 III. CHAPTER IV Thea noticed that Bowers took rather more pains with her now that Fred Ottenberg often dropped in at eleven-thirty to hear her lesson. After the lesson the young man took Bowers off to lunch with him, and Bowers liked good food when another man paid for it. He encouraged Fred's visits, and Thea soon saw that Fred knew exactly why. One morning, after her lesson, Ottenberg turned to Bowers. "'If you'll lend me Miss Thea, I think I have an engagement for her. Mrs. Henry Nathan Meyer is going to give three musical evenings in April, first three Saturdays, and she has consulted me about soloists. For the first evening she has a young violinist, and she would be charmed to have Miss Cronberg. She will pay fifty dollars. Not much, but Miss Thea would meet some people there who might be useful. What do you say?" Bowers passed the question on to Thea. "'I guess you could use the fifty, couldn't you, Miss Cronberg? You can easily work up some songs.' Thea was perplexed. "'I need the money awfully,' she said frankly, "'but I haven't got the right clothes for that sort of thing. I suppose I'd better try to get some.'" Ottenberg spoke up quickly. "'Oh, you'd make nothing out of it if you went to buying evening clothes. I've thought of that. Mrs. Nathan Meyer has a troupe of daughters, a perfect sororaleo, all ages and sizes. She'll be glad to fit you out if you aren't sensitive about wearing kosher clothes. Let me take you to see her, and you'll find that she'll arrange that easily enough. I told her she must produce something nice, blue or yellow, and properly cut. I brought half a dozen worth gowns through the customs for her two weeks ago, and she's not ungrateful. When can we go to see her?' "'I haven't any time free except at night,' Thea replied, in some confusion. "'Tomorrow evening, then. I shall call for you at eight. Bring all your songs along. She will want us to give her a little rehearsal, perhaps. I'll play your accompaniments, if you've no objection. That will save money for you and for Mrs. Nathan Meyer. She needs it.'" Ottenberg chuckled as he took down the number of Thea's boarding-house. The Nathan Myers were so rich and great that even Thea had heard of them, and this seemed a very remarkable opportunity. Ottenberg had brought it about by merely lifting a finger, apparently. He was a bear prince, sure enough, as Bowers had said. The next evening, at a quarter to eight, Thea was dressed and waiting in the boarding-house parlor. She was nervous and fidgety and found it difficult to sit still on the hard convex upholstery of the chairs. She tried them one after another, moving about the dimly-lighted musty room, where the gas always leaked gently and sang in the burners. There was no one in the parlor but the medical student, who was playing one of Seuss's marches so vigorously that the china ornaments on the top of the piano rattled. In a few moments some of the pension-office girls would come in and begin to two-step. Thea wished that Ottenberg would come and let her escape. She glanced at herself in the long sombre mirror. She was wearing her pale blue broadclothed church dress, which was not unbecoming, but was certainly too heavy to wear to anybody's house in the evening. Her slippers were run over at the heel, and she had not had time to have them mended, and her white gloves were not so clean as they should be. However, she knew that she would forget these annoying things as soon as Ottenberg came. Mary, the Hungarian chambermaid, came to the door, stood between the plush portiers, beckoned to Thea, and made an inarticulate sound in her throat. Thea jumped up and ran into the hall, where Ottenberg stood smiling, his caped cloak open, his silk hat in his white kid hand. The Hungarian girl stood like a monument on her flat heels, staring at the pink carnation in Ottenberg's coat. Her broad, pockmarked face was the only expression of which it was capable, a kind of animal wonder. As the young man followed Thea out, he glanced back over his shoulder through the crack of the door. The hun clapped her hands over her stomach, opened her mouth, and made another raucous sound in her throat. "'Isn't she awful?' Thea exclaimed. I think she's half-witted. Can you understand her?' Ottenberg laughed as he helped her into the carriage. "'Oh, yes, I can understand her.'" He settled himself on the front seat opposite Thea. "'Now, I want to tell you about the people we are going to see. We may have a musical public in this country some day, but as yet there are only the Germans and the Jews. All the other people go to hear Jesse Darcy sing, O promise me. The Nathan Myers are of the finest kind of Jews. If you do anything for Mrs. Henry Nathan Meyer, you must put yourself into her hands. Whatever she says about music, about clothes, about life, will be correct. When you may feel at ease with her, she expects nothing of people. She has lived in Chicago twenty years. If you were to behave like the mager who was so interested in my buttonhole, she would not be surprised. If you were to sing like Jesse Darcy, she would not be surprised, but she would manage not to hear you again. "'Would she?' Well, that's the kind of people I want to find." Thea felt herself growing bolder. "'You will be all right with her so long as you do not try to be anything that you are not. Her standards have nothing to do with Chicago. Her perceptions, or her grandmothers which is the same thing, were keen when all this was an Indian village, so merely be yourself and you will like her. She will like you because the Jews always sense talent, and,' he added ironically, they admire certain qualities of feeling that are found only in the white-skinned races.' Thea looked into the young man's face as the light of a street lamp flashed into the carriage. His somewhat academic manner amused her. "'What makes you take such an interest in singers?' she asked curiously. "'You seem to have a perfect passion for hearing music lessons. I wish I could trade jobs with you.' "'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.' "'What's the other?' The question came meekly from the figure opposite him. Another arc light flashed in at the window. Fred saw her face and broke into a laugh. "'Why, you are guying me, you little wretch. You don't let me behave properly.' He dropped his gloved hand lightly on her knee, took it away, and let it hang between his own. "'Do you know,' he said confidentially, "'I believe I'm more in earnest about all this than you are.' "'About all what?' "'All you've got in your throat there.' "'Oh, I'm in earnest all right. Only I never was much good at talking. Jesse Darcy is the smooth talker. You notice the effect I get there. If she only got him, she'd be a wonder, you know.' Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Meyer were alone in their great library. Their three unmarried daughters had departed in successive carriages, one to a dinner, one to a Nietzsche Club, one to a ball given for the girls employed in the big department stores. When Autenberg and Thea entered, Henry Nathan Meyer and his wife were sitting at a table at the farther end of the long room, with a reading lamp and a tray of cigarettes and cordial glasses between them. The overhead lights were too soft to bring out the colors of the big rugs, and none of the picture lights were on. One could merely see that there were pictures there. Thea had whispered that they were roussos and caros, very fine ones which the old banker had bought long ago for next to nothing. In the hall, Autenberg had stopped Thea before a painting of a woman eating grapes out of a paper bag, and had told her gravely that there was the most beautiful manne in the world. He made her take off her hat and gloves in the hall, and looked her over a little before he took her in. But once they were in the library he seemed perfectly satisfied with her, and led her down the long room to their hostess. As Nathan Meyer was a heavy, powerful old Jewess, with a great pompadour of white hair, a swarthy complexion, an eagle nose, and sharp, glittering eyes, she wore a black velvet dress with a long train and a diamond necklace and earrings. She took Thea to the other side of the table and presented her to Mr. Nathan Meyer, who apologized for not rising, pointing to a slippered foot on a cushion. He said that he had suffered from gout. He had a very soft voice, and spoke with an accent which would have been heavy, if it had not been so caressing. He kept Thea standing beside him for some time. He noticed that she stood easily, looked straight down into his face, and was not embarrassed. Even when Mrs. Nathan Meyer told Ottenberg to bring a chair for Thea, the old man did not release her hand, and she did not sit down. He admired her just as she was, as she happened to be standing, and she felt it. He was much handsomer than his wife, Thea thought. His forehead was high, his hair soft and white, his skin pink, a little puffy under his clear blue eyes. She noticed how warm and delicate his hands were, pleasant to touch, and beautiful to look at. Ottenberg had told her that Mr. Nathan Meyer had a very fine collection of medals and cameos, and his fingers looked as if they had never touched anything but delicate cut surfaces. He asked Thea where Moonstone was, how many inhabitants it had, what her father's business was, from what part of Sweden her grandfather came, and whether she spoke Swedish as a child. He was interested to hear that her mother's mother was still living, and that her grandfather had played the oboe. Thea felt at home standing there beside him. She felt that he was very wise, and that he someway took one's life up and looked it over kindly, as if it were a story. She was sorry when they left him to go into the music room. As they reached the door of the music room Mrs. Nathan Meyer turned a switch that threw on many lights. The room was even larger than the library, all glittering services, with two Steinway pianos. Mrs. Nathan Meyer rang for her own maid. Selma will take you upstairs, Miss Cronberg, and you will find some dresses on the bed. Try several of them, and take the one you like best. Selma will help you. She has a great deal of taste. When you are addressed, come down, and let us go over some of your songs with Mr. Ottenberg. After Thea went away with the maid, Ottenberg came up to Mrs. Nathan Meyer, and stood beside her, resting his hand on the back of her chair. Well, not a trout. Do you like her? I think so. I liked her when she talked to father. She will always get on better with men. Ottenberg leaned over her chair. Profitus, do you see what I meant? 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 19. 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. Or the kind of people, Ottenberg suggested. The old juice folded her arms over her massive chest, drew back her shoulders, and looked up at the young man. With that hard glint in her eye, the people won't matter much, I fancy. They will come and go. She is very much interested in herself as she should be. Ottenberg frowned. Wait until you hear her sing. Her eyes are different then. That gleam that comes in them is curious, isn't it? As you say, it's impersonal. The object of this discussion came in smiling. She had chosen neither the blue nor the yellow gown, but a pale rose-colour with silver butterflies. Mrs. Nathan Meyer lifted her long yet, and studied her as she approached. She caught the characteristic things at once, the free, strong walk, the calm carriage of the head, the silky whiteness of the girl's arms and shoulders. Yes, that colour is good for you, she said approvingly. The yellow one probably killed your hair. Yes, this does very well indeed, so we need to think no more about it. Thea glanced questioningly at Ottenberg. He smiled and bowed, seemed perfectly satisfied. He asked her to stand in the elbow of the piano in front of him instead of behind him as she had been taught to do. Yes, said the hostess with feeling that other position is barbarous. They sang an aria from Giaconda, some songs by Schumann, which she had studied with Harasanghi, and the talk for Diegrod, which Ottenberg liked. That you must do again, he declared, when they finished this song, you did it much better the other day. You accented it more like a dance or a gallop. How did you do it? Thea laughed, glancing sidewise at Mrs. Nathan Meyer. You want it rough-house to you. Bowers likes me to sing it more seriously, but it always makes me think about a story my grandmother used to tell. Fred pointed to the chair behind her. Won't you rest a moment and tell us about it? I thought you had some notion about it when you first sang it for me. Thea sat down. In Norway my grandmother knew a girl who was awfully in love with a young fellow. She went into service on a big dairy farm to make enough money for her outfit. They were married at Christmas time, and everyone was glad, because they'd been sighing around about each other for so long. That very summer, the day before St. John's Day, her husband caught her carrying on with another farm hand. The next night all the farm people had a bonfire and a big dance up on the mountain, and everybody was dancing and singing. I guess they were all a little drunk, for they got to seeing how near they could make the girls dance to the edge of the cliff. Oll, he was the girl's husband, seemed the jolliest and the drunkest of anybody. He danced his wife nearer and nearer the edge of the rock, and his wife began to scream so that the others stopped dancing and the music stopped. But Oll went right on singing, and he danced her over the edge of the cliff, and they fell hundreds of feet and were all smashed to pieces. Ottenberg turned back to the piano. That's the idea. Now come, Miss Thea, let it go. Thea took her place. She laughed and drew herself up out of her corsets, threw her shoulders high, and let them drop again. She had never sung in a low dress before, and she found it comfortable. Ottenberg jerked his head, and they began the song. The accompaniment sounded more than ever like the thumping and scraping of heavy feet. When they stopped, they heard a sympathetic tapping at the end of the room. Old Mr. Nathan Meyer had come to the door and was sitting back in the shadow, just inside the library, applauding with his cane. Thea threw him a bright smile. He continued to sit there, his slippered foot on a low chair, his cane between his fingers, and she glanced at him from time to time. The doorway made a frame for him, and he looked like a man in a picture with the long shadowy room behind him. Mrs. Nathan Meyer summoned the maid again. Selma will pack that gown in a box for you, and you can take it home in Mr. Ottenberg's carriage. Thea turned to follow the maid, but hesitated. Shall I wear gloves? She asked, turning again to Mrs. Nathan Meyer. No, I think not. Your arms are good, and you will feel freer without. You will need light slippers, pink, or white if you have them will do quite as well. Thea went upstairs with the maid, and Mrs. Nathan Meyer rose, took Ottenberg's arm, and walked toward her husband. That's the first real voice I have heard in Chicago, she said decidedly. I don't count that stupid priest woman. What do you say, father? Mr. Nathan Meyer shook his white head and smiled softly, as if he were thinking about something very agreeable. Svensksk, somar, he murmured. She is like a Swedish summer. I spent nearly a year there when I was a young man, he explained to Ottenberg. When Ottenberg got Thea and her big box into the carriage, it occurred to him that she must be hungry after seeing so much. When he asked her, she admitted that she was very hungry indeed. When he took out his watch, would you mind stopping somewhere with me? It's only eleven. Mind, of course, I wouldn't mind. I wasn't brought up like that. I can take care of myself. Ottenberg laughed, and I can take care of myself so we can do lots of jolly things together. He opened the carriage door and spoke to the driver. I'm stuck on the way you sing that greek song, he declared. When Thea got into bed that night, she told herself that this was the happiest evening she had had in Chicago. She had enjoyed the Nathan Myers and their grand house, their new dress, and Ottenberg, her first real carriage ride, and the good supper when she was so hungry. And Ottenberg was jolly. He made you want to come back at him. You weren't always being caught up and mystified. When you started in with him, you went. You cut the breeze, as Ray used to say. He had some go in him. Philip Frederick Ottenberg was the third son of the great brewer. His mother was Caterina First, the daughter and heiress of a brewing business older and richer than Otto Ottenberg's. As a young woman she had been a conspicuous figure in the German American society in New York, and not untouched by scandal. She was a handsome, headstrong girl, a rebellious and violent force in a provincial society. She was brutally sentimental and heavily romantic. Her free speech, her continental ideas, and her proclivity for championing new causes even when she did not know much about them made her an object of suspicion. She was always going abroad to seek out intellectual affinities, and was one of the group of young women who followed Wagner about in his old age, keeping at a respectful distance, but receiving now and then a gracious acknowledgment that he appreciated their homage. When the composer died, Caterina, then a matron with a family, took to her bed and saw no one for a week. After having been engaged to an American actor, a Welsh socialist agitator, and a German army officer, Freuline First at last placed herself in her great brewery interests into the trustworthy hands of Otto Atenberg, who had been her suitor ever since he was a clerk learning his business in her father's office. Her first two sons were exactly like their father. Even as children they were industrious, earnest little tradesmen. As Frau Atenberg said, she had to wait for her Fred, but she got him at last, the first man who had altogether pleased her. Frederick entered Harvard when he was eighteen. When his mother went to Boston to visit him, she not only got him everything he wished for, but she made handsome and often embarrassing presents to all his friends. She gave dinners and supper parties for the Gleek Club, made the crew break training, and was a generally disturbing influence. In his third year, Fred left the university because of a serious escapade which had somewhat hampered his life ever since. He went at once into his father's business where, in his own way, he had made himself very useful. Fred Atenberg was now twenty-eight, and people could only say of him that he had been less hurt by his mother's indulgence than most boys would have been. He had never wanted anything that he could not have it, and he might have had a great many things that he had never wanted. 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, prize fights, 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 had so many natural interests that he had no affectations. At Harvard he kept away from the aesthetic circle that had already discovered Francis Thompson. 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. CHAPTER V March began badly for Thea. She had a cold during the first week, and after she got through her church duties on Sunday, she had to go to bed with tonsillitis. She was still in the boarding-house at which young Ottenberg had called when he took her to see Mrs. Nathan Meyer. She had stayed on there because her room, although it was inconvenient and very small, was at the corner of the house and got the sunlight. Since she left Mrs. Larch, this was the first place where she had got away from a north light. Her rooms had all been as damp and moldy as they were dark, with deep foundations of dirt under the carpets and dirty walls. In her present room there was no running water and no clothes closet, and she had to have the dresser moved out to make room for her piano. But there were two windows, one on the south and one on the west, a light wallpaper with morning glory vines and on the floor a clean matting. The landlady had tried to make the room look cheerful because it was hard to let. It was so small that Thea could keep it clean herself after the hun had done her worst. She hung her dresses on the door under a sheet, used the wash stand for a dresser, slept on a cot, and opened both the windows when she practiced. She felt less walled in than she had in the other houses. Wednesday was her third day in bed. The medical student who lived in the house had been in to see her and left some tablets and a foamy gargle and told her that she could probably go back to work on Monday. The landlady stuck her head in once a day, but Thea did not encourage her visits. The Hungarian chambermaid brought her soup and she made a sloppy pretense of putting the room in order, but she was such a dirty creature that Thea would not let her touch her cot. She got up every morning and turned the mattress and made the bed herself. The exertion made her feel miserably ill, but at least she could lie still contentedly for a long while afterward. She hated the poisoned feeling in her throat, and no matter how often she gargled she felt unclean and disgusting. Still if she had to be ill she was almost glad that she had a contagious illness, otherwise she would have been at the mercy of the people in the house. She knew that they disliked her, yet now that she was ill they took it upon themselves to tap at her door, send her messages, books, even a miserable flower or two. Thea knew that their sympathy was an expression of self-righteousness, and she hated them for it. The divinity student who was always whispering soft things to her sent her licorice or sonata. The medical student had been kind to her. He knew that she did not want to pay a doctor. His gargle had helped her, and he gave her things to make her sleep at night. But he had been a cheat, too. She had no soreness in her chest, and had told him so clearly. All this thumping of her back and listening to her breathing was done to satisfy personal curiosity. She had watched him with a contemptuous smile. She was too sick to care, if it amused him. She made him wash his hands before he touched her. He was never very clean. All the same it wounded her and made her feel that the world was a pretty disgusting place. The cruizer sonata did not make her feel any more cheerful. She threw it aside with hatred. She could not believe it was written by the same man who wrote the novel that had thrilled her. Her cot was beside the south window, and on Wednesday afternoon she lay thinking about the Harsanis, about old Mr. Nathan Meyer, and about how she was missing Fred Oppenberg's visits to the studio. That was much the worst thing about being sick. If she were going to the studio every day she might be having pleasant encounters with Fred. He was always running away, Bauer said, and he might be planning to go away as soon as Mrs. Nathan Meyer's evenings were over, and here she was losing all this time. After a while she heard the hun's clumsy trot in the hall, and then a pound on the door. Mary came in making her usual uncouth sounds, carrying a long box and a big basket. Thea set up in bed and tore off the strings and paper. The basket was full of fruit, with a big Hawaiian pineapple in the middle, and in the box there were layers of pink roses with long woody stems and dark green leaves. They filled the room with a cool smell that made another air to breathe. Mary stood with her apron full of paper and cardboard. When she saw Thea take an envelope out from under the flowers she uttered an exclamation, pointed to the roses, and then to the bosom of her own dress on the left side. Thea laughed and nodded. She understood that Mary associated the color with Oppenberg's boutonniere. She pointed to the water-pitcher. She had nothing else big enough to hold the flowers, and made Mary put it on the window sill beside her. After Mary was gone, Thea locked the door. When the landlady knocked she pretended that she was asleep. She lay still all afternoon, and with drowsy eyes watched the roses open. They were the first hot-house flowers she had ever had. The cool fragrance they released was soothing, and as the pink petals curled back they were the only things between her and the gray sky. She lay on her side, putting the room and the boarding house behind her. Fred knew where all the pleasant things in the world were, she reflected, and knew the road to them. He had keys to all the nice places in his pocket, and seemed to jingle them from time to time. And then he was young, and her friends had always been old. Her mind went back over them. They had all been teachers, wonderfully kind, but still teachers. Ray Kennedy, she knew, had wanted to marry her, but he was the most protecting and teacher-like of them all. She moved impatiently in her cot, and threw her braids away from her hot neck over her pillow. I don't want him for a teacher, she thought, frowning petulantly out the window. I've had such a string of them. I want him for a sweetheart. CHAPTER VI Thea said Fred Ottenberg won drizzly afternoon in April while they sat waiting for their tea at a restaurant in the Pullman Building, overlooking the lake. What are you going to do this summer? I don't know. Work, I suppose. With bowers, you mean? Even bowers goes fishing for a month. Chicago's no place to work in the summer. Haven't you made any plans? Thea shredched her shoulders. No use having any plans when you haven't any money. They are unbecoming. Aren't you going home? She shook her head. No. It won't be comfortable there till I've got something to show for myself. I'm not getting on at all, you know. This year has been mostly wasted. You're stale, that's what's the matter with you, and just now you're dead tired. You'll talk more rationally after you've had some tea. Rest your throat until it comes. They were sitting by a window. As Ottenberg looked at her in the gray light, he remembered what Mrs. Nathan Meyer had said about the Swedish face breaking early. Thea was as gray as the weather. Her skin looked sick. Her hair, too, though on a damp day it curled charmingly about her face, looked pale. Fred beckoned the waiter and increased his order for food. Thea did not hear him. She was staring out of the window down at the roof of the Art Institute and the green lions dripping in the rain. The lake was all rolling mist with a soft shimmer of robin's egg blue in the gray. A lumberboat with two very tall masts was emerging gaunt and black out of the fog. When the tea came Thea ate hungrily and Fred watched her. He thought her eyes became a little less bleak. The kettle sang cheerfully over the spirit lamp and she seemed to concentrate her attention upon that pleasant sound. She kept looking toward it listlessly and indulgently in a way that gave him a realization of her loneliness. Fred lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. He and Thea were alone in the quiet dusky room full of white tables. In those days Chicago people never stopped for tea. Come, he said at last, what would you do this summer if you could do whatever you wished? I'd go a long way from here west, I think. Maybe I could get some of my spring back. All this cold, cloudy weather. She looked out at the lake and shivered. I don't know it does things to me, she ended abruptly. Fred nodded, I know. You've been going down ever since you had tonsillitis. I've seen it. What you need is to sit in the sun and bake for three months. You've got the right idea. I remember once when we were having dinner somewhere you kept asking me about the cliff-dweller ruins. Do they still interest you? Of course they do. I've always wanted to go down there long before I ever got in for this. I don't think I told you, but my father owns a whole canyon full of cliff-dweller ruins. He has a big worthless ranch down in Arizona, near a Navajo reservation, and there's a canyon on the place they call Panther Canyon, chock-full of that sort of thing. I often go down there to hunt. Henry Biltmer and his wife live there and they keep a tidy place. He's an old German who worked in the brewery until he lost his health. Now he runs a few cattle. Henry likes to do me a favor. I've done a few for him. Fred drowned his cigarette in his saucer and studied Thea's expression, which was wistful and intent, envious and admiring. He continued with satisfaction. If you went down there and stayed with them for two or three months, they wouldn't let you pay anything. I might send Henry a new gun, but even I couldn't offer him money for putting up a friend of mine. I'll get your transportation. It would make a new girl of you. Let me write to Henry and you pack your trunk. That's all that's necessary. No red tape about it. What do you say, Thea? She bit her lip and sighed as if she were waking up. Fred crumpled his napkin impatiently. Well, isn't it easy enough? That's the trouble. It's too easy. Doesn't sound probable. I'm not used to getting things for nothing. Ottenberg laughed. Oh, if that's all, I'll show you how to begin. You won't get this for nothing quite. I'll ask you to let me stop off and see you on my way to California. Perhaps by that time you will be glad to see me. Better let me break the news to Bowers. I can manage him. He needs a little transportation himself now and then. You must get corduroy riding things and leather leggings. There are a few snakes about. Why do you keep frowning? Well, I don't exactly see why you take the trouble. What do you get out of it? You haven't liked me so well the last two or three weeks. Fred dropped his third cigarette and looked at his watch. If you don't see that, it's because you need a tonic. I'll show you what I'll get out of it. Now I'm going to get a cab and take you home. You are too tired to walk a step. You'd better go to bed as soon as you get there. Of course I don't like you so well when you're half anesthetized all the time. What have you been doing to yourself? Thea rose. I don't know. Being bored eats the heart out of me, I guess. She walked meekly in front of him to the elevator. Fred noticed for the hundredth time how vehemently her body proclaimed her state of feeling. He remembered how remarkably brilliant and beautiful she had been when she sang at Mrs. Nathan Myers, 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. As he put her into the cab, Fred reflected once more that he gave her up. He would attack her when his lance was brighter. End of Part 3, Chapter 6, Recording by Denise Norderl, Modesto, California. Part 4, Sections 1, 2 and 3 of The Song of the Lark. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sherpin Ling, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cybercather. Part 4, Sections 1, 2 and 3. Section 1. The San Francisco mountain lies in northern Arizona above Flagstaff and its blue slopes and snowy summit entice the eye for a hundred miles across the desert. Around its base lie the pine forests of the Navajos, where the great red-trunked trees lift out their peaceful centuries in that sparkling air. The pinions 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. Over their forests, there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear. That was the first thing Thea Cromborg felt about the forest, as she drove through it one May morning in Henry Biltworth's Democrat Wagon, and it was the first great forest she had ever seen. She had got off the train at Flagstaff that morning, rolled off into the high, chill air when all the pines on the mountain were fired by sunrise, so that she seemed to fall from sleep directly into the forest. Old Biltmer followed a faint wagon trail which ran southeast, and which as they traveled, continually dipped lower, falling away from the high plateau on the slope of which Flagstaff sits. With the white peak of the mountain, the snow gorges above the timber, now disappeared from time to time as the road dropped and dropped, and the forest closed behind the wagon. More than the mountain disappeared as the forest closed thus. Thea seemed to be taking very little through the wood with her. The personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her. The high sparkling air drank it up like blotting paper. It was lost in the thrilling blue of the new sky in the song of the thin wind and the pinions. The old fretted lines which marked one off, which defined her, made her thea Cromborg, Bowers' accompanists, a soprano with a faulty middle voice, were all erased. So far she had failed. Her two years in Chicago had not resulted in anything. She had failed with Hassani, and she had made no great progress with her voice. She had come to believe that whatever Bowers had taught her was of secondary importance, and that in the essential things she had made no advance. 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 alone to fasten themselves upon her and torment her. That night when she clamored into her big German feather bed, she felt completely released from the enslaving desire to get on in the world. Darkness had once again the sweet wonder that it had in childhood. Thea's life at the Attenberg Ranch was simple and full of light, like the days themselves. She awoke every morning when the first fierce shafts of sunlight darted through the curtain-less windows of her room at the ranch house. After breakfast she took her lunch basket and went down to the canyon. Usually she did not return until sunset. Panther Canyon was like a thousand others, one of those abrupt fissures with which the earth in the southwest is riddled, so abrupt that you might walk over the edge of any one of them on a dark night and never know what had happened to you. This canyon headed on the Attenberg Ranch, about a mile from the ranch house, and it was accessible only at its head. The canyon walls, the first 200 feet below the surface, were perpendicular cliffs, striped with even running strata of rock. From their own to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were shelving and lightly fringed with pinions and dwarf cedars. The effect was that of a gentler canyon within a wilder one. The dead city lay at the point where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped inner gorge began. There, a stratum of rock, softer than those above, had been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like a deep groove running along the sides of the canyon. In this hollow, like a great foat in the rock, the ancient people had built their houses of yellowish stone and mortar. The overhanging cliff above made a roof 200 feet thick. The hard stratum below was an everlasting floor. The houses stood alone in a row, like the buildings in a city block, or like a barracks. In both walls of the canyon, the same streak of soft rock had been washed out, and the long horizontal groove had been built up with houses. The dead city had thus two streets, one set in either cliff, facing each other across the ravine with a river of blue air between them. The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these two streets went on for four miles or more, interrupted by the erupt turnings of the gorge, but beginning again within each turn. The canyon had a dozen of these false endings near its head. Beyond, the windings were larger and less perceptible, and it went on for a hundred miles, too narrow, precipitous, and terrible for men to follow it. The cliff dwellers liked wide canyons, where the gray cliffs caught the sun. Panther Canyon had been deserted for hundreds of years when the first Spanish missionaries came into Arizona, but the masonry of the houses was still wonderfully firm, had crumbled only where a landslide or a rolling boulder had torn it. All the houses in the canyon were clean with the cleanness of some baked, wind-swept places, and they all smelled of the tough little cedars that twisted themselves into the very doorways. One of these rock rooms Thea took for her own. Fred had told her how to make it comfortable. The day after she came, O. Henry brought over on one of the pack ponies a row of Navajo blankets that belonged to Fred, and Thea lined her cave with them. The room was not more than eight by ten feet, and she could touch the stone roof with her fingertips. This was her old idea, a nest in a high cliff, full of sun. All morning long, the sun beat upon her cliff while the ruins on the opposite side of the canyon were in shadow. In the afternoon, when she had the shade of two hundred feet of rock wall, the ruins on the other side of the gulf stood out in the blazing sunlight. Before her door ran the narrow winding path that had been the street of the ancient people. The yaka and niggerhead cactus grew everywhere. From her doorstep she looked out on the ochre colored slope that ran down several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was sparsely grown with dwarf trees. Their colors were so pale that the shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out sharper than the trees themselves. When Thea first came, the choke cherry bushes were in blossom, and the scent of them was almost sickeningly sweet after the shower. At the very bottom of the canyon, along the stream, there was a thread of bright flickering golden green cottonwood seedlings. They made a living chattering screen behind which she took her bath every morning. Thea went down to the stream by the Indian water trail. She had found a bathing pool with a sand bottom where the creek was dammed by fallen trees. The climb back was long and steep, and when she reached her little house in the cliff, she always felt fresh delight in its comfort and in accessibility. By the time she got there, the woolly red and gray blankets were saturated with sunlight, and she sometimes fell asleep as soon as she stretched her body on their warm surfaces. She used to wander at her own inactivity. She could lie there hour after hour in the sun and listen to the strident roar 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 rocks. 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 a stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort. Later she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind, almost in her hands. They were scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with fragrance and color and sound, but almost nothing to do with words. She was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head all morning as the spring keeps welling up. And it was like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than like an idea or an act of remembering. Music had never come to her in that sensuous form before. It had always been a thing to be struggled with. Had always brought anxiety and exaltation and shock-green. Never content in ignorance. Maria began to wonder whether people could not utterly lose the power to work, as they can lose their voice or their memory. She had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to another, as if it mattered. And now her power to think seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation. She could become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a color like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones outside her door, or she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas. Section 3. The faculty of observation was never highly developed in Thea Kronborg. A great deal escaped her eye as she passed through the world. But the things which were for her, she saw. She experienced them physically and remembered them as if they had once been a part of herself. The roses she used to see in the florist's shops in Chicago were merely roses. But when she thought of the moonflowers that grew over Mrs. Telemonte's door, it was as if she had been that vine and had opened up in white flowers every night. There were memories of light on the sandhills, of masses of prickly pear blossoms she had found in the desert in early childhood, of the late afternoon sun pouring through the grape leaves in a mint bed in Mrs. Kohler's garden, which she would never lose. These recollections were a part of her mind and personality. In Chicago she had got almost nothing that went into her subconscious self and took root there. But here, in Panther Canyon, there were again things which seemed destined for her. Panther Canyon was the home of innumerable swallows. They built nests in the wall far above the hollow groove in which Thea's own rock chamber lay. They seldom ventured above the rim of the canyon to the flat windswept table land. Their world was the blue-air river between the canyon walls. In that blue gulf, the arrow-shaped birds swam all day long with only an occasional movement of the wings. The only sad thing about them was their timidity, the way in which they lived their lives between the echoing cliffs and never dared to rise out of the shadow of the canyon walls. As they swam past her door, Thea often felt how easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world. From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive sadness, now stronger, now fainter, like the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the sun, but always present, a part of the air won't breathe. The night when Thea dreamed about the canyon, or in the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it, her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in the sunlight, the swallows, the cedars smell, and that peculiar sadness, a voice out of the past, not very loud that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally. Growing up in her lodge, Thea could, with her thumbnail, dislodge flakes of carbon from the rock roof, the cooking smoke of the ancient people. They were that near, a timid nest-building folk like the swallows, how often Thea remembered great Kennedys moralizing about the cleft cities. He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle, or the sadness of history, as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best. On the first day that Thea climbed the water trail, she began to have intuitions about the women who had worn the path, and who had spanned so great a part of their lives going up and down it. She found herself trying to walk as they must have walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins which she had never known before, which must have come up to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky trail. She could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her back as she climbed. The empty houses among which she wandered in the afternoon, the blanketed one in which she lay all morning, were hounded by certain fears and desires, feeling about warmth and cold and water and physical strength. It seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those old people came up to her out of the rock shelf on which she lay, that certain feelings were transmitted to her, suggestions that were simple, insistent and monotonous, like the beating of Indian drums. They were not expressible in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves into attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or relaxation. The naked strength of youth sharp as the sun shifts, the crouching timorousness of age, the solanness of women who waited for their captors. At the first turning of the canyon, there was a half ruined tower of yellow masonry, a watch tower upon which the young men used to entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes for a whole morning, Thea could see the coppery breasts and shoulders of an Indian youth there against the sky. See him throw the net and watch the struggle with the eagle. Oh Henry Biltmer at the ranch had been a great deal among the Pueblo Indians who are the descendants of the cliff dwellers. After supper he used to sit and smoke his pipe by the kitchen stove and talk to Thea about them. He had never found anyone before who was interested in his ruins. Every Sunday the old man proud about in the canyon and he had come to know a good deal more about it than he could account for. He had gathered up a whole chest full of cliff-dweller relics which he meant to take back to Germany with him some day. He taught Thea how to find things among the ruins, grinding stones and drills and needles made of turkey bones. There were fragments of pottery everywhere. Oh Henry explained to her that the ancient people had developed masonry and pottery far beyond any other crafts. After they had made houses for themselves, the next thing was to house the precious water. He explained to her how all their customs and ceremonies and their religion went back to water. The man provided the food, but water was the care of the women. The stupid women carried water for most of their lives. The clever ones made the vessels to hold it. Their pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element itself. The strongest Indian need was expressed in those graceful jars, fashioned slowly by hand, without the aid of a wheel. When Thea took a bath at the bottom of the canyon, in a sunny pool behind a screen of cottonwoods, she sometimes felt as if the water must have sovereign qualities from having been the object of so much service and desire. That stream was the only living thing left of the drama that had been played out in the canyon centuries ago. In the rapid restless heart of it, flowing swifter than the rest, there was a continuity of life that reached back into the old time. The glittering thread of Curran had a kind of lightly worn, loosely knit personality, graceful and laughing. Thea's bath came to have a ceremonial gravity. The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic. 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 broken pottery. What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mode 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 jaws. 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. End of Part 4, Sections 1, 2 and 3, Recording by Sierping Niem. Part 4, Sections 4 and 5 of the Song of the Lark. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sierping Niem. The Song of the Lark by Willis Cybert Cather. Part 4, Sections 4 and 5. Section 4. Thea had a superstitious feeling about the pot shirts and liked better to leave them in the dwellings where she found them. If she took a few bits back to her own lodge and hit them under the blankets, she did it guiltily as if she were being watched. She was a guest in these houses and ought to behave as such. Nearly every afternoon she went to the chambers which contained the most interesting fragments of pottery, sat and looked at them for a while. Some of them were beautifully decorated. This care expended upon vessels that could not hold food or water any better for the additional labor put upon them made her heart go out to those ancient potters. They had not only expressed their desire, but they had expressed it as beautifully as they could. Food, fire, water and something else, even here in this crack in the world so far back in the night of the past. Down here at the beginning that painful thing was already stirring, the seed of sorrow and of so much delight. There were jars done in delicate overlay, like pine cones, and there were many patterns in a low relief, like basket work. Some of the pottery was decorated in color, red and brown, black and white, in graceful geometrical patterns. One day, on a fragment of a shallow bowl, she found a crested serpent's head, painted in red on terracotta. Again she found half a bowl with a broad band of white cliff houses painted on a black ground. They were scarcely conventionalized at all. There they were in the black border, just as they stood in the rock before her. They brought her centuries nearer to these people to find that they saw their houses exactly as she saw them. Yes, Ray Kennedy was right. All these things made one feel that one ought to do one's best, and helped to fulfill some desire of the dust that slept there. 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 beginnings of what was to come. These pot shirts were like fatters 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. Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of that line of pale yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the cliff. Moonstone and Chicago had become vague. Here everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood. The mind was like a rag-bag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab. And here she must throw this lumber away. The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest. Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer, she felt united and strong. When Thea had been at the Attenberg range for two months, she got a letter from Fred announcing that he might be alone at almost any time now. The letter came at night, and the next morning she took it down into the canyon with her. She was delighted that he was coming soon. She had never felt so grateful to anyone, and she wanted to tell him everything that had happened to her since she had been there, more than had happened in all her life before. Certainly she liked Fred better than anyone else in the world. There was Hassani, of course, but Hassani was always tired. Just now, and here, she wanted someone who had never been tired, who could catch an idea and run with it. She was ashamed to think what an apprehensive drudge she must always have seemed to Fred, and she wondered why he had concerned himself about her at all. Perhaps she would never be so happy or so good-looking again, and she would like Fred to see her for once at her best. She had not been seen in much, but she knew that her voice was more interesting than it had ever been before. She had begun to understand that, with her, at least, voice was, first of all, vitality. A lightness in the body and a driving power in the blood. If she had that, she could see. When she felt so keenly alive, lying on that insensible shelf of stone, when her body bounded like a rubber ball away from its hardness, then she could see. This, too, she could explain to Fred. He would know what she meant. Another week passed, Thea did the same things as before, felt the same inferences, went over the same ideas, but there was a livelier movement in her thoughts and a freshening of sensation like the brightness which came over the underbrush after the shower. A persistent affirmation or denial was going on in her, like the tapping of the woodpecker in the one tall pine tree across the chasm. Musical phrases drove each other rapidly through her mind, and the song of the cicada was now too long and too sharp. Everything seemed suddenly to take the form of a desire for action. It was while she was in this abstracted state, waiting for the clock to strike, that Thea at last made up her mind what she was going to try to do in the world, and that she was going to Germany to study without further loss of time. Only by the merest chance had she ever got to Panther Canyon. There was certainly no kindly providence that directed one's life, and one's parents did not, in the least, care what became of one, so long as one did not misbehave and endangered their comfort. One's life was at the mercy of blind chance. She had better take it in her own hands and lose everything than meekly draw the plow under the broad of parental guidance. She had seen it when she was at home last summer. The hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward any serious effort. Even to her father, he seemed indecorous. Whenever she spoke seriously, he looked apologetic. Yet she had clung fast to whatever was left of Moonstone in her mind. No more of that. The cliff dwellers had lengthened her past. She had older and higher obligations. Section 5 One Sunday afternoon, late in July, old Henry Biltmer was romantically descending into the head of the canyon. The Sunday before had been one of those cloudy days, fortunately rare. When the life goes out of that country and it becomes a grey ghost, an empty, shivering uncertainty, Henry had spent the day in the barn. His canyon was a reality only when it was flooded with the light of its great lamp. When the yellow rocks cast purple shadows, and the resin was fairly cooking in the corkscrew cedars. The yuckas were in blossom now. Out of each clump of sharp bayonet leaves, rows of tall stalk hung with greenish white bells with thick, flashy petals. The knickerhead cactus was thrusting its crimson blooms up out of every crevice in the rocks. Henry had come out on the pretext of hunting a spade and pig-axe that young Attenberg had borrowed, but he was keeping his eyes open. He was really very curious about the new occupants of the canyon and what they found to do there all day long. He led his eye travel along the gulf for a mile or so to the first turning, where the fissure zigzagged out and then receded behind a stone promontory on which stood the yellowish crumpling ruin of the old watchtower. From the base of this tower, which now threw its shadow forward, bits of rock kept flying out into the open gulf, skating upon the air until they lost their momentum, then falling like chips until they rang upon the ledges at the bottom of the gorge or splashed into the stream. Biltmer shaded his eyes with his hand. There on the promontory, against a cream-colored cliff, were two figures nimbly moving in the light, both slender and agile, entirely absorbed in their game. They looked like two boys, both were headless and both wore white shirts. Henry forgot his pickaxe and followed the trail before the cliff houses toward the tower. Behind the tower, as he well knew, were heaps of stones, large and small, piled against the face of the cliff. He had always believed that the Indian watchmen piled them there for ammunition. John and Fred had come upon these missiles and were throwing them for distance. As Biltmer approached, he could hear them laughing, and he caught Thea's voice, high and excited, with a ring of vexation in it. Fred was teaching her to throw a heavy stone like a discus. When it was Fred's turn, he sent a triangular-shaped stone out into the air with considerable skill. Thea watched it enviously, standing in a half-defiant posture. Her sleeves rolled above her elbows and her face flushed with heat and excitement. After Fred's third missile had run upon the rocks below, she snatched up a stone and stepped impatiently out on the ledge in front of him. He caught her by the elbows and pulled her back. Not so close, you silly. You'll spin yourself off in a minute. You went that close. There's your heel mark, she retorted. Well, I know how. That makes a difference. He drew a mark in the dust with his toe. There, that's right. Don't step over that. Pivot yourself on your spine and make a half turn. When you've swung your length, let it go. Thea settled the flat piece of rock between her wrists and fingers, faced a cliff wall, stretched her arm in position, whirled round on her left foot to the full stretch of her body, and let the missile spin out over the gulf. She hung expectantly in the air, forgetting to draw back her arm, her eyes following the stone as if it carried her fortunes with it. Her comrade watched her. There weren't many girls who could show a line like that from the toe to the thigh, from the shoulder to the tip of the outstretched hand. The stone spanned itself and began to fall. Thea drew back and struck her knee furiously with her palm. There it goes again. Not nearly so far as yours. What is the matter with me? Give me another. She faced the cliff and whirled again. The stone spun out not quite so far as before. Attenberg laughed. Why do you keep on working after you've thrown it? You can't help it alone then. Without replying, Thea stooped and select another stone, took a deep breath, and made another turn. Fred watched the disc, exclaiming, Good girl, you got past the pine that time. That's a good throw. She took out her handkerchief and wiped her glowing face and throat, pausing to fill her right shoulder with her left hand. Aha! You've made yourself sore, haven't you? What did I tell you? You go at things too hard. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Thea. Fred dusted his hands and began tucking in the blouse of his shirt. I'm going to make some single sticks and teach you to fence. You'd be all right there. You are light and quick and you've got lots of drive in you. I'd like to have you come at me with foils. You'd look so fierce, he chuckled. She turned away from him and stubbornly sent out another stone, hanging in the air after its flight. Her fury amused Fred, who took all games lightly and played them well. She was breathing hard and little beads of moisture had gathered on her upper lip. He slipped his arm about her. If you will look as pretty as that, he bent his head and kissed her. Thea was startled, gave him an angry push, drove at him with her free hand in a manner quite hostile. Fred was on his metal in an instant. He pinned both her arms down and kissed her resolutely. When he released her, she turned away and spoke over her shoulder. That was mean of you, but I suppose I deserved what I got. I should say you did deserve it, Fred painted, turning savage on me like that. I should say you did deserve it. He saw her shoulders harden. Well, I just said I deserved it, didn't I? What more do you want? I want you to tell me why you flew at me like that. You weren't playing. You looked as if you'd like to murder me. She brushed back her hair impatiently. I didn't mean anything, really. You interrupted me when I was watching the stone. I can't jump from one thing to another. I pushed you without thinking. Fred thought her back expressed contrition. He went up to her, stood behind her with his chin above her shoulder, and said something in her ear. Fred laughed and turned toward him. They left the stone pile carelessly, as if they had never been interested in it. Rounded the yellow tower and disappeared into the second turn of the canyon, where the dead city, interrupted by the jutting promontory, began again. Oh, Biltmer had been somewhat embarrassed by the turn the game had taken. He had not heard their conversation, but the pantomime against the rocks was clear enough. When the two young people disappeared, their host retreated rapidly toward the head of the canyon. I guess that young lady can take care of herself, he chuckled. Young Fred, though, he has quite away with them. End of Part 4, Sections 4 and 5, Recording by Sherping Ling. Part 4, Sections 6 and 7 of The Song of the Lark. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sherping Ling. The Song of the Lark by Willis Cybert Cather. Part 4, Sections 6 and 7. Section 6. Day was breaking over Panther Canyon. The gulf was cold and full of heavy, purplish twilight. The wood smoke which drifted from one of the cliff houses hung in the blue scarf across the chasm until the draft caught it and whirled it away. Lark was crouching in the doorway of a rock house while Attenberg looked after the crackling fire in the next cave. He was waiting for it to burn down to coals before he put the coffee on to boil. They had left the ranch house that morning, a little after three o'clock, having packed their camp equipment the day before and had crossed the open pasture land with their lantern while the stars were still bright. Bring the descent into the canyon by lantern light. They were chilled through their coats and sweaters. The lantern crapped slowly along the rock trail where the heavy air seemed to offer resistance. The voice of the stream at the bottom of the gorge was hollow and threatening, much louder and deeper than it ever was by day, another voice altogether. The solanness of the place seemed to say that the world could get on very well without people, red or white, that under the human world there was a geological world conducting its silent immense operations which were indifferent to man. Thea had often seen the desert sunrise, a lighthearted affair where the sun springs out of bed and the world is golden in an instant, but this canyon seemed to awaken like an old man, with room and stiffness of the joints, with heaviness and adult MacLinan mind. She crouched against the wall while the stars faded and thought what courage the early races must have had to endure so much for the little they got out of life. Alas, a kind of hopefulness broke in the air. In a moment the pine trees up on the edge of the rim were flashing with coppery fire. The thin red clouds which hung above their pointed tops began to boil and move rapidly, weaving in and out like smoke. The swallows darted out of their rock houses as at a signal and flew upward toward the rim. Little brown birds began to chirp in the bushes along the water course down at the bottom of the ravine where everything was still dusky and pale. At first the golden light seemed to hang like a wave upon the rim of the canyon. The trees and bushes up there, which one scarcely noticed at noon, stood out magnified by the slanting rays. Long thin streaks of light began to reach quaveringly down into the canyon. The red sun rose rapidly above the tops of the blazing pines, and its glow burst into the gulf about the very doorstep on which Thea sat. It bored into the wet dark underbrush. The dripping cherry bushes, the pale aspenths, and the frosty pinions were glittering and trembling, swimming in the liquid gold. All the pale, dusty, little herbs of the bean family, never seen by anyone but the botanist, became for a moment individual and important. Their silky leaves quite beautiful with dew and light. The arch of sky overhead, heavy as lead a little while before, lifted, became more and more transparent, and one could look up into depths of pearly blue. The savour of coffee and bacon mingled with the smell of wet cedars drying, and Fred called to Thea that he was ready for her. They sat down in the doorway of his kitchen, with the warmth of the live coals behind them and the sunlight on their faces, and began their breakfast. Mrs. Biltmer's thick coffee cups and the cream bottle between them, the coffee pot and frying pan conveniently keeping hot among the embers. I thought you were going back on the whole proposition, Thea, when you were crawling alone with that lantern. I couldn't get a word out of you. I know, I was cold and hungry, and I didn't believe there was going to be any morning anyway. Didn't you feel queer at all? Fred squinted above his smoking cup. Well, I'm never strong for getting up full the sun. The world looks unfinished. When I first lit the fire and had a square look at you, I thought I'd got the wrong girl. Pale, green, you were a sight. Thea leaned back into the shadow of the rock room and warmed her hands over the coals. It was dismal enough. How warm these walls are, all the way round, and your breakfast is so good. I'm all right now, Fred. Yes, you're all right now. Fred lit a cigarette and looked at her critically as her head emerged into the sun again. You get up every morning just a little bit handsomer than you were the day before. I'd love you just as much if you were not turning into one of the loveliest women I've ever seen. But you are, and that's a fact to be reckoned with. He watched her across the thin line of smoke he blew from his lips. What are you going to do with all that beauty and all that talent, Miss Cronborg? She turned away to the fire again. I don't know what you're talking about. She muttered with an awkwardness which did not conceal her pleasure. Attenberg laughed softly. Oh, yes you do. Nobody better. You are a close one, but you give yourself away sometimes like everybody else. Do you know? I've decided that you never do a single thing without an ulterior motive. He threw away his cigarette, took out his tobacco pouch, and began to fill his pipe. You ride and fence and walk and climb, but I know that all the while you are getting somewhere in your mind. All these things are instruments, and I, too, am an instrument. He looked up in time to intercept a quick startled glance from Thea. Oh, I don't mind, he chuckled, not a bit. Every woman, every interesting woman, has ulterior motives. Many of them less credible than yours. It's your constancy that amuses me. You must have been doing that ever since you were two feet high. Thea looked slowly up at her companion's good-humored face. His eyes, sometimes too restless and sympathetic in town, had grown steadier and clearer in the open air. His short curly beard and yellow hair had reddened in the sun and wind. The pleasant vigor of his person was always delightful to her, something to signal to and laugh with in a world of negative people. With Fred she was never becalmed. There was always life in the air, always something coming and going, a rhythm of feeling and action, stronger than the natural accord of youth. As she looked at him, leaning against the sunny wall, she felt a desire to be frank with him. She was not willfully holding anything back, but on the other hand she could not force things that held themselves back. Yes, it was like that when I was little, she said alas. I had to be close, as you called it, or go under. But I didn't know I had been like that since you came. I've had nothing to be close about. I haven't thought about anything but having a good time with you. I've just drifted. Fred blew a trail of smoke out into the breeze and looked knowing. Yes, you drift like a rifle ball, my dear. It's your, your direction that I like best of all. Most fellows wouldn't, you know. I'm unusual. They both laughed, but Thea frowned questioningly. Why wouldn't most fellows, other fellows, have liked me? Yes, serious fellows. You told me yourself they were all old or solemn. But jolly fellows want to be the whole target. They would say you were all brain and muscle, that you have no feeling. She glanced at him sidewise. Oh, they would, would they? Of course they would, Fred continued blindly. Jolly fellows have no imagination. They want to be the animating force. When they are not around, they want a girl to be extinct. He waved his hand. Oh, fellows, like Mr. Nathan Mayer, understand your kind. But among the young ones, you are rather lucky to have found me. Even I wasn't always so wise. I've had my time of thinking it would not bore me to be the Apollo of the Homie Flat, and I've paid out a trifle to learn better. All those things get very tedious unless they are hooked up with an idea of some sort. It's because we don't come out here only to look at each other and drink coffee that it's so pleasant to look at each other. Fred drew on his pipe for a while, studying Thea's abstraction. She was staring up at the far wall of the canyon with a troubled expression that drew her eyes narrow and her mouth hard. Her hands lay in her lap, one over the other, the fingers interlacing. Suppose Fred came out at length. Suppose I were to offer you what most of the young men I know would offer a girl they'd been sitting up nights about, a comfortable flat in Chicago, a summer camp up in the woods, musical evenings, and a family to bring up. Would it look attractive to you? Thea set up straight and stared at him in alarm, glared into his eyes. Perfectly hideous, she exclaimed. Fred dropped back against the old stonework and laughed deep in his chest. Well, don't be frightened. I won't offer them. You're not a nest-building bird. You know, I always liked your song. Me for the jolt of the breakers, I understand. She rose impatiently and walked to the edge of the cliff. It's not that so much. It's waking up every morning with a feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own, that you are 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 anymore now, she entreated. It isn't that I want to keep anything from you. The trouble is that I've got nothing to keep, except you know as well as I, that feeling. I told you about it in Chicago once, but it always makes me unhappy to talk about it. It will spoil the day. Will you go for a climb with me? She held out her hands with a smile so eager that it made Attenberg feel how much she needed to get away from herself. He sprang up and caught the hands she put out so cordially and stood swinging them back and forth. I won't tease you, but words enough to me, but I love it all the same, understand? He pressed her hands and dropped them. Now, where are you going to drag me? I want you to drag me over there to the other houses. They are more interesting than these. She pointed across the gorge to the road of white houses in the other cliff. The trail is broken away, but I got up there once. It's possible. You have to go to the bottom of the canyon, cross the creek, and then go up hand over hand. Attenberg, lounging against the sunny wall, his hands in the pockets of his jacket looked across at the distant dwellings. It's an awful climb, he sighed, when I could be perfectly happy here with my pipe. However, he took up his stick and hat and followed Thea down the water trail. Do you climb this path every day? You surely earn your bath. I went down and had a look at your pool the other afternoon. Me, place, with all those little cotton woods, must be very becoming. Think so, Thea said over her shoulder as she swung round a turn. Yes, and so do you, evidently. I'm becoming an expert at reading your meaning in your back and behind you so much on these single foot trails. You don't wear stays, do you? Not here. I wouldn't anywhere if I were you. They will make you less elastic. The side muscles get flabby. If you're going for opera, there is a fortune in the flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy even when they are well set up. Thea switched opinion branch back at him. Oh, I'll never get fat. That I can promise you. Fred smiled, looking after her. Keep that promise, no matter how many others you break, he drawled. The upward climb after they had crossed the stream was at first a breathless scramble through the underbrush. When they reached the big boulders, Attenberg went first because he had the longer leg reach and gave Thea a hand when the step was quite young her, swinging her up until she could get a foothold. At last they reached a little platform among the rocks with only a hundred feet of jacket sloping wall between them and the cliff houses. Attenberg laid down under a pine tree and declared that he was going to have a pipe before he went any farther. It's a good thing to know when to stop, Thea, he said meaningly. I'm not going to stop now until I get there. Thea insisted. I'll go on alone. Fred settled his shoulder against the tree trunk. Go on if you like, but I'm here to enjoy myself. If you meet a rattler on the way, have it out with him. She hesitated, fanning herself with her felt hat. I never have met one. There's reasoning for you, Fred murmured languidly. Thea turned away resolutely and began to go up the wall using an irregular cleft in the rock for a path. The cliff, which looked almost perpendicular from the bottom, was really made up of ledges and boulders and behind these she soon disappeared. For a long while Fred smoked with half closed eyes, smiling to himself now and again. Occasionally he lifted an eyebrow as he heard the rattle of small stones among the rocks above. In a temper he concluded to her good. Then he subsided into warm browsiness and listened to the locuses in the yakas and the tap-tap of the old woodpecker that was never wary of assaulting the big time. Fred had finished his pipe and was wondering whether he wanted another when he heard a call from the cliff far above him. Looking up he saw Thea standing on the edge of a projecting crack. She waved to him and threw her arm over her head as if she were snapping her fingers in the air. As he saw her there between the sky and the gulf with that great wash of air and the morning light about her Fred recalled the brilliant figure and Mrs. Nathan Mayers. Thea was one of those people who emerged unexpectedly larger than we are accustomed to see them. Even at this distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity. A kind of brilliancy of motion, of a personality that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things. Lying still with his hands under his head, Attenberg rhetorically addressed the figure in the air. You are the sort that used to run wild in Germany, dressed in their hair and a piece of skin. Soldiers caught them in nets. Old Nathan Mayer, he mused, would like a peep at her now. Knowing old fellow, always buying those zorn etchings of peasant girls bathing. No sack in them either must be the cold climate he set up. She'll begin to pitch rocks on me if I don't move. In response to another impatient gesture from the crack, he rose and began swinging slowly up the trail. It was the afternoon of that long day. Thea was lying on the blanket in the door of her rock house. She and Attenberg had come back from their climb and had lunch, and he had gone off for a nap in one of the cliff houses farther down the path. He was sleeping peacefully, his coat under his head and his face turned toward the wall. Thea too was drowsy and lay looking through half-closed eyes up at the blazing blue arch over the rim of the canyon. She was thinking of nothing at all. Her mind, like a body, was full of warmth, latitude, physical content. Suddenly an eagle, tawny and of great size, sailed over the cleft in which she lay across the arch of sky. He dropped for a moment into the gulf between the walls, then wheeled and mounted until his plumage was so steep in light that he looked like a golden bird. He swept on, following the course of the canyon a little way and then disappearing beyond the rim. 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. Oh, eagle of eagles, endeavor, achievement, desire, glorious driving of human art. From a cleft in the heart of the world, she saluted it. It had come all the way. When man lived in caves, it was there. A vanished race but alone the trails in a stream under the spreading cactus. They're still glittered in the sun, the bits of their frail clay vessels, fragments of their desire. Section seven. From the day of Fred's arrival, he and Thea were unceasingly active. They took long rides into the Navajo pine forests, bought turquoises and silver bracelets from the wandering Indian herdsmen and rode 20 miles to Flagstaff upon the slightest pretext. Thea had never felt this pleasant excitement about any man before and she found herself trying very hard to please young Attenberg. She was never tired, never dull. There was a zest about waking up in the morning and dressing, about walking, riding, even about sleep. One morning, when Thea came out from her room at seven o'clock, she found Henry and Fred on the porch looking up at the sky. The day was already hot and there was no breeze. The sun was shining but heavy brown clouds were hanging in the west, like the smoke of a forest fire. She and Fred had meant to ride to Flagstaff that morning but Biltmer advised against it, foretelling a storm. After breakfast, they lingered about the house, waiting for the weather to make up its mind. Fred had brought his guitar and as they had the dining room to themselves, he made Thea go over some songs with him. They got interested and kept it up until Mrs. Biltmer came to set the table for dinner. Attenberg knew some of the Mexican things Spanish Johnny used to sing. Thea had never before happened to tell him about Spanish Johnny and he seemed more interested in Johnny than in Dr. Archie or lunch. After dinner, they were too restless to endure the ranch house any longer and ran away to the canyon to practice with single sticks. Fred carried a slicker and a sweater and he made Thea wear one of the rubber hats that hung in Biltmer's gun room. As they crossed the pasture land, the clumsy slicker kept catching in the lasings of his leggings. Why don't you drop that thing? Thea asked. I won't mind a shower. I've been wet before. No use taking chances. From the canyon, they were unable to watch the sky. Since only a strip of the zenith was visible, the flat ledge by the watch tower was the only level spot large enough for single stick exercise and they were still practicing there when at about four o'clock, a tremendous roll of thunder echoed between the cliffs and the atmosphere suddenly became thick. Fred thrust the sticks in a cleft in the rock. We're in for it, Thea. Better make for your cave where there are blankets. He caught her elbow and hurried her along the path before the cliff houses. They made the half mile at a quick trot and as they ran, the rocks and the sky and the air between the cliffs turned a turbid green like the color in a moss agate. When they reached the blanketed rock room, they looked at each other and laughed. Their faces had taken on a greenish pallor. Thea's hair even was green. Darkest pitch in here, Fred exclaimed as they hurried over the old rock doorstep. But it's warm, the rocks hold the heat. It's going to be terribly cold outside, all right. He was interrupted by a deafening peel of thunder. Lord, what an echo. Lucky you don't mind. It's worth watching out there. We needn't come in yet. The green light grew murkier and murkier. The smaller vegetation was blotted out. The yaks, the cedars and pinions stood dark and rigid like bronze. The swallows flew up with sharp, terrified twitterings. Even the quaking asps were still. While Fred and Thea watched from the doorway, the light changed to purple. Clouds of dark vapor, like chlorine gas, began to flow down from the head of the canyon and hung between them and the cliff houses in the opposite wall. Before they knew it, the wall itself had disappeared. The air was positively venomous looking and grew colder every minute. The thunder seemed to crash against one cliff, then against the other, and to go shrieking off into the inner canyon. The moment the rain broke, it beat the vapors down. In a gulf before them, the water fell in spouts and dashed from the high cliff's overhead. It tore aspen and chowberry bushes out of the ground and left the yaks hanging by their tough roots. Only the little cedars stood black and unmoved in the torrents that fell from so far above. The rock chamber was full of fine spray from the streams of water that shot over the doorway. Thea crept to the back wall and rolled herself in a blanket and Fred threw the heavier blankets over her. The wool of the Navajo sheep was soon kindled by the warmth of her body and was impenetrable to dampness. Her hair, where it hung below the rubber hat, gathered the moisture like a sponge. Fred put on the slicker, tied the sweater about his neck and settled himself cross-legged beside her. The chamber was so dark that although he could see the outline of her head and shoulders, he could not see her face. He struck a wax match to light his pipe. As he sheltered it between his hands, it sizzled and sputtered, throwing a yellow flicker over Thea in her blankets. You looked like a gypsy, he said, as he dropped the match. Anyone you'd rather be shut up with than me? No? Sure about that? I think I am. Aren't you cold? Not especially, Fred smoked in silence, listening to the roar of the water outside. We may not get away from here right away, he remarked. I shan't mind, shall you? He laughed grimly and pulled on his pipe. Do you know where you are at, Miss Thea Cromborg? He said alas. You've got me going pretty hard, I suppose you know. I've had a lot of sweethearts, but I have never been so much engrossed before. What are you going to do about it? He heard nothing from the blankets. Are you going to play fair, or is it about my cue to cut away? I'll play fair. I don't see why you want to go. What do you want me around for, to play with? Thea struggled up among the blankets. I want you for everything. I don't know whether I'm what people call in love with you or not. Immunes don't, that means sitting in a hammock with somebody. I don't want to sit in a hammock with you, but I want to do almost everything else. Oh, hundreds of things. If I run away, will you go with me? I don't know. I'll have to think about that. Maybe I would. She freed herself from her wrappings and stood up. It's not raining so hard now. Hadn't we better start this minute? It will be night before we get to build merch. Fred struck another match. It's seven. I don't know how much of the path may be washed away. I don't even know whether I ought to let you try it without a lantern. Thea went to the doorway and looked out. There's nothing else to do. The sweater and the slicker will keep me dry. And this will be my chance to find out whether these shoes are really watertight. They cause a weak salary. She retreated to the back of the cave. It's getting blacker every minute. Rottenberg took a brandy flask from his coat pocket. Better have some of this before we start. Can you take it without water? Thea lifted it obediently to her lips. She put on the sweater and Fred helped her to get the clumsy slicker on over it. He buttoned it and fastened the high collar. She could feel that his hands were hurried and clumsy. The coat was too big and he took off his neck tie and belted it in at the waist. While she tucked her hair more securely under the rubber head, he stood in front of her, between her and the gray doorway, without moving. Are you ready to go? She asked carelessly. If you are, he spoke quietly without moving except to bend his head forward a little. Thea laughed and put her hands on his shoulders. You know how to handle me, don't you? She whispered. For the first time, she kissed him without constraint or embarrassment. Thea, Thea, Thea. Fred whispered her name three times, shaking her a little as if to awaken her. It was too dark to see, but he could feel that she was smiling. When she kissed him, she had not hidden her face on his shoulder. She had risen a little on her toes and stood straight and free. In that moment, when he came close to her actual personality, he felt in her the same expansion that he had noticed at Mrs. Nathan Mayers. She became freer and stronger under impulses. When she rose to meet him like that, he felt her flash into everything that she had ever suggested to him, as if she filled out her own shadow. She pushed him away and shot past him out into the rain. Now for it, Fred, she called back exultantly. The rain was pouring steadily down through the dying great twilight and muddy streams were spouting and foaming over the cliff. Fred called her and held her back. Keep behind me, Thea. I don't know about the path. It may be gone altogether. Can't tell what there is under this water. But the path was older than the white man's Arizona. The rush of water had washed away the dust and stones that lay on the surface. But the rock skeleton of the Indian Trail was there, ready for the foot. Where the streams poured down through gullies, there was always a cedar or a pinion to cling to. By wading and slipping and climbing, they got along. As they neared the head of the canyon, where the path lifted and rose in steep loops to the surface of the plateau, the climb was more difficult. The earth above had broken away and washed down over the trail, bringing rocks and bushes and even young trees with it. The last ghost of daylight was dying and there was no time to lose. The canyon behind them was already black. We've got to go right through the top of this pine tree, Thea. No time to hunt the way around. Give me your hand. After they had crashed through the mess of branches, Fred stopped abruptly. Gosh, what a hole. Can you jump it? Wait a minute. He cleared the washout, slipped on the wet rock at the father's side and caught himself just in time to escape a tumble. If I could only find something to hold to, I could give you a hand. It's so cursed dark and there are no trees here where they are needed. Here's something. It's a root. It will hold all right. He braced himself on the rock, gripped the crooked root with one hand and swung himself across toward Thea, holding out his arm. Good jump. I must say you don't lose your nerve in a tight place. Can you keep at it a little longer? We're almost out. Have to make that next ledge. Put your foot on my knee and catch something to pull by. Thea went up over his shoulder. It's hard ground up here she panted. Did I wrench your arm when I slipped then? It was a cactus I grabbed and it startled me. Now one more pool and we are on the level. They emerged gasping upon the black plateau. In the last five minutes the darkness had solidified and it seemed as if the sky were pouring black water. They could not see where the sky ended or the plane began. The light at the ranch house burned a steady spark through the rain. Fred drew Thea's arm through his and they struck off toward the light. They could not see each other and the rain at their backs seemed to drive them alone. They kept laughing as they stumbled over turfs of grass or stepped into slippery pools. They were delighted with each other and with the adventure which laid behind them. I can't even see the whites of your eyes Thea but I'd know who was here stepping out with me anywhere. Part coyote you are by the feel of you. When you make up your mind to jump you jump my gracious. What's the matter with your hand? Cactus spines. Didn't I tell you when I grabbed the cactus? I thought it was a root. Are we going straight? I don't know, somewhere near it I think. I'm very comfortable aren't you? You are warm except your cheeks. How funny they are when they are wet. Still you always feel like you. I like this. I could walk to Flagstaff. It's fun not being able to see anything. I feel sure of you when I can't see you. Will you run away with me? Thea laughed. I won't run far tonight. I'll think about it. Look Fred, there's somebody coming. Henry with his lantern. Good enough. Hello, hello. Fred shouted. The moving light bobbed toward them. In half an hour Thea was in her big feather bed, drinking hot lentil soup, and almost before the soup was swallowed, she was asleep. End of part 4, sections 6 and 7, recording by Sherping Lin.