The Song of the Lark quotes

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

… 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.

The doctor dropped back into his swivel chair, the mottled volume still in his hand.

“They aren’t exactly books, Thea,” he said seriously. “They’re a city.”

“Yes, and no. They’re a history of a live city, not a dead one. A Frenchman undertook to write about a whole cityful of people, all the kinds he knew. And he got them nearly all in, I guess. Yes, it’s very interesting.

All the Mexican houses had neat little yards, with tamarisk hedges and flowers, and walks bordered with shells or whitewashed stones. Johnny’s house was dark. His wife, Mrs. Tellamantez, was sitting on the doorstep, combing her long, blue-black hair.

(Mexican women are like the Spartans; when they are in trouble, in love, under stress of any kind, they comb and comb their hair.)

She rose without embarrassment or apology, comb in hand, and greeted the doctor.

Mrs. Tellamantez could not write her name, and could read but little. Her strong nature lived upon itself. She was chiefly known in Moonstone for her forbearance with her incorrigible husband.

Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with Johnny, and everybody liked him.

His popularity would have been unusual for a white man, for a Mexican it was unprecedented. His talents were his undoing. He had a high, uncertain tenor voice, and he played the mandolin with exceptional skill. Periodically he went crazy.

But he has no judgment, and he is fooled.” She stooped quickly, took up one of the white conch-shells that bordered the walk, and, with an apologetic inclination of her head, held it to Dr. Archie’s ear. “

Listen, doctor. You hear something in there? You hear the sea; and yet the sea is very far from here.

You have judgment, and you know that. But he is fooled. To him, it is the sea itself. A little thing is big to him.” She bent and placed the shell in the white row, with its fellows.

As Ray Kennedy’s party followed the faint road across the sagebrush, they heard behind them the sound of church bells, which gave them a sense of escape and boundless freedom.

Every rabbit that shot across the path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway thought, a message that one sent into the desert.

As they went farther, the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the sunlight.

Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general culture came hard, and he was determined to get it.

Ray was a freethinker, and inconsistently believed himself damned for being one.

When he was braking, down on the Santa Fe, at the end of his run he used to climb into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read Robert Ingersoll’s speeches …

Her own broad, resolute face set its chin at her, her eyes flashed into her own defiantly. Lily Fisher was pretty, and she was willing to be just as big a fool as people wanted her to be.

Very well; Thea Kronborg wasn’t. She would rather be hated than be stupid, any day.

She popped into bed and read stubbornly at a queer paper book the drugstore man had given her because he couldn’t sell it.

… who can never learn not to put the kerosene can on the stove, may yet be able to tell fortunes, to persuade a backward child to grow, to cure warts, or to tell people what to do with a young girl who has gone melancholy.

Tillie’s mind was a curious machine; when she was awake it went round like a wheel when the belt has slipped off, and when she was asleep she dreamed follies.

But she had intuitions. She knew, for instance, that Thea was different from the other Kronborgs, worthy though they all were. Her romantic imagination found possibilities in her niece.

Tillie threw up her head and laughed; there was something sharp and wild about Tillie’s laugh—when it was not a giggle. “Oh, I guess Thea hasn’t got time to do any showing off.

Her time to show off ain’t come yet. I expect she’ll make us all sit up when it does.

No use asking her to take the part. She’d turn her nose up at it. I guess they’d be glad to get her in the Denver Dramatics, if they could.”

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.

Wunsch persisted. “Why you not answer me?”

“Because it would be silly. You are just trying to make me say things. It spoils things to ask questions.”

Wunsch bowed mockingly; his smile was disagreeable. Suddenly his face grew grave, grew fierce, indeed. He pulled himself up from his clumsy stoop and folded his arms. “But it is necessary to know if you know some things. Some things cannot be taught.

On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly-pear blossoms with their thousand stamens.

She looked at the sand hills until she wished she were a sand hill.

And yet she knew that she was going to leave them all behind some day. They would be changing all day long, yellow and purple and lavender, and she would not be there.

They would be changing all day long, yellow and purple and lavender, and she would not be there. From that day on, she felt there was a secret between her and Wunsch.

Together they had lifted a lid, pulled out a drawer, and looked at something. They hid it away and never spoke of what they had seen; but neither of them forgot it.

I’ve started up half a dozen of ’em. Look at that little one down there now”—she stooped and pointed. In the gully below them there was, indeed, a little rabbit with a white spot of a tail, crouching down on the sand, quite motionless.

It seemed to be lapping up the moonlight like cream.

On the other side of the walk, down in the ditch, there was a patch of tall, rank sunflowers, their shaggy leaves white with dust. The moon stood over the cottonwood grove.

I don’t learn anything here, and as for the people—In my own town in Michigan, now, there were people who liked me on my father’s account, who had even known my grandfather. That meant something.

But here it’s all like the sand: blows north one day and south the next.

We’re all a lot of gamblers without much nerve, playing for small stakes. The railroad is the one real fact in this country. That has to be; the world has to be got back and forth.

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.

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.

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!”

What was it about the child that one believed in? Was it her dogged industry, so unusual in this free-and-easy country? Was it her imagination? More likely it was because she had both imagination and a stubborn will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other.

her broad eager face, so fair in color, with its high cheekbones, yellow eyebrows and greenish-hazel eyes. It was a face full of light and energy, of the unquestioning hopefulness of first youth.

Yes, she was like a flower full of sun, but not the soft German flowers of his childhood.

He had it now, the comparison he had absently reached for before: she was like the yellow prickly pear blossoms that open there in the desert; thornier and sturdier than the maiden flowers he remembered; not so sweet, but wonderful.

That night Mrs. Kohler brushed away many a tear as she got supper and set the table for two. When they sat down, Fritz was more silent than usual.

People who have lived long together need a third at table: they know each other’s thoughts so well that they have nothing left to say.

Mrs. Kohler stirred and stirred her coffee and clattered the spoon, but she had no heart for her supper. She felt, for the first time in years, that she was tired of her own cooking.

He rested Thea because he was so different; because, though he often told her interesting things, he never set lively fancies going in her head; because he never misunderstood her, and because he never, by any chance, for a single instant, understood her!

Yes, with Ray she was safe; by him she would never be discovered!

“The sand has been blowing against them for a good many hundred years,” Ray explained, directing Thea’s eyes with his gloved hand. “You see the sand blows low, being so heavy, and cuts them out underneath.

Wind and sand are pretty high-class architects.

That’s the principle of most of the Cliff-Dweller remains down at Canyon de Chelly. The sandstorms had dug out big depressions in the face of a cliff, and the Indians built their houses back in that depression.”

Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not use them to show off, but because they seemed to him more adequate than colloquial speech. He felt strongly about these things, and groped for words, as he said, “to express himself.”

He had the lamentable American belief that “expression” is obligatory.

He still carried in his trunk, among the unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the title-page of which was written “Impressions on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H. Kennedy.” The pages of that book were like a battlefield;

“Yes, he was a good loser. But I didn’t get over it for a long while. Sheep are so damned resigned. Sometimes, to this day, when I’m dog-tired, I try to save them sheep all night long.

It comes kind of hard on a boy when he first finds out how little he is, and how big everything else is.

”

“Yes, he was a good loser. But I didn’t get over it for a long while.

Sheep are so damned resigned.

Sometimes, to this day, when I’m dog-tired, I try to save them sheep all night long. It comes kind of hard on a boy when he first finds out how little he is, and how big everything else is.”

Mrs. Kronborg had her own conviction that people talked when they felt like it, and said what they chose, no matter how the minister’s family conducted themselves. But she did not impart these dangerous ideas to her children.

Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

Mrs. Kronborg did not have any particular zest for prayer-meetings, and she stayed at home whenever she had a valid excuse.

The usual Wednesday night gathering was made up of old women, with perhaps six or eight old men, and a few sickly girls who had not much interest in life; two of them, indeed, were already preparing to die.

Thea accepted the mournfulness of the prayer-meetings as a kind of spiritual discipline, like funerals.

She always read late after she went home and felt a stronger wish than usual to live and to be happy.

The old women sat motionless as Indians in their shawls and bonnets; some of them wore long black mourning veils. The old men drooped in their chairs.

Every back, every face, every head said “resignation.”

Often there were long silences, when you could hear nothing but the crackling of the soft coal in the stove and the muffled cough of one of the sick girls.

Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that color of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like.

That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

One bitterly cold night in December the prayer-meeting seemed to Thea longer than usual. The prayers and the talks went on and on.

but her mind had really shocking habits of classification. The wickedness of Denver and of Chicago, and even of Moonstone, occupied her thoughts too much.

She had none of the delicacy that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.

Thea, and all Thea’s ways and friends, seemed indecorous to Anna. She not only felt a grave social discrimination against the Mexicans; she could not forget that Spanish Johnny was a drunkard and that “nobody knew what he did when he ran away from home.”

She did not believe in them. It was only in attitudes of protest or reproof, clinging to the cross, that human beings could be even temporarily decent.

Preacher Kronborg’s secret convictions were very much like Anna’s. He believed that his wife was absolutely good, but there was not a man or woman in his congregation whom he trusted all the way.

Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find something to admire in almost any human conduct that was positive and energetic. She could always be taken in by the stories of tramps and runaway boys.

She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window—or so it seemed.

In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without.

There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.

Life rushed in upon her through that window—or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without.

There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.

It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls.

It is well for its peace of mind that the traveling public takes railroads so much for granted.

The only men who are incurably nervous about railway travel are the railroad operatives. A railroad man never forgets that the next run may be his turn.

They have no right to the track at any given time, but are supposed to be on it when it is free, and to make the best time they can between passenger trains.

A freight train, on a single-track road, gets anywhere at all only by stealing bases.

Ray Kennedy had stuck to the freight service, although he had had opportunities to go into the passenger service at higher pay. He always regarded railroading as a temporary makeshift, until he “got into something,” and he disliked the passenger service.

Ray looked up at him; a lonely, disconsolate smile played over his mouth and his square cheeks.

“Never mind about all that, padre,” he said quietly. “Christ and me fell out long ago.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Ray took pity on Mr. Kronborg’s embarrassment. “You go back for the little girl, padre. I want a word with the doc in private.”

Every cactus knew about it. But now that it was not to be, he knew the truth. Thea was never meant for any rough fellow like him—hadn’t he really known that all along, he asked himself? She wasn’t meant for common men.

She was like wedding cake, a thing to dream on.

He raised his eyelids a little. She was stroking his hand and looking off into the distance. He felt in her face that look of unconscious power that Wunsch had seen there. Yes, she was bound for the big terminals of the world;

“Then you’ll remember me,” he whispered.

The spark in his eye, which is one’s very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment they looked into each other’s natures.

Thea realized how good and how greathearted he was, and he realized about her many things.

When that elusive spark of personality retreated in each of them, Thea still saw in his wet eyes her own face, very small, but much prettier than the cracked glass at home had ever shown it.

It was the first time she had seen her face in that kindest mirror a woman can ever find.

Ray had felt things in that moment when he seemed to be looking into the very soul of Thea Kronborg. Yes, the gold mine, the oil well, the copper ledge, they’d all got away from him, as things will;

But, of course, it was herself and her own adventure that mattered to her.

If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.

Thea was surprised that she did not feel a deeper sense of loss at leaving her old life behind her. It seemed, on the contrary, as she looked out at the yellow desert speeding by, that she had left very little.

The doctor thought she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen, and very funny, with her telescope and big handbag. She made him feel jolly, and a little mournful, too.

He knew that the splendid things of life are few, after all, and so very easy to miss.

They worked like horses, both of them; indeed, they would never have used any horseflesh they owned as they used themselves. They reared a large family and worked their sons and daughters as mercilessly as they worked themselves; all of them but Lars.

Lars was the fourth son, and he was born lazy.

He seemed to bear the mark of overstrain on the part of his parents. Even in his cradle he was an example of physical inertia; anything to lie still.

He invested his money carefully and was that rare thing, a preacher of independent means. His white, well-kept hands were his result—the evidence that he had worked out his life successfully in the way that pleased him.

His Kansas brothers hated the sight of his hands.

Larsen liked all the softer things of life—insofar as he knew about them. He slept late in the morning, was fussy about his food, and read a great many novels, preferring sentimental ones.

he merely spent his life resting and playing, to make up for the time his forebears had wasted grubbing in the earth. He was simple-hearted and kind; he enjoyed his candy and his children and his sacred cantatas.

He could work energetically at almost any form of play.

Dr. Archie was deep in “The Lament of Mary Magdalen,” when Mr. Larsen and Thea came back to the study. From the minister’s expression he judged that Thea had succeeded in interesting him.

She said something of this kind once to her teacher, in the midst of a bitter struggle. Harsanyi turned the light of his wonderful eye upon her—poor fellow, he had but one, though that was set in such a handsome head—and said slowly: “

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

Your mother did not bring anything into the world to play piano. That you must bring into the world yourself.”

Sometimes she got so nervous at the piano that she left it, and snatching up her hat and cape went out and walked, hurrying through the streets like Christian fleeing from the City of Destruction. And while she walked she cried.

There was scarcely a street in the neighborhood that she had not cried up and down before that winter was over.

The thing that used to lie under her cheek, that sat so warmly over her heart when she glided away from the sand hills that autumn morning, was far from her.

He put his hand back to her throat and sat with his head bent, his one eye closed. He loved to hear a big voice throb in a relaxed, natural throat, and he was thinking that no one had ever felt this voice vibrate before.

It was like a wild bird that had flown into his studio on Middleton Street from goodness knew how far!

No one knew that it had come, or even that it existed; least of all the strange, crude girl in whose throat it beat its passionate wings. What a simple thing it was, he reflected; why had he never guessed it before?

Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why all this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one’s imagination; that it is not to be had by order.

She often wearied him, but she never bored him.

Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt there was a nature quite different, of which he never got so much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when she sang.

Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the pocket of his velvet coat. “Why so?

Shipwrecks come and go, Märchen come and go, but the river keeps right on.

There you have your open, flowing tone.”

Harsanyi was never quite sure where the light came from when her face suddenly flashed out at him in that way. Her eyes were too small to account for it, though they glittered like green ice in the sun.

At such moments her hair was yellower, her skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly been turned up inside of her.

She went at the song again:

All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it.

They might trample her to death, but they should never have it.

As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height.

She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses.

She would have it, what the trumpets were singing!

She would have it, have it—it! Under the old cape she pressed her hands upon her heaving bosom, that was a little girl’s no longer.

but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would have it, have it—it!

Under the old cape she pressed her hands upon her heaving bosom, that was a little girl’s no longer.

“Perhaps that is why they interest one. All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer.

The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity.

It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.”

“

Dear me, why should I be? They’ve learned from me, and I’ve learned from them.

” As they rose, Thomas took the younger man affectionately by the arm. “Tell me about that wife of yours. Is she well, and as lovely as ever? And such fine children! Come to see me oftener, when I get back.

You will have work enough. But sometimes you will need to be understood; what you never show to anyone will need companionship. And then you must come to me.” He peered into her face with that searching, intimate glance. “

You know what I mean, the thing in you that has no business with what is little, that will have to do only with beauty and power.

”

Thea threw out her hands fiercely, as if to push him away. She made a sound in her throat, but it was not articulate. Harsanyi took one of her hands and kissed it lightly upon the back.

His salute was one of greeting, not of farewell, and it was for someone he had never seen.

When Mrs. Harsanyi came in at six o’clock, she found her husband sitting listlessly by the window. “Tired?” she asked.

“But some day I shall be able to look her in the face and laugh because I did what I could for her. I believe in her. She will do nothing common.

She is uncommon, in a common, common world.

That is what I get out of it. It means more to me than if she played at my concert and brought me a dozen pupils. All this drudgery will kill me if once in a while I cannot hope something, for somebody!

I believe in her. She will do nothing common. She is uncommon, in a common, common world. That is what I get out of it. It means more to me than if she played at my concert and brought me a dozen pupils.

All this drudgery will kill me if once in a while I cannot hope something, for somebody! If I cannot sometimes see a bird fly and wave my hand to it.

”

She took it for granted that some day, when she was older, she would know a great deal more about it.

It was as if she had an appointment to meet the rest of herself sometime, somewhere.

It was moving to meet her and she was moving to meet it. That meeting awaited her, just as surely as, for the poor girl in the seat behind her, there awaited a hole in the earth, already dug.

Let them try it once! Along with the yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead.

Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and beaten under.

Having told herself once more that she meant to grab a few things, Thea went to sleep.

and within it there was a full, powerful pulsation. She smiled—though she was ashamed of it—with the natural contempt of strength for weakness, with the sense of physical security which makes the savage merciless.

Nobody could die while they felt like that inside.

The springs there were wound so tight that it would be a long while before there was any slack in them. The life in there was rooted deep. She was going to have a few things before she died.

People who could use words in that confident way, and who spoke them elegantly, had a great advantage in life, she reflected. There were so many words which she could not pronounce in speech as she had to do in singing.

Language was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away.

But the most important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was not.

There were so many words which she could not pronounce in speech as she had to do in singing. Language was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away.

But the most important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was not.

When she paid her check she consulted the waiter. “Waiter, do you suppose I could buy one of those roses? I’m out of the day-coach, and there is a sick girl in there.

When Thea sat down she looked into her rose and thought it the most beautiful thing in the world; it was wide open, recklessly offering its yellow heart, and there were drops of water on the petals.

All the future was in that rose, all that one would like to be.

The flower put her in an absolutely regal mood. She had a whole pot of coffee, and scrambled eggs with chopped ham, utterly disregarding the astonishing price they cost.

She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she “believed in immigration,” and so did Thea believe in it. This earth seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance.

The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range.

Wire fences might mark the end of a man’s pasture, but they could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang—and one’s heart sang there, too.

The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range.

Wire fences might mark the end of a man’s pasture, but they could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can.

It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang—and one’s heart sang there, too. Thea was glad that this was her country, even if one did not learn to speak elegantly there.

The thing that looked at her out of her own eyes was the only friend she could count on. Oh, she would make these people sorry enough! There would come a time when they would want to make it up with her. But, never again!

She had no little vanities, only one big one, and she would never forgive.

Her mother was all right, but her mother was a part of the family, and she was not. In the nature of things, her mother had to be on both sides. Thea felt that she had been betrayed.

Her mother had reproved her for this omission. And how was she to know, Thea asked herself, that Anna expected to be teased because Bert Rice now came and sat in the hammock with her every night? No, it was all clear enough.

Nothing that she would ever do in the world would seem important to them, and nothing they would ever do would seem important to her.

Thea lay thinking intently all through the stifling afternoon. Tillie whispered something outside her door once, but she did not answer.

Thea shrugged. “Oh, I can get along, in a little way.” She looked intently out of the window at the arc streetlamp that was just beginning to sputter. “But it’s silly to live at all for little things,” she added quietly. “

Living’s too much trouble unless one can get something big out of it.

”

But if you decide what it is you want most, you can get it.” His eye caught hers for a moment. “Not everybody can, but you can.

Only, if you want a big thing, you’ve got to have nerve enough to cut out all that’s easy, everything that’s to be had cheap.

” Dr. Archie paused. He picked up a paper-cutter and, feeling the edge of it softly with his fingers, he added slowly, as if to himself:—

Suppose she never got away again, after all? Suppose one broke a leg and had to lie in bed at home for weeks, or had pneumonia and died there.

The desert was so big and thirsty; if one’s foot slipped, it could drink one up like a drop of water.

This time, when Thea left Moonstone to go back to Chicago, she went alone. As the train pulled out, she looked back at her mother and father and Thor. They were calm and cheerful; they did not know, they did not understand.

But when the sun rose in the morning, she was far away. It was all behind her, and she knew that she would never cry like that again.

People live through such pain only once; pain comes again, but it finds a tougher surface.

Thea remembered how she had gone away the first time, with what confidence in everything, and what pitiful ignorance. Such a silly! She felt resentful toward that stupid, good-natured child. How much older she was now, and how much harder!

So many grinning, stupid faces!

Thea was sitting by the window in Bowers’s studio, waiting for him to come back from lunch. On her knee was the latest number of an illustrated musical journal in which musicians great and little stridently advertised their wares.

On her knee was the latest number of an illustrated musical journal in which musicians great and little stridently advertised their wares. Every afternoon she played accompaniments for people who looked and smiled like these.

She was getting tired of the human countenance.

Thea had been in Chicago for two months. She had a small church position which partly paid her living expenses, and she paid for her singing lessons by playing Bowers’s accompaniments every afternoon from two until six.

She wore a beautiful little green hat with three long green feathers sticking straight up in front, a little cape made of velvet and fur with a yellow satin rose on it. Her gloves, her shoes, her veil, somehow made themselves felt.

She gave the impression of wearing a cargo of splendid merchandise.

Mrs. Priest nodded graciously to Thea, coquettishly to Bowers, and asked him to untie her veil for her. She threw her splendid wrap on a chair, the yellow lining out. Thea was already at the piano. Mrs. Priest stood behind her.

She shone with care and cleanliness, mature vigor, unchallenged authority, gracious good-humor, and absolute confidence in her person, her powers, her position, and her way of life; a glowing, overwhelming self-satisfaction, only to be found where human society is young and strong and without yesterdays.

Her face had a kind of heavy, thoughtless beauty, like a pink peony just at the point of beginning to fade.

Her brown hair was waved in front and done up behind in a great twist, held by a tortoiseshell comb with gold filigree.

Priest; although the lady did murmur one day when she took Bowers home in her carriage, “How handsome your afternoon girl would be if she did not have that unfortunate squint; it gives her that vacant Swede look, like an animal.” That amused Bowers.

He liked to watch the germination and growth of antipathies.

One of the first disappointments Thea had to face when she returned to Chicago that fall, was the news that the Harsanyis were not coming back. They had spent the summer in a camp in the Adirondacks and were moving to New York.

“Well, there’s nothing he loves like a good fakir, and nothing he hates like a good artist. I always remember something Mr. Harsanyi said about him.

He said Bowers was the cold muffin that had been left on the plate.

”

They seemed to have a warmer feeling for Jessie than for Mrs. Priest, an affectionate and cherishing regard.

Chicago was not so very different from Moonstone, after all, and Jessie Darcey was only Lily Fisher under another name.

Thea particularly hated to accompany for Miss Darcey because she sang off pitch and didn’t mind it in the least. It was excruciating to sit there day after day and hear her; there was something shameless and indecent about not singing true.

Taken by surprise Thea put down the score she was reading and answered before she knew what she was saying, “

I hate her for the sake of what I used to think a singer might be.

”

The great empty space over the water was restful and spoke of freedom. If she had any money at all, she would go away. The stars glittered over the wide black water. She looked up at them wearily and shook her head.

She believed that what she felt was despair, but it was only one of the forms of hope.

She felt, indeed, as if she were bidding the stars goodbye; but she was renewing a promise.

She looked up at them wearily and shook her head. She believed that what she felt was despair, but it was only one of the forms of hope. She felt, indeed, as if she were bidding the stars goodbye; but she was renewing a promise.

Though their challenge is universal and eternal, the stars get no answer but that⁠—the brief light flashed back to them from the eyes of the young who unaccountably aspire.

The rich, noisy, city, fat with food and drink, is a spent thing; its chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide-and-seek with the undertaker. Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence.

but she was renewing a promise. Though their challenge is universal and eternal, the stars get no answer but that—the brief light flashed back to them from the eyes of the young who unaccountably aspire.

The rich, noisy, city, fat with food and drink, is a spent thing; its chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide-and-seek with the undertaker.

Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace.

The rich, noisy, city, fat with food and drink, is a spent thing; its chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide-and-seek with the undertaker.

Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence.

Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace.

The rich, noisy, city, fat with food and drink, is a spent thing; its chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide-and-seek with the undertaker. Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence.

Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace.

She flecks her whip upon flesh that is more alive, upon that stream of hungry boys and girls who tramp the streets of every city, recognizable by their pride and discontent, who are the Future, and who possess the treasure of creative power.

“I’m not interested in singers.” His tone was offended. “

I am interested in talent. There are only two interesting things in the world, anyhow; and talent is one of them.

”

“About her beauty? She has great possibilities, but you can never tell about those Northern women. They look so strong, but they are easily battered. The face falls so early under those wide cheekbones.

A single idea⁠—hate or greed, or even love⁠—can tear them to shreds.

She is nineteen? Well, in ten years she may have quite a regal beauty, or she may have a heavy, discontented face, all dug out in channels. That will depend upon the kind of ideas she lives with.”

He was extravagant, but not prodigal. He turned most of the money his mother gave him into the business, and lived on his generous salary.

Fred had never been bored for a whole day in his life.

When he was in Chicago or St. Louis, he went to ballgames, prizefights, and horse-races. When he was in Germany, he went to concerts and to the opera. He belonged to a long list of sporting-clubs and hunting-clubs, and was a good boxer.

He liked no poetry but German poetry. Physical energy was the thing he was full to the brim of, and music was one of its natural forms of expression. He had a healthy love of sport and art, of eating and drinking.

When he was in Germany, he scarcely knew where the soup ended and the symphony began.

He remembered how remarkably brilliant and beautiful she had been when she sang at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s: flushed and gleaming, round and supple, something that couldn’t be dimmed or downed. And now she seemed a moving figure of discouragement. The very waiters glanced at her apprehensively.

It was not that she made a fuss, but her back was most extraordinarily vocal.

One never needed to see her face to know what she was full of that day. Yet she was certainly not mercurial. Her flesh seemed to take a mood and to “set,” like plaster.

The piñons and scrub begin only where the forest ends, where the country breaks into open, stony clearings and the surface of the earth cracks into deep canyons. The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other.

Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone.

They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech.

Her student life closed behind her, like the forest, and she doubted whether she could go back to it if she tried. Probably she would teach music in little country towns all her life.

Failure was not so tragic as she would have supposed; she was tired enough not to care.

She was getting back to the earliest sources of gladness that she could remember. She had loved the sun, and the brilliant solitudes of sand and sun, long before these other things had come along to fasten themselves upon her and torment her.

She used to wonder at her own inactivity. She could lie there hour after hour in the sun and listen to the strident whir of the big locusts, and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps.

All her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up.

Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out long upon the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to catch up with her. She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort.

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.

A dream had been dreamed there long ago, in the night of ages, and the wind had whispered some promise to the sadness of the savage. In their own way, those people had felt the beginnings of what was to come.

These potsherds were like fetters that bound one to a long chain of human endeavor.

Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older. She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much.

She rose impatiently and walked to the edge of the cliff. “It’s not that so much.

It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you.

” She stood for a moment as if she were tortured by uncertainty, then turned suddenly back to him. “Don’t talk about these things any more now,” she entreated. “It isn’t that I want to keep anything from you.

Thea sprang to her feet as if she had been thrown up from the rock by volcanic action. She stood rigid on the edge of the stone shelf, straining her eyes after that strong, tawny flight.

O eagle of eagles! Endeavor, achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art!

From a cleft in the heart of the world she saluted it … It had come all the way; when men lived in caves, it was there. A vanished race;

“Yes; more than I’ve ever been. But I don’t think I could go back.

The past closes up behind one, somehow. One would rather have a new kind of misery.

The old kind seems like death or unconsciousness. You can’t force your life back into that mould again. No, one can’t go back.” She rose and stood by the back grating of the platform, her hand on the brass rail.

But her joviality, Fred felt, was an asset, and ought to be developed. He discovered that she was more receptive and more effective under a pleasant stimulus than she was under the gray grind which she considered her salvation.

She was still Methodist enough to believe that if a thing were hard and irksome, it must be good for her.

And yet, whatever she did well was spontaneous. Under the least glow of excitement, as at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s, he had seen the apprehensive, frowning drudge of Bowers’s studio flash into a resourceful and consciously beautiful woman.

But a personality like that, unconsciously revealing itself for the first time under the exaltation of a personal feeling—what could one do but watch it? As he used to say to himself, in reckless moments back there in the canyon, “

You can’t put out a sunrise.

” He had to watch it, and then he had to share it.

In their unquestioned regularity lurked every sort of human cruelty and meanness, and every kind of humiliation and suffering.

He would rather have any woman he cared for wounded than crushed.

He would deceive her not once, he told himself fiercely, but a hundred times, to keep her free.

Where did it come from, that light? How could a face, a familiar face, become so the picture of hope, be painted with the very colors of youth’s exaltation? She was right; she was not one of those who draw back.

Some people get on by avoiding dangers, others by riding through them.

They stood by the railing looking back at the sand levels, both feeling that the train was steaming ahead very fast. Fred’s mind was a confusion of images and ideas. Only two things were clear to him:

Since then you’ve come into your personality. You were always locking horns with it before. You were a sullen little drudge eight months ago, afraid of being caught at either looking or moving like yourself. Nobody could tell anything about you.

A voice is not an instrument that’s found ready-made. A voice is personality.

It can be as big as a circus and as common as dirt.—There’s good money in that kind, too, but I don’t happen to be interested in them.—Nobody could tell much about what you might be able to do, last winter.

Thea sat down in the chair he had quitted. “It’s only poor people who feel that way about money, and who are really honest,” she said gravely. “

Sometimes I think that to be really honest, you must have been so poor that you’ve been tempted to steal.

”

He felt as if he were still hunting for something, like old Jasper Flight. He knew that this was an unbecoming and ungrateful state of mind, and he reproached himself for it.

But he could not help wondering why it was that life, even when it gave so much, after all gave so little.

What was it that he had expected and missed? Why was he, more than he was anything else, disappointed?

Nearer than anything else they corresponded to what he had hoped to find in the world, and had not found. It came over him now that the unexpected favors of fortune, no matter how dazzling, do not mean very much to us.

They may excite or divert us for a time, but when we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.

She told him, indeed, that she could not very well get along without Mr. Kronborg. The doctor looked at her with astonishment. Was it possible that she could miss the foolish old man so much? He reminded her of her children.

“Yes,” she replied; “the children are all very well, but they are not father. We were married young.”

The doctor watched her wonderingly as she went on knitting, thinking how much she looked like Thea. The difference was one of degree rather than of kind. The daughter had a compelling enthusiasm, the mother had none.

I will make a really great success, if you’ll try with me. You shall have everything you want, and we will always be together. I have a little house all picked out where we are to live.”

“Bringing up a family is not all it’s cracked up to be,” said Mrs. Kronborg with a flicker of irony, as she tucked the letter back under her pillow.

“The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.

“The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world.

Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.

I used to feel sorry that you had no family, doctor, but maybe you’re as well off.”

Kronborg respectfully. “I gave her what chance I could, in a crowded house. I kept the other children out of the parlor for her. That was about all I could do. If she wasn’t disturbed, she needed no watching.

She went after it like a terrier after rats from the first, poor child.

She was downright afraid of it. That’s why I always encouraged her taking Thor off to outlandish places. When she was out of the house, then she was rid of it.”

The homely reunion, that he had somehow expected, now seemed foolish. Instead of feeling proud that he knew her better than all these people about him, he felt chagrined at his own ingenuousness. For he did not know her better.

This woman he had never known; she had somehow devoured his little friend, as the wolf ate up Red Ridinghood.

Beautiful, radiant, tender as she was, she chilled his old affection; that sort of feeling was not appropriate. She seemed much, much farther away from him than she had seemed all those years when she was in Germany.

Beautiful, radiant, tender as she was, she chilled his old affection; that sort of feeling was not appropriate. She seemed much, much farther away from him than she had seemed all those years when she was in Germany.

The ocean he could cross, but there was something here he could not cross.

There was a moment, when she turned to the King and smiled that rare, sunrise smile of her childhood, when he thought she was coming back to him.

She sat down in a low chair beside him and leaned forward, drawing her shoulders together.

She seemed to him inappropriately young and inappropriately old, shorn of her long tresses at one end and of her long robes at the other.

“How do you happen to be here?” she asked abruptly. “How can you leave a silver mine? I couldn’t! Sure nobody’ll cheat you? But you can explain everything tomorrow.” She paused. “You remember how you sewed me up in a poultice, once?

That color has to be born in a singer, it can’t be acquired; lots of beautiful voices haven’t a vestige of it. It’s almost like another gift—the rarest of all.

The voice simply is the mind and is the heart.

It can’t go wrong in interpretation, because it has in it the thing that makes all interpretation. That’s why you feel so sure of her. After you’ve listened to her for an hour or so, you aren’t afraid of anything.

Fred leaned forward, and looked sharply into his face. “That’s the point; how could you raise me? Once again!”

“Once again, and always the same!”

The doctor put down his glass. “This doesn’t seem to produce any symptoms in me tonight.” He lit a cigar. “Seriously, Freddy, I wish I knew more about what she’s driving at. It makes me jealous, when you are so in it and I’m not.”

You, too, have your extravagances, Archie. And what I like best in you is this particular enthusiasm, which is not at all practical or sensible, which is downright quixotic. You are not altogether what you seem, and you have your reservations.

Living among the wolves, you have not become one.

Lupibus vivendi non lupus sum.”

In the morning, especially, it seemed to her very probable that whatever struggled above the good average was not quite sound. Certainly very little of that superfluous ardor, which cost so dear, ever got across the footlights.

These misgivings waited to pounce upon her when she wakened. They hovered about her bed like vultures.

She reached under her pillow for her handkerchief, without opening her eyes. She had a shadowy memory that there was to be something unusual, that this day held more disquieting possibilities than days commonly held. There was something she dreaded; what was it?

She dreaded waking stale and disappointed after a great effort. The first thing that came was always the sense of the futility of such endeavor, and of the absurdity of trying too hard.

Up to a certain point, say eighty degrees, artistic endeavor could be fat and comfortable, methodical and prudent.

But if you went further than that, if you drew yourself up toward ninety degrees, you parted with your defenses and left yourself exposed to mischance. The legend was that in those upper reaches you might be divine;

Up to a certain point, say eighty degrees, artistic endeavor could be fat and comfortable, methodical and prudent. But if you went further than that, if you drew yourself up toward ninety degrees, you parted with your defenses and left yourself exposed to mischance.

The legend was that in those upper reaches you might be divine; but you were much likelier to be ridiculous.

Your public wanted just about eighty degrees; if you gave it more it blew its nose and put a crimp in you. In the morning, especially, it seemed to her very probable that whatever struggled above the good average was not quite sound.

The chin was as lovely as ever, the cheeks as smooth. All the lines of last night had disappeared.

Only at the outer corners of her eyes, between the eye and the temple, were the faintest indications of a future attack⁠—mere kitten scratches that playfully hinted where one day the cat would claw her.

He studied her without any embarrassment. Last night everything had been awkward; but now, as he held her hands, a kind of harmony came between them, a reestablishment of confidence.

Ottenburg shot ahead and instructed the driver, while the doctor put Thea into the cab and shut the door. She did not speak to either of them again. As the driver scrambled into his seat she opened the score and fixed her eyes upon it.

Her face, in the white light, looked as bleak as a stone quarry.

As her cab slid away, Ottenburg shoved Archie into a second taxi that waited by the curb. “We’d better trail her,” he explained. “There might be a holdup of some kind.” As the cab whizzed off he broke into an eruption of profanity.

An English company playing at the Empire had just come in. The waiters, in red waistcoats, were hurrying about. Fred got a table at the back of the room, in a corner, and urged his waiter to get the oysters on at once.

“Takes a few minutes to open them, sir,” the man expostulated.

“Yes, but make it as few as possible, and bring the lady’s first. Then grilled chops with kidneys, and salad.”

and there was but one way in which she could give herself to people largely and gladly, spontaneously. Even as a girl she had been at her best in vigorous effort, he remembered; physical effort, when there was no other kind at hand.

She could be expansive only in explosions.

Old Nathanmeyer had seen it. In the very first song Fred had ever heard her sing, she had unconsciously declared it.

If I think of anything else for a flash, I’m gone, done for. But at the same time, one can take things in—with another part of your brain, maybe. It’s different from what you get in study, more practical and conclusive.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

You learn the delivery of a part only before an audience.”

“Oh, it’s a question of a big personality—and all that goes with it. Brains, of course. Imagination, of course. But the important thing is that she was born full of color, with a rich personality.

That’s a gift of the gods, like a fine nose. You have it, or you haven’t.

Against it, intelligence and musicianship and habits of industry don’t count at all. Singers are a conventional race. When Thea was studying in Berlin the other girls were mortally afraid of her.

“My dear doctor, I don’t have any. Your work becomes your personal life. You are not much good until it does. It’s like being woven into a big web. You can’t pull away, because all your little tendrils are woven into the picture.

It takes you up, and uses you, and spins you out; and that is your life. Not much else can happen to you.

”

She smiled again. “I don’t think I know just what that expression means. I’ve never been able to find out. I think I was in love with you when I was little, but not with anyone since then.

There are a great many ways of caring for people. It’s not, after all, a simple state, like measles or tonsilitis.

Nordquist is a taking sort of man. He and I were out in a rowboat once in a terrible storm. The lake was fed by glaciers—ice water—and we couldn’t have swum a stroke if the boat had filled.

I began the world on six hundred dollars, and it was the price of a man’s life. Ray Kennedy had worked hard and been sober and denied himself, and when he died he had six hundred dollars to show for it.

I always measure things by that six hundred dollars, just as I measure high buildings by the Moonstone standpipe.

There are standards we can’t get away from.”

You get to hating people who do contemptible work and who get on just as well as you do. There are many disappointments in my profession, and bitter, bitter contempts!” Her face hardened, and looked much older. “

If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up for it, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard.

I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.” As she glanced at Dr.

Her face hardened, and looked much older. “If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up for it, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard.

I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!

A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.” As she glanced at Dr. Archie’s face, Thea stopped short and turned her own face away.

“If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up for it, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!

A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.

” As she glanced at Dr. Archie’s face, Thea stopped short and turned her own face away. Her eyes followed the path of the searchlight up the river and rested upon the illumined headland.

Most of all the feeling. It comes in when I’m working on a part, like the smell of a garden coming in at the window. I try all the new things, and then go back to the old. Perhaps my feelings were stronger then.

A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.

I am more or less of an artist now, but then I was nothing else. When I went with you to Chicago that first time, I carried with me the essentials, the foundation of all I do now.

Not enough to ask you for my trunk when I needed it. But you see, when I set out from Moonstone with you, I had had a rich, romantic past. I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it.

Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth.

And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory.

When we’ve got it all out—the last, the finest thrill of it, the brightest hope of it,”—she lifted her hand above her head and dropped it—“then we stop. We do nothing but repeat after that.

The stream has reached the level of its source. That’s our measure.

”

“What’s the matter? Do you still get nervous?”

“Of course I do. I don’t mind nerves so much as getting numbed,”

Thea muttered, sheltering her face for a moment with her muff. “I’m under a spell, you know, hoodooed. It’s the thing I want to do that I can never do. Any other effects I can get easily enough.”

You’ve done what I hoped for you, what I was honestly willing to lose you for—then. I’m older now, and I think I was an ass. I wouldn’t do it again if I had the chance, not much! But I’m not sorry.

It takes a great many people to make one⁠—Brünnhilde.

”