Mr. Kronborg was too fond of his ease and too
sensible to worry his children much about religion.
He was more sincere than many preachers, but when he
spoke to his family about matters of conduct it was usually
with a regard for keeping up appearances. The church and
church work were discussed in the family like the routine
of any other business. Sunday was the hard day of the
week with them, just as Saturday was the busy day with
the merchants on Main Street. Revivals were seasons of
extra work and pressure, just as threshing-time was on the
farms. Visiting elders had to be lodged and cooked for,
the folding-bed in the parlor was let down, and Mrs.
Kronborg had to work in the kitchen all day long and
attend the night meetings.
During one of these revivals Thea's sister Anna professed
religion with, as Mrs. Kronborg said, "a good deal of
fluster." While Anna was going up to the mourners' bench
nightly and asking for the prayers of the congregation, she
disseminated general gloom throughout the household, and
after she joined the church she took on an air of "set-apart-
ness" that was extremely trying to her brothers and her
sister, though they realized that Anna's sanctimoniousness
was perhaps a good thing for their father. A preacher ought
to have one child who did more than merely acquiesce in
religious observances, and Thea and the boys were glad
enough that it was Anna and not one of themselves who
assumed this obligation.
"Anna, she's American," Mrs. Kronborg used to say.
The Scandinavian mould of countenance, more or less
marked in each of the other children, was scarcely dis-
cernible in her, and she looked enough like other Moon-
stone girls to be thought pretty. Anna's nature was con-
ventional, like her face. Her position as the minister's
eldest daughter was important to her, and she tried to
live up to it. She read sentimental religious story-books
and emulated the spiritual struggles and magnanimous
behavior of their persecuted heroines. Everything had to
be interpreted for Anna. Her opinions about the small-
est and most commonplace things were gleaned from the
Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons and
Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attrac-
tive to her in its natural state--indeed, scarcely anything
was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some
authority. Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love,
marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular
quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies
of human living. She discussed all these subjects with other
Methodist girls of her age. They would spend hours, for
instance, in deciding what they would or would not toler-
ate in a suitor or a husband, and the frailties of masculine
nature were too often a subject of discussion among them.
In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except
where her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious,
with no graver fault than priggishness; but her mind had
really shocking habits of classification. The wickedness of
Denver and of Chicago, and even of Moonstone, occupied
her thoughts too much. She had none of the delicacy that
goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy
curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.
Thea, and all Thea's ways and friends, seemed indecor-
ous to Anna. She not only felt a grave social discrimination
against the Mexicans; she could not forget that Spanish
Johnny was a drunkard and that "nobody knew what he
did when he ran away from home." Thea pretended, of
course, that she liked the Mexicans because they were
fond of music; but every one knew that music was no-
thing very real, and that it did not matter in a girl's re-
lations with people. What was real, then, and what did
matter? Poor Anna!
Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of
steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he
was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor
with brass buttons on his coat. On the whole, she won-
dered what such an exemplary young man found to like in
Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his
position in Moonstone, but she KNEW he had kissed the
Mexican barytone's pretty daughter, and she had a whole
DOSSIER of evidence about his behavior in his hours of relax-
ation in Denver. He was "fast," and it was because he was
"fast" that Thea liked him. Thea always liked that kind
of people. Dr. Archie's whole manner with Thea, Anna
often told her mother, was too free. He was always putting
his hand on Thea's head, or holding her hand while he
laughed and looked down at her. The kindlier manifesta-
tion of human nature (about which Anna sang and talked,
in the interests of which she went to conventions and wore
white ribbons) were never realities to her after all. She did
not believe in them. It was only in attitudes of protest or
reproof, clinging to the cross, that human beings could be
even temporarily decent.
Preacher Kronborg's secret convictions were very much
like Anna's. He believed that his wife was absolutely good,
but there was not a man or woman in his congregation
whom he trusted all the way.
Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find
something to admire in almost any human conduct that
was positive and energetic. She could always be taken
in by the stories of tramps and runaway boys. She went
to the circus and admired the bareback riders, who were
"likely good enough women in their way." She admired
Dr. Archie's fine physique and well-cut clothes as much
as Thea did, and said she "felt it was a privilege to be
handled by such a gentleman when she was sick."
Soon after Anna became a church member she began to
remonstrate with Thea about practicing--playing "secu-
lar music"--on Sunday. One Sunday the dispute in the
parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in
the kitchen. She listened judicially and told Anna to read
the chapter about how Naaman the leper was permitted
to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Thea went back to
the piano, and Anna lingered to say that, since she was in
the right, her mother should have supported her.
"No," said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, "I can't
see it that way, Anna. I never forced you to practice, and
I don't see as I should keep Thea from it. I like to hear her,
and I guess your father does. You and Thea will likely fol-
low different lines, and I don't see as I'm called upon to
bring you up alike."
Anna looked meek and abused. "Of course all the church
people must hear her. Ours is the only noisy house on this
street. You hear what she's playing now, don't you?"
Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. "Yes;
it's the Blue Danube waltzes. I'm familiar with 'em. If
any of the church people come at you, you just send 'em
to me. I ain't afraid to speak out on occasion, and I
wouldn't mind one bit telling the Ladies' Aid a few things
about standard composers." Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and
added thoughtfully, "No, I wouldn't mind that one bit."
Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a
week, and Mrs. Kronborg suspected that she held a larger
place than usual in her daughter's prayers; but that was
another thing she didn't mind.
Although revivals were merely a part of the year's work,
like examination week at school, and although Anna's
piety impressed her very little, a time came when Thea was
perplexed about religion. A scourge of typhoid broke out
in Moonstone and several of Thea's schoolmates died of
it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the
ground, and wondered a good deal about them. But a
certain grim incident, which caused the epidemic, troubled
her even more than the death of her friends.
Early in July, soon after Thea's fifteenth birthday, a
particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone
in an empty box car. Thea was sitting in the hammock in
the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from
the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking
under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with
rusty screening nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry
face covered with black hair. It was just before supper-
time when he came along, and the street smelled of fried
potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing
the air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked
over the fence. She hoped he would not stop at their gate,
for her mother never turned any one away, and this was
the dirtiest and most utterly wretched-looking tramp she
had ever seen. There was a terrible odor about him, too.
She caught it even at that distance, and put her handker-
chief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she
knew that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled
a little faster.
A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped
in an empty shack over on the east edge of town, beside
the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable sort of show
there. He told the boys who went to see what he was doing,
that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained
a filthy clown's suit, and his box held half a dozen rattle-
snakes.
Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to
get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an
accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons. There
she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in
the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the
sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--
and his eyes wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in
and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him,
and he panted to the tune of "Marching through Georgia."
After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp ex-
hibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now
pass the hat, and that when the onlookers had contributed
the sum of one dollar, he would eat "one of these living
reptiles." The crowd began to cough and murmur, and the
saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested the
wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried
him away to the calaboose.
The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,--an old hut
with a barred window and a padlock on the door. The
tramp was utterly filthy and there was no way to give him
a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake vagrants,
so after the constable had detained the tramp for twenty-
four hours, he released him and told him to "get out of
town, and get quick." The fellow's rattlesnakes had been
killed by the saloon keeper. He hid in a box car in the
freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the next
station, but he was found and put out. After that he was
seen no more. He had disappeared and left no trace except
an ugly, stupid word, chalked on the black paint of the
seventy-five-foot standpipe which was the reservoir for the
Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another
tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to
the English officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a
comment on life which the defeated, along the hard roads
of the world, sometimes bawl at the victorious.
A week after the tramp excitement had passed over,
the city water began to smell and to taste. The Kron-
borgs had a well in their back yard and did not use city
water, but they heard the complaints of their neighbors.
At first people said that the town well was full of rot-
ting cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-
station convinced the mayor that the water left the well
untainted. Mayors reason slowly, but, the well being
eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the
standpipe--there was no other track for it to go in.
The standpipe amply rewarded investigation. The tramp
had got even with Moonstone. He had climbed the
standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into
seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and
roll of ticking. The city council had a mild panic and
passed a new ordinance about tramps. But the fever had
already broken out, and several adults and half a dozen
children died of it.
Thea had always found everything that happened in
Moonstone exciting, disasters particularly so. It was grat-
ifying to read sensational Moonstone items in the Denver
paper. But she wished she had not chanced to see the
tramp as he came into town that evening, sniffing the
supper-laden air. His face remained unpleasantly clear in
her memory, and her mind struggled with the problem of
his behavior as if it were a hard page in arithmetic. Even
when she was practicing, the drama of the tramp kept
going on in the back of her head, and she was constantly
trying to make herself realize what pitch of hatred or
despair could drive a man to do such a hideous thing. She
kept seeing him in his bedraggled clown suit, the white
paint on his roughly shaven face, playing his accordion
before the saloon. She had noticed his lean body, his
high, bald forehead that sloped back like a curved metal
lid. How could people fall so far out of fortune? She tried
to talk to Ray Kennedy about her perplexity, but Ray
would not discuss things of that sort with her. It was in
his sentimental conception of women that they should be
deeply religious, though men were at liberty to doubt and
finally to deny. A picture called "The Soul Awakened,"
popular in Moonstone parlors, pretty well interpreted
Ray's idea of woman's spiritual nature.
One evening when she was haunted by the figure of the
tramp, Thea went up to Dr. Archie's office. She found him
sewing up two bad gashes in the face of a little boy who
had been kicked by a mule. After the boy had been ban-
daged and sent away with his father, Thea helped the doc-
tor wash and put away the surgical instruments. Then
she dropped into her accustomed seat beside his desk
and began to talk about the tramp. Her eyes were hard
and green with excitement, the doctor noticed.
"It seems to me, Dr. Archie, that the whole town's to
blame. I'm to blame, myself. I know he saw me hold my
nose when he went by. Father's to blame. If he believes
the Bible, he ought to have gone to the calaboose and
cleaned that man up and taken care of him. That's what
I can't understand; do people believe the Bible, or don't
they? If the next life is all that matters, and we're put
here to get ready for it, then why do we try to make money,
or learn things, or have a good time? There's not one
person in Moonstone that really lives the way the New
Testament says. Does it matter, or don't it?"
Dr. Archie swung round in his chair and looked at her,
honestly and leniently. "Well, Thea, it seems to me like
this. Every people has had its religion. All religions are
good, and all are pretty much alike. But I don't see how we
could live up to them in the sense you mean. I've thought
about it a good deal, and I can't help feeling that while we
are in this world we have to live for the best things of this
world, and those things are material and positive. Now,
most religions are passive, and they tell us chiefly what we
should not do." The doctor moved restlessly, and his eyes
hunted for something along the opposite wall: "See here,
my girl, take out the years of early childhood and the time
we spend in sleep and dull old age, and we only have about
twenty able, waking years. That's not long enough to get
acquainted with half the fine things that have been done
in the world, much less to do anything ourselves. I think
we ought to keep the Commandments and help other
people all we can; but the main thing is to live those
twenty splendid years; to do all we can and enjoy all we
can."
Dr. Archie met his little friend's searching gaze, the look
of acute inquiry which always touched him.
"But poor fellows like that tramp--" she hesitated and
wrinkled her forehead.
The doctor leaned forward and put his hand protect-
ingly over hers, which lay clenched on the green felt desk-
top. "Ugly accidents happen, Thea; always have and
always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile
and forgotten. They don't leave any lasting scar in the
world, and they don't affect the future. The things that
last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and
do something, they really count." He saw tears on her
cheeks, and he remembered that he had never seen her cry
before, not even when she crushed her finger when she was
little. He rose and walked to the window, came back and
sat down on the edge of his chair.
"Forget the tramp, Thea. This is a great big world, and
I want you to get about and see it all. You're going to
Chicago some day, and do something with that fine voice
of yours. You're going to be a number one musician and
make us proud of you. Take Mary Anderson, now; even the
tramps are proud of her. There isn't a tramp along the `Q'
system who hasn't heard of her. We all like people who
do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid."
They had a long talk. Thea felt that Dr. Archie had
never let himself out to her so much before. It was the
most grown-up conversation she had ever had with him.
She left his office happy, flattered and stimulated. She ran
for a long while about the white, moonlit streets, looking
up at the stars and the bluish night, at the quiet houses
sunk in black shade, the glittering sand hills. She loved
the familiar trees, and the people in those little houses, and
she loved the unknown world beyond Denver. She felt as
if she were being pulled in two, between the desire to go
away forever and the desire to stay forever. She had only
twenty years--no time to lose.
Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office
with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until
she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves;
when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were
spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was
not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside
her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating
with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life
rushed in upon her through that window--or so it seemed.
In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from with-
out. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was
not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one
which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor
and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg
learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the
Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one
passion and four walls.
Read next: PART I - FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD#Chapter 19
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