she must have inherited the “constitution” which he was never tired of
admiring in her mother.
One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found
Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight
was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a
big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand
and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy forehead
and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her mother’s
room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed darning
stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck and a
determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and
unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in
bed, still looked like a girl’s. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie
respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined.
Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had
brought her husband some property, too,—one fourth of her father’s
broad acres in Nebraska,—but this she kept in her own name. She had
profound respect for her husband’s erudition and eloquence. She sat
under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by his
stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by
lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the
pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his administration of
worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at
table; she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever
parental sentiment there was in the house, to remember birthdays and
anniversaries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals. It
was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and their conduct in
some sort of order, and this she accomplished with a success that was a
source of wonder to her neighbors. As she used to remark, and her
husband admiringly to echo, she “had never lost one.” With all his
flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact, punctual way
in which his wife got her children into the world and along in it. He
believed, and he was right in believing, that the sovereign State of
Colorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.
Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in
heaven. More modern views would not have startled her; they would simply
have seemed foolish—thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built
the tower of Babel, or like Axel’s plan to breed ostriches in the
chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on
this and other matters, it would have been difficult to say, but once
formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questioned her
convictions than she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even
tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong prejudices, and she
never forgave.
When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg was reflecting that
the washing was a week behind, and deciding what she had better do about
it. The arrival of a new baby meant a revision of her entire domestic
schedule, and as she drove her needle along she had been working out new
sleeping arrangements and cleaning days. The doctor had entered the
house without knocking, after making noise enough in the hall to prepare
his patients. Thea was reading, her book propped up before her in the
sunlight.
“Mustn’t do that; bad for your eyes,” he said, as Thea shut the book
quickly and slipped it under the covers.
Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: “Bring the baby here, doctor, and
have that chair. She wanted him in there for company.”
Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow paper bag down on
Thea’s coverlid and winked at her. They had a code of winks and
grimaces. When he went in to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag
cautiously, trying to keep it from crackling. She drew out a long bunch
of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they had been
packed still clinging to them. They were called Malaga grapes in
Moonstone, and once or twice during the winter the leading grocer got a
keg of them. They were used mainly for table decoration, about
Christmas-time. Thea had never had more than one grape at a time before.
When the doctor came back she was holding the almost transparent fruit
up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green skins softly with the tips of
her fingers. She did not thank him; she only snapped her eyes at him in
a special way which he understood, and, when he gave her his hand, put
it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if she were trying to do so
without knowing it—and without his knowing it.
Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair. “And how’s Thea feeling
to-day?”
He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a third person
overheard his conversation. Big and handsome and superior to his fellow
townsmen as Dr. Archie was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter
Kronborg he often dodged behind a professional manner. There was
sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self consciousness all over
his big body, which made him awkward—likely to stumble, to kick up
rugs, or to knock over chairs. If any one was very sick, he forgot
himself, but he had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.
Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with pleasure. “All right.
I like to be sick. I have more fun then than other times.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t have to go to school, and I don’t have to practice. I can read
all I want to, and have good things,”—she patted the grapes. “I had
lots of fun that time I mashed my finger and you wouldn’t let Professor
Wunsch make me practice. Only I had to do left hand, even then. I think
that was mean.”
The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger, where the nail had
grown back a little crooked. “You mustn’t trim it down close at the
corner there, and then it will grow straight. You won’t want it crooked
when you’re a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts.”
She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his new scarf-pin.
“That’s the prettiest one you ev-ER had. I wish you’d stay a long while
and let me look at it. What is it?”
Dr. Archie laughed. “It’s an opal. Spanish Johnny brought it up for me
from Chihuahua in his shoe. I had it set in Denver, and I wore it to-day
for your benefit.”
Thea had a curious passion for jewelry. She wanted every shining stone
she saw, and in summer she was always going off into the sand hills to
hunt for crystals and agates and bits of pink chalcedony. She had two
cigar boxes full of stones that she had found or traded for, and she
imagined that they were of enormous value. She was always planning how
she would have them set.
“What are you reading?” The doctor reached under the covers and pulled
out a book of Byron�
�s poems. “Do you like this?”
She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly, and pointed to “My
native land, good-night.” “That,” she said sheepishly.
“How about ‘Maid of Athens’?”
She blushed and looked at him suspiciously. “I like ‘There was a sound
of revelry,’” she muttered.
The doctor laughed and closed the book. It was clumsily bound in padded
leather and had been presented to the Reverend Peter Kronborg by his
Sunday-School class as an ornament for his parlor table.
“Come into the office some day, and I’ll lend you a nice book. You can
skip the parts you don’t understand. You can read it in vacation.
Perhaps you’ll be able to understand all of it by then.”
Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano. “In vacation I have
to practice four hours every day, and then there’ll be Thor to take care
of.” She pronounced it “Tor.”
“Thor? Oh, you’ve named the baby Thor?” exclaimed the doctor.
Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly, “That’s a
nice name, only maybe it’s a little—old fashioned.” She was very
sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact
that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish
English, at that, one might add.
Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter Kronborg had been
sent to a small divinity school in Indiana by the women of a Swedish
evangelical mission, who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and
begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth through the
seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and to bury the
members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his
Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he had learned
out of books at college. He always spoke of “the infant Saviour,” “our
Heavenly Father,” etc. The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human
speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate.
Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due to the fact that he
habitually expressed himself in a book learned language, wholly remote
from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish
to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial
English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until
she went to school never spoke at all, except in monosyllables, and her
mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied. She was still inept in
speech for a child so intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she
seldom attempted to explain them, even at school, where she excelled in
“written work” and never did more than mutter a reply.
“Your music professor stopped me on the street to-day and asked me how
you were,” said the doctor, rising. “He’ll be sick himself, trotting
around in this slush with no overcoat or overshoes.”
“He’s poor,” said Thea simply.
The doctor sighed. “I’m afraid he’s worse than that. Is he always all
right when you take your lessons? Never acts as if he’d been drinking?”
Thea looked angry and spoke excitedly. “He knows a lot. More than
anybody. I don’t care if he does drink; he’s old and poor.” Her voice
shook a little.
Mrs. Kronborg spoke up from the next room. “He’s a good teacher, doctor.
It’s good for us he does drink. He’d never be in a little place like
this if he didn’t have some weakness. These women that teach music
around here don’t know nothing. I wouldn’t have my child wasting time
with them. If Professor Wunsch goes away, Thea’ll have nobody to take
from. He’s careful with his scholars; he don’t use bad language. Mrs.
Kohler is always present when Thea takes her lesson. It’s all right.”
Mrs. Kronborg spoke calmly and judicially. One could see that she had
thought the matter out before.
“I’m glad to hear that, Mrs. Kronborg. I wish we could get the old man
off his bottle and keep him tidy. Do you suppose if I gave you an old
overcoat you could get him to wear it?” The doctor went to the bedroom
door and Mrs. Kronborg looked up from her darning.
“Why, yes, I guess he’d be glad of it. He’ll take most anything from me.
He won’t buy clothes, but I guess he’d wear ‘em if he had ‘em. I’ve
never had any clothes to give him, having so many to make over for.”
“I’ll have Larry bring the coat around to-night. You aren’t cross with
me, Thea?” taking her hand.
Thea grinned warmly. “Not if you give Professor Wunsch a coat—and
things,” she tapped the grapes significantly. The doctor bent over and
kissed her.
III
Being sick was all very well, but Thea knew from experience that
starting back to school again was attended by depressing difficulties.
One Monday morning she got up early with Axel and Gunner, who shared her
wing room, and hurried into the back living-room, between the
dining-room and the kitchen. There, beside a soft-coal stove, the
younger children of the family undressed at night and dressed in the
morning. The older daughter, Anna, and the two big boys slept upstairs,
where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The
first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean,
prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of
breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as
she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter underwear
was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because
she happened to have the most sensitive skin. While she was tugging it
on, her Aunt Tillie brought in warm water from the boiler and filled the
tin pitcher. Thea washed her face, brushed and braided her hair, and got
into her blue cashmere dress. Over this she buttoned a long apron, with
sleeves, which would not be removed until she put on her cloak to go to
school. Gunner and Axel, on the soap box behind the stove, had their
usual quarrel about which should wear the tightest stockings, but they
exchanged reproaches in low tones, for they were wholesomely afraid of
Mrs. Kronborg’s rawhide whip. She did not chastise her children often,
but she did it thoroughly. Only a somewhat stern system of discipline
could have kept any degree of order and quiet in that overcrowded house.
Mrs. Kronborg’s children were all trained to dress themselves at the
earliest possible age, to make their own beds,—the boys as well as the
girls,—to take care of their clothes, to eat what was given them, and
to keep out of the way. Mrs. Kronborg would have made a good chess
player; she had a head for moves and positions.
Anna, the elder daughter, was her mother’s lieutenant. All the children
knew that they must obey Anna, who was an obstinate contender for
proprieties and not always fair minded. To see the young Kronborgs
headed for Sunday School was like watching a military drill. Mrs.
Kronborg let her children’s minds alone. She did not pry into their
&n
bsp; thoughts or nag them. She respected them as individuals, and outside of
the house they had a great deal of liberty. But their communal life was
definitely ordered.
In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen; Gus and Charley
and Anna first, while the younger children were dressing. Gus was
nineteen and was a clerk in a dry-goods store. Charley, eighteen months
younger, worked in a feed store. They left the house by the kitchen door
at seven o’clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt Tillie get the breakfast
for the younger ones. Without the help of this sister-in-law, Tillie
Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg’s life would have been a hard one. Mrs. Kronborg
often reminded Anna that “no hired help would ever have taken the same
interest.”
Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from a lowly,
ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of Sweden. His
great-grandfather had gone to Norway to work as a farm laborer and had
married a Norwegian girl. This strain of Norwegian blood came out
somewhere in each generation of the Kronborgs. The intemperance of one
of Peter Kronborg’s uncles, and the religious mania of another, had been
alike charged to the Norwegian grandmother. Both Peter Kronborg and his
sister Tillie were more like the Norwegian root of the family than like
the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was strong in Thea, though
in her it took a very different character.
Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl at
thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes—which taste, as Mrs.
Kronborg philosophically said, did nobody any harm. Tillie was always
cheerful, and her tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the day.
She had been cruelly overworked on her father’s Minnesota farm when she
was a young girl, and she had never been so happy as she was now; had
never before, as she said, had such social advantages. She thought her
brother the most important man in Moonstone. She never missed a church
service, and, much to the embarrassment of the children, she always
“spoke a piece” at the Sunday-School concerts. She had a complete set of
“Standard Recitations,” which she conned on Sundays. This morning, when
Thea and her two younger brothers sat down to breakfast, Tillie was
remonstrating with Gunner because he had not learned a recitation
The Song of the Lark Page 2