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make it, how much it had been admired, and what narrow
escapes it had had from moths and fire. Silk, Mrs. Kohler
explained, would have been much easier to manage than
woolen cloth, in which it was often hard to get the right
shades. The reins of the horses, the wheels of the spurs,
the brooding eyebrows of the Emperor, Murat's fierce
mustaches, the great shakos of the Guard, were all worked
out with the minutest fidelity. Thea's admiration for this
picture had endeared her to Mrs. Kohler. It was now many
years since she used to point out its wonders to her own
little boys. As Mrs. Kohler did not go to church, she never
heard any singing, except the songs that floated over from
Mexican Town, and Thea often sang for her after the lesson
was over. This morning Wunsch pointed to the piano.
"On Sunday, when I go by the church, I hear you sing
something."
Thea obediently sat down on the stool again and began,
"COME, YE DISCONSOLATE." Wunsch listened thoughtfully,
his hands on his knees. Such a beautiful child's voice!
Old Mrs. Kohler's face relaxed in a smile of happiness;
she half closed her eyes. A big fly was darting in and out
of the window; the sunlight made a golden pool on the
rag carpet and bathed the faded cretonne pillows on the
lounge, under the piece-picture. "EARTH HAS NO SORROW
THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL," the song died away.
"That is a good thing to remember," Wunsch shook him-
self. "You believe that?" looking quizzically at Thea.
She became confused and pecked nervously at a black
key with her middle finger. "I don't know. I guess so,"
she murmured.
Her teacher rose abruptly. "Remember, for next time,
thirds. You ought to get up earlier."
That night the air was so warm that Fritz and Herr
Wunsch had their after-supper pipe in the grape arbor,
smoking in silence while the sound of fiddles and guitars
came across the ravine from Mexican Town. Long after
Fritz and his old Paulina had gone to bed, Wunsch sat
motionless in the arbor, looking up through the woolly
vine leaves at the glittering machinery of heaven.
"LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI."
That line awoke many memories. He was thinking of
youth; of his own, so long gone by, and of his pupil's, just
beginning. He would even have cherished hopes for her,
except that he had become superstitious. He believed that
whatever he hoped for was destined not to be; that his
affection brought ill-fortune, especially to the young; that
if he held anything in his thoughts, he harmed it. He had
taught in music schools in St. Louis and Kansas City, where
the shallowness and complacency of the young misses had
maddened him. He had encountered bad manners and bad
faith, had been the victim of sharpers of all kinds, was
dogged by bad luck. He had played in orchestras that were
never paid and wandering opera troupes which disbanded
penniless. And there was always the old enemy, more
relentless than the others. It was long since he had wished
anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the
body. Now that he was tempted to hope for another, he
felt alarmed and shook his head.
It was his pupil's power of application, her rugged will,
that interested him. He had lived for so long among people
whose sole ambition was to get something for nothing that
he had learned not to look for seriousness in anything. Now
that he by chance encountered it, it recalled standards, am-
bitions, a society long forgot. What was it she reminded
him of? A yellow flower, full of sunlight, perhaps. No; a
thin glass full of sweet-smelling, sparkling Moselle wine. He
seemed to see such a glass before him in the arbor, to watch
the bubbles rising and breaking, like the silent discharge
of energy in the nerves and brain, the rapid florescence in
young blood--Wunsch felt ashamed and dragged his slip-
pers along the path to the kitchen, his eyes on the ground.
V
The children in the primary grades were sometimes
required to make relief maps of Moonstone in sand.
Had they used colored sands, as the Navajo medicine men
do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have indicated
the social classifications of Moonstone, since these con-
formed to certain topographical boundaries, and every
child understood them perfectly.
The main business street ran, of course, through the
center of the town. To the west of this street lived all the
people who were, as Tillie Kronborg said, "in society."
Sylvester Street, the third parallel with Main Street on the
west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings were
built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from
the court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie's
house, its big yard and garden surrounded by a white paling
fence. The Methodist Church was in the center of the
town, facing the court-house square. The Kronborgs lived
half a mile south of the church, on the long street that
stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement. This
was the first street west of Main, and was built up only on
one side. The preacher's house faced the backs of the brick
and frame store buildings and a draw full of sunflowers
and scraps of old iron. The sidewalk which ran in front
of the Kronborgs' house was the one continuous sidewalk
to the depot, and all the train men and roundhouse em-
ployees passed the front gate every time they came up-
town. Thea and Mrs. Kronborg had many friends among
the railroad men, who often paused to chat across the fence,
and of one of these we shall have more to say.
In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street,
toward the deep ravine which, farther south, wound by
Mexican Town, lived all the humbler citizens, the people
who voted but did not run for office. The houses were little
story-and-a-half cottages, with none of the fussy archi-
tectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street.
They nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Vir-
ginia creeper; their occupants had no social pretensions to
keep up. There were no half-glass front doors with door-
bells, or formidable parlors behind closed shutters. Here
the old women washed in the back yard, and the men sat
in the front doorway and smoked their pipes. The people
on Sylvester Street scarcely knew that this part of the
town existed. Thea liked to take Thor and her express
wagon and explore these quiet, shady streets, where the
people never tried to have lawns or to grow elms and pine
trees, but let the native timber have its way and spread in
luxuriance. She had many friends there, old women who
gave her a yellow rose or a spray of trumpet vine and
appeased Thor with a cooky or a doughnut. They called
Thea "that preacher's girl," but the demonstrative was
misplaced, for when they spoke of Mr. Kronborg they
called him "the Methodist preacher."
Dr. Archie was very proud of his yard and garden, which
he worked himself. He was the only man in Moonstone
who was successful at growing rambler roses, and his
strawberries were famous. One morning when Thea was
downtown on an errand, the doctor stopped her, took her
hand and went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly
always did when they met.
"You haven't been up to my place to get any straw-
berries yet, Thea. They're at their best just now. Mrs.
Archie doesn't know what to do with them all. Come up
this afternoon. Just tell Mrs. Archie I sent you. Bring a
big basket and pick till you are tired."
When she got home Thea told her mother that she didn't
want to go, because she didn't like Mrs. Archie.
"She is certainly one queer woman," Mrs. Kronborg
assented, "but he's asked you so often, I guess you'll have
to go this time. She won't bite you."
After dinner Thea took a basket, put Thor in his baby-
buggy, and set out for Dr. Archie's house at the other end
of town. As soon as she came within sight of the house,
she slackened her pace. She approached it very slowly,
stopping often to pick dandelions and sand-peas for Thor
to crush up in his fist.
It was his wife's custom, as soon as Dr. Archie left the
house in the morning, to shut all the doors and windows
to keep the dust out, and to pull down the shades to keep
the sun from fading the carpets. She thought, too, that
neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house was closed
up. She was one of those people who are stingy without
motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it.
She must have known that skimping the doctor in heat
and food made him more extravagant than he would have
been had she made him comfortable. He never came home
for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and
shreds of food. No matter how much milk he bought, he
could never get thick cream for his strawberries. Even
when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in smooth,
ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-
hand, to dilute it before it got to the breakfast table. The
butcher's favorite joke was about the kind of meat he sold
Mrs. Archie. She felt no interest in food herself, and she
hated to prepare it. She liked nothing better than to have
Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days--he often went
chiefly because he was hungry--and to be left alone to
eat canned salmon and to keep the house shut up from
morning until night.
Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said,
"they ate too much and broke too much"; she even said
they knew too much. She used what mind she had in
devising shifts to minimize her housework. She used to
tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would
be no housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married,
she had been always in a panic for fear she would have
children. Now that her apprehensions on that score had
grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having dust
in the house as she had once been of having children in it.
If dust did not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said.
She would take any amount of trouble to avoid trouble.
Why, nobody knew. Certainly her husband had never
been able to make her out. Such little, mean natures are
among the darkest and most baffling of created things.
There is no law by which they can be explained. The or-
dinary incentives of pain and pleasure do not account for
their behavior. They live like insects, absorbed in petty
activities that seem to have nothing to do with any genial
aspect of human life.
Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, "liked to gad."
She liked to have her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and
to be out of it--anywhere. A church social, a prayer
meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no prefer-
ence. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit
for hours in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, lis-
tening to the talk of the women who came in, watching
them while they tried on hats, blinking at them from her
corner with her sharp, restless little eyes. She never talked
much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town and
she had a sharp ear for racy anecdotes--"traveling men's
stories," they used to be called in Moonstone. Her clicking
laugh sounded like a typewriting machine in action, and,
for very pointed stories, she had a little screech.
Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years,
and when she was Belle White she was one of the "pretty"
girls in Lansing, Michigan. She had then a train of suitors.
She could truly remind Archie that "the boys hung around
her." They did. They thought her very spirited and were
always saying, "Oh, that Belle White, she's a case!" She
used to play heavy practical jokes which the young men
thought very clever. Archie was considered the most
promising young man in "the young crowd," so Belle
selecte...
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