by Willa Cather
Peter Kronborg smiled. “There you go, Anna. That’s you all over again. Now, I have no favorites; they all have their good points. But you,” with a twinkle, “always did go in for brains.”
Mrs. Kronborg chuckled as she wiped the cracker crumbs from Thor’s chin and fists. “Well, you’re mighty conceited, Peter! But I don’t know as I ever regretted it. I prefer having a family of my own to fussing with other folks’ children, that’s the truth.”
Before the Kronborgs reached Copper Hole, Thea’s destiny was pretty well mapped out for her. Mr. Kronborg was always delighted to have an excuse for enlarging the house.
Mrs. Kronborg was quite right in her conjecture that there would be unfriendly comment in Moonstone when Thea raised her prices for music-lessons. People said she was getting too conceited for anything. Mrs. Livery Johnson put on a new bonnet and paid up all her back calls to have the pleasure of announcing in each parlor she entered that her daughters, at least, would “never pay professional prices to Thea Kronborg.”
Thea raised no objection to quitting school. She was now in the “high room,” as it was called, in next to the highest class, and was studying geometry and beginning Caesar. She no longer recited her lessons to the teacher she liked, but to the Principal, a man who belonged, like Mrs. Livery Johnson, to the camp of Thea’s natural enemies. He taught school because he was too lazy to work among grown-up people, and he made an easy job of it. He got out of real work by inventing useless activities for his pupils, such as the “tree-diagramming system.” Thea had spent hours making trees out of “Thanatopsis,” Hamlet’s soliloquy, Cato on “Immortality.” She agonized under this waste of time, and was only too glad to accept her father’s offer of liberty.
So Thea left school the first of November. By the first of January she had eight one-hour pupils and ten half-hour pupils, and there would be more in the summer. She spent her earnings generously. She bought a new Brussels carpet for the parlor, and a rifle for Gunner and Axel, and an imitation tiger-skin coat and cap for Thor. She enjoyed being able to add to the family possessions, and thought Thor looked quite as handsome in his spots as the rich children she had seen in Denver. Thor was most complacent in his conspicuous apparel. He could walk anywhere by this time—though he always preferred to sit, or to be pulled in his cart. He was a blissfully lazy child, and had a number of long, dull plays, such as making nests for his china duck and waiting for her to lay him an egg. Thea thought him very intelligent, and she was proud that he was so big and burly. She found him restful, loved to hear him call her “sitter,” and really liked his companionship, especially when she was tired. On Saturday, for instance, when she taught from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, she liked to get off in a corner with Thor after supper, away from all the bathing and dressing and joking and talking that went on in the house, and ask him about his duck, or hear him tell one of his rambling stories.
XV
By the time Thea’s fifteenth birthday came round, she was established as a music teacher in Moonstone. The new room had been added to the house early in the spring, and Thea had been giving her lessons there since the middle of May. She liked the personal independence which was accorded her as a wage-earner. The family questioned her comings and goings very little. She could go buggy-riding with Ray Kennedy, for instance, without taking Gunner or Axel. She could go to Spanish Johnny’s and sing part songs with the Mexicans, and nobody objected.
Thea was still under the first excitement of teaching, and was terribly in earnest about it. If a pupil did not get on well, she fumed and fretted. She counted until she was hoarse. She listened to scales in her sleep. Wunsch had taught only one pupil seriously, but Thea taught twenty. The duller they were, the more furiously she poked and prodded them. With the little girls she was nearly always patient, but with pupils older than herself, she sometimes lost her temper. One of her mistakes was to let herself in for a calling-down from Mrs. Livery Johnson. That lady appeared at the Kronborgs’ one morning and announced that she would allow no girl to stamp her foot at her daughter Grace. She added that Thea’s bad manners with the older girls were being talked about all over town, and that if her temper did not speedily improve she would lose all her advanced pupils. Thea was frightened. She felt she could never bear the disgrace, if such a thing happened. Besides, what would her father say, after he had gone to the expense of building an addition to the house? Mrs. Johnson demanded an apology to Grace. Thea said she was willing to make it. Mrs. Johnson said that hereafter, since she had taken lessons of the best piano teacher in Grinnell, Iowa, she herself would decide what pieces Grace should study. Thea readily consented to that, and Mrs. Johnson rustled away to tell a neighbor woman that Thea Kronborg could be meek enough when you went at her right.
Thea was telling Ray about this unpleasant encounter as they were driving out to the sand hills the next Sunday.
“She was stuffing you, all right, Thee,” Ray reassured her. “There’s no general dissatisfaction among your scholars. She just wanted to get in a knock. I talked to the piano tuner the last time he was here, and he said all the people he tuned for expressed themselves very favorably about your teaching. I wish you didn’t take so much pains with them, myself.”
“But I have to, Ray. They’re all so dumb. They’ve got no ambition,” Thea exclaimed irritably. “Jenny Smiley is the only one who isn’t stupid. She can read pretty well, and she has such good hands. But she don’t care a rap about it. She has no pride.”
Ray’s face was full of complacent satisfaction as he glanced sidewise at Thea, but she was looking off intently into the mirage, at one of those mammoth cattle that are nearly always reflected there. “Do you find it easier to teach in your new room?” he asked.
“Yes; I’m not interrupted so much. Of course, if I ever happen to want to practice at night, that’s always the night Anna chooses to go to bed early.”
“It’s a darned shame, Thee, you didn’t cop that room for yourself. I’m sore at the padre about that. He ought to give you that room. You could fix it up so pretty.”
“I didn’t want it, honest I didn’t. Father would have let me have it. I like my own room better. Somehow I can think better in a little room. Besides, up there I am away from everybody, and I can read as late as I please and nobody nags me.”
“A growing girl needs lots of sleep,” Ray providently remarked.
Thea moved restlessly on the buggy cushions. “They need other things more,” she muttered. “Oh, I forgot. I brought something to show you. Look here, it came on my birthday. Wasn’t it nice of him to remember?” She took from her pocket a postcard, bent in the middle and folded, and handed it to Ray. On it was a white dove, perched on a wreath of very blue forget-me-nots, and “Birthday Greetings” in gold letters. Under this was written, “From A. Wunsch.”
Ray turned the card over, examined the postmark, and then began to laugh.
“Concord, Kansas. He has my sympathy!”
“Why, is that a poor town?”
“It’s the jumping-off place, no town at all. Some houses dumped down in the middle of a cornfield. You get lost in the corn. Not even a saloon to keep things going; sell whiskey without a license at the butcher shop, beer on ice with the liver and beefsteak. I wouldn’t stay there over Sunday for a ten-dollar bill.”
“Oh, dear! What do you suppose he’s doing there? Maybe he just stopped off there a few days to tune pianos,” Thea suggested hopefully.
Ray gave her back the card. “He’s headed in the wrong direction. What does he want to get back into a grass country for? Now, there are lots of good live towns down on the Santa Fe, and everybody down there is musical. He could always get a job playing in saloons if he was dead broke. I’ve figured out that I’ve got no years of my life to waste in a Methodist country where they raise pork.”
“We must stop on our way back and show this card to Mrs. Kohler. She misses him so.”
“By the way, Thee, I hear the old woman goes to c
hurch every Sunday to hear you sing. Fritz tells me he has to wait till two o’clock for his Sunday dinner these days. The church people ought to give you credit for that, when they go for you.”
Thea shook her head and spoke in a tone of resignation. “They’ll always go for me, just as they did for Wunsch. It wasn’t because he drank they went for him; not really. It was something else.”
“You want to salt your money down, Thee, and go to Chicago and take some lessons. Then you come back, and wear a long feather and high heels and put on a few airs, and that’ll fix ‘em. That’s what they like.”
“I’ll never have money enough to go to Chicago. Mother meant to lend me some, I think, but now they’ve got hard times back in Nebraska, and her farm don’t bring her in anything. Takes all the tenant can raise to pay the taxes. Don’t let’s talk about that. You promised to tell me about the play you went to see in Denver.”
Any one would have liked to hear Ray’s simple and clear account of the performance he had seen at the Tabor Grand Opera House—Maggie Mitchell in Little Barefoot—and any one would have liked to watch his kind face. Ray looked his best out of doors, when his thick red hands were covered by gloves, and the dull red of his sunburned face somehow seemed right in the light and wind. He looked better, too, with his hat on; his hair was thin and dry, with no particular color or character, “regular Willy-boy hair,” as he himself described it. His eyes were pale beside the reddish bronze of his skin. They had the faded look often seen in the eyes of men who have lived much in the sun and wind and who have been accustomed to train their vision upon distant objects.
Ray realized that Thea’s life was dull and exacting, and that she missed Wunsch. He knew she worked hard, that she put up with a great many little annoyances, and that her duties as a teacher separated her more than ever from the boys and girls of her own age. He did everything he could to provide recreation for her. He brought her candy and magazines and pineapples—of which she was very fond—from Denver, and kept his eyes and ears open for anything that might interest her. He was, of course, living for Thea. He had thought it all out carefully and had made up his mind just when he would speak to her. When she was seventeen, then he would tell her his plan and ask her to marry him. He would be willing to wait two, or even three years, until she was twenty, if she thought best. By that time he would surely have got in on something: copper, oil, gold, silver, sheep,—something.
Meanwhile, it was pleasure enough to feel that she depended on him more and more, that she leaned upon his steady kindness. He never broke faith with himself about her; he never hinted to her of his hopes for the future, never suggested that she might be more intimately confidential with him, or talked to her of the thing he thought about so constantly. He had the chivalry which is perhaps the proudest possession of his race. He had never embarrassed her by so much as a glance. Sometimes, when they drove out to the sand hills, he let his left arm lie along the back of the buggy seat, but it never came any nearer to Thea than that, never touched her. He often turned to her a face full of pride, and frank admiration, but his glance was never so intimate or so penetrating as Dr. Archie’s. His blue eyes were clear and shallow, friendly, uninquiring. He rested Thea because he was so different; because, though he often told her interesting things, he never set lively fancies going in her head; because he never misunderstood her, and because he never, by any chance, for a single instant, understood her! Yes, with Ray she was safe; by him she would never be discovered!
XVI
The pleasantest experience Thea had that summer was a trip that she and her mother made to Denver in Ray Kennedy’s caboose. Mrs. Kronborg had been looking forward to this excursion for a long while, but as Ray never knew at what hour his freight would leave Moonstone, it was difficult to arrange. The call-boy was as likely to summon him to start on his run at twelve o’clock midnight as at twelve o’clock noon. The first week in June started out with all the scheduled trains running on time, and a light freight business. Tuesday evening Ray, after consulting with the dispatcher, stopped at the Kronborgs’ front gate to tell Mrs. Kronborg—who was helping Tillie water the flowers—that if she and Thea could be at the depot at eight o’clock the next morning, he thought he could promise them a pleasant ride and get them into Denver before nine o’clock in the evening. Mrs. Kronborg told him cheerfully, across the fence, that she would “take him up on it,” and Ray hurried back to the yards to scrub out his car.
The one complaint Ray’s brakemen had to make of him was that he was too fussy about his caboose. His former brakeman had asked to be transferred because, he said, “Kennedy was as fussy about his car as an old maid about her bird-cage.” Joe Giddy, who was braking with Ray now, called him “the bride,” because he kept the caboose and bunks so clean.
It was properly the brakeman’s business to keep the car clean, but when Ray got back to the depot, Giddy was nowhere to be found. Muttering that all his brakemen seemed to consider him “easy,” Ray went down to his car alone. He built a fire in the stove and put water on to heat while he got into his overalls and jumper. Then he set to work with a scrubbing-brush and plenty of soap and “cleaner.” He scrubbed the floor and seats, blacked the stove, put clean sheets on the bunks, and then began to demolish Giddy’s picture gallery. Ray found that his brakemen were likely to have what he termed “a taste for the nude in art,” and Giddy was no exception. Ray took down half a dozen girls in tights and ballet skirts,—premiums for cigarette coupons,—and some racy calendars advertising saloons and sporting clubs, which had cost Giddy both time and trouble; he even removed Giddy’s particular pet, a naked girl lying on a couch with her knee carelessly poised in the air. Underneath the picture was printed the title, “The Odalisque.” Giddy was under the happy delusion that this title meant something wicked,—there was a wicked look about the consonants,—but Ray, of course, had looked it up, and Giddy was indebted to the dictionary for the privilege of keeping his lady. If “odalisque” had been what Ray called an objectionable word, he would have thrown the picture out in the first place. Ray even took down a picture of Mrs. Langtry in evening dress, because it was entitled the “Jersey Lily,” and because there was a small head of Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, in one corner. Albert Edward’s conduct was a popular subject of discussion among railroad men in those days, and as Ray pulled the tacks out of this lithograph he felt more indignant with the English than ever. He deposited all these pictures under the mattress of Giddy’s bunk, and stood admiring his clean car in the lamplight; the walls now exhibited only a wheatfield, advertising agricultural implements, a map of Colorado, and some pictures of race-horses and hunting-dogs. At this moment Giddy, freshly shaved and shampooed, his shirt shining with the highest polish known to Chinese laundrymen, his straw hat tipped over his right eye, thrust his head in at the door.
“What in hell—” he brought out furiously. His good humored, sunburned face seemed fairly to swell with amazement and anger.
“That’s all right, Giddy,” Ray called in a conciliatory tone. “Nothing injured. I’ll put ‘em all up again as I found ‘em. Going to take some ladies down in the car to-morrow.”
Giddy scowled. He did not dispute the propriety of Ray’s measures, if there were to be ladies on board, but he felt injured. “I suppose you’ll expect me to behave like a Y.M.C.A. secretary,” he growled. “I can’t do my work and serve tea at the same time.”
“No need to have a tea-party,” said Ray with determined cheerfulness. “Mrs. Kronborg will bring the lunch, and it will be a darned good one.”
Giddy lounged against the car, holding his cigar between two thick fingers. “Then I guess she’ll get it,” he observed knowingly. “I don’t think your musical friend is much on the grub-box. Has to keep her hands white to tickle the ivories.” Giddy had nothing against Thea, but he felt cantankerous and wanted to get a rise out of Kennedy.
“Every man to his own job,” Ray replied agreeably, pulling his white shirt on over his head.
“You’ll eat ‘em to-morrow, all the same.” Ray’s tone had a steely glitter as he jumped out of the car, and Giddy stood aside to let him pass. He knew that Kennedy’s next reply would be delivered by hand. He had once seen Ray beat up a nasty fellow for insulting a Mexican woman who helped about the grub-car in the work train, and his fists had worked like two steel hammers. Giddy wasn’t looking for trouble.
At eight o’clock the next morning Ray greeted his ladies and helped them into the car. Giddy had put on a clean shirt and yellow pig-skin gloves and was whistling his best. He considered Kennedy a fluke as a ladies’ man, and if there was to be a party, the honors had to be done by some one who wasn’t a blacksmith at small-talk. Giddy had, as Ray sarcastically admitted, “a local reputation as a jollier,” and he was fluent in gallant speeches of a not too-veiled nature. He insisted that Thea should take his seat in the cupola, opposite Ray’s, where she could look out over the country. Thea told him, as she clambered up, that she cared a good deal more about riding in that seat than about going to Denver. Ray was never so companionable and easy as when he sat chatting in the lookout of his little house on wheels. Good stories came to him, and interesting recollections. Thea had a great respect for the reports he had to write out, and for the telegrams that were handed to him at stations; for all the knowledge and experience it must take to run a freight train.