The Song of the Lark

by Willa Sibert Cather

  she must have inherited the “constitution” which he was never tired of

  admiring in her mother.

  One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found

  Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight

  was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a

  big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand

  and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy forehead

  and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her mother’s

  room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed darning

  stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck and a

  determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and

  unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in

  bed, still looked like a girl’s. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie

  respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined.

  Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had

  brought her husband some property, too,—one fourth of her father’s

  broad acres in Nebraska,—but this she kept in her own name. She had

  profound respect for her husband’s erudition and eloquence. She sat

  under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by his

  stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by

  lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the

  pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his administration of

  worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at

  table; she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever

  parental sentiment there was in the house, to remember birthdays and

  anniversaries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals. It

  was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and their conduct in

  some sort of order, and this she accomplished with a success that was a

  source of wonder to her neighbors. As she used to remark, and her

  husband admiringly to echo, she “had never lost one.” With all his

  flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact, punctual way

  in which his wife got her children into the world and along in it. He

  believed, and he was right in believing, that the sovereign State of

  Colorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.

  Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in

  heaven. More modern views would not have startled her; they would simply

  have seemed foolish—thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built

  the tower of Babel, or like Axel’s plan to breed ostriches in the

  chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on

  this and other matters, it would have been difficult to say, but once

  formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questioned her

  convictions than she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even

  tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong prejudices, and she

  never forgave.

  When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg was reflecting that

  the washing was a week behind, and deciding what she had better do about

  it. The arrival of a new baby meant a revision of her entire domestic

  schedule, and as she drove her needle along she had been working out new

  sleeping arrangements and cleaning days. The doctor had entered the

  house without knocking, after making noise enough in the hall to prepare

  his patients. Thea was reading, her book propped up before her in the

  sunlight.

  “Mustn’t do that; bad for your eyes,” he said, as Thea shut the book

  quickly and slipped it under the covers.

  Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: “Bring the baby here, doctor, and

  have that chair. She wanted him in there for company.”

  Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow paper bag down on

  Thea’s coverlid and winked at her. They had a code of winks and

  grimaces. When he went in to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag

  cautiously, trying to keep it from crackling. She drew out a long bunch

  of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they had been

  packed still clinging to them. They were called Malaga grapes in

  Moonstone, and once or twice during the winter the leading grocer got a

  keg of them. They were used mainly for table decoration, about

  Christmas-time. Thea had never had more than one grape at a time before.

  When the doctor came back she was holding the almost transparent fruit

  up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green skins softly with the tips of

  her fingers. She did not thank him; she only snapped her eyes at him in

  a special way which he understood, and, when he gave her his hand, put

  it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if she were trying to do so

  without knowing it—and without his knowing it.

  Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair. “And how’s Thea feeling

  to-day?”

  He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a third person

  overheard his conversation. Big and handsome and superior to his fellow

  townsmen as Dr. Archie was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter

  Kronborg he often dodged behind a professional manner. There was

  sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self consciousness all over

  his big body, which made him awkward—likely to stumble, to kick up

  rugs, or to knock over chairs. If any one was very sick, he forgot

  himself, but he had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.

  Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with pleasure. “All right.

  I like to be sick. I have more fun then than other times.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t have to go to school, and I don’t have to practice. I can read

  all I want to, and have good things,”—she patted the grapes. “I had

  lots of fun that time I mashed my finger and you wouldn’t let Professor

  Wunsch make me practice. Only I had to do left hand, even then. I think

  that was mean.”

  The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger, where the nail had

  grown back a little crooked. “You mustn’t trim it down close at the

  corner there, and then it will grow straight. You won’t want it crooked

  when you’re a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts.”

  She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his new scarf-pin.

  “That’s the prettiest one you ev-ER had. I wish you’d stay a long while

  and let me look at it. What is it?”

  Dr. Archie laughed. “It’s an opal. Spanish Johnny brought it up for me

  from Chihuahua in his shoe. I had it set in Denver, and I wore it to-day

  for your benefit.”

  Thea had a curious passion for jewelry. She wanted every shining stone

  she saw, and in summer she was always going off into the sand hills to

  hunt for crystals and agates and bits of pink chalcedony. She had two

  cigar boxes full of stones that she had found or traded for, and she

  imagined that they were of enormous value. She was always planning how

  she would have them set.

  “What are you reading?” The doctor reached under the covers and pulled

  out a book of Byron�
�s poems. “Do you like this?”

  She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly, and pointed to “My

  native land, good-night.” “That,” she said sheepishly.

  “How about ‘Maid of Athens’?”

  She blushed and looked at him suspiciously. “I like ‘There was a sound

  of revelry,’” she muttered.

  The doctor laughed and closed the book. It was clumsily bound in padded

  leather and had been presented to the Reverend Peter Kronborg by his

  Sunday-School class as an ornament for his parlor table.

  “Come into the office some day, and I’ll lend you a nice book. You can

  skip the parts you don’t understand. You can read it in vacation.

  Perhaps you’ll be able to understand all of it by then.”

  Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano. “In vacation I have

  to practice four hours every day, and then there’ll be Thor to take care

  of.” She pronounced it “Tor.”

  “Thor? Oh, you’ve named the baby Thor?” exclaimed the doctor.

  Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly, “That’s a

  nice name, only maybe it’s a little—old fashioned.” She was very

  sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact

  that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish

  English, at that, one might add.

  Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter Kronborg had been

  sent to a small divinity school in Indiana by the women of a Swedish

  evangelical mission, who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and

  begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth through the

  seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and to bury the

  members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his

  Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he had learned

  out of books at college. He always spoke of “the infant Saviour,” “our

  Heavenly Father,” etc. The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human

  speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate.

  Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due to the fact that he

  habitually expressed himself in a book learned language, wholly remote

  from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish

  to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial

  English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until

  she went to school never spoke at all, except in monosyllables, and her

  mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied. She was still inept in

  speech for a child so intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she

  seldom attempted to explain them, even at school, where she excelled in

  “written work” and never did more than mutter a reply.

  “Your music professor stopped me on the street to-day and asked me how

  you were,” said the doctor, rising. “He’ll be sick himself, trotting

  around in this slush with no overcoat or overshoes.”

  “He’s poor,” said Thea simply.

  The doctor sighed. “I’m afraid he’s worse than that. Is he always all

  right when you take your lessons? Never acts as if he’d been drinking?”

  Thea looked angry and spoke excitedly. “He knows a lot. More than

  anybody. I don’t care if he does drink; he’s old and poor.” Her voice

  shook a little.

  Mrs. Kronborg spoke up from the next room. “He’s a good teacher, doctor.

  It’s good for us he does drink. He’d never be in a little place like

  this if he didn’t have some weakness. These women that teach music

  around here don’t know nothing. I wouldn’t have my child wasting time

  with them. If Professor Wunsch goes away, Thea’ll have nobody to take

  from. He’s careful with his scholars; he don’t use bad language. Mrs.

  Kohler is always present when Thea takes her lesson. It’s all right.”

  Mrs. Kronborg spoke calmly and judicially. One could see that she had

  thought the matter out before.

  “I’m glad to hear that, Mrs. Kronborg. I wish we could get the old man

  off his bottle and keep him tidy. Do you suppose if I gave you an old

  overcoat you could get him to wear it?” The doctor went to the bedroom

  door and Mrs. Kronborg looked up from her darning.

  “Why, yes, I guess he’d be glad of it. He’ll take most anything from me.

  He won’t buy clothes, but I guess he’d wear ‘em if he had ‘em. I’ve

  never had any clothes to give him, having so many to make over for.”

  “I’ll have Larry bring the coat around to-night. You aren’t cross with

  me, Thea?” taking her hand.

  Thea grinned warmly. “Not if you give Professor Wunsch a coat—and

  things,” she tapped the grapes significantly. The doctor bent over and

  kissed her.

  III

  Being sick was all very well, but Thea knew from experience that

  starting back to school again was attended by depressing difficulties.

  One Monday morning she got up early with Axel and Gunner, who shared her

  wing room, and hurried into the back living-room, between the

  dining-room and the kitchen. There, beside a soft-coal stove, the

  younger children of the family undressed at night and dressed in the

  morning. The older daughter, Anna, and the two big boys slept upstairs,

  where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The

  first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean,

  prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of

  breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as

  she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter underwear

  was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because

  she happened to have the most sensitive skin. While she was tugging it

  on, her Aunt Tillie brought in warm water from the boiler and filled the

  tin pitcher. Thea washed her face, brushed and braided her hair, and got

  into her blue cashmere dress. Over this she buttoned a long apron, with

  sleeves, which would not be removed until she put on her cloak to go to

  school. Gunner and Axel, on the soap box behind the stove, had their

  usual quarrel about which should wear the tightest stockings, but they

  exchanged reproaches in low tones, for they were wholesomely afraid of

  Mrs. Kronborg’s rawhide whip. She did not chastise her children often,

  but she did it thoroughly. Only a somewhat stern system of discipline

  could have kept any degree of order and quiet in that overcrowded house.

  Mrs. Kronborg’s children were all trained to dress themselves at the

  earliest possible age, to make their own beds,—the boys as well as the

  girls,—to take care of their clothes, to eat what was given them, and

  to keep out of the way. Mrs. Kronborg would have made a good chess

  player; she had a head for moves and positions.

  Anna, the elder daughter, was her mother’s lieutenant. All the children

  knew that they must obey Anna, who was an obstinate contender for

  proprieties and not always fair minded. To see the young Kronborgs

  headed for Sunday School was like watching a military drill. Mrs.

  Kronborg let her children’s minds alone. She did not pry into their

&n
bsp; thoughts or nag them. She respected them as individuals, and outside of

  the house they had a great deal of liberty. But their communal life was

  definitely ordered.

  In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen; Gus and Charley

  and Anna first, while the younger children were dressing. Gus was

  nineteen and was a clerk in a dry-goods store. Charley, eighteen months

  younger, worked in a feed store. They left the house by the kitchen door

  at seven o’clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt Tillie get the breakfast

  for the younger ones. Without the help of this sister-in-law, Tillie

  Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg’s life would have been a hard one. Mrs. Kronborg

  often reminded Anna that “no hired help would ever have taken the same

  interest.”

  Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from a lowly,

  ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of Sweden. His

  great-grandfather had gone to Norway to work as a farm laborer and had

  married a Norwegian girl. This strain of Norwegian blood came out

  somewhere in each generation of the Kronborgs. The intemperance of one

  of Peter Kronborg’s uncles, and the religious mania of another, had been

  alike charged to the Norwegian grandmother. Both Peter Kronborg and his

  sister Tillie were more like the Norwegian root of the family than like

  the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was strong in Thea, though

  in her it took a very different character.

  Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl at

  thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes—which taste, as Mrs.

  Kronborg philosophically said, did nobody any harm. Tillie was always

  cheerful, and her tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the day.

  She had been cruelly overworked on her father’s Minnesota farm when she

  was a young girl, and she had never been so happy as she was now; had

  never before, as she said, had such social advantages. She thought her

  brother the most important man in Moonstone. She never missed a church

  service, and, much to the embarrassment of the children, she always

  “spoke a piece” at the Sunday-School concerts. She had a complete set of

  “Standard Recitations,” which she conned on Sundays. This morning, when

  Thea and her two younger brothers sat down to breakfast, Tillie was

  remonstrating with Gunner because he had not learned a recitation