The Song of the Lark

by Willa Sibert Cather

  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 himself. “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, ambitions, 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 slippers 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 conformed

  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 employees passed the front

  gate every time they came uptown. 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

  architectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street. They

  nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Virginia creeper; their

  occupants had no social pretensions to keep up. There were no half-glass

  front doors with doorbells, 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 strawberries 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 ordinary 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

  preference. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit for hours

  in Mrs. Smiley’s millinery and notion store, listening 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 selected him. She let him see, made him fully aware, that she had

  selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who could not withstand

  such enlightenment. Belle’s family were sorry for him. On his wedding

  day her sisters looked at the big, handsome boy—he was twenty-four—as

  he walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they looked at each

  other. His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant face, his gentle,

  protecting arm, made them uncomfortable. Well, they were glad that he

  was going West at once, to fulfill his doom where they would not be

  onlookers. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off

  their hands.

  More than that, Belle seemed to have got herself off her hands. Her

  reputed prettiness must have been entirely the result of determination,

  of a fierce little ambition. Once she had married, fastened herself on

  some one, come to port,—it vanished like the ornamental plumage which

  drops away from some birds after the mating season. The one aggressive

  action of her life was over. She began to shrink in face and stature. Of

  her harum-scarum spirit there was nothing left but the little screech.

  Within a few years she looked as small and mean as she was.

  Thor’s chariot crept along. Thea approached the house unwillingly. She

  didn’t care about the strawberries, anyhow. She had come only because

  she did not want to hurt Dr. Archie’s feelings. She not only disliked

  Mrs. Archie, she was a little afraid of her. While Thea was getting the

  heavy baby-buggy through the iron gate she heard some one call, “Wait a

  minute!” and Mrs. Archie came running around the house from the back

  door, her apron over her head. She came to help with the buggy, because

  she was afraid the wheels might scratch the paint off the gateposts. She

  was a skinny little woman with a great pile of frizzy light hair on a

  small head.

  “Dr. Archie told me to come up and pick some strawberries,” Thea

  muttered, wishing she had stayed at home.

  Mrs. Archie led the way to the back door, squinting and shading her eyes

  with her hand. “Wait a minute,” she said again, when Thea explained why

  she had come.

  She went into her kitchen and Thea sat down on the porch step. When Mrs.

  Archie reappeared she carried in her hand a little wooden butter-basket

  trimmed with fringed tissue paper, which she must have brought home from

  some church supper. “You’ll have to have something to put them in,” she

  said, ignoring the yawning willow basket which stood empty on Thor’s

  feet. “You can have this, and you needn’t mind about returning it. You

  know about not trampling the vines, don’t you?”

  Mrs. Archie went back into the house and Thea leaned over in the sand

  and picked a few strawberries. As soon as she was sure that she was not

  going to cry, she tossed the little basket into the big one and ran

  Thor’s buggy along the gravel walk and out of the gate as fast as she

  could push it. She was angry, and she was ashamed for Dr. Archie. She

  could not help thinking how uncomfortable he would be if he ever found

  out about it. Little things like that were the ones that cut him most.

  She slunk home by the back way, and again almost cried when
she told her

  mother about it.

  Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband’s supper. She laughed

  as she dropped a new lot into the hot grease. “It’s wonderful, the way

  some people are made,” she declared. “But I wouldn’t let that upset me

  if I was you. Think what it would be to live with it all the time. You

  look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and take a dime and go

  downtown and get an ice-cream soda. That’ll make you feel better. Thor

  can have a little of the ice-cream if you feed it to him with a spoon.

  He likes it, don’t you, son?” She stooped to wipe his chin. Thor was

  only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite true that he

  liked ice-cream.

  VI

  Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah’s ark town

  set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and

  cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their

  turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the

  North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail,

  brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting,

  wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water

  and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain.

  The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break

  into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water.

  The long street which connected Moonstone with the depot settlement

  traversed in its course a considerable stretch of rough open country,

  staked out in lots but not built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the

  town and the railroad. When you set out along this street to go to the

  station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and farther apart,

  until they ceased altogether, and the board sidewalk continued its

  uneven course through sunflower patches, until you reached the solitary,

  new brick Catholic Church. The church stood there because the land was

  given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining waste lots, in

  the hope of making them more salable—“Farrier’s Addition,” this patch

  of prairie was called in the clerk’s office. An eighth of a mile beyond

  the church was a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk

  became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the gully was old