In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen; Gus and Charley
and Anna first, while the younger children were dressing. Gus was
nineteen and was a clerk in a dry-goods store. Charley, eighteen months
younger, worked in a feed store. They left the house by the kitchen door
at seven o’clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt Tillie get the breakfast
for the younger ones. Without the help of this sister-in-law, Tillie
Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg’s life would have been a hard one. Mrs. Kronborg
often reminded Anna that “no hired help would ever have taken the same
interest.”
Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from a lowly,
ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of Sweden. His
great-grandfather had gone to Norway to work as a farm laborer and had
married a Norwegian girl. This strain of Norwegian blood came out
somewhere in each generation of the Kronborgs. The intemperance of one
of Peter Kronborg’s uncles, and the religious mania of another, had been
alike charged to the Norwegian grandmother. Both Peter Kronborg and his
sister Tillie were more like the Norwegian root of the family than like
the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was strong in Thea, though
in her it took a very different character.
Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl at
thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes—which taste, as Mrs.
Kronborg philosophically said, did nobody any harm. Tillie was always
cheerful, and her tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the day.
She had been cruelly overworked on her father’s Minnesota farm when she
was a young girl, and she had never been so happy as she was now; had
never before, as she said, had such social advantages. She thought her
brother the most important man in Moonstone. She never missed a church
service, and, much to the embarrassment of the children, she always
“spoke a piece” at the Sunday-School concerts. She had a complete set of
“Standard Recitations,” which she conned on Sundays. This morning, when
Thea and her two younger brothers sat down to breakfast, Tillie was
remonstrating with Gunner because he had not learned a recitation
assigned to him for George Washington Day at school. The unmemorized
text lay heavily on Gunner’s conscience as he attacked his buckwheat
cakes and sausage. He knew that Tillie was in the right, and that “when
the day came he would be ashamed of himself.”
“I don’t care,” he muttered, stirring his coffee; “they oughtn’t to make
boys speak. It’s all right for girls. They like to show off.”
“No showing off about it. Boys ought to like to speak up for their
country. And what was the use of your father buying you a new suit, if
you’re not going to take part in anything?”
“That was for Sunday-School. I’d rather wear my old one, anyhow. Why
didn’t they give the piece to Thea?” Gunner grumbled.
Tillie was turning buckwheat cakes at the griddle. “Thea can play and
sing, she don’t need to speak. But you’ve got to know how to do
something, Gunner, that you have. What are you going to do when you git
big and want to git into society, if you can’t do nothing? Everybody’ll
say, ‘Can you sing? Can you play? Can you speak? Then git right out of
society.’ An’ that’s what they’ll say to you, Mr. Gunner.”
Gunner and Alex grinned at Anna, who was preparing her mother’s
breakfast. They never made fun of Tillie, but they understood well
enough that there were subjects upon which her ideas were rather
foolish. When Tillie struck the shallows, Thea was usually prompt in
turning the conversation.
“Will you and Axel let me have your sled at recess?” she asked.
“All the time?” asked Gunner dubiously.
“I’ll work your examples for you to-night, if you do.”
“Oh, all right. There’ll be a lot of ‘em.”
“I don’t mind, I can work ‘em fast. How about yours, Axel?”
Axel was a fat little boy of seven, with pretty, lazy blue eyes. “I
don’t care,” he murmured, buttering his last buckwheat cake without
ambition; “too much trouble to copy ‘em down. Jenny Smiley’ll let me
have hers.”
The boys were to pull Thea to school on their sled, as the snow was
deep. The three set off together. Anna was now in the high school, and
she no longer went with the family party, but walked to school with some
of the older girls who were her friends, and wore a hat, not a hood like
Thea.
IV
“And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!” Those were the closing words of
Thea’s favorite fairy tale, and she thought of them as she ran out into
the world one Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm. She
was going to the Kohlers’ to take her lesson, but she was in no hurry.
It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little
overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with
sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had
just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood
trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery
tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for
everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one
had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The
double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in
which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and
the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their
skin.
Thea had to walk more than a mile to reach the Kohlers’ house, a very
pleasant mile out of town toward the glittering sand hills,—yellow this
morning, with lines of deep violet where the clefts and valleys were.
She followed the sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town;
then took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where the
Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry sand creek,
across which the railroad track ran on a trestle. Beyond that gulch, on
a little rise of ground that faced the open sandy plain, was the
Kohlers’ house, where Professor Wunsch lived. Fritz Kohler was the town
tailor, one of the first settlers. He had moved there, built a little
house and made a garden, when Moonstone was first marked down on the
map. He had three sons, but they now worked on the railroad and were
stationed in distant cities. One of them had gone to work for the Santa
Fe, and lived in New Mexico.
Mrs. Kohler seldom crossed the ravine and went into the town except at
Christmas-time, when she had to buy presents and Christmas cards to send
to her old friends in Freeport, Illinois. As she did not go to church,
she did not possess such a thing as a hat. Year after year she wore the
same red hood in winter and a black sunbonnet in summer. She made her
own dresses; the skirts came barely to her shoe-tops, and were gathered
as full as they could possibly be to the waistband. She preferred men’s
shoes, and usually wore the cast-offs of one of her sons. She had never
learned much English, and her plants and shrubs were her companions. She
lived for her men and her garden. Beside that sand gulch, she had tried
to reproduce a bit of her own village in the Rhine Valley. She hid
herself behind the growth she had fostered, lived under the shade of
what she had planted and watered and pruned. In the blaze of the open
plain she was stupid and blind like an owl. Shade, shade; that was what
she was always planning and making. Behind the high tamarisk hedge, her