The Song of the Lark
Willa Sibert Cather
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Title: Song of the Lark
Author: Willa Cather
Posting Date: June 25, 2008 [EBook #44]
Release Date: 1992
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONG OF THE LARK ***
Produced by Judith Boss and Marvin Peterson
SONG OF THE LARK
By Willa Cather
(1915 edition)
CONTENTS:
PART
I.
FRIENDS
OF
CHILDHOOD
II.
THE
SONG
OF
THE
LARK
III
.
STUPID
FACES
IV.
THE
ANCIENT
PEOPLE
V.
DOCTOR
ARCHIE’S
VENTURE
VI.
KRONBORG
EPILOGUE
PART I. FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD
I
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish
clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in
Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store.
Larry, the doctor’s man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room
and the double student’s lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass
sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was
so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted
and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had
worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about it.
The doctor’s flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase,
with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was
filled with medical books of every thickness and color. On the top shelf
stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark
mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.
As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the doctor
in small Colorado towns twenty-five years ago was generally young.
Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders
which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a
distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.
There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown
hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over his high forehead. His
nose was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent. He wore a
curly, reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look
a little like the pictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large and
well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded with crinkly
reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly, wide-waled serge; the
traveling men had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver tailor.
The doctor was always well dressed.
Dr. Archie turned up the student’s lamp and sat down in the swivel chair
before his desk. He sat uneasily, beating a tattoo on his knees with his
fingers, and looked about him as if he were bored. He glanced at his
watch, then absently took from his pocket a bunch of small keys,
selected one and looked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely perceptible,
played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative. Behind the door
that led into the hall, under his buffalo-skin driving-coat, was a locked
cupboard. This the doctor opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of
muddy overshoes. Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses and
decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters. Hearing a step in the empty,
echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cupboard again, snapping the
Yale lock. The door of the waiting-room opened, a man entered and came
on into the consulting-room.
“Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg,” said the doctor carelessly. “Sit down.”
His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin brown beard,
streaked with gray. He wore a frock coat, a broad-brimmed black hat, a
white lawn necktie, and steel rimmed spectacles. Altogether there was a
pretentious and important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his
coat and sat down.
“Good-evening, doctor. Can you step around to the house with me? I think
Mrs. Kronborg will need you this evening.” This was said with profound
gravity and, curiously enough, with a slight embarrassment.
“Any hurry?” the doctor asked over his shoulder as he went into his
operating-room.
Mr. Kronborg coughed behind his hand, and contracted his brows. His face
threatened at every moment to break into a smile of foolish excitement.
He controlled it only by calling upon his habitual pulpit manner. “Well,
I think it would be as well to go immediately. Mrs. Kronborg will be
more comfortable if you are there. She has been suffering for some
time.”
The doctor came back and threw a black bag upon his desk. He wrote some
instructions for his man on a prescription pad and then drew on his
overcoat. “All ready,” he announced, putting out his lamp. Mr. Kronborg
rose and they tramped through the empty hall and down the stairway to
the street. The drug store below was dark, and the saloon next door was
just closing. Every other light on Main Street was out.
On either side of the road and at the outer edge of the board sidewalk,
the snow had been shoveled into breastworks. The town looked small and
black, flattened down in the snow, muffled and all but extinguished.
Overhead the stars shone gloriously. It was impossible not to notice
them. The air was so clear that the white sand hills to the east of
Moonstone gleamed softly. Following the Reverend Mr. Kronborg along the
narrow walk, past the little dark, sleeping houses, the doctor looked up
at the flashing night and whistled softly. It did seem that people were
stupider than they need be; as if on a night like this there ought to be
something better to do than to sleep nine hours, or to assist Mrs.
Kronborg in functions which she could have performed so admirably
unaided. He wished he had gone down to Denver to hear Fay Templeton sing
“See-Saw.” Then he remembered that he had a personal interest in this
family, after all. They turned into another street and saw before them
lighted windows; a low story-and-a-half house, with a
wing built on at
the right and a kitchen addition at the back, everything a little on the
slant—roofs, windows, and doors. As they approached the gate, Peter
Kronborg’s pace grew brisker. His nervous, ministerial cough annoyed the
doctor. “Exactly as if he were going to give out a text,” he thought. He
drew off his glove and felt in his vest pocket. “Have a troche,
Kronborg,” he said, producing some. “Sent me for samples. Very good for
a rough throat.”
“Ah, thank you, thank you. I was in something of a hurry. I neglected to
put on my overshoes. Here we are, doctor.” Kronborg opened his front
door—seemed delighted to be at home again.
The front hall was dark and cold; the hatrack was hung with an
astonishing number of children’s hats and caps and cloaks. They were
even piled on the table beneath the hatrack. Under the table was a heap
of rubbers and overshoes. While the doctor hung up his coat and hat,
Peter Kronborg opened the door into the living-room. A glare of light
greeted them, and a rush of hot, stale air, smelling of warming
flannels.
At three o’clock in the morning Dr. Archie was in the parlor putting on
his cuffs and coat—there was no spare bedroom in that house. Peter
Kronborg’s seventh child, a boy, was being soothed and cosseted by his
aunt, Mrs. Kronborg was asleep, and the doctor was going home. But he
wanted first to speak to Kronborg, who, coatless and fluttery, was
pouring coal into the kitchen stove. As the doctor crossed the
dining-room he paused and listened. From one of the wing rooms, off to
the left, he heard rapid, distressed breathing. He went to the kitchen
door.
“One of the children sick in there?” he asked, nodding toward the
partition.
Kronborg hung up the stove-lifter and dusted his fingers. “It must be
Thea. I meant to ask you to look at her. She has a croupy cold. But in
my excitement—Mrs. Kronborg is doing finely, eh, doctor? Not many of
your patients with such a constitution, I expect.”
“Oh, yes. She’s a fine mother.” The doctor took up the lamp from the
kitchen table and unceremoniously went into the wing room. Two chubby
little boys were asleep in a double bed, with the coverlids over their
noses and their feet drawn up. In a single bed, next to theirs, lay a
little girl of eleven, wide awake, two yellow braids sticking up on the
pillow behind her. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were blazing.
The doctor shut the door behind him. “Feel pretty sick, Thea?” he asked
as he took out his thermometer. “Why didn’t you call somebody?”
She looked at him with greedy affection. “I thought you were here,” she
spoke between quick breaths. “There is a new baby, isn’t there? Which?”
“Which?” repeated the doctor.
“Brother or sister?”
He smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Brother,” he said,
taking her hand. “Open.”
“Good. Brothers are better,” she murmured as he put the glass tube under
her tongue.
“Now, be still, I want to count.” Dr. Archie reached for her hand and
took out his watch. When he put her hand back under the quilt he went
over to one of the windows—they were both tight shut—and lifted it a
little way. He reached up and ran his hand along the cold, unpapered
wall. “Keep under the covers; I’ll come back to you in a moment,” he
said, bending over the glass lamp with his thermometer. He winked at her
from the door before he shut it.
Peter Kronborg was sitting in his wife’s room, holding the bundle which
contained his son. His air of cheerful importance, his beard and
glasses, even his shirt-sleeves, annoyed the doctor. He beckoned
Kronborg into the living-room and said sternly:—
“You’ve got a very sick child in there. Why didn’t you call me before?
It’s pneumonia, and she must have been sick for several days. Put the
baby down somewhere, please, and help me make up the bed-lounge here in
the parlor. She’s got to be in a warm room, and she’s got to be quiet.
You must keep the other children out. Here, this thing opens up, I see,”
swinging back the top of the carpet lounge. “We can lift her mattress
and carry her in just as she is. I don’t want to disturb her more than
is necessary.”
Kronborg was all concern immediately. The two men took up the mattress
and carried the sick child into the parlor. “I’ll have to go down to my
office to get some medicine, Kronborg. The drug store won’t be open.
Keep the covers on her. I won’t be gone long. Shake down the stove and
put on a little coal, but not too much; so it’ll catch quickly, I mean.
Find an old sheet for me, and put it there to warm.”
The doctor caught his coat and hurried out into the dark street. Nobody
was stirring yet, and the cold was bitter. He was tired and hungry and
in no mild humor. “The idea!” he muttered; “to be such an ass at his
age, about the seventh! And to feel no responsibility about the little
girl. Silly old goat! The baby would have got into the world somehow;
they always do. But a nice little girl like that—she’s worth the whole
litter. Where she ever got it from—” He turned into the Duke Block and
ran up the stairs to his office.
Thea Kronborg, meanwhile, was wondering why she happened to be in the
parlor, where nobody but company—usually visiting preachers—ever
slept. She had moments of stupor when she did not see anything, and
moments of excitement when she felt that something unusual and pleasant
was about to happen, when she saw everything clearly in the red light
from the isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner—the nickel trimmings
on the stove itself, the pictures on the wall, which she thought very
beautiful, the flowers on the Brussels carpet, Czerny’s “Daily Studies”
which stood open on the upright piano. She forgot, for the time being,
all about the new baby.
When she heard the front door open, it occurred to her that the pleasant
thing which was going to happen was Dr. Archie himself. He came in and
warmed his hands at the stove. As he turned to her, she threw herself
wearily toward him, half out of her bed. She would have tumbled to the
floor had he not caught her. He gave her some medicine and went to the
kitchen for something he needed. She drowsed and lost the sense of his
being there. When she opened her eyes again, he was kneeling before the
stove, spreading something dark and sticky on a white cloth, with a big
spoon; batter, perhaps. Presently she felt him taking off her nightgown.
He wrapped the hot plaster about her chest. There seemed to be straps
which he pinned over her shoulders. Then he took out a thread and needle
and began to sew her up in it. That, she felt, was too strange; she must
be dreaming anyhow, so she succumbed to her drowsiness.
Thea had been moaning with every breath since the doctor came back, but
she did not know it. She did not realize that she was suffering pain.
When she was conscious at all, she seemed to be separated fr
om her body;
to be perched on top of the piano, or on the hanging lamp, watching the
doctor sew her up. It was perplexing and unsatisfactory, like dreaming.
She wished she could waken up and see what was going on.
The doctor thanked God that he had persuaded Peter Kronborg to keep out
of the way. He could do better by the child if he had her to himself. He
had no children of his own. His marriage was a very unhappy one. As he
lifted and undressed Thea, he thought to himself what a beautiful thing
a little girl’s body was,—like a flower. It was so neatly and
delicately fashioned, so soft, and so milky white. Thea must have got
her hair and her silky skin from her mother. She was a little Swede,
through and through. Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would
cherish a little creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so
little and hot, so clever, too,—he glanced at the open exercise book on
the piano. When he had stitched up the flaxseed jacket, he wiped it
neatly about the edges, where the paste had worked out on the skin. He
put on her the clean nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and tucked
the blankets about her. As he pushed back the hair that had fuzzed down
over her eyebrows, he felt her head thoughtfully with the tips of his
fingers. No, he couldn’t say that it was different from any other
child’s head, though he believed that there was something very different
about her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose,
fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin—the one soft touch
in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had
caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually
drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her
affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make
up the doctor’s life in Moonstone.
The windows grew gray. He heard a tramping on the attic floor, on the
back stairs, then cries: “Give me my shirt!” “Where’s my other
stocking?”
“I’ll have to stay till they get off to school,” he reflected, “or
they’ll be in here tormenting her, the whole lot of them.”
II
For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might
slip through his hands, do what he might. But she did not. On the
contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her father remarked,
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