The Song of the Lark

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 flattop 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.

“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.

“It is always possible to learn when one likes,” said Wunsch. His words were peremptory, as usual, but his tone was mild, even confidential. “There is always a way. And if some day you are going to sing, it is necessary to know well the German language.”

Thea stooped over to pick a leaf of rosemary. How did Wunsch know that, when the very roses on her wallpaper had never heard it? “But am I going to?” she asked, still stooping.

“That is for you to say,” returned Wunsch coldly. “You would better marry some Jacob here and keep the house for him, may‑be? That is as one desires.”

Thea flashed up at him a clear, laughing look. “No, I don’t want to do that. You know,” she brushed his coat sleeve quickly with her yellow head. “Only how can I learn anything here? It’s so far from Denver.”

Wunsch’s loose lower lip curled in amusement. Then, as if he suddenly remembered something, he spoke seriously. “Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing⁠—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little. It brought Columbus across the sea in a little boat, und so weiter.” Wunsch made a grimace, took his pupil’s hand and drew her toward the grape arbor. “Hereafter I will more speak to you in German. Now, sit down and I will teach you for your birthday that little song. Ask me the words you do not know already. Now: Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen.”

Wunsch would not go across the ravine to the town until he went to take the morning train for Denver. He said that after he got to Denver he would “look around.” He left Moonstone one bright October morning, without telling anyone goodbye. He bought his ticket and went directly into the smoking-car. When the train was beginning to pull out, he heard his name called frantically, and looking out of the window he saw Thea Kronborg standing on the siding, bareheaded and panting. Some boys had brought word to school that they saw Wunsch’s trunk going over to the station, and Thea had run away from school. She was at the end of the station platform, her hair in two braids, her blue gingham dress wet to the knees because she had run across lots through the weeds. It had rained during the night, and the tall sunflowers behind her were fresh and shining.

“Goodbye, Herr Wunsch, goodbye!” she called waving to him.

He thrust his head out at the car window and called back, “Leben sie wohl, leben sie wohl, mein Kind!” He watched her until the train swept around the curve beyond the roundhouse, and then sank back into his seat, muttering, “She had been running. Ah, she will run a long way; they cannot stop her!”

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself⁠—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.