by Willa Cather
Thea slid closer to him and caught his arm. “No, no. I won’t let you get gray. You’ve got to stay young for me. I’m getting young now, too.”
Archie laughed. “Getting?”
“Yes. People aren’t young when they’re children. Look at Thor, now; he’s just a little old man. But Gus has a sweetheart, and he’s young!”
“Something in that!” Dr. Archie patted her head, and then felt the shape of her skull gently, with the tips of his fingers. “When you were little, Thea, I used always to be curious about the shape of your head. You seemed to have more inside it than most youngsters. I haven’t examined it for a long time. Seems to be the usual shape, but uncommonly hard, some how. What are you going to do with yourself, anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
“Honest, now?” He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.
Thea laughed and edged away from him.
“You’ve got something up your sleeve, haven’t you? Anything you like; only don’t marry and settle down here without giving yourself a chance, will you?”
“Not much. See, there’s another rabbit!”
“That’s all right about the rabbits, but I don’t want you to get tied up. Remember that.”
Thea nodded. “Be nice to Wunsch, then. I don’t know what I’d do if he went away.”
“You’ve got older friends than Wunsch here, Thea.”
“I know.” Thea spoke seriously and looked up at the moon, propping her chin on her hand. “But Wunsch is the only one that can teach me what I want to know. I’ve got to learn to do something well, and that’s the thing I can do best.”
“Do you want to be a music-teacher?”
“Maybe, but I want to be a good one. I’d like to go to Germany to study, some day. Wunsch says that’s the best place,—the only place you can really learn.” Thea hesitated and then went on nervously, “I’ve got a book that says so, too. It’s called ‘My Musical Memories.’ It made me want to go to Germany even before Wunsch said anything. Of course it’s a secret. You’re the first one I’ve told.”
Dr. Archie smiled indulgently. “That’s a long way off. Is that what you’ve got in your hard noddle?” He put his hand on her hair, but this time she shook him off.
“No, I don’t think much about it. But you talk about going, and a body has to have something to go to!”
“That’s so.” Dr. Archie sighed. “You’re lucky if you have. Poor Wunsch, now, he hasn’t. What do such fellows come out here for? He’s been asking me about my mining stock, and about mining towns. What would he do in a mining town? He wouldn’t know a piece of ore if he saw one. He’s got nothing to sell that a mining town wants to buy. Why don’t those old fellows stay at home? We won’t need them for another hundred years. An engine wiper can get a job, but a piano player! Such people can’t make good.”
“My grandfather Alstrom was a musician, and he made good.”
Dr. Archie chuckled. “Oh, a Swede can make good anywhere, at anything! You’ve got that in your favor, miss. Come, you must be getting home.”
Thea rose. “Yes, I used to be ashamed of being a Swede, but I’m not any more. Swedes are kind of common, but I think it’s better to be something.”
“It surely is! How tall you are getting. You come above my shoulder now.”
“I’ll keep on growing, don’t you think? I particularly want to be tall. Yes, I guess I must go home. I wish there’d be a fire.”
“A fire?”
“Yes, so the fire-bell would ring and the roundhouse whistle would blow, and everybody would come running out. Sometime I’m going to ring the fire-bell myself and stir them all up.”
“You’d be arrested.”
“Well, that would be better than going to bed.”
“I’ll have to lend you some more books.”
Thea shook herself impatiently. “I can’t read every night.”
Dr. Archie gave one of his low, sympathetic chuckles as he opened the gate for her. “You’re beginning to grow up, that’s what’s the matter with you. I’ll have to keep an eye on you. Now you’ll have to say good-night to the moon.”
“No, I won’t. I sleep on the floor now, right in the moonlight. My window comes down to the floor, and I can look at the sky all night.”
She shot round the house to the kitchen door, and Dr. Archie watched her disappear with a sigh. He thought of the hard, mean, frizzy little woman who kept his house for him; once the belle of a Michigan town, now dry and withered up at thirty. “If I had a daughter like Thea to watch,” he reflected, “I wouldn’t mind anything. I wonder if all of my life’s going to be a mistake just because I made a big one then? Hardly seems fair.”
Howard Archie was “respected” rather than popular in Moonstone. Everyone recognized that he was a good physician, and a progressive Western town likes to be able to point to a handsome, well-set-up, well-dressed man among its citizens. But a great many people thought Archie “distant,” and they were right. He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. He knew that every one was curious about his wife, that she played a sort of character part in Moonstone, and that people made fun of her, not very delicately. Her own friends—most of them women who were distasteful to Archie—liked to ask her to contribute to church charities, just to see how mean she could be. The little, lop-sided cake at the church supper, the cheapest pincushion, the skimpiest apron at the bazaar, were always Mrs. Archie’s contribution.
All this hurt the doctor’s pride. But if there was one thing he had learned, it was that there was no changing Belle’s nature. He had married a mean woman; and he must accept the consequences. Even in Colorado he would have had no pretext for divorce, and, to do him justice, he had never thought of such a thing. The tenets of the Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though he had long ceased to believe in them, still influenced his conduct and his conception of propriety. To him there was something vulgar about divorce. A divorced man was a disgraced man; at least, he had exhibited his hurt, and made it a matter for common gossip. Respectability was so necessary to Archie that he was willing to pay a high price for it. As long as he could keep up a decent exterior, he could manage to get on; and if he could have concealed his wife’s littleness from all his friends, he would scarcely have complained. He was more afraid of pity than he was of any unhappiness. Had there been another woman for whom he cared greatly, he might have had plenty of courage; but he was not likely to meet such a woman in Moonstone.
There was a puzzling timidity in Archie’s make-up. The thing that held his shoulders stiff, that made him resort to a mirthless little laugh when he was talking to dull people, that made him sometimes stumble over rugs and carpets, had its counterpart in his mind. He had not the courage to be an honest thinker. He could comfort himself by evasions and compromises. He consoled himself for his own marriage by telling himself that other people’s were not much better. In his work he saw pretty deeply into marital relations in Moonstone, and he could honestly say that there were not many of his friends whom he envied. Their wives seemed to suit them well enough, but they would never have suited him.
Although Dr. Archie could not bring himself to regard marriage merely as a social contract, but looked upon it as somehow made sacred by a church in which he did not believe,—as a physician he knew that a young man whose marriage is merely nominal must yet go on living his life. When he went to Denver or to Chicago, he drifted about in careless company where gayety and good-humor can be bought, not because he had any taste for such society, but because he honestly believed that anything was better than divorce. He often told himself that “hanging and wiving go by destiny.” If wiving went badly with a man,—and it did oftener than not,—then he must do the best he could to keep up appearances and help the tradition of domestic happiness along. The Moonstone gossips, assembled in Mrs. Smiley’s millinery and notion store, often discussed Dr.
Archie’s politeness to his wife, and his pleasant manner of speaking about her. “Nobody has ever got a thing out of him yet,” they agreed. And it was certainly not because no one had ever tried.
When he was down in Denver, feeling a little jolly, Archie could forget how unhappy he was at home, and could even make himself believe that he missed his wife. He always bought her presents, and would have liked to send her flowers if she had not repeatedly told him never to send her anything but bulbs,—which did not appeal to him in his expansive moments. At the Denver Athletic Club banquets, or at dinner with his colleagues at the Brown Palace Hotel, he sometimes spoke sentimentally about “little Mrs. Archie,” and he always drank the toast “to our wives, God bless them!” with gusto.
The determining factor about Dr. Archie was that he was romantic. He had married Belle White because he was romantic—too romantic to know anything about women, except what he wished them to be, or to repulse a pretty girl who had set her cap for him. At medical school, though he was a rather wild boy in behavior, he had always disliked coarse jokes and vulgar stories. In his old Flint’s Physiology there was still a poem he had pasted there when he was a student; some verses by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes about the ideals of the medical profession. After so much and such disillusioning experience with it, he still had a romantic feeling about the human body; a sense that finer things dwelt in it than could be explained by anatomy. He never jested about birth or death or marriage, and did not like to hear other doctors do it. He was a good nurse, and had a reverence for the bodies of women and children. When he was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then his constraint and self-consciousness fell away from him. He was easy, gentle, competent, master of himself and of other people. Then the idealist in him was not afraid of being discovered and ridiculed.
In his tastes, too, the doctor was romantic. Though he read Balzac all the year through, he still enjoyed the Waverley Novels as much as when he had first come upon them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his grandfather’s library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and holidays, because it brought back the pleasures of his boyhood so vividly. He liked Scott’s women. Constance de Beverley and the minstrel girl in “The Fair Maid of Perth,” not the Duchesse de Langeais, were his heroines. But better than anything that ever got from the heart of a man into printer’s ink, he loved the poetry of Robert Burns. “Death and Dr. Hornbook” and “The Jolly Beggars,” Burns’s “Reply to his Tailor,” he often read aloud to himself in his office, late at night, after a glass of hot toddy. He used to read “Tam o’Shanter” to Thea Kronborg, and he got her some of the songs, set to the old airs for which they were written. He loved to hear her sing them. Sometimes when she sang, “Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast,” the doctor and even Mr. Kronborg joined in. Thea never minded if people could not sing; she directed them with her head and somehow carried them along. When her father got off the pitch she let her own voice out and covered him.
XIII
At the beginning of June, when school closed, Thea had told Wunsch that she didn’t know how much practicing she could get in this summer because Thor had his worst teeth still to cut.
“My God! all last summer he was doing that!” Wunsch exclaimed furiously.
“I know, but it takes them two years, and Thor is slow,” Thea answered reprovingly.
The summer went well beyond her hopes, however. She told herself that it was the best summer of her life, so far. Nobody was sick at home, and her lessons were uninterrupted. Now that she had four pupils of her own and made a dollar a week, her practicing was regarded more seriously by the household. Her mother had always arranged things so that she could have the parlor four hours a day in summer. Thor proved a friendly ally. He behaved handsomely about his molars, and never objected to being pulled off into remote places in his cart. When Thea dragged him over the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or a bank, he would waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his monkey in the sand and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the cactus and set up a howl, but usually he let his sister read peacefully, while he coated his hands and face, first with an all-day sucker and then with gravel.
Life was pleasant and uneventful until the first of September, when Wunsch began to drink so hard that he was unable to appear when Thea went to take her mid-week lesson, and Mrs. Kohler had to send her home after a tearful apology. On Saturday morning she set out for the Kohlers’ again, but on her way, when she was crossing the ravine, she noticed a woman sitting at the bottom of the gulch, under the railroad trestle. She turned from her path and saw that it was Mrs. Tellamantez, and she seemed to be doing drawn-work. Then Thea noticed that there was something beside her, covered up with a purple and yellow Mexican blanket. She ran up the gulch and called to Mrs. Tellamantez. The Mexican woman held up a warning finger. Thea glanced at the blanket and recognized a square red hand which protruded. The middle finger twitched slightly.
“Is he hurt?” she gasped.
Mrs. Tellamantez shook her head. “No; very sick. He knows nothing,” she said quietly, folding her hands over her drawn-work.
Thea learned that Wunsch had been out all night, that this morning Mrs. Kohler had gone to look for him and found him under the trestle covered with dirt and cinders. Probably he had been trying to get home and had lost his way. Mrs. Tellamantez was watching beside the unconscious man while Mrs. Kohler and Johnny went to get help.
“You better go home now, I think,” said Mrs. Tellamantez, in closing her narration.
Thea hung her head and looked wistfully toward the blanket.
“Couldn’t I just stay till they come?” she asked. “I’d like to know if he’s very bad.”
“Bad enough,” sighed Mrs. Tellamantez, taking up her work again.
Thea sat down under the narrow shade of one of the trestle posts and listened to the locusts rasping in the hot sand while she watched Mrs. Tellamantez evenly draw her threads. The blanket looked as if it were over a heap of bricks.
“I don’t see him breathing any,” she said anxiously.
“Yes, he breathes,” said Mrs. Tellamantez, not lifting her eyes.
It seemed to Thea that they waited for hours. At last they heard voices, and a party of men came down the hill and up the gulch. Dr. Archie and Fritz Kohler came first; behind were Johnny and Ray, and several men from the roundhouse. Ray had the canvas litter that was kept at the depot for accidents on the road. Behind them trailed half a dozen boys who had been hanging round the depot.
When Ray saw Thea, he dropped his canvas roll and hurried forward. “Better run along home, Thee. This is ugly business.” Ray was indignant that anybody who gave Thea music lessons should behave in such a manner.
Thea resented both his proprietary tone and his superior virtue. “I won’t. I want to know how bad he is. I’m not a baby!” she exclaimed indignantly, stamping her foot into the sand.
Dr. Archie, who had been kneeling by the blanket, got up and came toward Thea, dusting his knees. He smiled and nodded confidentially. “He’ll be all right when we get him home. But he wouldn’t want you to see him like this, poor old chap! Understand? Now, skip!”
Thea ran down the gulch and looked back only once, to see them lifting the canvas litter with Wunsch upon it, still covered with the blanket.
The men carried Wunsch up the hill and down the road to the Kohlers’. Mrs. Kohler had gone home and made up a bed in the sitting-room, as she knew the litter could not be got round the turn in the narrow stairway. Wunsch was like a dead man. He lay unconscious all day. Ray Kennedy stayed with him till two o’clock in the afternoon, when he had to go out on his run. It was the first time he had ever been inside the Kohlers’ house, and he was so much impressed by Napoleon that the piece-picture formed a new bond between him and Thea.
Dr. Archie went back at six o’clock, and found Mrs. Kohler and Spanish Johnny with Wunsch, who was in a high fever, muttering and groaning.
“There ought to be some one here to loo
k after him to-night, Mrs. Kohler,” he said. “I’m on a confinement case, and I can’t be here, but there ought to be somebody. He may get violent.”
Mrs. Kohler insisted that she could always do anything with Wunsch, but the doctor shook his head and Spanish Johnny grinned. He said he would stay. The doctor laughed at him. “Ten fellows like you couldn’t hold him, Spanish, if he got obstreperous; an Irishman would have his hands full. Guess I’d better put the soft pedal on him.” He pulled out his hypodermic.
Spanish Johnny stayed, however, and the Kohlers went to bed. At about two o’clock in the morning Wunsch rose from his ignominious cot. Johnny, who was dozing on the lounge, awoke to find the German standing in the middle of the room in his undershirt and drawers, his arms bare, his heavy body seeming twice its natural girth. His face was snarling and savage, and his eyes were crazy. He had risen to avenge himself, to wipe out his shame, to destroy his enemy. One look was enough for Johnny. Wunsch raised a chair threateningly, and Johnny, with the lightness of a picador, darted under the missile and out of the open window. He shot across the gully to get help, meanwhile leaving the Kohlers to their fate.
Fritz, upstairs, heard the chair crash upon the stove. Then he heard doors opening and shutting, and some one stumbling about in the shrubbery of the garden. He and Paulina sat up in bed and held a consultation. Fritz slipped from under the covers, and going cautiously over to the window, poked out his head. Then he rushed to the door and bolted it.
