The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather [rosie project .txt] 📗

where he met her, taking in the light, lively sweep of her hair, her clear green eyes and her throat that came up strong and dazzlingly white from her green velvet gown. The chin was as lovely as ever, the cheeks as smooth. All the lines of last night had disappeared. Only at the outer corners of her eyes, between the eye and the temple, were the faintest indications of a future attack⁠—mere kitten scratches that playfully hinted where one day the cat would claw her. He studied her without any embarrassment. Last night everything had been awkward; but now, as he held her hands, a kind of harmony came between them, a reestablishment of confidence.

“After all, Thea⁠—in spite of all, I still know you,” he murmured.

She took his arm and led him up to the young man who was standing beside the piano. “Mr. Landry knows all about you, Dr. Archie. He has known about you for many years.” While the two men shook hands she stood between them, drawing them together by her presence and her glances. “When I first went to Germany, Landry was studying there. He used to be good enough to work with me when I could not afford to have an accompanist for more than two hours a day. We got into the way of working together. He is a singer, too, and has his own career to look after, but he still manages to give me some time. I want you to be friends.” She smiled from one to the other.

The rooms, Archie noticed, full of last night’s flowers, were furnished in light colors, the hotel bleakness of them a little softened by a magnificent Steinway piano, white bookshelves full of books and scores, some drawings of ballet dancers, and the very deep sofa behind the piano.

“Of course,” Archie asked apologetically, “you have seen the papers?”

“Very cordial, aren’t they? They evidently did not expect as much as I did. Elsa is not really in my voice. I can sing the music, but I have to go after it.”

“That is exactly,” the doctor came out boldly, “what Fred Ottenburg said this morning.”

They had remained standing, the three of them, by the piano, where the gray afternoon light was strongest. Thea turned to the doctor with interest. “Is Fred in town? They were from him, then⁠—some flowers that came last night without a card.” She indicated the white lilacs on the window sill. “Yes, he would know, certainly,” she said thoughtfully. “Why don’t we sit down? There will be some tea for you in a minute, Landry. He’s very dependent upon it,” disapprovingly to Archie. “Now tell me, Doctor, did you really have a good time last night, or were you uncomfortable? Did you feel as if I were trying to hold my hat on by my eyebrows?”

He smiled. “I had all kinds of a time. But I had no feeling of that sort. I couldn’t be quite sure that it was you at all. That was why I came up here last night. I felt as if I’d lost you.”

She leaned toward him and brushed his sleeve reassuringly. “Then I didn’t give you an impression of painful struggle? Landry was singing at Weber and Fields’ last night. He didn’t get in until the performance was half over. But I see the Tribune man felt that I was working pretty hard. Did you see that notice, Oliver?”

Dr. Archie looked closely at the redheaded young man for the first time, and met his lively brown eyes, full of a droll, confiding sort of humor. Mr. Landry was not prepossessing. He was undersized and clumsily made, with a red, shiny face and a sharp little nose that looked as if it had been whittled out of wood and was always in the air, on the scent of something. Yet it was this queer little beak, with his eyes, that made his countenance anything of a face at all. From a distance he looked like the groceryman’s delivery boy in a small town. His dress seemed an acknowledgment of his grotesqueness: a short coat, like a little boys’ roundabout, and a vest fantastically sprigged and dotted, over a lavender shirt.

At the sound of a muffled buzz, Mr. Landry sprang up.

“May I answer the telephone for you?” He went to the writing-table and took up the receiver. “Mr. Ottenburg is downstairs,” he said, turning to Thea and holding the mouthpiece against his coat.

“Tell him to come up,” she replied without hesitation. “How long are you going to be in town, Dr. Archie?”

“Oh, several weeks, if you’ll let me stay. I won’t hang around and be a burden to you, but I want to try to get educated up to you, though I expect it’s late to begin.”

Thea rose and touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Well, you’ll never be any younger, will you?”

“I’m not so sure about that,” the doctor replied gallantly.

The maid appeared at the door and announced Mr. Frederick Ottenburg. Fred came in, very much got up, the doctor reflected, as he watched him bending over Thea’s hand. He was still pale and looked somewhat chastened, and the lock of hair that hung down over his forehead was distinctly moist. But his black afternoon coat, his gray tie and gaiters were of a correctness that Dr. Archie could never attain for all the efforts of his faithful slave, Van Deusen, the Denver haberdasher. To be properly up to those tricks, the doctor supposed, you had to learn them young. If he were to buy a silk hat that was the twin of Ottenburg’s, it would be shaggy in a week, and he could never carry it as Fred held his.

Ottenburg had greeted Thea in German, and as she replied in the same language, Archie joined Mr. Landry at the window. “You know Mr. Ottenburg, he tells me?”

Mr. Landry’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, I regularly follow him about, when he’s in town. I would, even if he didn’t send me such wonderful Christmas presents: Russian vodka by the half-dozen!”

Thea called