One July night, when the moon was full, Dr. Archie
was coming up from the depot, restless and discon-
tented, wishing there were something to do. He carried
his straw hat in his hand, and kept brushing his hair back
from his forehead with a purposeless, unsatisfied gesture.
After he passed Uncle Billy Beemer's cottonwood grove,
the sidewalk ran out of the shadow into the white moon-
light and crossed the sand gully on high posts, like a bridge.
As the doctor approached this trestle, he saw a white figure,
and recognized Thea Kronborg. He quickened his pace and
she came to meet him.
"What are you doing out so late, my girl?" he asked as
he took her hand.
"Oh, I don't know. What do people go to bed so early
for? I'd like to run along before the houses and screech at
them. Isn't it glorious out here?"
The young doctor gave a melancholy laugh and pressed
her hand.
"Think of it," Thea snorted impatiently. "Nobody up
but us and the rabbits! 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. There was no wind, and no sound
but the wheezing of an engine down on the tracks.
"Well, we may as well watch the rabbits." Dr. Archie
sat down on the sidewalk and let his feet hang over the
edge. He pulled out a smooth linen handkerchief that
smelled of German cologne water. "Well, how goes it?
Working hard? You must know about all Wunsch can
teach you by this time."
Thea shook her head. "Oh, no, I don't, Dr. Archie.
He's hard to get at, but he's been a real musician in his
time. Mother says she believes he's forgotten more than
the music-teachers down in Denver ever knew."
"I'm afraid he won't be around here much longer," said
Dr. Archie. "He's been making a tank of himself lately.
He'll be pulling his freight one of these days. That's the
way they do, you know. I'll be sorry on your account."
He paused and ran his fresh handkerchief over his face.
"What the deuce are we all here for anyway, Thea?" he
said abruptly.
"On earth, you mean?" Thea asked in a low voice.
"Well, primarily, yes. But secondarily, why are we in
Moonstone? It isn't as if we'd been born here. You were,
but Wunsch wasn't, and I wasn't. I suppose I'm here
because I married as soon as I got out of medical school and
had to get a practice quick. If you hurry things, you always
get left in the end. 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. But the rest of us are here just because
it's the end of a run and the engine has to have a drink.
Some day I'll get up and find my hair turning gray, and
I'll have nothing to show for it."
Thea slid closer to him and caught his arm. "No, no.
I won't let you get gray. You've got to stay young for me.
I'm getting young now, too."
Archie laughed. "Getting?"
"Yes. People aren't young when they're children. Look
at Thor, now; he's just a little old man. But Gus has a
sweetheart, and he's young!"
"Something in that!" Dr. Archie patted her head, and
then felt the shape of her skull gently, with the tips of his
fingers. "When you were little, Thea, I used always to be
curious about the shape of your head. You seemed to have
more inside it than most youngsters. I haven't examined
it for a long time. Seems to be the usual shape, but uncom-
monly hard, some how. What are you going to do with
yourself, anyway?"
"I don't know."
"Honest, now?" He lifted her chin and looked into her
eyes.
Thea laughed and edged away from him.
"You've got something up your sleeve, haven't you?
Anything you like; only don't marry and settle down here
without giving yourself a chance, will you?"
"Not much. See, there's another rabbit!"
"That's all right about the rabbits, but I don't want
you to get tied up. Remember that."
Thea nodded. "Be nice to Wunsch, then. I don't know
what I'd do if he went away."
"You've got older friends than Wunsch here, Thea."
"I know." Thea spoke seriously and looked up at the
moon, propping her chin on her hand. "But Wunsch is the
only one that can teach me what I want to know. I've got
to learn to do something well, and that's the thing I can
do best."
"Do you want to be a music-teacher?"
"Maybe, but I want to be a good one. I'd like to go to
Germany to study, some day. Wunsch says that's the best
place,--the only place you can really learn." Thea hesi-
tated and then went on nervously, "I've got a book that
says so, too. It's called `My Musical Memories.' It made me
want to go to Germany even before Wunsch said anything.
Of course it's a secret. You're the first one I've told."
Dr. Archie smiled indulgently. "That's a long way off.
Is that what you've got in your hard noddle?" He put his
hand on her hair, but this time she shook him off.
"No, I don't think much about it. But you talk about
going, and a body has to have something to go TO!"
"That's so." Dr. Archie sighed. "You're lucky if you
have. Poor Wunsch, now, he hasn't. What do such fellows
come out here for? He's been asking me about my mining
stock, and about mining towns. What would he do in a
mining town? He wouldn't know a piece of ore if he saw
one. He's got nothing to sell that a mining town wants to
buy. Why don't those old fellows stay at home? We won't
need them for another hundred years. An engine wiper
can get a job, but a piano player! Such people can't make
good."
"My grandfather Alstrom was a musician, and he made
good."
Dr. Archie chuckled. "Oh, a Swede can make good any-
where, at anything! You've got that in your favor, miss.
Come, you must be getting home."
Thea rose. "Yes, I used to be ashamed of being a Swede,
but I'm not any more. Swedes are kind of common, but I
think it's better to be SOMETHING."
"It surely is! How tall you are getting. You come above
my shoulder now."
"I'll keep on growing, don't you think? I particularly
want to be tall. Yes, I guess I must go home. I wish
there'd be a fire."
"A fire?"
"Yes, so the fire-bell would ring and the roundhouse
whistle would blow, and everybody would come running
out. Sometime I'm going to ring the fire-bell myself and
stir them all up."
"You'd be arrested."
"Well, that would be better than going to bed."
"I'll have to lend you some more books."
Thea shook herself impatiently. "I can't read every
night."
Dr. Archie gave one of his low, sympathetic chuckles as
he opened the gate for her. "You're beginning to grow up,
that's what's the matter with you. I'll have to keep an eye
on you. Now you'll have to say good-night to the moon."
"No, I won't. I sleep on the floor now, right in the moon-
light. My window comes down to the floor, and I can look
at the sky all night."
She shot round the house to the kitchen door, and Dr.
Archie watched her disappear with a sigh. He thought of
the hard, mean, frizzy little woman who kept his house
for him; once the belle of a Michigan town, now dry and
withered up at thirty. "If I had a daughter like Thea to
watch," he reflected, "I wouldn't mind anything. I won-
der if all of my life's going to be a mistake just because I
made a big one then? Hardly seems fair."
Howard Archie was "respected" rather than popular in
Moonstone. Everyone recognized that he was a good
physician, and a progressive Western town likes to be able
to point to a handsome, well-set-up, well-dressed man
among its citizens. But a great many people thought
Archie "distant," and they were right. He had the uneasy
manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who
has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are
in some sense his own kind. He knew that every one was
curious about his wife, that she played a sort of character
part in Moonstone, and that people made fun of her, not
very delicately. Her own friends--most of them women
who were distasteful to Archie--liked to ask her to con-
tribute to church charities, just to see how mean she could
be. The little, lop-sided cake at the church supper, the
cheapest pincushion, the skimpiest apron at the bazaar,
were always Mrs. Archie's contribution.
All this hurt the doctor's pride. But if there was one
thing he had learned, it was that there was no changing
Belle's nature. He had married a mean woman; and he
must accept the consequences. Even in Colorado he
would have had no pretext for divorce, and, to do him jus-
tice, he had never thought of such a thing. The tenets of
the Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though
he had long ceased to believe in them, still influenced his
conduct and his conception of propriety. To him there was
something vulgar about divorce. A divorced man was a
disgraced man; at least, he had exhibited his hurt, and made
it a matter for common gossip. Respectability was so
necessary to Archie that he was willing to pay a high price
for it. As long as he could keep up a decent exterior, he
could manage to get on; and if he could have concealed
his wife's littleness from all his friends, he would scarcely
have complained. He was more afraid of pity than he was
of any unhappiness. Had there been another woman for
whom he cared greatly, he might have had plenty of cour-
age; but he was not likely to meet such a woman in Moon-
stone.
There was a puzzling timidity in Archie's make-up. The
thing that held his shoulders stiff, that made him resort to a
mirthless little laugh when he was talking to dull people,
that made him sometimes stumble over rugs and carpets,
had its counterpart in his mind. He had not the courage
to be an honest thinker. He could comfort himself by eva-
sions and compromises. He consoled himself for his own
marriage by telling himself that other people's were not
much better. In his work he saw pretty deeply into marital
relations in Moonstone, and he could honestly say that
there were not many of his friends whom he envied. Their
wives seemed to suit them well enough, but they would
never have suited him.
Although Dr. Archie could not bring himself to regard
marriage merely as a social contract, but looked upon it as
somehow made sacred by a church in which he did not be-
lieve,--as a physician he knew that a young man whose
marriage is merely nominal must yet go on living his life.
When he went to Denver or to Chicago, he drifted about in
careless company where gayety and good-humor can be
bought, not because he had any taste for such society, but
because he honestly believed that anything was better
than divorce. He often told himself that "hanging and
wiving go by destiny." If wiving went badly with a man,
--and it did oftener than not,--then he must do the best
he could to keep up appearances and help the tradition
of domestic happiness along. The Moonstone gossips, as-
sembled in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, often
discussed Dr. Archie's politeness to his wife, and his pleas-
ant manner of speaking about her. "Nobody has ever got
a thing out of him yet," they agreed. And it was certainly
not because no one had ever tried.
When he was down in Denver, feeling a little jolly,
Archie could forget how unhappy he was at home, and could
even make himself believe that he missed his wife. He
always bought her presents, and would have liked to send
her flowers if she had not repeatedly told him never to send
her anything but bulbs,--which did not appeal to him in
his expansive moments. At the Denver Athletic Club ban-
quets, or at dinner with his colleagues at the Brown Palace
Hotel, he sometimes spoke sentimentally about "little
Mrs. Archie," and he always drank the toast "to our wives,
God bless them!" with gusto.
The determining factor about Dr. Archie was that he
was romantic. He had married Belle White because he was
romantic--too romantic to know anything about women,
except what he wished them to be, or to repulse a pretty
girl who had set her cap for him. At medical school, though
he was a rather wild boy in behavior, he had always dis-
liked coarse jokes and vulgar stories. In his old Flint's
Physiology there was still a poem he had pasted there when
he was a student; some verses by Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes about the ideals of the medical profession. After
so much and such disillusioning experience with it, he still
had a romantic feeling about the human body; a sense that
finer things dwelt in it than could be explained by anatomy.
He never jested about birth or death or marriage, and did
not like to hear other doctors do it. He was a good nurse,
and had a reverence for the bodies of women and children.
When he was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then
his constraint and self-consciousness fell away from him.
He was easy, gentle, competent, master of himself and of
other people. Then the idealist in him was not afraid of
being discovered and ridiculed.
In his tastes, too, the doctor was romantic. Though he
read Balzac all the year through, he still enjoyed the
Waverley Novels as much as when he had first come upon
them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his grandfather's
library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and
holidays, because it brought back the pleasures of his boy-
hood so vividly. He liked Scott's women. Constance de
Beverley and the minstrel girl in "The Fair Maid of
Perth," not the Duchesse de Langeais, were his heroines.
But better than anything that ever got from the heart of
a man into printer's ink, he loved the poetry of Robert
Burns. "Death and Dr. Hornbook" and "The Jolly Beg-
gars," Burns's "Reply to his Tailor," he often read aloud to
himself in his office, late at night, after a glass of hot toddy.
He used to read "Tam o'Shanter" to Thea Kronborg, and
he got her some of the songs, set to the old airs for which
they were written. He loved to hear her sing them. Some-
times when she sang, "Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast,"
the doctor and even Mr. Kronborg joined in. Thea never
minded if people could not sing; she directed them with
her head and somehow carried them along. When her
father got off the pitch she let her own voice out and
covered him.
Read next: PART I - FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD#Chapter 13
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