least, I understand her. I know what she needs and

where she’s bound, and I mean to see that she has a fighting chance.”

His own conduct looked crooked, he admitted; but he asked himself

whether, between men and women, all ways were not more or less crooked.

He believed those which are called straight were the most dangerous of

all. They seemed to him, for the most part, to lie between windowless

stone walls, and their rectitude had been achieved at the expense of

light and air. In their unquestioned regularity lurked every sort of

human cruelty and meanness, and every kind of humiliation and

suffering. He would rather have any woman he cared for wounded than

crushed. He would deceive her not once, he told himself fiercely, but a

hundred times, to keep her free.

When Fred went back to the observation car at one o’clock, after the

luncheon call, it was empty, and he found Thea alone on the platform.

She put out her hand, and met his eyes.

“It’s as I said. Things have closed behind me. I can’t go back, so I am

going on—to Mexico?” She lifted her face with an eager, questioning

smile.

Fred met it with a sinking heart. Had he really hoped she would give

him another answer? He would have given pretty much anything—But there,

that did no good. He could give only what he had. Things were never

complete in this world; you had to snatch at them as they came or go

without. Nobody could look into her face and draw back, nobody who had

any courage. She had courage enough for anything—look at her mouth and

chin and eyes! Where did it come from, that light? How could a face, a

familiar face, become so the picture of hope, be painted with the very

colors of youth’s exaltation? She was right; she was not one of those

who draw back. Some people get on by avoiding dangers, others by riding

through them.

They stood by the railing looking back at the sand levels, both feeling

that the train was steaming ahead very fast. Fred’s mind was a

confusion of images and ideas. Only two things were clear to him: the

force of her determination, and the belief that, handicapped as he was,

he could do better by her than another man would do. He knew he would

always remember her, standing there with that expectant,

forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.