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

little verses musically, like a song, and the entreaty of the flowers was even softer than the rest, as the shy speech of flowers might be, and she ended with the voice suspended, almost with a rising inflection. It was a nature-voice, Wunsch told himself, breathed from the creature and apart from language, like the sound of the wind in the trees, or the murmur of water.

“What is it the flowers mean when they ask him not to be harsh to their sister, eh?” he asked, looking down at her curiously and wrinkling his dull red forehead.

Thea glanced at him in surprise. “I suppose he thinks they are asking him not to be harsh to his sweetheart⁠—or some girl they remind him of.”

“And why trauriger, blasser Mann?”

They had come back to the grape arbor, and Thea picked out a sunny place on the bench, where a tortoiseshell cat was stretched at full length. She sat down, bending over the cat and teasing his whiskers. “Because he had been awake all night, thinking about her, wasn’t it? Maybe that was why he was up so early.”

Wunsch shrugged his shoulders. “If he think about her all night already, why do you say the flowers remind him?”

Thea looked up at him in perplexity. A flash of comprehension lit her face and she smiled eagerly. “Oh, I didn’t mean ‘remind’ in that way! I didn’t mean they brought her to his mind! I meant it was only when he came out in the morning, that she seemed to him like that⁠—like one of the flowers.”

“And before he came out, how did she seem?”

This time it was Thea who shrugged her shoulders. The warm smile left her face. She lifted her eyebrows in annoyance and looked off at the sand hills.

Wunsch persisted. “Why you not answer me?”

“Because it would be silly. You are just trying to make me say things. It spoils things to ask questions.”

Wunsch bowed mockingly; his smile was disagreeable. Suddenly his face grew grave, grew fierce, indeed. He pulled himself up from his clumsy stoop and folded his arms. “But it is necessary to know if you know some things. Some things cannot be taught. If you not know in the beginning, you not know in the end. For a singer there must be something in the inside from the beginning. I shall not be long in this place, may‑be, and I like to know. Yes”⁠—he ground his heel in the gravel⁠—“yes, when you are barely six, you must know that already. That is the beginning of all things; der Geist, die Phantasie. It must be in the baby, when it makes its first cry, like der Rhythmus, or it is not to be. You have some voice already, and if in the beginning, when you are with things-to-play, you know that what you will not tell me, then you can learn to sing, may‑be.”

Wunsch began to pace the arbor, rubbing his hands together. The dark flush of his face had spread up under the iron-gray bristles on his head. He was talking to himself, not to Thea. Insidious power of the linden bloom! “Oh, much you can learn! Aber nicht die Americanischen Fräulein. They have nothing inside them,” striking his chest with both fists. “They are like the ones in the Märchen, a grinning face and hollow in the insides. Something they can learn, oh, yes, may‑be! But the secret⁠—what make the rose to red, the sky to blue, the man to love⁠—in der Brust, in der Brust it is, und ohne dieses giebt es keine Kunst, giebt es keine Kunst!” He threw up his square hand and shook it, all the fingers apart and wagging. Purple and breathless he went out of the arbor and into the house, without saying goodbye. These outbursts frightened Wunsch. They were always harbingers of ill.

Thea got her music-book and stole quietly out of the garden. She did not go home, but wandered off into the sand dunes, where the prickly pear was in blossom and the green lizards were racing each other in the glittering light. She was shaken by a passionate excitement. She did not altogether understand what Wunsch was talking about; and yet, in a way she knew. She knew, of course, that there was something about her that was different. But it was more like a friendly spirit than like anything that was a part of herself. She thought everything to it, and it answered her; happiness consisted of that backward and forward movement of herself. The something came and went, she never knew how. Sometimes she hunted for it and could not find it; again, she lifted her eyes from a book, or stepped out of doors, or wakened in the morning, and it was there⁠—under her cheek, it usually seemed to be, or over her breast⁠—a kind of warm sureness. And when it was there, everything was more interesting and beautiful, even people. When this companion was with her, she could get the most wonderful things out of Spanish Johnny, or Wunsch, or Dr. Archie.

On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly-pear blossoms with their thousand stamens. She looked at the sand hills until she wished she were a sand hill. And yet she knew that she was going to leave them all behind some day. They would be changing all day long, yellow and purple and lavender, and she would not be there. From that day on, she felt there was a secret between her and Wunsch. Together they had lifted a lid, pulled out a drawer, and looked at something. They hid it away and never spoke of what they had seen; but neither of them forgot it.

XII

One July night, when the moon was full, Dr. Archie was coming up from the depot, restless and discontented,