Chapter III: Part I: Friends of Childhood (3)

The acquisition of this room was the beginning of a new era in Thea’s life. It was one of the most important things that ever happened to her. Hitherto, except in summer, when she could be out of doors, she had lived in constant turmoil; the family, the day school, the Sunday-School. The clamor about her drowned the voice within herself. In the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs sleeping-rooms by a long, cold, unfinished lumber room, her mind worked better. She thought things out more clearly. Pleasant plans and ideas occurred to her which had never come before. She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends. She left them there in the morning, when she finished dressing in the cold, and at night, when she came up with her lantern and shut the door after a busy day, she found them awaiting her. There was no possible way of heating the room, but that was fortunate, for otherwise it would have been occupied by one of her older brothers.

From the time when she moved up into the wing, Thea began to live a double life. During the day, when the hours were full of tasks, she was one of the Kronborg children, but at night she was a different person. On Friday and Saturday nights she always read for a long while after she was in bed. She had no clock, and there was no one to nag her.

Ray Kennedy, on his way from the depot to his boardinghouse, often looked up and saw Thea’s light burning when the rest of the house was dark, and felt cheered as by a friendly greeting. He was a faithful soul, and many disappointments had not changed his nature. He was still, at heart, the same boy who, when he was sixteen, had settled down to freeze with his sheep in a Wyoming blizzard, and had been rescued only to play the losing game of fidelity to other charges.

Ray had no very clear idea of what might be going on in Thea’s head, but he knew that something was. He used to remark to Spanish Johnny, “That girl is developing something fine.” Thea was patient with Ray, even in regard to the liberties he took with her name. Outside the family, every one in Moonstone, except Wunsch and Dr. Archie, called her “Thee-a,” but this seemed cold and distant to Ray, so he called her “Thee.” Once, in a moment of exasperation, Thea asked him why he did this, and he explained that he once had a chum, Theodore, whose name was always abbreviated thus, and that since he was killed down on the Santa Fé, it seemed natural to call somebody “Thee.” Thea sighed and submitted. She was always helpless before homely sentiment and usually changed the subject.

It was the custom for each of the different Sunday Schools in Moonstone to give a concert on Christmas Eve. But this year all the churches were to unite and give, as was announced from the pulpits, “a semi-sacred concert of picked talent” at the opera house. The Moonstone Orchestra, under the direction of Professor Wunsch, was to play, and the most talented members of each Sunday School were to take part in the programme. Thea was put down by the committee “for instrumental.” This made her indignant, for the vocal numbers were always more popular. Thea went to the president of the committee and demanded hotly if her rival, Lily Fisher, were going to sing. The president was a big, florid, powdered woman, a fierce W.C.T.U. worker, one of Thea’s natural enemies. Her name was Johnson; her husband kept the livery stable, and she was called Mrs. Livery Johnson, to distinguish her from other families of the same surname. Mrs. Johnson was a prominent Baptist, and Lily Fisher was the Baptist prodigy. There was a not very Christian rivalry between the Baptist Church and Mr. Kronborg’s church.

When Thea asked Mrs. Johnson whether her rival was to be allowed to sing, Mrs. Johnson, with an eagerness which told how she had waited for this moment, replied that “Lily was going to recite to be obliging, and to give other children a chance to sing.” As she delivered this thrust, her eyes glittered more than the Ancient Mariner’s, Thea thought. Mrs. Johnson disapproved of the way in which Thea was being brought up, of a child whose chosen associates were Mexicans and sinners, and who was, as she pointedly put it, “bold with men.” She so enjoyed an opportunity to rebuke Thea, that, tightly corseted as she was, she could scarcely control her breathing, and her lace and her gold watch chain rose and fell “with short, uneasy motion.” Frowning, Thea turned away and walked slowly homeward. She suspected guile. Lily Fisher was the most stuck-up doll in the world, and it was certainly not like her to recite to be obliging. Nobody who could sing ever recited, because the warmest applause always went to the singers.

However, when the programme was printed in the Moonstone _Gleam_, there it was: “Instrumental solo, Thea Kronborg. Recitation, Lily Fisher.”

Because his orchestra was to play for the concert, Mr. Wunsch imagined that he had been put in charge of the music, and he became arrogant. He insisted that Thea should play a “Ballade” by Reinecke. When Thea consulted her mother, Mrs. Kronborg agreed with her that the “Ballade” would “never take” with a Moonstone audience. She advised Thea to play “something with variations,” or, at least, “The Invitation to the Dance.”

“It makes no matter what they like,” Wunsch replied to Thea’s entreaties. “It is time already that they learn something.”

Thea’s fighting powers had been impaired by an ulcerated tooth and consequent loss of sleep, so she gave in. She finally had the molar pulled, though it was a second tooth and should have been saved. The dentist was a clumsy, ignorant country boy, and Mr. Kronborg would not hear of Dr. Archie’s taking Thea to a dentist in Denver, though Ray Kennedy said he could get a pass for her. What with the pain of the tooth, and family discussions about it, with trying to make Christmas presents and to keep up her school work and practicing, and giving lessons on Saturdays, Thea was fairly worn out.

On Christmas Eve she was nervous and excited. It was the first time she had ever played in the opera house, and she had never before had to face so many people. Wunsch would not let her play with her notes, and she was afraid of forgetting. Before the concert began, all the participants had to assemble on the stage and sit there to be looked at. Thea wore her white summer dress and a blue sash, but Lily Fisher had a new pink silk, trimmed with white swansdown.

The hall was packed. It seemed as if every one in Moonstone was there, even Mrs. Kohler, in her hood, and old Fritz. The seats were wooden kitchen chairs, numbered, and nailed to long planks which held them together in rows. As the floor was not raised, the chairs were all on the same level. The more interested persons in the audience peered over the heads of the people in front of them to get a good view of the stage. From the platform Thea picked out many friendly faces. There was Dr. Archie, who never went to church entertainments; there was the friendly jeweler who ordered her music for her,—he sold accordions and guitars as well as watches,—and the druggist who often lent her books, and her favorite teacher from the school. There was Ray Kennedy, with a party of freshly barbered railroad men he had brought along with him. There was Mrs. Kronborg with all the children, even Thor, who had been brought out in a new white plush coat. At the back of the hall sat a little group of Mexicans, and among them Thea caught the gleam of Spanish Johnny’s white teeth, and of Mrs. Tellamantez’s lustrous, smoothly coiled black hair.

After the orchestra played “Selections from Erminie,” and the Baptist preacher made a long prayer, Tillie Kronborg came on with a highly colored recitation, “The Polish Boy.” When it was over every one breathed more freely. No committee had the courage to leave Tillie off a programme. She was accepted as a trying feature of every entertainment. The Progressive Euchre Club was the only social organization in the town that entirely escaped Tillie. After Tillie sat down, the Ladies’ Quartette sang, “Beloved, it is Night,” and then it was Thea’s turn.

The “Ballade” took ten minutes, which was five minutes too long. The audience grew restive and fell to whispering. Thea could hear Mrs. Livery Johnson’s bracelets jangling as she fanned herself, and she could hear her father’s nervous, ministerial cough. Thor behaved better than any one else. When Thea bowed and returned to her seat at the back of the stage there was the usual applause, but it was vigorous only from the back of the house where the Mexicans sat, and from Ray Kennedy’s _claqueurs_. Any one could see that a good-natured audience had been bored.

Because Mr. Kronborg’s sister was on the programme, it had also been necessary to ask the Baptist preacher’s wife’s cousin to sing. She was a “deep alto” from McCook, and she sang, “Thy Sentinel Am I.” After her came Lily Fisher. Thea’s rival was also a blonde, but her hair was much heavier than Thea’s, and fell in long round curls over her shoulders. She was the angel-child of the Baptists, and looked exactly like the beautiful children on soap calendars. Her pink-and-white face, her set smile of innocence, were surely born of a color-press. She had long, drooping eyelashes, a little pursed-up mouth, and narrow, pointed teeth, like a squirrel’s.

Lily began:—

“_Rock of Ages, cleft for me_, carelessly the maiden sang.”

Thea drew a long breath. That was the game; it was a recitation and a song in one. Lily trailed the hymn through half a dozen verses with great effect. The Baptist preacher had announced at the beginning of the concert that “owing to the length of the programme, there would be no encores.” But the applause which followed Lily to her seat was such an unmistakable expression of enthusiasm that Thea had to admit Lily was justified in going back. She was attended this time by Mrs. Livery Johnson herself, crimson with triumph and gleaming-eyed, nervously rolling and unrolling a sheet of music. She took off her bracelets and played Lily’s accompaniment. Lily had the effrontery to come out with, “She sang the song of Home, Sweet Home, the song that touched my heart.” But this did not surprise Thea; as Ray said later in the evening, “the cards had been stacked against her from the beginning.” The next issue of the _Gleam_ correctly stated that “unquestionably the honors of the evening must be accorded to Miss Lily Fisher.” The Baptists had everything their own way.

After the concert Ray Kennedy joined the Kronborgs’ party and walked home with them. Thea was grateful for his silent sympathy, even while it irritated her. She inwardly vowed that she would never take another lesson from old Wunsch. She wished that her father would not keep cheerfully singing, “When Shepherds Watched,” as he marched ahead, carrying Thor. She felt that silence would become the Kronborgs for a while. As a family, they somehow seemed a little ridiculous, trooping along in the starlight. There were so many of them, for one thing. Then Tillie was so absurd. She was giggling and talking to Anna just as if she had not made, as even Mrs. Kronborg admitted, an exhibition of herself.

When they got home, Ray took a box from his overcoat pocket and slipped it into Thea’s hand as he said goodnight. They all hurried in to the glowing stove in the parlor. The sleepy children were sent to bed. Mrs. Kronborg and Anna stayed up to fill the stockings.

“I guess you’re tired, Thea. You needn’t stay up.” Mrs. Kronborg’s clear and seemingly indifferent eye usually measured Thea pretty accurately.

Thea hesitated. She glanced at the presents laid out on the dining-room table, but they looked unattractive. Even the brown plush monkey she had bought for Thor with such enthusiasm seemed to have lost his wise and humorous expression. She murmured, “All right,” to her mother, lit her lantern, and went upstairs.

Ray’s box contained a hand-painted white satin fan, with pond lilies—an unfortunate reminder. Thea smiled grimly and tossed it into her upper drawer. She was not to be consoled by toys. She undressed quickly and stood for some time in the cold, frowning in the broken looking glass at her flaxen pig-tails, at her white neck and arms. Her own broad, resolute face set its chin at her, her eyes flashed into her own defiantly. Lily Fisher was pretty, and she was willing to be just as big a fool as people wanted her to be. Very well; Thea Kronborg wasn’t. She would rather be hated than be stupid, any day. She popped into bed and read stubbornly at a queer paper book the drug-store man had given her because he couldn’t sell it. She had trained herself to put her mind on what she was doing, otherwise she would have come to grief with her complicated daily schedule. She read, as intently as if she had not been flushed with anger, the strange “Musical Memories” of the Reverend H. R. Haweis. At last she blew out the lantern and went to sleep. She had many curious dreams that night. In one of them Mrs. Tellamantez held her shell to Thea’s ear, and she heard the roaring, as before, and distant voices calling, “Lily Fisher! Lily Fisher!”

IX

Mr. Kronborg considered Thea a remarkable child; but so were all his children remarkable. If one of the business men downtown remarked to him that he “had a mighty bright little girl, there,” he admitted it, and at once began to explain what a “long head for business” his son Gus had, or that Charley was “a natural electrician,” and had put in a telephone from the house to the preacher’s study behind the church.

Mrs. Kronborg watched her daughter thoughtfully. She found her more interesting than her other children, and she took her more seriously, without thinking much about why she did so. The other children had to be guided, directed, kept from conflicting with one another. Charley and Gus were likely to want the same thing, and to quarrel about it. Anna often demanded unreasonable service from her older brothers; that they should sit up until after midnight to bring her home from parties when she did not like the youth who had offered himself as her escort; or that they should drive twelve miles into the country, on a winter night, to take her to a ranch dance, after they had been working hard all day. Gunner often got bored with his own clothes or stilts or sled, and wanted Axel’s. But Thea, from the time she was a little thing, had her own routine. She kept out of every one’s way, and was hard to manage only when the other children interfered with her. Then there was trouble indeed: bursts of temper which used to alarm Mrs. Kronborg. “You ought to know enough to let Thea alone. She lets you alone,” she often said to the other children.

One may have staunch friends in one’s own family, but one seldom has admirers. Thea, however, had one in the person of her addle-pated aunt, Tillie Kronborg. In older countries, where dress and opinions and manners are not so thoroughly standardized as in our own West, there is a belief that people who are foolish about the more obvious things of life are apt to have peculiar insight into what lies beyond the obvious. The old woman who can never learn not to put the kerosene can on the stove, may yet be able to tell fortunes, to persuade a backward child to grow, to cure warts, or to tell people what to do with a young girl who has gone melancholy. Tillie’s mind was a curious machine; when she was awake it went round like a wheel when the belt has slipped off, and when she was asleep she dreamed follies. But she had intuitions. She knew, for instance, that Thea was different from the other Kronborgs, worthy though they all were. Her romantic imagination found possibilities in her niece. When she was sweeping or ironing, or turning the ice-cream freezer at a furious rate, she often built up brilliant futures for Thea, adapting freely the latest novel she had read.

Tillie made enemies for her niece among the church people because, at sewing societies and church suppers, she sometimes spoke vauntingly, with a toss of her head, just as if Thea’s “wonderfulness” were an accepted fact in Moonstone, like Mrs. Archie’s stinginess, or Mrs. Livery Johnson’s duplicity. People declared that, on this subject, Tillie made them tired.

Tillie belonged to a dramatic club that once a year performed in the Moonstone Opera House such plays as “Among the Breakers,” and “The Veteran of 1812.” Tillie played character parts, the flirtatious old maid or the spiteful _intrigante_. She used to study her parts up in the attic at home. While she was committing the lines, she got Gunner or Anna to hold the book for her, but when she began “to bring out the expression,” as she said, she used, very timorously, to ask Thea to hold the book. Thea was usually—not always—agreeable about it. Her mother had told her that, since she had some influence with Tillie, it would be a good thing for them all if she could tone her down a shade and “keep her from taking on any worse than need be.” Thea would sit on the foot of Tillie’s bed, her feet tucked under her, and stare at the silly text. “I wouldn’t make so much fuss, there, Tillie,” she would remark occasionally; “I don’t see the point in it”; or, “What do you pitch your voice so high for? It don’t carry half as well.”

“I don’t see how it comes Thea is so patient with Tillie,” Mrs. Kronborg more than once remarked to her husband. “She ain’t patient with most people, but it seems like she’s got a peculiar patience for Tillie.”

Tillie always coaxed Thea to go “behind the scenes” with her when the club presented a play, and help her with her make-up. Thea hated it, but she always went. She felt as if she had to do it. There was something in Tillie’s adoration of her that compelled her. There was no family impropriety that Thea was so much ashamed of as Tillie’s “acting” and yet she was always being dragged in to assist her. Tillie simply had her, there. She didn’t know why, but it was so. There was a string in her somewhere that Tillie could pull; a sense of obligation to Tillie’s misguided aspirations. The saloon-keepers had some such feeling of responsibility toward Spanish Johnny.

The dramatic club was the pride of Tillie’s heart, and her enthusiasm was the principal factor in keeping it together. Sick or well, Tillie always attended rehearsals, and was always urging the young people, who took rehearsals lightly, to “stop fooling and begin now.” The young men—bank clerks, grocery clerks, insurance agents—played tricks, laughed at Tillie, and “put it up on each other” about seeing her home; but they often went to tiresome rehearsals just to oblige her. They were good-natured young fellows. Their trainer and stage-manager was young Upping, the jeweler who ordered Thea’s music for her.

Though barely thirty, he had followed half a dozen professions, and had once been a violinist in the orchestra of the Andrews Opera Company, then well known in little towns throughout Colorado and Nebraska.

By one amazing indiscretion Tillie very nearly lost her hold upon the Moonstone Drama Club. The club had decided to put on “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” a very ambitious undertaking because of the many supers needed and the scenic difficulties of the act which took place in Andersonville Prison. The members of the club consulted together in Tillie’s absence as to who should play the part of the drummer boy. It must be taken by a very young person, and village boys of that age are self-conscious and are not apt at memorizing. The part was a long one, and clearly it must be given to a girl. Some members of the club suggested Thea Kronborg, others advocated Lily Fisher. Lily’s partisans urged that she was much prettier than Thea, and had a much “sweeter disposition.” Nobody denied these facts. But there was nothing in the least boyish about Lily, and she sang all songs and played all parts alike. Lily’s simper was popular, but it seemed not quite the right thing for the heroic drummer boy.

Upping, the trainer, talked to one and another: “Lily’s all right for girl parts,” he insisted, “but you’ve got to get a girl with some ginger in her for this. Thea’s got the voice, too. When she sings, ‘Just Before the Battle, Mother,’ she’ll bring down the house.”

When all the members of the club had been privately consulted, they announced their decision to Tillie at the first regular meeting that was called to cast the parts. They expected Tillie to be overcome with joy, but, on the contrary, she seemed embarrassed. “I’m afraid Thea hasn’t got time for that,” she said jerkily. “She is always so busy with her music. Guess you’ll have to get somebody else.”

The club lifted its eyebrows. Several of Lily Fisher’s friends coughed. Mr. Upping flushed. The stout woman who always played the injured wife called Tillie’s attention to the fact that this would be a fine opportunity for her niece to show what she could do. Her tone was condescending.

Tillie threw up her head and laughed; there was something sharp and wild about Tillie’s laugh—when it was not a giggle. “Oh, I guess Thea hasn’t got time to do any showing off. Her time to show off ain’t come yet. I expect she’ll make us all sit up when it does. No use asking her to take the part. She’d turn her nose up at it. I guess they’d be glad to get her in the Denver Dramatics, if they could.”

The company broke up into groups and expressed their amazement. Of course all Swedes were conceited, but they would never have believed that all the conceit of all the Swedes put together would reach such a pitch as this. They confided to each other that Tillie was “just a little off, on the subject of her niece,” and agreed that it would be as well not to excite her further. Tillie got a cold reception at rehearsals for a long while afterward, and Thea had a crop of new enemies without even knowing it.

X

Wunsch and old Fritz and Spanish Johnny celebrated Christmas together, so riotously that Wunsch was unable to give Thea her lesson the next day. In the middle of the vacation week Thea went to the Kohlers’ through a soft, beautiful snowstorm. The air was a tender blue-gray, like the color on the doves that flew in and out of the white dove-house on the post in the Kohlers’ garden. The sand hills looked dim and sleepy. The tamarisk hedge was full of snow, like a foam of blossoms drifted over it. When Thea opened the gate, old Mrs. Kohler was just coming in from the chicken yard, with five fresh eggs in her apron and a pair of old top-boots on her feet. She called Thea to come and look at a bantam egg, which she held up proudly. Her bantam hens were remiss in zeal, and she was always delighted when they accomplished anything. She took Thea into the sitting-room, very warm and smelling of food, and brought her a plateful of little Christmas cakes, made according to old and hallowed formulae, and put them before her while she warmed her feet. Then she went to the door of the kitchen stairs and called: “Herr Wunsch, Herr Wunsch!”

Wunsch came down wearing an old wadded jacket, with a velvet collar. The brown silk was so worn that the wadding stuck out almost everywhere. He avoided Thea’s eyes when he came in, nodded without speaking, and pointed directly to the piano stool. He was not so insistent upon the scales as usual, and throughout the little sonata of Mozart’s she was studying, he remained languid and absent-minded. His eyes looked very heavy, and he kept wiping them with one of the new silk handkerchiefs Mrs. Kohler had given him for Christmas. When the lesson was over he did not seem inclined to talk. Thea, loitering on the stool, reached for a tattered book she had taken off the music-rest when she sat down. It was a very old Leipsic edition of the piano score of Gluck’s “Orpheus.” She turned over the pages curiously.

“Is it nice?” she asked.

“It is the most beautiful opera ever made,” Wunsch declared solemnly. “You know the story, eh? How, when she die, Orpheus went down below for his wife?”

“Oh, yes, I know. I didn’t know there was an opera about it, though. Do people sing this now?”

“_Aber ja!_ What else? You like to try? See.” He drew her from the stool and sat down at the piano. Turning over the leaves to the third act, he handed the score to Thea. “Listen, I play it through and you get the _rhythmus. Eins, zwei, drei, vier_.” He played through Orpheus’ lament, then pushed back his cuffs with awakening interest and nodded at Thea. “Now, _vom blatt, mit mir_.”

“Ach, ich habe sie verloren, All’ mein Glück ist nun dahin.”

Wunsch sang the aria with much feeling. It was evidently one that was very dear to him.

“_Noch einmal_, alone, yourself.” He played the introductory measures, then nodded at her vehemently, and she began:—

“Ach, ich habe sie verloren.”

When she finished, Wunsch nodded again. “_Schön_,” he muttered as he finished the accompaniment softly. He dropped his hands on his knees and looked up at Thea. “That is very fine, eh? There is no such beautiful melody in the world. You can take the book for one week and learn something, to pass the time. It is good to know—always. _Euridice, Eu—ri—di—ce, weh dass ich auf Erden bin!_” he sang softly, playing the melody with his right hand.

Thea, who was turning over the pages of the third act, stopped and scowled at a passage. The old German’s blurred eyes watched her curiously.

“For what do you look so, _immer?_” puckering up his own face. “You see something a little difficult, may-be, and you make such a face like it was an enemy.”

Thea laughed, disconcerted. “Well, difficult things are enemies, aren’t they? When you have to get them?”

Wunsch lowered his head and threw it up as if he were butting something. “Not at all! By no means.” He took the book from her and looked at it. “Yes, that is not so easy, there. This is an old book. They do not print it so now any more, I think. They leave it out, may-be. Only one woman could sing that good.”

Thea looked at him in perplexity.

Wunsch went on. “It is written for alto, you see. A woman sings the part, and there was only one to sing that good in there. You understand? Only one!” He glanced at her quickly and lifted his red forefinger upright before her eyes.

Thea looked at the finger as if she were hypnotized. “Only one?” she asked breathlessly; her hands, hanging at her sides, were opening and shutting rapidly.

Wunsch nodded and still held up that compelling finger. When he dropped his hands, there was a look of satisfaction in his face.

“Was she very great?”

Wunsch nodded.

“Was she beautiful?”

“_Aber gar nicht!_ Not at all. She was ugly; big mouth, big teeth, no figure, nothing at all,” indicating a luxuriant bosom by sweeping his hands over his chest. “A pole, a post! But for the voice—_ach!_ She have something in there, behind the eyes,” tapping his temples.

Thea followed all his gesticulations intently. “Was she German?”

“No, _Spanisch_.” He looked down and frowned for a moment. “_Ach_, I tell you, she look like the Frau Tellamantez, some-thing. Long face, long chin, and ugly al-so.”

“Did she die a long while ago?”

“Die? I think not. I never hear, anyhow. I guess she is alive somewhere in the world; Paris, may-be. But old, of course. I hear her when I was a youth. She is too old to sing now any more.”

“Was she the greatest singer you ever heard?”

Wunsch nodded gravely. “Quite so. She was the most—” he hunted for an English word, lifted his hand over his head and snapped his fingers noiselessly in the air, enunciating fiercely, “_künst-ler-isch!_” The word seemed to glitter in his uplifted hand, his voice was so full of emotion.

Wunsch rose from the stool and began to button his wadded jacket, preparing to return to his half-heated room in the loft. Thea regretfully put on her cloak and hood and set out for home.

When Wunsch looked for his score late that afternoon, he found that Thea had not forgotten to take it with her. He smiled his loose, sarcastic smile, and thoughtfully rubbed his stubbly chin with his red fingers. When Fritz came home in the early blue twilight the snow was flying faster, Mrs. Kohler was cooking _Hasenpfeffer_ in the kitchen, and the professor was seated at the piano, playing the Gluck, which he knew by heart. Old Fritz took off his shoes quietly behind the stove and lay down on the lounge before his masterpiece, where the firelight was playing over the walls of Moscow. He listened, while the room grew darker and the windows duller. Wunsch always came back to the same thing:—

“Ach, ich habe sie verloren, ... Euridice, Euridice!”

From time to time Fritz sighed softly. He, too, had lost a Euridice.

XI

One Saturday, late in June, Thea arrived early for her lesson. As she perched herself upon the piano stool,—a wobbly, old-fashioned thing that worked on a creaky screw,—she gave Wunsch a side glance, smiling. “You must not be cross to me to-day. This is my birthday.”

“So?” he pointed to the keyboard.

After the lesson they went out to join Mrs. Kohler, who had asked Thea to come early, so that she could stay and smell the linden bloom. It was one of those still days of intense light, when every particle of mica in the soil flashed like a little mirror, and the glare from the plain below seemed more intense than the rays from above. The sand ridges ran glittering gold out to where the mirage licked them up, shining and steaming like a lake in the tropics. The sky looked like blue lava, forever incapable of clouds,—a turquoise bowl that was the lid of the desert. And yet within Mrs. Kohler’s green patch the water dripped, the beds had all been hosed, and the air was fresh with rapidly evaporating moisture.

The two symmetrical linden trees were the proudest things in the garden. Their sweetness embalmed all the air. At every turn of the paths,—whether one went to see the hollyhocks or the bleeding heart, or to look at the purple morning-glories that ran over the bean-poles,—wherever one went, the sweetness of the lindens struck one afresh and one always came back to them. Under the round leaves, where the waxen yellow blossoms hung, bevies of wild bees were buzzing. The tamarisks were still pink, and the flower-beds were doing their best in honor of the linden festival. The white dove-house was shining with a fresh coat of paint, and the pigeons were crooning contentedly, flying down often to drink at the drip from the water tank. Mrs. Kohler, who was transplanting pansies, came up with her trowel and told Thea it was lucky to have your birthday when the lindens were in bloom, and that she must go and look at the sweet peas. Wunsch accompanied her, and as they walked between the flower-beds he took Thea’s hand.

“Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen,”—

he muttered. “You know that von Heine? _Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen?_” He looked down at Thea and softly pressed her hand.

“No, I don’t know it. What does _flüstern_ mean?”

“_Flüstern?_—to whisper. You must begin now to know such things. That is necessary. How many birthdays?”

“Thirteen. I’m in my ’teens now. But how can I know words like that? I only know what you say at my lessons. They don’t teach German at school. How can I learn?”

“It is always possible to learn when one likes,” said Wunsch. His words were peremptory, as usual, but his tone was mild, even confidential. “There is always a way. And if some day you are going to sing, it is necessary to know well the German language.”

Thea stooped over to pick a leaf of rosemary. How did Wunsch know that, when the very roses on her wall-paper had never heard it? “But am I going to?” she asked, still stooping.

“That is for you to say,” returned Wunsch coldly. “You would better marry some _Jacob_ here and keep the house for him, may-be? That is as one desires.”

Thea flashed up at him a clear, laughing look. “No, I don’t want to do that. You know,” she brushed his coat sleeve quickly with her yellow head. “Only how can I learn anything here? It’s so far from Denver.”

Wunsch’s loose lower lip curled in amusement. Then, as if he suddenly remembered something, he spoke seriously. “Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little. It brought Columbus across the sea in a little boat, _und so weiter_.” Wunsch made a grimace, took his pupil’s hand and drew her toward the grape arbor. “Hereafter I will more speak to you in German. Now, sit down and I will teach you for your birthday that little song. Ask me the words you do not know already. Now: _Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen_.”

Thea memorized quickly because she had the power of listening intently. In a few moments she could repeat the eight lines for him. Wunsch nodded encouragingly and they went out of the arbor into the sunlight again. As they went up and down the gravel paths between the flowerbeds, the white and yellow butterflies kept darting before them, and the pigeons were washing their pink feet at the drip and crooning in their husky bass. Over and over again Wunsch made her say the lines to him. “You see it is nothing. If you learn a great many of the _Lieder_, you will know the German language already. _Weiter, nun_.” He would incline his head gravely and listen.

“Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen Geh’ ich im Garten herum; Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen, Ich aber, ich wandte stumm.

“Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen Und schau’n mitleidig mich an: ‘Sei unserer Schwester nicht böse, Du trauriger, blasser Mann!’”

(In the soft-shining summer morning I wandered the garden within. The flowers they whispered and murmured, But I, I wandered dumb.

The flowers they whisper and murmur, And me with compassion they scan: “Oh, be not harsh to our sister, Thou sorrowful, death-pale man!”)

Wunsch had noticed before that when his pupil read anything in verse the character of her voice changed altogether; it was no longer the voice which spoke the speech of Moonstone. It was a soft, rich contralto, and she read quietly; the feeling was in the voice itself, not indicated by emphasis or change of pitch. She repeated the little verses musically, like a song, and the entreaty of the flowers was even softer than the rest, as the shy speech of flowers might be, and she ended with the voice suspended, almost with a rising inflection. It was a nature-voice, Wunsch told himself, breathed from the creature and apart from language, like the sound of the wind in the trees, or the murmur of water.

“What is it the flowers mean when they ask him not to be harsh to their sister, eh?” he asked, looking down at her curiously and wrinkling his dull red forehead.

Thea glanced at him in surprise. “I suppose he thinks they are asking him not to be harsh to his sweetheart—or some girl they remind him of.”

“And why _trauriger, blasser Mann?_”

They had come back to the grape arbor, and Thea picked out a sunny place on the bench, where a tortoise-shell cat was stretched at full length. She sat down, bending over the cat and teasing his whiskers. “Because he had been awake all night, thinking about her, wasn’t it? Maybe that was why he was up so early.”

Wunsch shrugged his shoulders. “If he think about her all night already, why do you say the flowers remind him?”

Thea looked up at him in perplexity. A flash of comprehension lit her face and she smiled eagerly. “Oh, I didn’t mean ‘remind’ in that way! I didn’t mean they brought her to his mind! I meant it was only when he came out in the morning, that she seemed to him like that,—like one of the flowers.”

“And before he came out, how did she seem?”

This time it was Thea who shrugged her shoulders. The warm smile left her face. She lifted her eyebrows in annoyance and looked off at the sand hills.

Wunsch persisted. “Why you not answer me?”

“Because it would be silly. You are just trying to make me say things. It spoils things to ask questions.”

Wunsch bowed mockingly; his smile was disagreeable. Suddenly his face grew grave, grew fierce, indeed. He pulled himself up from his clumsy stoop and folded his arms. “But it is necessary to know if you know some things. Some things cannot be taught. If you not know in the beginning, you not know in the end. For a singer there must be something in the inside from the beginning. I shall not be long in this place, may-be, and I like to know. Yes,”—he ground his heel in the gravel,—“yes, when you are barely six, you must know that already. That is the beginning of all things; _der Geist, die Phantasie_. It must be in the baby, when it makes its first cry, like _der Rhythmus_, or it is not to be. You have some voice already, and if in the beginning, when you are with things-to-play, you know that what you will not tell me, then you can learn to sing, may-be.”

Wunsch began to pace the arbor, rubbing his hands together. The dark flush of his face had spread up under the iron-gray bristles on his head. He was talking to himself, not to Thea. Insidious power of the linden bloom! “Oh, much you can learn! _Aber nicht die Americanischen Fräulein_. They have nothing inside them,” striking his chest with both fists. “They are like the ones in the _Märchen_, a grinning face and hollow in the insides. Something they can learn, oh, yes, may-be! But the secret—what make the rose to red, the sky to blue, the man to love—_in der Brust, in der Brust_ it is, _und ohne dieses giebt es keine Kunst, giebt es keine Kunst!_” He threw up his square hand and shook it, all the fingers apart and wagging. Purple and breathless he went out of the arbor and into the house, without saying good-bye. These outbursts frightened Wunsch. They were always harbingers of ill.

Thea got her music-book and stole quietly out of the garden. She did not go home, but wandered off into the sand dunes, where the prickly pear was in blossom and the green lizards were racing each other in the glittering light. She was shaken by a passionate excitement. She did not altogether understand what Wunsch was talking about; and yet, in a way she knew. She knew, of course, that there was something about her that was different. But it was more like a friendly spirit than like anything that was a part of herself. She thought everything to it, and it answered her; happiness consisted of that backward and forward movement of herself. The something came and went, she never knew how. Sometimes she hunted for it and could not find it; again, she lifted her eyes from a book, or stepped out of doors, or wakened in the morning, and it was there,—under her cheek, it usually seemed to be, or over her breast,—a kind of warm sureness. And when it was there, everything was more interesting and beautiful, even people. When this companion was with her, she could get the most wonderful things out of Spanish Johnny, or Wunsch, or Dr. Archie.

On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly-pear blossoms with their thousand stamens. She looked at the sand hills until she wished she _were_ a sand hill. And yet she knew that she was going to leave them all behind some day. They would be changing all day long, yellow and purple and lavender, and she would not be there. From that day on, she felt there was a secret between her and Wunsch. Together they had lifted a lid, pulled out a drawer, and looked at something. They hid it away and never spoke of what they had seen; but neither of them forgot it.

XII

One July night, when the moon was full, Dr. Archie was coming up from the depot, restless and discontented, wishing there were something to do. He carried his straw hat in his hand, and kept brushing his hair back from his forehead with a purposeless, unsatisfied gesture. After he passed Uncle Billy Beemer’s cottonwood grove, the sidewalk ran out of the shadow into the white moonlight and crossed the sand gully on high posts, like a bridge. As the doctor approached this trestle, he saw a white figure, and recognized Thea Kronborg. He quickened his pace and she came to meet him.

“What are you doing out so late, my girl?” he asked as he took her hand.

“Oh, I don’t know. What do people go to bed so early for? I’d like to run along before the houses and screech at them. Isn’t it glorious out here?”

The young doctor gave a melancholy laugh and pressed her hand.

“Think of it,” Thea snorted impatiently. “Nobody up but us and the rabbits! I’ve started up half a dozen of ’em. Look at that little one down there now,”—she stooped and pointed. In the gully below them there was, indeed, a little rabbit with a white spot of a tail, crouching down on the sand, quite motionless. It seemed to be lapping up the moonlight like cream. On the other side of the walk, down in the ditch, there was a patch of tall, rank sunflowers, their shaggy leaves white with dust. The moon stood over the cottonwood grove. There was no wind, and no sound but the wheezing of an engine down on the tracks.

“Well, we may as well watch the rabbits.” Dr. Archie sat down on the sidewalk and let his feet hang over the edge. He pulled out a smooth linen handkerchief that smelled of German cologne water. “Well, how goes it? Working hard? You must know about all Wunsch can teach you by this time.”

Thea shook her head. “Oh, no, I don’t, Dr. Archie. He’s hard to get at, but he’s been a real musician in his time. Mother says she believes he’s forgotten more than the music-teachers down in Denver ever knew.”

“I’m afraid he won’t be around here much longer,” said Dr. Archie. “He’s been making a tank of himself lately. He’ll be pulling his freight one of these days. That’s the way they do, you know. I’ll be sorry on your account.” He paused and ran his fresh handkerchief over his face. “What the deuce are we all here for anyway, Thea?” he said abruptly.

“On earth, you mean?” Thea asked in a low voice.

“Well, primarily, yes. But secondarily, why are we in Moonstone? It isn’t as if we’d been born here. You were, but Wunsch wasn’t, and I wasn’t. I suppose I’m here because I married as soon as I got out of medical school and had to get a practice quick. If you hurry things, you always get left in the end. I don’t learn anything here, and as for the people—In my own town in Michigan, now, there were people who liked me on my father’s account, who had even known my grandfather. That meant something. But here it’s all like the sand: blows north one day and south the next. We’re all a lot of gamblers without much nerve, playing for small stakes. The railroad is the one real fact in this country. That has to be; the world has to be got back and forth. But the rest of us are here just because it’s the end of a run and the engine has to have a drink. Some day I’ll get up and find my hair turning gray, and I’ll have nothing to show for it.”

Thea slid closer to him and caught his arm. “No, no. I won’t let you get gray. You’ve got to stay young for me. I’m getting young now, too.”

Archie laughed. “Getting?”

“Yes. People aren’t young when they’re children. Look at Thor, now; he’s just a little old man. But Gus has a sweetheart, and he’s young!”

“Something in that!” Dr. Archie patted her head, and then felt the shape of her skull gently, with the tips of his fingers. “When you were little, Thea, I used always to be curious about the shape of your head. You seemed to have more inside it than most youngsters. I haven’t examined it for a long time. Seems to be the usual shape, but uncommonly hard, some how. What are you going to do with yourself, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Honest, now?” He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

Thea laughed and edged away from him.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve, haven’t you? Anything you like; only don’t marry and settle down here without giving yourself a chance, will you?”

“Not much. See, there’s another rabbit!”

“That’s all right about the rabbits, but I don’t want you to get tied up. Remember that.”

Thea nodded. “Be nice to Wunsch, then. I don’t know what I’d do if he went away.”

“You’ve got older friends than Wunsch here, Thea.”

“I know.” Thea spoke seriously and looked up at the moon, propping her chin on her hand. “But Wunsch is the only one that can teach me what I want to know. I’ve got to learn to do something well, and that’s the thing I can do best.”

“Do you want to be a music-teacher?”

“Maybe, but I want to be a good one. I’d like to go to Germany to study, some day. Wunsch says that’s the best place,—the only place you can really learn.” Thea hesitated and then went on nervously, “I’ve got a book that says so, too. It’s called ‘My Musical Memories.’ It made me want to go to Germany even before Wunsch said anything. Of course it’s a secret. You’re the first one I’ve told.”

Dr. Archie smiled indulgently. “That’s a long way off. Is that what you’ve got in your hard noddle?” He put his hand on her hair, but this time she shook him off.

“No, I don’t think much about it. But you talk about going, and a body has to have something to go _to!_”

“That’s so.” Dr. Archie sighed. “You’re lucky if you have. Poor Wunsch, now, he hasn’t. What do such fellows come out here for? He’s been asking me about my mining stock, and about mining towns. What would he do in a mining town? He wouldn’t know a piece of ore if he saw one. He’s got nothing to sell that a mining town wants to buy. Why don’t those old fellows stay at home? We won’t need them for another hundred years. An engine wiper can get a job, but a piano player! Such people can’t make good.”

“My grandfather Alstrom was a musician, and he made good.”

Dr. Archie chuckled. “Oh, a Swede can make good anywhere, at anything! You’ve got that in your favor, miss. Come, you must be getting home.”

Thea rose. “Yes, I used to be ashamed of being a Swede, but I’m not any more. Swedes are kind of common, but I think it’s better to be _something_.”

“It surely is! How tall you are getting. You come above my shoulder now.”

“I’ll keep on growing, don’t you think? I particularly want to be tall. Yes, I guess I must go home. I wish there’d be a fire.”

“A fire?”

“Yes, so the fire-bell would ring and the roundhouse whistle would blow, and everybody would come running out. Sometime I’m going to ring the fire-bell myself and stir them all up.”

“You’d be arrested.”

“Well, that would be better than going to bed.”

“I’ll have to lend you some more books.”

Thea shook herself impatiently. “I can’t read every night.”

Dr. Archie gave one of his low, sympathetic chuckles as he opened the gate for her. “You’re beginning to grow up, that’s what’s the matter with you. I’ll have to keep an eye on you. Now you’ll have to say good-night to the moon.”

“No, I won’t. I sleep on the floor now, right in the moonlight. My window comes down to the floor, and I can look at the sky all night.”

She shot round the house to the kitchen door, and Dr. Archie watched her disappear with a sigh. He thought of the hard, mean, frizzy little woman who kept his house for him; once the belle of a Michigan town, now dry and withered up at thirty. “If I had a daughter like Thea to watch,” he reflected, “I wouldn’t mind anything. I wonder if all of my life’s going to be a mistake just because I made a big one then? Hardly seems fair.”

Howard Archie was “respected” rather than popular in Moonstone. Everyone recognized that he was a good physician, and a progressive Western town likes to be able to point to a handsome, well-set-up, well-dressed man among its citizens. But a great many people thought Archie “distant,” and they were right. He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. He knew that every one was curious about his wife, that she played a sort of character part in Moonstone, and that people made fun of her, not very delicately. Her own friends—most of them women who were distasteful to Archie—liked to ask her to contribute to church charities, just to see how mean she could be. The little, lop-sided cake at the church supper, the cheapest pincushion, the skimpiest apron at the bazaar, were always Mrs. Archie’s contribution.

All this hurt the doctor’s pride. But if there was one thing he had learned, it was that there was no changing Belle’s nature. He had married a mean woman; and he must accept the consequences. Even in Colorado he would have had no pretext for divorce, and, to do him justice, he had never thought of such a thing. The tenets of the Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though he had long ceased to believe in them, still influenced his conduct and his conception of propriety. To him there was something vulgar about divorce. A divorced man was a disgraced man; at least, he had exhibited his hurt, and made it a matter for common gossip. Respectability was so necessary to Archie that he was willing to pay a high price for it. As long as he could keep up a decent exterior, he could manage to get on; and if he could have concealed his wife’s littleness from all his friends, he would scarcely have complained. He was more afraid of pity than he was of any unhappiness. Had there been another woman for whom he cared greatly, he might have had plenty of courage; but he was not likely to meet such a woman in Moonstone.