Chapter V: Part I: Friends of Childhood (5)

Giddy, down in the car, in the pauses of his work, made himself agreeable to Mrs. Kronborg.

“It’s a great rest to be where my family can’t get at me, Mr. Giddy,” she told him. “I thought you and Ray might have some housework here for me to look after, but I couldn’t improve any on this car.”

“Oh, we like to keep her neat,” returned Giddy glibly, winking up at Ray’s expressive back. “If you want to see a clean ice-box, look at this one. Yes, Kennedy always carries fresh cream to eat on his oatmeal. I’m not particular. The tin cow’s good enough for me.”

“Most of you boys smoke so much that all victuals taste alike to you,” said Mrs. Kronborg. “I’ve got no religious scruples against smoking, but I couldn’t take as much interest cooking for a man that used tobacco. I guess it’s all right for bachelors who have to eat round.”

Mrs. Kronborg took off her hat and veil and made herself comfortable. She seldom had an opportunity to be idle, and she enjoyed it. She could sit for hours and watch the sage-hens fly up and the jack-rabbits dart away from the track, without being bored. She wore a tan bombazine dress, made very plainly, and carried a roomy, worn, mother-of-the-family handbag.

Ray Kennedy always insisted that Mrs. Kronborg was “a fine-looking lady,” but this was not the common opinion in Moonstone. Ray had lived long enough among the Mexicans to dislike fussiness, to feel that there was something more attractive in ease of manner than in absentminded concern about hairpins and dabs of lace. He had learned to think that the way a woman stood, moved, sat in her chair, looked at you, was more important than the absence of wrinkles from her skirt. Ray had, indeed, such unusual perceptions in some directions, that one could not help wondering what he would have been if he had ever, as he said, had “half a chance.”

He was right; Mrs. Kronborg was a fine-looking woman. She was short and square, but her head was a real head, not a mere jerky termination of the body. It had some individuality apart from hats and hairpins. Her hair, Moonstone women admitted, would have been very pretty “on anybody else.” Frizzy bangs were worn then, but Mrs. Kronborg always dressed her hair in the same way, parted in the middle, brushed smoothly back from her low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her head in two thick braids. It was growing gray about the temples, but after the manner of yellow hair it seemed only to have grown paler there, and had taken on a color like that of English primroses. Her eyes were clear and untroubled; her face smooth and calm, and, as Ray said, “strong.”

Thea and Ray, up in the sunny cupola, were laughing and talking. Ray got great pleasure out of seeing her face there in the little box where he so often imagined it. They were crossing a plateau where great red sandstone boulders lay about, most of them much wider at the top than at the base, so that they looked like great toadstools.

“The sand has been blowing against them for a good many hundred years,” Ray explained, directing Thea’s eyes with his gloved hand. “You see the sand blows low, being so heavy, and cuts them out underneath. Wind and sand are pretty high-class architects. That’s the principle of most of the Cliff-Dweller remains down at Canyon de Chelly. The sandstorms had dug out big depressions in the face of a cliff, and the Indians built their houses back in that depression.”

“You told me that before, Ray, and of course you know. But the geography says their houses were cut out of the face of the living rock, and I like that better.”

Ray sniffed. “What nonsense does get printed! It’s enough to give a man disrespect for learning. How could them Indians cut houses out of the living rock, when they knew nothing about the art of forging metals?” Ray leaned back in his chair, swung his foot, and looked thoughtful and happy. He was in one of his favorite fields of speculation, and nothing gave him more pleasure than talking these things over with Thea Kronborg. “I’ll tell you, Thee, if those old fellows had learned to work metals once, your ancient Egyptians and Assyrians wouldn’t have beat them very much. Whatever they did do, they did well. Their masonry’s standing there to-day, the corners as true as the Denver Capitol. They were clever at most everything but metals; and that one failure kept them from getting across. It was the quicksand that swallowed ’em up, as a race. I guess civilization proper began when men mastered metals.”

Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not use them to show off, but because they seemed to him more adequate than colloquial speech. He felt strongly about these things, and groped for words, as he said, “to express himself.” He had the lamentable American belief that “expression” is obligatory. He still carried in his trunk, among the unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the title-page of which was written “Impressions on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H. Kennedy.” The pages of that book were like a battlefield; the laboring author had fallen back from metaphor after metaphor, abandoned position after position. He would have admitted that the art of forging metals was nothing to this treacherous business of recording impressions, in which the material you were so full of vanished mysteriously under your striving hand. “Escaping steam!” he had said to himself, the last time he tried to read that notebook.

Thea didn’t mind Ray’s travel-lecture expressions. She dodged them, unconsciously, as she did her father’s professional palaver. The light in Ray’s pale-blue eyes and the feeling in his voice more than made up for the stiffness of his language.

“Were the Cliff-Dwellers really clever with their hands, Ray, or do you always have to make allowance and say, ‘That was pretty good for an Indian’?” she asked.

Ray went down into the car to give some instructions to Giddy. “Well,” he said when he returned, “about the aborigines: once or twice I’ve been with some fellows who were cracking burial mounds. Always felt a little ashamed of it, but we did pull out some remarkable things. We got some pottery out whole; seemed pretty fine to me. I guess their women were their artists. We found lots of old shoes and sandals made out of yucca fiber, neat and strong; and feather blankets, too.”

“Feather blankets? You never told me about them.”

“Didn’t I? The old fellows—or the squaws—wove a close netting of yucca fiber, and then tied on little bunches of down feathers, overlapping, just the way feathers grow on a bird. Some of them were feathered on both sides. You can’t get anything warmer than that, now, can you?—or prettier. What I like about those old aborigines is, that they got all their ideas from nature.”

Thea laughed. “That means you’re going to say something about girls’ wearing corsets. But some of your Indians flattened their babies’ heads, and that’s worse than wearing corsets.”

“Give me an Indian girl’s figure for beauty,” Ray insisted. “And a girl with a voice like yours ought to have plenty of lung-action. But you know my sentiments on that subject. I was going to tell you about the handsomest thing we ever looted out of those burial mounds. It was on a woman, too, I regret to say. She was preserved as perfect as any mummy that ever came out of the pyramids. She had a big string of turquoises around her neck, and she was wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with little yellow feathers that must have come off wild canaries. Can you beat that, now? The fellow that claimed it sold it to a Boston man for a hundred and fifty dollars.”

Thea looked at him admiringly. “Oh, Ray, and didn’t you get anything off her, to remember her by, even? She must have been a princess.”

Ray took a wallet from the pocket of the coat that was hanging beside him, and drew from it a little lump wrapped in worn tissue paper. In a moment a stone, soft and blue as a robin’s egg, lay in the hard palm of his hand. It was a turquoise, rubbed smooth in the Indian finish, which is so much more beautiful than the incongruous high polish the white man gives that tender stone. “I got this from her necklace. See the hole where the string went through? You know how the Indians drill them? Work the drill with their teeth. You like it, don’t you? They’re just right for you. Blue and yellow are the Swedish colors.” Ray looked intently at her head, bent over his hand, and then gave his whole attention to the track.

“I’ll tell you, Thee,” he began after a pause, “I’m going to form a camping party one of these days and persuade your _padre_ to take you and your mother down to that country, and we’ll live in the rock houses—they’re as comfortable as can be—and start the cook fires up in ’em once again. I’ll go into the burial mounds and get you more keepsakes than any girl ever had before.” Ray had planned such an expedition for his wedding journey, and it made his heart thump to see how Thea’s eyes kindled when he talked about it. “I’ve learned more down there about what makes history,” he went on, “than in all the books I’ve ever read. When you sit in the sun and let your heels hang out of a doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas come to you. You begin to feel what the human race has been up against from the beginning. There’s something mighty elevating about those old habitations. You feel like it’s up to you to do your best, on account of those fellows having it so hard. You feel like you owed them something.”

At Wassiwappa, Ray got instructions to sidetrack until Thirty-six went by. After reading the message, he turned to his guests. “I’m afraid this will hold us up about two hours, Mrs. Kronborg, and we won’t get into Denver till near midnight.”

“That won’t trouble me,” said Mrs. Kronborg contentedly. “They know me at the Y.W.C.A., and they’ll let me in any time of night. I came to see the country, not to make time. I’ve always wanted to get out at this white place and look around, and now I’ll have a chance. What makes it so white?”

“Some kind of chalky rock.” Ray sprang to the ground and gave Mrs. Kronborg his hand. “You can get soil of any color in Colorado; match most any ribbon.”

While Ray was getting his train on to a side track, Mrs. Kronborg strolled off to examine the post-office and station house; these, with the water tank, made up the town. The station agent “batched” and raised chickens. He ran out to meet Mrs. Kronborg, clutched at her feverishly, and began telling her at once how lonely he was and what bad luck he was having with his poultry. She went to his chicken yard with him, and prescribed for gapes.

Wassiwappa seemed a dreary place enough to people who looked for verdure, a brilliant place to people who liked color. Beside the station house there was a blue-grass plot, protected by a red plank fence, and six fly-bitten box-elder trees, not much larger than bushes, were kept alive by frequent hosings from the water plug. Over the windows some dusty morning-glory vines were trained on strings. All the country about was broken up into low chalky hills, which were so intensely white, and spotted so evenly with sage, that they looked like white leopards crouching. White dust powdered everything, and the light was so intense that the station agent usually wore blue glasses. Behind the station there was a water course, which roared in flood time, and a basin in the soft white rock where a pool of alkali water flashed in the sun like a mirror. The agent looked almost as sick as his chickens, and Mrs. Kronborg at once invited him to lunch with her party. He had, he confessed, a distaste for his own cooking, and lived mainly on soda crackers and canned beef. He laughed apologetically when Mrs. Kronborg said she guessed she’d look about for a shady place to eat lunch.

She walked up the track to the water tank, and there, in the narrow shadows cast by the uprights on which the tank stood, she found two tramps. They sat up and stared at her, heavy with sleep. When she asked them where they were going, they told her “to the coast.” They rested by day and traveled by night; walked the ties unless they could steal a ride, they said; adding that “these Western roads were getting strict.” Their faces were blistered, their eyes blood-shot, and their shoes looked fit only for the trash pile.

“I suppose you’re hungry?” Mrs. Kronborg asked. “I suppose you both drink?” she went on thoughtfully, not censoriously.

The huskier of the two hoboes, a bushy, bearded fellow, rolled his eyes and said, “I wonder?” But the other, who was old and spare, with a sharp nose and watery eyes, sighed. “Some has one affliction, some another,” he said.

Mrs. Kronborg reflected. “Well,” she said at last, “you can’t get liquor here, anyway. I am going to ask you to vacate, because I want to have a little picnic under this tank for the freight crew that brought me along. I wish I had lunch enough to provide you, but I ain’t. The station agent says he gets his provisions over there at the post office store, and if you are hungry you can get some canned stuff there.” She opened her handbag and gave each of the tramps a half-dollar.

The old man wiped his eyes with his forefinger. “Thank ’ee, ma’am. A can of tomatters will taste pretty good to me. I wasn’t always walkin’ ties; I had a good job in Cleveland before—”

The hairy tramp turned on him fiercely. “Aw, shut up on that, grandpaw! Ain’t you got no gratitude? What do you want to hand the lady that fur?”

The old man hung his head and turned away. As he went off, his comrade looked after him and said to Mrs. Kronborg: “It’s true, what he says. He had a job in the car shops; but he had bad luck.” They both limped away toward the store, and Mrs. Kronborg sighed. She was not afraid of tramps. She always talked to them, and never turned one away. She hated to think how many of them there were, crawling along the tracks over that vast country.

Her reflections were cut short by Ray and Giddy and Thea, who came bringing the lunch box and water bottles. Although there was not shadow enough to accommodate all the party at once, the air under the tank was distinctly cooler than the surrounding air, and the drip made a pleasant sound in that breathless noon. The station agent ate as if he had never been fed before, apologizing every time he took another piece of fried chicken. Giddy was unabashed before the devilled eggs of which he had spoken so scornfully last night. After lunch the men lit their pipes and lay back against the uprights that supported the tank.

“This is the sunny side of railroading, all right,” Giddy drawled luxuriously.

“You fellows grumble too much,” said Mrs. Kronborg as she corked the pickle jar. “Your job has its drawbacks, but it don’t tie you down. Of course there’s the risk; but I believe a man’s watched over, and he can’t be hurt on the railroad or anywhere else if it’s intended he shouldn’t be.”

Giddy laughed. “Then the trains must be operated by fellows the Lord has it in for, Mrs. Kronborg. They figure it out that a railroad man’s only due to last eleven years; then it’s his turn to be smashed.”

“That’s a dark Providence, I don’t deny,” Mrs. Kronborg admitted. “But there’s lots of things in life that’s hard to understand.”

“I guess!” murmured Giddy, looking off at the spotted white hills.

Ray smoked in silence, watching Thea and her mother clear away the lunch. He was thinking that Mrs. Kronborg had in her face the same serious look that Thea had; only hers was calm and satisfied, and Thea’s was intense and questioning. But in both it was a large kind of look, that was not all the time being broken up and convulsed by trivial things. They both carried their heads like Indian women, with a kind of noble unconsciousness. He got so tired of women who were always nodding and jerking; apologizing, deprecating, coaxing, insinuating with their heads.

When Ray’s party set off again that afternoon the sun beat fiercely into the cupola, and Thea curled up in one of the seats at the back of the car and had a nap.

As the short twilight came on, Giddy took a turn in the cupola, and Ray came down and sat with Thea on the rear platform of the caboose and watched the darkness come in soft waves over the plain. They were now about thirty miles from Denver, and the mountains looked very near. The great toothed wall behind which the sun had gone down now separated into four distinct ranges, one behind the other. They were a very pale blue, a color scarcely stronger than wood smoke, and the sunset had left bright streaks in the snow-filled gorges. In the clear, yellow-streaked sky the stars were coming out, flickering like newly lighted lamps, growing steadier and more golden as the sky darkened and the land beneath them fell into complete shadow. It was a cool, restful darkness that was not black or forbidding, but somehow open and free; the night of high plains where there is no moistness or mistiness in the atmosphere.

Ray lit his pipe. “I never get tired of them old stars, Thee. I miss ’em up in Washington and Oregon where it’s misty. Like ’em best down in Mother Mexico, where they have everything their own way. I’m not for any country where the stars are dim.” Ray paused and drew on his pipe. “I don’t know as I ever really noticed ’em much till that first year I herded sheep up in Wyoming. That was the year the blizzard caught me.”

“And you lost all your sheep, didn’t you, Ray?” Thea spoke sympathetically. “Was the man who owned them nice about it?”

“Yes, he was a good loser. But I didn’t get over it for a long while. Sheep are so damned resigned. Sometimes, to this day, when I’m dog-tired, I try to save them sheep all night long. It comes kind of hard on a boy when he first finds out how little he is, and how big everything else is.”

Thea moved restlessly toward him and dropped her chin on her hand, looking at a low star that seemed to rest just on the rim of the earth. “I don’t see how you stood it. I don’t believe I could. I don’t see how people can stand it to get knocked out, anyhow!” She spoke with such fierceness that Ray glanced at her in surprise. She was sitting on the floor of the car, crouching like a little animal about to spring.

“No occasion for you to see,” he said warmly. “There’ll always be plenty of other people to take the knocks for you.”

“That’s nonsense, Ray.” Thea spoke impatiently and leaned lower still, frowning at the red star. “Everybody’s up against it for himself, succeeds or fails—himself.”

“In one way, yes,” Ray admitted, knocking the sparks from his pipe out into the soft darkness that seemed to flow like a river beside the car. “But when you look at it another way, there are a lot of halfway people in this world who help the winners win, and the failers fail. If a man stumbles, there’s plenty of people to push him down. But if he’s like ‘the youth who bore,’ those same people are foreordained to help him along. They may hate to, worse than blazes, and they may do a lot of cussin’ about it, but they have to help the winners and they can’t dodge it. It’s a natural law, like what keeps the big clock up there going, little wheels and big, and no mix-up.” Ray’s hand and his pipe were suddenly outlined against the sky. “Ever occur to you, Thee, that they have to be on time close enough to _make time?_ The Dispatcher up there must have a long head.” Pleased with his similitude, Ray went back to the lookout. Going into Denver, he had to keep a sharp watch.

Giddy came down, cheerful at the prospect of getting into port, and singing a new topical ditty that had come up from the Santa Fé by way of La Junta. Nobody knows who makes these songs; they seem to follow events automatically. Mrs. Kronborg made Giddy sing the whole twelve verses of this one, and laughed until she wiped her eyes. The story was that of Katie Casey, head diningroom girl at Winslow, Arizona, who was unjustly discharged by the Harvey House manager. Her suitor, the yardmaster, took the switchmen out on a strike until she was reinstated. Freight trains from the east and the west piled up at Winslow until the yards looked like a log-jam. The division superintendent, who was in California, had to wire instructions for Katie Casey’s restoration before he could get his trains running. Giddy’s song told all this with much detail, both tender and technical, and after each of the dozen verses came the refrain:—

“Oh, who would think that Katie Casey owned the Santa Fé? But it really looks that way, The dispatcher’s turnin’ gray, All the crews is off their pay; She can hold the freight from Albuquerq’ to Needles any day; The division superintendent, he come home from Monterey, Just to see if things was pleasin’ Katie Ca—a—a—sey.”

Thea laughed with her mother and applauded Giddy. Everything was so kindly and comfortable; Giddy and Ray, and their hospitable little house, and the easy-going country, and the stars. She curled up on the seat again with that warm, sleepy feeling of the friendliness of the world—which nobody keeps very long, and which she was to lose early and irrevocably.

XVII

The summer flew by. Thea was glad when Ray Kennedy had a Sunday in town and could take her driving. Out among the sand hills she could forget the “new room” which was the scene of wearing and fruitless labor. Dr. Archie was away from home a good deal that year. He had put all his money into mines above Colorado Springs, and he hoped for great returns from them.

In the fall of that year, Mr. Kronborg decided that Thea ought to show more interest in church work. He put it to her frankly, one night at supper, before the whole family. “How can I insist on the other girls in the congregation being active in the work, when one of my own daughters manifests so little interest?”

“But I sing every Sunday morning, and I have to give up one night a week to choir practice,” Thea declared rebelliously, pushing back her plate with an angry determination to eat nothing more.

“One night a week is not enough for the pastor’s daughter,” her father replied. “You won’t do anything in the sewing society, and you won’t take part in the Christian Endeavor or the Band of Hope. Very well, you must make it up in other ways. I want some one to play the organ and lead the singing at prayer-meeting this winter. Deacon Potter told me some time ago that he thought there would be more interest in our prayer-meetings if we had the organ. Miss Meyers don’t feel that she can play on Wednesday nights. And there ought to be somebody to start the hymns. Mrs. Potter is getting old, and she always starts them too high. It won’t take much of your time, and it will keep people from talking.”

This argument conquered Thea, though she left the table sullenly. The fear of the tongue, that terror of little towns, is usually felt more keenly by the minister’s family than by other households. Whenever the Kronborgs wanted to do anything, even to buy a new carpet, they had to take counsel together as to whether people would talk. Mrs. Kronborg had her own conviction that people talked when they felt like it, and said what they chose, no matter how the minister’s family conducted themselves. But she did not impart these dangerous ideas to her children. Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

Mrs. Kronborg did not have any particular zest for prayer-meetings, and she stayed at home whenever she had a valid excuse. Thor was too old to furnish such an excuse now, so every Wednesday night, unless one of the children was sick, she trudged off with Thea, behind Mr. Kronborg. At first Thea was terribly bored. But she got used to prayer-meeting, got even to feel a mournful interest in it.

The exercises were always pretty much the same. After the first hymn her father read a passage from the Bible, usually a Psalm. Then there was another hymn, and then her father commented upon the passage he had read and, as he said, “applied the Word to our necessities.” After a third hymn, the meeting was declared open, and the old men and women took turns at praying and talking. Mrs. Kronborg never spoke in meeting. She told people firmly that she had been brought up to keep silent and let the men talk, but she gave respectful attention to the others, sitting with her hands folded in her lap.

The prayer-meeting audience was always small. The young and energetic members of the congregation came only once or twice a year, “to keep people from talking.” The usual Wednesday night gathering was made up of old women, with perhaps six or eight old men, and a few sickly girls who had not much interest in life; two of them, indeed, were already preparing to die. Thea accepted the mournfulness of the prayer-meetings as a kind of spiritual discipline, like funerals. She always read late after she went home and felt a stronger wish than usual to live and to be happy.

The meetings were conducted in the Sunday-School room, where there were wooden chairs instead of pews; an old map of Palestine hung on the wall, and the bracket lamps gave out only a dim light. The old women sat motionless as Indians in their shawls and bonnets; some of them wore long black mourning veils. The old men drooped in their chairs. Every back, every face, every head said “resignation.” Often there were long silences, when you could hear nothing but the crackling of the soft coal in the stove and the muffled cough of one of the sick girls.

There was one nice old lady,—tall, erect, self-respecting, with a delicate white face and a soft voice. She never whined, and what she said was always cheerful, though she spoke so nervously that Thea knew she dreaded getting up, and that she made a real sacrifice to, as she said, “testify to the goodness of her Saviour.” She was the mother of the girl who coughed, and Thea used to wonder how she explained things to herself. There was, indeed, only one woman who talked because she was, as Mr. Kronborg said, “tonguey.” The others were somehow impressive. They told about the sweet thoughts that came to them while they were at their work; how, amid their household tasks, they were suddenly lifted by the sense of a divine Presence. Sometimes they told of their first conversion, of how in their youth that higher Power had made itself known to them. Old Mr. Carsen, the carpenter, who gave his services as janitor to the church, used often to tell how, when he was a young man and a scoffer, bent on the destruction of both body and soul, his Saviour had come to him in the Michigan woods and had stood, it seemed to him, beside the tree he was felling; and how he dropped his axe and knelt in prayer “to Him who died for us upon the tree.” Thea always wanted to ask him more about it; about his mysterious wickedness, and about the vision.

Sometimes the old people would ask for prayers for their absent children. Sometimes they asked their brothers and sisters in Christ to pray that they might be stronger against temptations. One of the sick girls used to ask them to pray that she might have more faith in the times of depression that came to her, “when all the way before seemed dark.” She repeated that husky phrase so often, that Thea always remembered it.

One old woman, who never missed a Wednesday night, and who nearly always took part in the meeting, came all the way up from the depot settlement. She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black canyons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that color of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

One bitterly cold night in December the prayer-meeting seemed to Thea longer than usual. The prayers and the talks went on and on. It was as if the old people were afraid to go out into the cold, or were stupefied by the hot air of the room. She had left a book at home that she was impatient to get back to. At last the Doxology was sung, but the old people lingered about the stove to greet each other, and Thea took her mother’s arm and hurried out to the frozen sidewalk, before her father could get away. The wind was whistling up the street and whipping the naked cottonwood trees against the telegraph poles and the sides of the houses. Thin snow clouds were flying overhead, so that the sky looked gray, with a dull phosphorescence. The icy streets and the shingle roofs of the houses were gray, too. All along the street, shutters banged or windows rattled, or gates wobbled, held by their latch but shaking on loose hinges. There was not a cat or a dog in Moonstone that night that was not given a warm shelter; the cats under the kitchen stove, the dogs in barns or coal-sheds. When Thea and her mother reached home, their mufflers were covered with ice, where their breath had frozen. They hurried into the house and made a dash for the parlor and the hard-coal burner, behind which Gunner was sitting on a stool, reading his Jules Verne book. The door stood open into the dining-room, which was heated from the parlor. Mr. Kronborg always had a lunch when he came home from prayer-meeting, and his pumpkin pie and milk were set out on the dining-table. Mrs. Kronborg said she thought she felt hungry, too, and asked Thea if she didn’t want something to eat.

“No, I’m not hungry, mother. I guess I’ll go upstairs.”

“I expect you’ve got some book up there,” said Mrs. Kronborg, bringing out another pie. “You’d better bring it down here and read. Nobody’ll disturb you, and it’s terrible cold up in that loft.”

Thea was always assured that no one would disturb her if she read downstairs, but the boys talked when they came in, and her father fairly delivered discourses after he had been renewed by half a pie and a pitcher of milk.

“I don’t mind the cold. I’ll take a hot brick up for my feet. I put one in the stove before I left, if one of the boys hasn’t stolen it. Good-night, mother.” Thea got her brick and lantern, and dashed upstairs through the windy loft. She undressed at top speed and got into bed with her brick. She put a pair of white knitted gloves on her hands, and pinned over her head a piece of soft flannel that had been one of Thor’s long petticoats when he was a baby. Thus equipped, she was ready for business. She took from her table a thick paper-backed volume, one of the “line” of paper novels the druggist kept to sell to traveling men. She had bought it, only yesterday, because the first sentence interested her very much, and because she saw, as she glanced over the pages, the magical names of two Russian cities. The book was a poor translation of “Anna Karenina.” Thea opened it at a mark, and fixed her eyes intently upon the small print. The hymns, the sick girl, the resigned black figures were forgotten. It was the night of the ball in Moscow.

Thea would have been astonished if she could have known how, years afterward, when she had need of them, those old faces were to come back to her, long after they were hidden away under the earth; that they would seem to her then as full of meaning, as mysteriously marked by Destiny, as the people who danced the mazurka under the elegant Korsunsky.

XVIII

Mr. Kronborg was too fond of his ease and too sensible to worry his children much about religion. He was more sincere than many preachers, but when he spoke to his family about matters of conduct it was usually with a regard for keeping up appearances. The church and church work were discussed in the family like the routine of any other business. Sunday was the hard day of the week with them, just as Saturday was the busy day with the merchants on Main Street. Revivals were seasons of extra work and pressure, just as threshing-time was on the farms. Visiting elders had to be lodged and cooked for, the folding-bed in the parlor was let down, and Mrs. Kronborg had to work in the kitchen all day long and attend the night meetings.

During one of these revivals Thea’s sister Anna professed religion with, as Mrs. Kronborg said, “a good deal of fluster.” While Anna was going up to the mourners’ bench nightly and asking for the prayers of the congregation, she disseminated general gloom throughout the household, and after she joined the church she took on an air of “set-apartness” that was extremely trying to her brothers and her sister, though they realized that Anna’s sanctimoniousness was perhaps a good thing for their father. A preacher ought to have one child who did more than merely acquiesce in religious observances, and Thea and the boys were glad enough that it was Anna and not one of themselves who assumed this obligation.

“Anna, she’s American,” Mrs. Kronborg used to say. The Scandinavian mould of countenance, more or less marked in each of the other children, was scarcely discernible in her, and she looked enough like other Moonstone girls to be thought pretty. Anna’s nature was conventional, like her face. Her position as the minister’s eldest daughter was important to her, and she tried to live up to it. She read sentimental religious story-books and emulated the spiritual struggles and magnanimous behavior of their persecuted heroines. Everything had to be interpreted for Anna. Her opinions about the smallest and most commonplace things were gleaned from the Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons and Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attractive to her in its natural state—indeed, scarcely anything was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some authority. Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies of human living. She discussed all these subjects with other Methodist girls of her age. They would spend hours, for instance, in deciding what they would or would not tolerate in a suitor or a husband, and the frailties of masculine nature were too often a subject of discussion among them. In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except where her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious, with no graver fault than priggishness; but her mind had really shocking habits of classification. The wickedness of Denver and of Chicago, and even of Moonstone, occupied her thoughts too much. She had none of the delicacy that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.

Thea, and all Thea’s ways and friends, seemed indecorous to Anna. She not only felt a grave social discrimination against the Mexicans; she could not forget that Spanish Johnny was a drunkard and that “nobody knew what he did when he ran away from home.” Thea pretended, of course, that she liked the Mexicans because they were fond of music; but every one knew that music was nothing very real, and that it did not matter in a girl’s relations with people. What was real, then, and what did matter? Poor Anna!

Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor with brass buttons on his coat. On the whole, she wondered what such an exemplary young man found to like in Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his position in Moonstone, but she _knew_ he had kissed the Mexican barytone’s pretty daughter, and she had a whole _dossier_ of evidence about his behavior in his hours of relaxation in Denver. He was “fast,” and it was because he was “fast” that Thea liked him. Thea always liked that kind of people. Dr. Archie’s whole manner with Thea, Anna often told her mother, was too free. He was always putting his hand on Thea’s head, or holding her hand while he laughed and looked down at her. The kindlier manifestation of human nature (about which Anna sang and talked, in the interests of which she went to conventions and wore white ribbons) were never realities to her after all. She did not believe in them. It was only in attitudes of protest or reproof, clinging to the cross, that human beings could be even temporarily decent.

Preacher Kronborg’s secret convictions were very much like Anna’s. He believed that his wife was absolutely good, but there was not a man or woman in his congregation whom he trusted all the way.

Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find something to admire in almost any human conduct that was positive and energetic. She could always be taken in by the stories of tramps and runaway boys. She went to the circus and admired the bareback riders, who were “likely good enough women in their way.” She admired Dr. Archie’s fine physique and well-cut clothes as much as Thea did, and said she “felt it was a privilege to be handled by such a gentleman when she was sick.”

Soon after Anna became a church member she began to remonstrate with Thea about practicing—playing “secular music”—on Sunday. One Sunday the dispute in the parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in the kitchen. She listened judicially and told Anna to read the chapter about how Naaman the leper was permitted to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Thea went back to the piano, and Anna lingered to say that, since she was in the right, her mother should have supported her.

“No,” said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, “I can’t see it that way, Anna. I never forced you to practice, and I don’t see as I should keep Thea from it. I like to hear her, and I guess your father does. You and Thea will likely follow different lines, and I don’t see as I’m called upon to bring you up alike.”

Anna looked meek and abused. “Of course all the church people must hear her. Ours is the only noisy house on this street. You hear what she’s playing now, don’t you?”

Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. “Yes; it’s the Blue Danube waltzes. I’m familiar with ’em. If any of the church people come at you, you just send ’em to me. I ain’t afraid to speak out on occasion, and I wouldn’t mind one bit telling the Ladies’ Aid a few things about standard composers.” Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and added thoughtfully, “No, I wouldn’t mind that one bit.”

Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a week, and Mrs. Kronborg suspected that she held a larger place than usual in her daughter’s prayers; but that was another thing she didn’t mind.

Although revivals were merely a part of the year’s work, like examination week at school, and although Anna’s piety impressed her very little, a time came when Thea was perplexed about religion. A scourge of typhoid broke out in Moonstone and several of Thea’s schoolmates died of it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the ground, and wondered a good deal about them. But a certain grim incident, which caused the epidemic, troubled her even more than the death of her friends.

Early in July, soon after Thea’s fifteenth birthday, a particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone in an empty box car. Thea was sitting in the hammock in the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty screening nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry face covered with black hair. It was just before suppertime when he came along, and the street smelled of fried potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing the air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked over the fence. She hoped he would not stop at their gate, for her mother never turned any one away, and this was the dirtiest and most utterly wretched-looking tramp she had ever seen. There was a terrible odor about him, too. She caught it even at that distance, and put her handkerchief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she knew that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled a little faster.

A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped in an empty shack over on the east edge of town, beside the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable sort of show there. He told the boys who went to see what he was doing, that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained a filthy clown’s suit, and his box held half a dozen rattlesnakes.

Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons. There she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in the clown’s suit, his face shaved and painted white,—the sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,—and his eyes wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him, and he panted to the tune of “Marching through Georgia.” After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp exhibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now pass the hat, and that when the onlookers had contributed the sum of one dollar, he would eat “one of these living reptiles.” The crowd began to cough and murmur, and the saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested the wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried him away to the calaboose.

The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,—an old hut with a barred window and a padlock on the door. The tramp was utterly filthy and there was no way to give him a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake vagrants, so after the constable had detained the tramp for twentyfour hours, he released him and told him to “get out of town, and get quick.” The fellow’s rattlesnakes had been killed by the saloon keeper. He hid in a box car in the freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the next station, but he was found and put out. After that he was seen no more. He had disappeared and left no trace except an ugly, stupid word, chalked on the black paint of the seventy-five-foot standpipe which was the reservoir for the Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to the English officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a comment on life which the defeated, along the hard roads of the world, sometimes bawl at the victorious.

A week after the tramp excitement had passed over, the city water began to smell and to taste. The Kronborgs had a well in their back yard and did not use city water, but they heard the complaints of their neighbors. At first people said that the town well was full of rotting cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-station convinced the mayor that the water left the well untainted. Mayors reason slowly, but, the well being eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the standpipe—there was no other track for it to go in. The standpipe amply rewarded investigation. The tramp had got even with Moonstone. He had climbed the standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and roll of ticking. The city council had a mild panic and passed a new ordinance about tramps. But the fever had already broken out, and several adults and half a dozen children died of it.

Thea had always found everything that happened in Moonstone exciting, disasters particularly so. It was gratifying to read sensational Moonstone items in the Denver paper. But she wished she had not chanced to see the tramp as he came into town that evening, sniffing the supper-laden air. His face remained unpleasantly clear in her memory, and her mind struggled with the problem of his behavior as if it were a hard page in arithmetic. Even when she was practicing, the drama of the tramp kept going on in the back of her head, and she was constantly trying to make herself realize what pitch of hatred or despair could drive a man to do such a hideous thing. She kept seeing him in his bedraggled clown suit, the white paint on his roughly shaven face, playing his accordion before the saloon. She had noticed his lean body, his high, bald forehead that sloped back like a curved metal lid. How could people fall so far out of fortune? She tried to talk to Ray Kennedy about her perplexity, but Ray would not discuss things of that sort with her. It was in his sentimental conception of women that they should be deeply religious, though men were at liberty to doubt and finally to deny. A picture called “The Soul Awakened,” popular in Moonstone parlors, pretty well interpreted Ray’s idea of woman’s spiritual nature.

One evening when she was haunted by the figure of the tramp, Thea went up to Dr. Archie’s office. She found him sewing up two bad gashes in the face of a little boy who had been kicked by a mule. After the boy had been bandaged and sent away with his father, Thea helped the doctor wash and put away the surgical instruments. Then she dropped into her accustomed seat beside his desk and began to talk about the tramp. Her eyes were hard and green with excitement, the doctor noticed.

“It seems to me, Dr. Archie, that the whole town’s to blame. I’m to blame, myself. I know he saw me hold my nose when he went by. Father’s to blame. If he believes the Bible, he ought to have gone to the calaboose and cleaned that man up and taken care of him. That’s what I can’t understand; do people believe the Bible, or don’t they? If the next life is all that matters, and we’re put here to get ready for it, then why do we try to make money, or learn things, or have a good time? There’s not one person in Moonstone that really lives the way the New Testament says. Does it matter, or don’t it?”

Dr. Archie swung round in his chair and looked at her, honestly and leniently. “Well, Thea, it seems to me like this. Every people has had its religion. All religions are good, and all are pretty much alike. But I don’t see how we could live up to them in the sense you mean. I’ve thought about it a good deal, and I can’t help feeling that while we are in this world we have to live for the best things of this world, and those things are material and positive. Now, most religions are passive, and they tell us chiefly what we should not do.” The doctor moved restlessly, and his eyes hunted for something along the opposite wall: “See here, my girl, take out the years of early childhood and the time we spend in sleep and dull old age, and we only have about twenty able, waking years. That’s not long enough to get acquainted with half the fine things that have been done in the world, much less to do anything ourselves. I think we ought to keep the Commandments and help other people all we can; but the main thing is to live those twenty splendid years; to do all we can and enjoy all we can.”

Dr. Archie met his little friend’s searching gaze, the look of acute inquiry which always touched him.

“But poor fellows like that tramp—” she hesitated and wrinkled her forehead.

The doctor leaned forward and put his hand protectingly over hers, which lay clenched on the green felt desktop. “Ugly accidents happen, Thea; always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don’t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don’t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.” He saw tears on her cheeks, and he remembered that he had never seen her cry before, not even when she crushed her finger when she was little. He rose and walked to the window, came back and sat down on the edge of his chair.

“Forget the tramp, Thea. This is a great big world, and I want you to get about and see it all. You’re going to Chicago some day, and do something with that fine voice of yours. You’re going to be a number one musician and make us proud of you. Take Mary Anderson, now; even the tramps are proud of her. There isn’t a tramp along the ‘Q’ system who hasn’t heard of her. We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid.”

They had a long talk. Thea felt that Dr. Archie had never let himself out to her so much before. It was the most grown-up conversation she had ever had with him. She left his office happy, flattered and stimulated. She ran for a long while about the white, moonlit streets, looking up at the stars and the bluish night, at the quiet houses sunk in black shade, the glittering sand hills. She loved the familiar trees, and the people in those little houses, and she loved the unknown world beyond Denver. She felt as if she were being pulled in two, between the desire to go away forever and the desire to stay forever. She had only twenty years—no time to lose.