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fullness of the faith she had kept before she knew its name
or its meaning.
Often when she sang, the best she had was unavailable;
she could not break through to it, and every sort of dis-
traction and mischance came between it and her. But
this afternoon the closed roads opened, the gates dropped.
What she had so often tried to reach, lay under her hand.
She had only to touch an idea to make it live.
While she was on the stage she was conscious that every
movement was the right movement, that her body was
absolutely the instrument of her idea. Not for nothing
had she kept it so severely, kept it filled with such energy
and fire. All that deep-rooted vitality flowered in her
voice, her face, in her very finger-tips. She felt like a tree
bursting into bloom. And her voice was as flexible as her
body; equal to any demand, capable of every NUANCE.
With the sense of its perfect companionship, its entire
trustworthiness, she had been able to throw herself into
the dramatic exigencies of the part, everything in her at
its best and everything working together.
The third act came on, and the afternoon slipped by.
Thea Kronborg's friends, old and new, seated about the
house on different floors and levels, enjoyed her triumph
according to their natures. There was one there, whom
nobody knew, who perhaps got greater pleasure out of
that afternoon than Harsanyi himself. Up in the top gal-
lery a gray-haired little Mexican, withered and bright as
a string of peppers beside a'dobe door, kept praying and
cursing under his breath, beating on the brass railing
and shouting "Bravo! Bravo!" until he was repressed by
his neighbors.
He happened to be there because a Mexican band was
to be a feature of Barnum and Bailey's circus that year.
One of the managers of the show had traveled about the
Southwest, signing up a lot of Mexican musicians at low
wages, and had brought them to New York. Among them
was Spanish Johnny. After Mrs. Tellamantez died, Johnny
abandoned his trade and went out with his mandolin to
pick up a living for one. His irregularities had become
his regular mode of life.
When Thea Kronborg came out of the stage entrance
on Fortieth Street, the sky was still flaming with the last
rays of the sun that was sinking off behind the North
River. A little crowd of people was lingering about the
door--musicians from the orchestra who were waiting
for their comrades, curious young men, and some poorly
dressed girls who were hoping to get a glimpse of the
singer. She bowed graciously to the group, through her
veil, but she did not look to the right or left as she crossed
the sidewalk to her cab. Had she lifted her eyes an instant
and glanced out through her white scarf, she must have
seen the only man in the crowd who had removed his hat
when she emerged, and who stood with it crushed up in
his hand. And she would have known him, changed as he
was. His lustrous black hair was full of gray, and his face
was a good deal worn by the EXTASI, so that it seemed to
have shrunk away from his shining eyes and teeth and left
them too prominent. But she would have known him.
She passed so near that he could have touched her, and he
did not put on his hat until her taxi had snorted away.
Then he walked down Broadway with his hands in his
overcoat pockets, wearing a smile which embraced all the
stream of life that passed him and the lighted towers that
rose into the limpid blue of the evening sky. If the singer,
going home exhausted in her cab, was wondering what
was the good of it all, that smile, could she have seen it,
would have answered her. It is the only commensurate
answer.
Here we must leave Thea Kronborg. From this time
on the story of her life is the story of her achievement.
The growth of an artist is an intellectual and spiritual
development which can scarcely be followed in a personal
narrative. This story attempts to deal only with the sim-
ple and concrete beginnings which color and accent an
artist's work, and to give some account of how a Moon-
stone girl found her way out of a vague, easy-going world
into a life of disciplined endeavor. Any account of the
loyalty of young hearts to some exalted ideal, and the
passion with which they strive, will always, in some of
us, rekindle generous emotions.
EPILOGUE
MOONSTONE again, in the year 1909. The Metho-
dists are giving an ice-cream sociable in the grove
about the new court-house. It is a warm summer night of
full moon. The paper lanterns which hang among the
trees are foolish toys, only dimming, in little lurid circles,
the great softness of the lunar light that floods the blue
heavens and the high plateau. To the east the sand hills
shine white as of old, but the empire of the sand is grad-
ually diminishing. The grass grows thicker over the dunes
than it used to, and the streets of the town are harder and
firmer than they were twenty-five years ago. The old in-
habitants will tell you that sandstorms are infrequent
now, that the wind blows less persistently in the spring
and plays a milder tune. Cultivation has modified the soil
and the climate, as it modifies human life.
The people seated about under the cottonwoods are
much smarter than the Methodists we used to know. The
interior of the new Methodist Church looks like a theater,
with a sloping floor, and as the congregation proudly say,
"opera chairs." The matrons who attend to serving the
refreshments to-night look younger for their years than
did the women of Mrs. Kronborg's time, and the children
all look like city children. The little boys wear "Buster
Browns" and the little girls Russian blouses. The coun-
try child, in made-overs and cut-downs, seems to have
vanished from the face of the earth.
At one of the tables, with her Dutch-cut twin boys,
sits a fair-haired, dimpled matron who was once Lily
Fisher. Her husband is president of the new bank, and
she "goes East for her summers," a practice which causes
envy and discontent among her neighbors. The twins are
well-behaved children, biddable, meek, neat about their
clothes, and always mindful of the proprieties they have
learned at summer hotels. While they are eating their ice-
cream and trying not to twist the spoon in their mouths,
a little shriek of laughter breaks from an adjacent table.
The twins look up. There sits a spry little old spinster
whom they know well. She has a long chin, a long nose,
and she is dressed like a young girl, with a pink sash and
a lace garden hat with pink rosebuds. She is surrounded
by a crowd of boys,--loose and lanky, short and thick,--
who are joking with her roughly, but not unkindly.
"Mamma," one of the twins comes out in a shrill
treble, "why is Tillie Kronborg always talking about a
thousand dollars?"
The boys, hearing this question, break into a roar of
laughter, the women titter behind their paper napkins,
and even from Tillie there is a little shriek of apprecia-
tion. The observing child's remark had made every one
suddenly realize that Tillie never stopped talking about
that particular sum of money. In the spring, when she
went to buy early strawberries, and was told that they
were thirty cents a box, she was sure to remind the grocer
that though her name was Kronborg she didn't get a
thousand dollars a night. In the autumn, when she went
to buy her coal for the winter, she expressed amazement
at the price quoted her, and told the dealer he must
have got her mixed up with her niece to think she could
pay such a sum. When she was making her Christmas
presents, she never failed to ask the women who came into
her shop what you COULD make for anybody who got a
thousand dollars a night. When the Denver papers an-
nounced that Thea Kronborg had married Frederick Otten-
burg, the head of the Brewers' Trust, Moonstone people
expected that Tillie's vain-gloriousness would take an-
other form. But Tillie had hoped that Thea would marry
a title, and she did not boast much about Ottenburg,--
at least not until after her memorable trip to Kansas City
to hear Thea sing.
Tillie is the last Kronborg left in Moonstone. She lives
alone in a little house with a green yard, and keeps a fancy-
work and millinery store. Her business methods are in-
formal, and she would never come out even at the end
of the year, if she did not receive a draft for a good round
sum from her niece at Christmas time. The arrival of this
draft always renews the discussion as to what Thea would
do for her aunt if she really did the right thing. Most of
the Moonstone people think Thea ought to take Tillie
to New York and keep her as a companion. While they
are feeling sorry for Tillie because she does not live at the
Plaza, Tillie is trying not to hurt their feelings by show-
ing too plainly how much she realizes the superiority of
her position. She tries to be modest when she complains
to the postmaster that her New York paper is more than
three days late. It means enough, surely, on the face of
it, that she is the only person in Moonstone who takes a
New York paper or who has any reason for taking one. A
foolish young girl, Tillie lived in the splendid sorrows of
"Wanda" and "Strathmore"; a foolish old girl, she lives
in her niece's triumphs. As she often says, she just missed
going on the stage herself.
That night after the sociable, as Tillie tripped home
with a crowd of noisy boys and girls, she was perhaps a
shade troubled. The twin's question rather lingered in her
ears. Did she, perhaps, insist too much on that thousand
dollars? Surely, people didn't for a minute think it was
the money she cared about? As for that, Tillie tossed her
head, she didn't care a rap. They must understand that
this money was different.
When the laughing little group that brought her home
had gone weaving down the sidewalk through the leafy
shadows and had disappeared, Tillie brought out a rocking
chair and sat down on her porch. On glorious, soft summer
nights like this, when the moon is opulent and full, the
day submerged and forgotten, she loves to sit there behind
her rose-vine and let her fancy wander where it will. If
you chanced to be passing down that Moonstone street
and saw that alert white figure rocking there behind the
screen of roses and lingering late into the night, you might
feel sorry for her, and how mistaken you would be! Tillie
lives in a little magic world, full of secret satisfactions.
Thea Kronborg has given much noble pleasure to a world
that needs all it can get, but to no individual has she
given more than to her queer old aunt in Moonstone. The
legend of Kronborg, the artist, fills Tillie's life; she feels
rich and exalted in it. What delightful things happen in
her mind as she sits there rocking! She goes back to those
early days of sand and sun, when Thea was a child and
Tillie was herself, so it seems to her, "young." When
she used to hurry to church to hear Mr. Kronborg's won-
derful sermons, and when Thea used to stand up by the
organ of a bright Sunday morning and sing "Come, Ye
Disconsolate." Or she thinks about that wonderful time
when the Metropolitan Opera Company sang a week's
engagement in Kansas City, and Thea sent for her and
had her stay with her at the Coates House and go to
every performance at Convention Hall. Thea let Tillie
go through her costume trunks and try on her wigs and
jewels. And the kindness of Mr. Ottenburg! When Thea
dined in her own room, he went down to dinner with
Tillie, and never looked bored or absent-minded when
she chattered. He took her to the hall the first time
Thea sang there, and sat in the box with her and helped
her through "Lohengrin." After the first act, when Tillie
turned tearful eyes to him and burst out, "I don't care,
she always seemed grand like...
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