Thea obediently sat down on the stool again and began, ”COME, YE
DISCONSOLATE.” Wunsch listened thoughtfully, his hands on his knees.
Such a beautiful child’s voice! Old Mrs. Kohler’s face relaxed in a
smile of happiness; she half closed her eyes. A big fly was darting in
and out of the window; the sunlight made a golden pool on the rag carpet
and bathed the faded cretonne pillows on the lounge, under the
piece-picture. ”EARTH HAS NO SORROW THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL,” the song
died away.
“That is a good thing to remember,” Wunsch shook himself. “You believe
that?” looking quizzically at Thea.
She became confused and pecked nervously at a black key with her middle
finger. “I don’t know. I guess so,” she murmured.
Her teacher rose abruptly. “Remember, for next time, thirds. You ought
to get up earlier.”
That night the air was so warm that Fritz and Herr Wunsch had their
after-supper pipe in the grape arbor, smoking in silence while the sound
of fiddles and guitars came across the ravine from Mexican Town. Long
after Fritz and his old Paulina had gone to bed, Wunsch sat motionless
in the arbor, looking up through the woolly vine leaves at the
glittering machinery of heaven.
“LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI.”
That line awoke many memories. He was thinking of youth; of his own, so
long gone by, and of his pupil’s, just beginning. He would even have
cherished hopes for her, except that he had become superstitious. He
believed that whatever he hoped for was destined not to be; that his
affection brought ill-fortune, especially to the young; that if he held
anything in his thoughts, he harmed it. He had taught in music schools
in St. Louis and Kansas City, where the shallowness and complacency of
the young misses had maddened him. He had encountered bad manners and
bad faith, had been the victim of sharpers of all kinds, was dogged by
bad luck. He had played in orchestras that were never paid and wandering
opera troupes which disbanded penniless. And there was always the old
enemy, more relentless than the others. It was long since he had wished
anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the body. Now
that he was tempted to hope for another, he felt alarmed and shook his
head.
It was his pupil’s power of application, her rugged will, that
interested him. He had lived for so long among people whose sole
ambition was to get something for nothing that he had learned not to
look for seriousness in anything. Now that he by chance encountered it,
it recalled standards, ambitions, a society long forgot. What was it she
reminded him of? A yellow flower, full of sunlight, perhaps. No; a thin
glass full of sweet-smelling, sparkling Moselle wine. He seemed to see
such a glass before him in the arbor, to watch the bubbles rising and
breaking, like the silent discharge of energy in the nerves and brain,
the rapid florescence in young blood—Wunsch felt ashamed and dragged
his slippers along the path to the kitchen, his eyes on the ground.
V
The children in the primary grades were sometimes required to make
relief maps of Moonstone in sand. Had they used colored sands, as the
Navajo medicine men do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have
indicated the social classifications of Moonstone, since these conformed
to certain topographical boundaries, and every child understood them
perfectly.
The main business street ran, of course, through the center of the town.
To the west of this street lived all the people who were, as Tillie
Kronborg said, “in society.” Sylvester Street, the third parallel with
Main Street on the west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings
were built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from the
court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie’s house, its big
yard and garden surrounded by a white paling fence. The Methodist Church
was in the center of the town, facing the court-house square. The
Kronborgs lived half a mile south of the church, on the long street that
stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement. This was the first
street west of Main, and was built up only on one side. The preacher’s
house faced the backs of the brick and frame store buildings and a draw
full of sunflowers and scraps of old iron. The sidewalk which ran in
front of the Kronborgs’ house was the one continuous sidewalk to the
depot, and all the train men and roundhouse employees passed the front
gate every time they came uptown. Thea and Mrs. Kronborg had many
friends among the railroad men, who often paused to chat across the
fence, and of one of these we shall have more to say.
In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street, toward the deep
ravine which, farther south, wound by Mexican Town, lived all the
humbler citizens, the people who voted but did not run for office. The
houses were little story-and-a-half cottages, with none of the fussy
architectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street. They
nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Virginia creeper; their
occupants had no social pretensions to keep up. There were no half-glass
front doors with doorbells, or formidable parlors behind closed
shutters. Here the old women washed in the back yard, and the men sat in
the front doorway and smoked their pipes. The people on Sylvester Street
scarcely knew that this part of the town existed. Thea liked to take
Thor and her express wagon and explore these quiet, shady streets, where
the people never tried to have lawns or to grow elms and pine trees, but
let the native timber have its way and spread in luxuriance. She had
many friends there, old women who gave her a yellow rose or a spray of
trumpet vine and appeased Thor with a cooky or a doughnut. They called
Thea “that preacher’s girl,” but the demonstrative was misplaced, for
when they spoke of Mr. Kronborg they called him “the Methodist
preacher.”
Dr. Archie was very proud of his yard and garden, which he worked
himself. He was the only man in Moonstone who was successful at growing
rambler roses, and his strawberries were famous. One morning when Thea
was downtown on an errand, the doctor stopped her, took her hand and
went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly always did when they
met.
“You haven’t been up to my place to get any strawberries yet, Thea.
They’re at their best just now. Mrs. Archie doesn’t know what to do with
them all. Come up this afternoon. Just tell Mrs. Archie I sent you.
Bring a big basket and pick till you are tired.”
When she got home Thea told her mother that she didn’t want to go,
because she didn’t like Mrs. Archie.
“She is certainly one queer woman,” Mrs. Kronborg assented, “but he’s
asked you so often, I guess you’ll have to go this time. She won’t bite
you.”
After dinner Thea took a basket, put Thor in his baby buggy, and set out
for Dr. Archie’s house at the other end of town. As soon as she came
within sight of the house, she slackened her pace. She approached it
very slowly, stopping often to pick dandelions and sand-peas for Thor to
crush up in his fist.
It was his wife’s custom, as soon as Dr. Archie left the house in the
morning, to shut all the doors and windows to keep the dust out, and to
pull down the shades to keep the sun from fading the carpets. She
thought, too, that neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house
was closed up. She was one of those people who are stingy without motive
or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it. She must have known
that skimping the doctor in heat and food made him more extravagant than
he would have been had she made him comfortable. He never came home for
lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and shreds of food. No
matter how much milk he bought, he could never get thick cream for his
strawberries. Even when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in
smooth, ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-hand, to
dilute it before it got to the breakfast table. The butcher’s favorite
joke was about the kind of meat he sold Mrs. Archie. She felt no
interest in food herself, and she hated to prepare it. She liked nothing
better than to have Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days—he often
went chiefly because he was hungry—and to be left alone to eat canned
salmon and to keep the house shut up from morning until night.
Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said, “they ate too
much and broke too much”; she even said they knew too much. She used
what mind she had in devising shifts to minimize her housework. She used
to tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would be no
housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married, she had been always in a
panic for fear she would have children. Now that her apprehensions on
that score had grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having dust
in the house as she had once been of having children in it. If dust did
not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said. She would take any
amount of trouble to avoid trouble. Why, nobody knew. Certainly her
husband had never been able to make her out. Such little, mean natures
are among the darkest and most baffling of created things. There is no
law by which they can be explained. The ordinary incentives of pain and
pleasure do not account for their behavior. They live like insects,
absorbed in petty activities that seem to have nothing to do with any
genial aspect of human life.
Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, “liked to gad.” She liked to have
her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and to be out of it—anywhere. A
church social, a prayer meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no
preference. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit for hours
in Mrs. Smiley’s millinery and notion store, listening to the talk of
the women who came in, watching them while they tried on hats, blinking
at them from her corner with her sharp, restless little eyes. She never
talked much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town and she had
a sharp ear for racy anecdotes—“traveling men’s stories,” they used to
be called in Moonstone. Her clicking laugh sounded like a typewriting
machine in action, and, for very pointed stories, she had a little
screech.
Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years, and when she was
Belle White she was one of the “pretty” girls in Lansing, Michigan. She
had then a train of suitors. She could truly remind Archie that “the
boys hung around her.” They did. They thought her very spirited and were
always saying, “Oh, that Belle White, she’s a case!” She used to play
heavy practical jokes which the young men thought very clever. Archie
was considered the most promising young man in “the young crowd,” so
Belle selected him. She let him see, made him fully aware, that she had
selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who could not withstand
such enlightenment. Belle’s family were sorry for him. On his wedding
day her sisters looked at the big, handsome boy—he was twenty-four—as
he walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they looked at each
other. His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant face, his gentle,
protecting arm, made them uncomfortable. Well, they were glad that he
was going West at once, to fulfill his doom where they would not be
onlookers. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off
their hands.
More than that, Belle seemed to have got herself off her hands. Her
reputed prettiness must have been entirely the result of determination,
of a fierce little ambition. Once she had married, fastened herself on
some one, come to port,—it vanished like the ornamental plumage which
drops away from some birds after the mating season. The one aggressive
action of her life was over. She began to shrink in face and stature. Of
her harum-scarum spirit there was nothing left but the little screech.
Within a few years she looked as small and mean as she was.
Thor’s chariot crept along. Thea approached the house unwillingly. She
didn’t care about the strawberries, anyhow. She had come only because
she did not want to hurt Dr. Archie’s feelings. She not only disliked
Mrs. Archie, she was a little afraid of her. While Thea was getting the
heavy baby-buggy through the iron gate she heard some one call, “Wait a
minute!” and Mrs. Archie came running around the house from the back
door, her apron over her head. She came to help with the buggy, because
she was afraid the wheels might scratch the paint off the gateposts. She
was a skinny little woman with a great pile of frizzy light hair on a
small head.
“Dr. Archie told me to come up and pick some strawberries,” Thea
muttered, wishing she had stayed at home.
Mrs. Archie led the way to the back door, squinting and shading her eyes
with her hand. “Wait a minute,” she said again, when Thea explained why
she had come.
She went into her kitchen and Thea sat down on the porch step. When Mrs.
Archie reappeared she carried in her hand a little wooden butter-basket
trimmed with fringed tissue paper, which she must have brought home from
some church supper. “You’ll have to have something to put them in,” she
said, ignoring the yawning willow basket which stood empty on Thor’s
feet. “You can have this, and you needn’t mind about returning it. You
know about not trampling the vines, don’t you?”
Mrs. Archie went back into the house and Thea leaned over in the sand
and picked a few strawberries. As soon as she was sure that she was not
going to cry, she tossed the little basket into the big one and ran
Thor’s buggy along the gravel walk and out of the gate as fast as she
could push it. She was angry, and she was ashamed for Dr. Archie. She
could not help thinking how uncomfortable he would be if he ever found
out about it. Little things like that were the ones that cut him most.
She slunk home by the back way, and again almost cried when
she told her
mother about it.
Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband’s supper. She laughed
as she dropped a new lot into the hot grease. “It’s wonderful, the way
some people are made,” she declared. “But I wouldn’t let that upset me
if I was you. Think what it would be to live with it all the time. You
look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and take a dime and go
downtown and get an ice-cream soda. That’ll make you feel better. Thor
can have a little of the ice-cream if you feed it to him with a spoon.
He likes it, don’t you, son?” She stooped to wipe his chin. Thor was
only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite true that he
liked ice-cream.
VI
Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah’s ark town
set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and
cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their
turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the
North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail,
brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting,
wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water
and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain.
The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break
into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water.
The long street which connected Moonstone with the depot settlement
traversed in its course a considerable stretch of rough open country,
staked out in lots but not built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the
town and the railroad. When you set out along this street to go to the
station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and farther apart,
until they ceased altogether, and the board sidewalk continued its
uneven course through sunflower patches, until you reached the solitary,
new brick Catholic Church. The church stood there because the land was
given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining waste lots, in
the hope of making them more salable—“Farrier’s Addition,” this patch
of prairie was called in the clerk’s office. An eighth of a mile beyond
the church was a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk
became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the gully was old
The Song of the Lark Page 4