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PART II
THE SONG OF THE LARK
I
THEA and Dr. Archie had been gone from Moonstone
four days. On the afternoon of the nineteenth of Octo-
ber they were in a street-car, riding through the depressing,
unkept wastes of North Chicago, on their way to call upon
the Reverend Lars Larsen, a friend to whom Mr. Kron-
borg had written. Thea was still staying at the rooms of
the Young Women's Christian Association, and was miser-
able and homesick there. The housekeeper watched her in
a way that made her uncomfortable. Things had not gone
very well, so far. The noise and confusion of a big city
tired and disheartened her. She had not had her trunk sent
to the Christian Association rooms because she did not
want to double cartage charges, and now she was running
up a bill for storage on it. The contents of her gray tele-
scope were becoming untidy, and it seemed impossible to
keep one's face and hands clean in Chicago. She felt as if
she were still on the train, traveling without enough
clothes to keep clean. She wanted another nightgown,
and it did not occur to her that she could buy one. There
were other clothes in her trunk that she needed very much,
and she seemed no nearer a place to stay than when
she arrived in the rain, on that first disillusioning morning.
Dr. Archie had gone at once to his friend Hartley Evans,
the throat specialist, and had asked him to tell him of a good
piano teacher and direct him to a good boarding-house.
Dr. Evans said he could easily tell him who was the best
piano teacher in Chicago, but that most students' board-
ing-houses were "abominable places, where girls got poor
food for body and mind." He gave Dr. Archie several ad-
dresses, however, and the doctor went to look the places
over. He left Thea in her room, for she seemed tired and
was not at all like herself. His inspection of boarding-
houses was not encouraging. The only place that seemed
to him at all desirable was full, and the mistress of the
house could not give Thea a room in which she could have
a piano. She said Thea might use the piano in her parlor;
but when Dr. Archie went to look at the parlor he found
a girl talking to a young man on one of the corner sofas.
Learning that the boarders received all their callers there,
he gave up that house, too, as hopeless.
So when they set out to make the acquaintance of Mr.
Larsen on the afternoon he had appointed, the question
of a lodging was still undecided. The Swedish Reform
Church was in a sloughy, weedy district, near a group of
factories. The church itself was a very neat little building.
The parsonage, next door, looked clean and comfortable,
and there was a well-kept yard about it, with a picket
fence. Thea saw several little children playing under a
swing, and wondered why ministers always had so many.
When they rang at the parsonage door, a capable-looking
Swedish servant girl answered the bell and told them that
Mr. Larsen's study was in the church, and that he was
waiting for them there.
Mr. Larsen received them very cordially. The furniture
in his study was so new and the pictures were so heavily
framed, that Thea thought it looked more like the wait-
ing-room of the fashionable Denver dentist to whom Dr.
Archie had taken her that summer, than like a preacher's
study. There were even flowers in a glass vase on the
desk. Mr. Larsen was a small, plump man, with a short,
yellow beard, very white teeth, and a little turned-up nose
on which he wore gold-rimmed eye-glasses. He looked
about thirty-five, but he was growing bald, and his thin,
hair was parted above his left ear and brought up over
the bare spot on the top of his head. He looked cheerful
and agreeable. He wore a blue coat and no cuffs.
After Dr. Archie and Thea sat down on a slippery leather
couch, the minister asked for an outline of Thea's plans.
Dr. Archie explained that she meant to study piano with
Andor Harsanyi; that they had already seen him, that
Thea had played for him and he said he would be glad to
teach her.
Mr. Larsen lifted his pale eyebrows and rubbed his
plump white hands together. "But he is a concert pianist
already. He will be very expensive."
"That's why Miss Kronborg wants to get a church posi-
tion if possible. She has not money enough to see her
through the winter. There's no use her coming all the way
from Colorado and studying with a second-rate teacher.
My friends here tell me Harsanyi is the best."
"Oh, very likely! I have heard him play with Thomas.
You Western people do things on a big scale. There are
half a dozen teachers that I should think-- However, you
know what you want." Mr. Larsen showed his contempt
for such extravagant standards by a shrug. He felt that
Dr. Archie was trying to impress him. He had succeeded,
indeed, in bringing out the doctor's stiffest manner. Mr.
Larsen went on to explain that he managed the music in
his church himself, and drilled his choir, though the tenor
was the official choirmaster. Unfortunately there were no
vacancies in his choir just now. He had his four voices,
very good ones. He looked away from Dr. Archie and
glanced at Thea. She looked troubled, even a little fright-
ened when he said this, and drew in her lower lip. She, cer-
tainly, was not pretentious, if her protector was. He con-
tinued to study her. She was sitting on the lounge, her
knees far apart, her gloved hands lying stiffly in her lap,
like a country girl. Her turban, which seemed a little too big
for her, had got tilted in the wind,--it was always windy
in that part of Chicago,--and she looked tired. She wore
no veil, and her hair, too, was the worse for the wind and
dust. When he said he had all the voices he required, he
noticed that her gloved hands shut tightly. Mr. Larsen
reflected that she was not, after all, responsible for the lofty
manner of her father's physician; that she was not even
responsible for her father, whom he remembered as a tire-
some fellow. As he watched her tired, worried face, he felt
sorry for her.
"All the same, I would like to try your voice," he said,
turning pointedly away from her companion. "I am inter-
ested in voices. Can you sing to the violin?"
"I guess so," Thea replied dully. "I don't know. I
never tried."
Mr. Larsen took his violin out of the case and began to
tighten the keys. "We might go into the lecture-room and
see how it goes. I can't tell much about a voice by the
organ. The violin is really the proper instrument to try
a voice." He opened a door at the back of his study, pushed
Thea gently through it, and looking over his shoulder to
Dr. Archie said, "Excuse us, sir. We will be back soon."
Dr. Archie chuckled. All preachers were alike, officious
and on their dignity; liked to deal with women and girls,
but not with men. He took up a thin volume from the
minister's desk. To his amusement it proved to be a book
of "Devotional and Kindred Poems; by Mrs. Aurelia S.
Larsen." He looked them over, thinking that the world
changed very little. He could remember when the wife of
his father's minister had published a volume of verses,
which all the church members had to buy and all the chil-
dren were encouraged to read. His grandfather had made
a face at the book and said, "Puir body!" Both ladies
seemed to have chosen the same subjects, too: Jephthah's
Daughter, Rizpah, David's Lament for Absalom, etc. The
doctor found the book very amusing.
The Reverend Lars Larsen was a reactionary Swede.
His father came to Iowa in the sixties, married a Swedish
girl who was ambitious, like himself, and they moved to
Kansas and took up land under the Homestead Act. After
that, they bought land and leased it from the Government,
acquired land in every possible way. They worked like
horses, both of them; indeed, they would never have used
any horse-flesh they owned as they used themselves. They
reared a large family and worked their sons and daughters
as mercilessly as they worked themselves; all of them but
Lars. Lars was the fourth son, and he was born lazy. He
seemed to bear the mark of overstrain on the part of his
parents. Even in his cradle he was an example of physical
inertia; anything to lie still. When he was a growing boy
his mother had to drag him out of bed every morning,
and he had to be driven to his chores. At school he had a
model "attendance record," because he found getting his
lessons easier than farm work. He was the only one of the
family who went through the high school, and by the time
he graduated he had already made up his mind to study
for the ministry, because it seemed to him the least labori-
ous of all callings. In so far as he could see, it was the only
business in which there was practically no competition, in
which a man was not all the time pitted against other men
who were willing to work themselves to death. His father
stubbornly opposed Lars's plan, but after keeping the boy
at home for a year and finding how useless he was on the
farm, he sent him to a theological seminary--as much to
conceal his laziness from the neighbors as because he did
not know what else to do with him.
Larsen, like Peter Kronborg, got on well in the ministry,
because he got on well with the women. His English was
no worse than that of most young preachers of American
parentage, and he made the most of his skill with the vio-
lin. He was supposed to exert a very desirable influence
over young people and to stimulate their interest in church
work. He married an American girl, and when his father
died he got his share of the property--which was very
considerable. He invested his money carefully and was
that rare thing, a preacher of independent means. His
white, well-kept hands were his result,--the evidence that
he had worked out his life successfully in the way that
pleased him. His Kansas brothers hated the sight of his
hands.
Larsen liked all the softer things of life,--in so far as he
knew about them. He slept late in the morning, was fussy
about his food, and read a great many novels, preferring
sentimental ones. He did not smoke, but he ate a great
deal of candy "for his throat," and always kept a box of
chocolate drops in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk.
He always bought season tickets for the symphony con-
certs, and he played his violin for women's culture clubs.
He did not wear cuffs, except on Sunday, because he be-
lieved that a free wrist facilitated his violin practice.
When he drilled his choir he always held his hand with the
little and index fingers curved higher than the other two,
like a noted German conductor he h...
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