THEA had a superstitious feeling about the potsherds,
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 hid 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 deco-
rated. 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 a 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 geo-
metrical patterns. One day, on a fragment of a shallow
bowl, she found a crested serpent's head, painted in red
on terra-cotta. 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. It brought her centuries nearer to these peo-
ple 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 help 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 the beginnings of
what was to come. These potsherds were like fetters that
bound one to a long chain of human endeavor.
Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea
now, but she herself seemed older. She had never been
alone for so long before, or thought so much. 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. Her mind was like a ragbag 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 Ottenburg ranch for two
months, she got a letter from Fred announcing that he
"might be along 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 any one,
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 any one else in the world. There was Harsanyi, of
course--but Harsanyi was always tired. Just now, and
here, she wanted some one 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 singing 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
sing. When she felt so keenly alive, lying on that insensi-
ble shelf of stone, when her body bounded like a rubber ball
away from its hardness, then she could sing. 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 influences, 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 a 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 endanger 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 plough under the
rod 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 it 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.
Read next: PART IV. THE ANCIENT PEOPLE#Chapter 5
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