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

store. Her business methods are informal, and she would never come out even at the end of the year, if she did not receive a draft for a good round sum from her niece at Christmas time. The arrival of this draft always renews the discussion as to what Thea would do for her aunt if she really did the right thing. Most of the Moonstone people think Thea ought to take Tillie to New York and keep her as a companion. While they are feeling sorry for Tillie because she does not live at the Plaza, Tillie is trying not to hurt their feelings by showing too plainly how much she realizes the superiority of her position. She tries to be modest when she complains to the postmaster that her New York paper is more than three days late. It means enough, surely, on the face of it, that she is the only person in Moonstone who takes a New York paper or who has any reason for taking one. A foolish young girl, Tillie lived in the splendid sorrows of “Wanda” and “Strathmore”; a foolish old girl, she lives in her niece’s triumphs. As she often says, she just missed going on the stage herself.

That night after the sociable, as Tillie tripped home with a crowd of noisy boys and girls, she was perhaps a shade troubled. The twin’s question rather lingered in her ears. Did she, perhaps, insist too much on that thousand dollars? Surely, people didn’t for a minute think it was the money she cared about? As for that, Tillie tossed her head, she didn’t care a rap. They must understand that this money was different.

When the laughing little group that brought her home had gone weaving down the sidewalk through the leafy shadows and had disappeared, Tillie brought out a rocking chair and sat down on her porch. On glorious, soft summer nights like this, when the moon is opulent and full, the day submerged and forgotten, she loves to sit there behind her rose-vine and let her fancy wander where it will. If you chanced to be passing down that Moonstone street and saw that alert white figure rocking there behind the screen of roses and lingering late into the night, you might feel sorry for her, and how mistaken you would be! Tillie lives in a little magic world, full of secret satisfactions. Thea Kronborg has given much noble pleasure to a world that needs all it can get, but to no individual has she given more than to her queer old aunt in Moonstone. The legend of Kronborg, the artist, fills Tillie’s life; she feels rich and exalted in it. What delightful things happen in her mind as she sits there rocking! She goes back to those early days of sand and sun, when Thea was a child and Tillie was herself, so it seems to her, “young.” When she used to hurry to church to hear Mr. Kronborg’s wonderful sermons, and when Thea used to stand up by the organ of a bright Sunday morning and sing “Come, Ye Disconsolate.” Or she thinks about that wonderful time when the Metropolitan Opera Company sang a week’s engagement in Kansas City, and Thea sent for her and had her stay with her at the Coates House and go to every performance at Convention Hall. Thea let Tillie go through her costume trunks and try on her wigs and jewels. And the kindness of Mr. Ottenburg! When Thea dined in her own room, he went down to dinner with Tillie, and never looked bored or absentminded when she chattered. He took her to the hall the first time Thea sang there, and sat in the box with her and helped her through Lohengrin. After the first act, when Tillie turned tearful eyes to him and burst out, “I don’t care, she always seemed grand like that, even when she was a girl. I expect I’m crazy, but she just seems to me full of all them old times!”⁠—Ottenburg was so sympathetic and patted her hand and said, “But that’s just what she is, full of the old times, and you are a wise woman to see it.” Yes, he said that to her. Tillie often wondered how she had been able to bear it when Thea came down the stairs in the wedding robe embroidered in silver, with a train so long it took six women to carry it.

Tillie had lived fifty-odd years for that week, but she got it, and no miracle was ever more miraculous than that. When she used to be working in the fields on her father’s Minnesota farm, she couldn’t help believing that she would some day have to do with the “wonderful,” though her chances for it had then looked so slender.

The morning after the sociable, Tillie, curled up in bed, was roused by the rattle of the milk cart down the street. Then a neighbor boy came down the sidewalk outside her window, singing “Casey Jones” as if he hadn’t a care in the world. By this time Tillie was wide awake. The twin’s question, and the subsequent laughter, came back with a faint twinge. Tillie knew she was shortsighted about facts, but this time⁠—Why, there were her scrapbooks, full of newspaper and magazine articles about Thea, and halftone cuts, snapshots of her on land and sea, and photographs of her in all her parts. There, in her parlor, was the phonograph that had come from Mr. Ottenburg last June, on Thea’s birthday; she had only to go in there and turn it on, and let Thea speak for herself. Tillie finished brushing her white hair and laughed as she gave it a smart turn and brought it into her usual French twist. If Moonstone doubted, she had evidence enough: in black and white, in figures and photographs, evidence in hair lines on metal disks. For one who had so often seen two and two as making six,