The Song of the Lark

by Willa Sibert Cather

  assigned to him for George Washington Day at school. The unmemorized

  text lay heavily on Gunner’s conscience as he attacked his buckwheat

  cakes and sausage. He knew that Tillie was in the right, and that “when

  the day came he would be ashamed of himself.”

  “I don’t care,” he muttered, stirring his coffee; “they oughtn’t to make

  boys speak. It’s all right for girls. They like to show off.”

  “No showing off about it. Boys ought to like to speak up for their

  country. And what was the use of your father buying you a new suit, if

  you’re not going to take part in anything?”

  “That was for Sunday-School. I’d rather wear my old one, anyhow. Why

  didn’t they give the piece to Thea?” Gunner grumbled.

  Tillie was turning buckwheat cakes at the griddle. “Thea can play and

  sing, she don’t need to speak. But you’ve got to know how to do

  something, Gunner, that you have. What are you going to do when you git

  big and want to git into society, if you can’t do nothing? Everybody’ll

  say, ‘Can you sing? Can you play? Can you speak? Then git right out of

  society.’ An’ that’s what they’ll say to you, Mr. Gunner.”

  Gunner and Alex grinned at Anna, who was preparing her mother’s

  breakfast. They never made fun of Tillie, but they understood well

  enough that there were subjects upon which her ideas were rather

  foolish. When Tillie struck the shallows, Thea was usually prompt in

  turning the conversation.

  “Will you and Axel let me have your sled at recess?” she asked.

  “All the time?” asked Gunner dubiously.

  “I’ll work your examples for you to-night, if you do.”

  “Oh, all right. There’ll be a lot of ‘em.”

  “I don’t mind, I can work ‘em fast. How about yours, Axel?”

  Axel was a fat little boy of seven, with pretty, lazy blue eyes. “I

  don’t care,” he murmured, buttering his last buckwheat cake without

  ambition; “too much trouble to copy ‘em down. Jenny Smiley’ll let me

  have hers.”

  The boys were to pull Thea to school on their sled, as the snow was

  deep. The three set off together. Anna was now in the high school, and

  she no longer went with the family party, but walked to school with some

  of the older girls who were her friends, and wore a hat, not a hood like

  Thea.

  IV

  “And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!” Those were the closing words of

  Thea’s favorite fairy tale, and she thought of them as she ran out into

  the world one Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm. She

  was going to the Kohlers’ to take her lesson, but she was in no hurry.

  It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little

  overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with

  sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had

  just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood

  trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery

  tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for

  everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one

  had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The

  double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in

  which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and

  the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their

  skin.

  Thea had to walk more than a mile to reach the Kohlers’ house, a very

  pleasant mile out of town toward the glittering sand hills,—yellow this

  morning, with lines of deep violet where the clefts and valleys were.

  She followed the sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town;

  then took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where the

  Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry sand creek,

  across which the railroad track ran on a trestle. Beyond that gulch, on

  a little rise of ground that faced the open sandy plain, was the

  Kohlers’ house, where Professor Wunsch lived. Fritz Kohler was the town

  tailor, one of the first settlers. He had moved there, built a little

  house and made a garden, when Moonstone was first marked down on the

  map. He had three sons, but they now worked on the railroad and were

  stationed in distant cities. One of them had gone to work for the Santa

  Fe, and lived in New Mexico.

  Mrs. Kohler seldom crossed the ravine and went into the town except at

  Christmas-time, when she had to buy presents and Christmas cards to send

  to her old friends in Freeport, Illinois. As she did not go to church,

  she did not possess such a thing as a hat. Year after year she wore the

  same red hood in winter and a black sunbonnet in summer. She made her

  own dresses; the skirts came barely to her shoe-tops, and were gathered

  as full as they could possibly be to the waistband. She preferred men’s

  shoes, and usually wore the cast-offs of one of her sons. She had never

  learned much English, and her plants and shrubs were her companions. She

  lived for her men and her garden. Beside that sand gulch, she had tried

  to reproduce a bit of her own village in the Rhine Valley. She hid

  herself behind the growth she had fostered, lived under the shade of

  what she had planted and watered and pruned. In the blaze of the open

  plain she was stupid and blind like an owl. Shade, shade; that was what

  she was always planning and making. Behind the high tamarisk hedge, her

  garden was a jungle of verdure in summer. Above the cherry trees and

  peach trees and golden plums stood the windmill, with its tank on

  stilts, which kept all this verdure alive. Outside, the sage-brush grew

  up to the very edge of the garden, and the sand was always drifting up

  to the tamarisks.

  Every one in Moonstone was astonished when the Kohlers took the

  wandering music-teacher to live with them. In seventeen years old Fritz

  had never had a crony, except the harness-maker and Spanish Johnny. This

  Wunsch came from God knew where,—followed Spanish Johnny into town when

  that wanderer came back from one of his tramps. Wunsch played in the

  dance orchestra, tuned pianos, and gave lessons. When Mrs. Kohler

  rescued him, he was sleeping in a dirty, unfurnished room over one of

  the saloons, and he had only two shirts in the world. Once he was under

  her roof, the old woman went at him as she did at her garden. She sewed

  and washed and mended for him, and made him so clean and respectable

  that he was able to get a large class of pupils and to rent a piano. As

  soon as he had money ahead, he sent to the Narrow Gauge lodging-house,

  in Denver, for a trunkful of music which had been held there for unpaid

  board. With tears in his eyes the old man—he was not over fifty, but

  sadly battered—told Mrs. Kohler that he asked nothing better of God

  than to end his days with her, and to be buried in the garden, under her

  linden trees. They were not American basswood, but the European linden,

  which has honey-colored blooms in summer, with a fragrance that

  surpasses all trees and flowers and drives young people wild with j
oy.

  Thea was reflecting as she walked along that had it not been for

  Professor Wunsch she might have lived on for years in Moonstone without

  ever knowing the Kohlers, without ever seeing their garden or the inside

  of their house. Besides the cuckoo clock,—which was wonderful enough,

  and which Mrs. Kohler said she kept for “company when she was

  lonesome,”—the Kohlers had in their house the most wonderful thing Thea

  had ever seen—but of that later.

  Professor Wunsch went to the houses of his other pupils to give them

  their lessons, but one morning he told Mrs. Kronborg that Thea had

  talent, and that if she came to him he could teach her in his slippers,

  and that would be better. Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word

  “talent,” which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would

  have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there,

  it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day and

  must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice

  four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the piano, just as

  a child with measles must be kept under the blankets. Mrs. Kronborg and

  her three sisters had all studied piano, and all sang well, but none of

  them had talent. Their father had played the oboe in an orchestra in

  Sweden, before he came to America to better his fortunes. He had even

  known Jenny Lind. A child with talent had to be kept at the piano; so

  twice a week in summer and once a week in winter Thea went over the

  gulch to the Kohlers’, though the Ladies’ Aid Society thought it was not

  proper for their preacher’s daughter to go “where there was so much

  drinking.” Not that the Kohler sons ever so much as looked at a glass of

  beer. They were ashamed of their old folks and got out into the world as

  fast as possible; had their clothes made by a Denver tailor and their

  necks shaved up under their hair and forgot the past. Old Fritz and

  Wunsch, however, indulged in a friendly bottle pretty often. The two men

  were like comrades; perhaps the bond between them was the glass wherein

  lost hopes are found; perhaps it was common memories of another country;

  perhaps it was the grapevine in the garden—knotty, fibrous shrub, full

  of homesickness and sentiment, which the Germans have carried around the

  world with them.

  As Thea approached the house she peeped between the pink sprays of the

  tamarisk hedge and saw the Professor and Mrs. Kohler in the garden,

  spading and raking. The garden looked like a relief-map now, and gave no

  indication of what it would be in August; such a jungle! Pole beans and

  potatoes and corn and leeks and kale and red cabbage—there would even

  be vegetables for which there is no American name. Mrs. Kohler was

  always getting by mail packages of seeds from Freeport and from the old

  country. Then the flowers! There were big sunflowers for the canary

  bird, tiger lilies and phlox and zinnias and lady’s-slippers and

  portulaca and hollyhocks,—giant hollyhocks. Beside the fruit trees

  there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa, and a balm-of-Gilead, two

  lindens, and even a ginka,—a rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped

  like butterflies, which shivered, but never bent to the wind.

  This morning Thea saw to her delight that the two oleander trees, one

  white and one red, had been brought up from their winter quarters in the

  cellar. There is hardly a German family in the most arid parts of Utah,

  New Mexico, Arizona, but has its oleander trees. However loutish the

  American-born sons of the family may be, there was never one who refused

  to give his muscle to the back-breaking task of getting those tubbed

  trees down into the cellar in the fall and up into the sunlight in the

  spring. They may strive to avert the day, but they grapple with the tub

  at last.

  When Thea entered the gate, her professor leaned his spade against the

  white post that supported the turreted dove-house, and wiped his face

  with his shirt-sleeve; someway he never managed to have a handkerchief

  about him. Wunsch was short and stocky, with something rough and

  bear-like about his shoulders. His face was a dark, bricky red, deeply

  creased rather than wrinkled, and the skin was like loose leather over

  his neck band—he wore a brass collar button but no collar. His hair was

  cropped close; iron-gray bristles on a bullet-like head. His eyes were

  always suffused and bloodshot. He had a coarse, scornful mouth, and

  irregular, yellow teeth, much worn at the edges. His hands were square

  and red, seldom clean, but always alive, impatient, even sympathetic.

  “MORGEN,” he greeted his pupil in a businesslike way, put on a black

  alpaca coat, and conducted her at once to the piano in Mrs. Kohler’s

  sitting-room. He twirled the stool to the proper height, pointed to it,

  and sat down in a wooden chair beside Thea.

  “The scale of B flat major,” he directed, and then fell into an attitude

  of deep attention. Without a word his pupil set to work.

  To Mrs. Kohler, in the garden, came the cheerful sound of effort, of

  vigorous striving. Unconsciously she wielded her rake more lightly.

  Occasionally she heard the teacher’s voice. “Scale of E minor…WEITER,

  WEITER!...IMMER I hear the thumb, like a lame foot. WEITER...WEITER,

  once…SCHON! The chords, quick!”

  The pupil did not open her mouth until they began the second movement of

  the Clementi sonata, when she remonstrated in low tones about the way he

  had marked the fingering of a passage.

  “It makes no matter what you think,” replied her teacher coldly. “There

  is only one right way. The thumb there. EIN, ZWEI, DREI, VIER,” etc.

  Then for an hour there was no further interruption.

  At the end of the lesson Thea turned on her stool and leaned her arm on

  the keyboard. They usually had a little talk after the lesson.

  Herr Wunsch grinned. “How soon is it you are free from school? Then we

  make ahead faster, eh?”

  “First week in June. Then will you give me the ‘Invitation to the

  Dance’?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It makes no matter. If you want him, you

  play him out of lesson hours.”

  “All right.” Thea fumbled in her pocket and brought out a crumpled slip

  of paper. “What does this mean, please? I guess it’s Latin.”

  Wunsch blinked at the line penciled on the paper. “Wherefrom you get

  this?” he asked gruffly.

  “Out of a book Dr. Archie gave me to read. It’s all English but that.

  Did you ever see it before?” she asked, watching his face.

  “Yes. A long time ago,” he muttered, scowling. “Ovidius!” He took a stub

  of lead pencil from his vest pocket, steadied his hand by a visible

  effort, and under the words:

  “LENTE CURRITE, LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI,” he wrote in a clear,

  elegant Gothic hand,—

  “GO SLOWLY, GO SLOWLY, YE STEEDS OF THE NIGHT.”

  He put the pencil back in his pocket and continued to stare at the

  Latin. It recalled the poem, which he had read as a student, and thought

  very fine. There
were treasures of memory which no lodging-house keeper

  could attach. One carried things about in one’s head, long after one’s

  linen could be smuggled out in a tuning-bag. He handed the paper back

  to Thea. “There is the English, quite elegant,” he said, rising.

  Mrs. Kohler stuck her head in at the door, and Thea slid off the stool.

  “Come in, Mrs. Kohler,” she called, “and show me the piece-picture.”

  The old woman laughed, pulled off her big gardening gloves, and pushed

  Thea to the lounge before the object of her delight. The

  “piece-picture,” which hung on the wall and nearly covered one whole end

  of the room, was the handiwork of Fritz Kohler. He had learned his trade

  under an old-fashioned tailor in Magdeburg who required from each of his

  apprentices a thesis: that is, before they left his shop, each

  apprentice had to copy in cloth some well known German painting,

  stitching bits of colored stuff together on a linen background; a kind

  of mosaic. The pupil was allowed to select his subject, and Fritz Kohler

  had chosen a popular painting of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The

  gloomy Emperor and his staff were represented as crossing a stone

  bridge, and behind them was the blazing city, the walls and fortresses

  done in gray cloth with orange tongues of flame darting about the domes

  and minarets. Napoleon rode his white horse; Murat, in Oriental dress, a

  bay charger. Thea was never tired of examining this work, of hearing how

  long it had taken Fritz to 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.”