8. VIII
ONE warm damp June night the Denver Express was
speeding westward across the earthy-smelling plains
of Iowa. The lights in the day-coach were turned low and
the ventilators were open, admitting showers of soot and
dust upon the occupants of the narrow green plush chairs
which were tilted at various angles of discomfort. In each
of these chairs some uncomfortable human being lay drawn
up, or stretched out, or writhing from one position to another.
There were tired men in rumpled shirts, their necks
bare and their suspenders down; old women with their
heads tied up in black handkerchiefs; bedraggled young
women who went to sleep while they were nursing their
babies and forgot to button up their dresses; dirty boys
who added to the general discomfort by taking off their
boots. The brakeman, when he came through at midnight,
sniffed the heavy air disdainfully and looked up at the
ventilators. As he glanced down the double rows of contorted
figures, he saw one pair of eyes that were wide open
and bright, a yellow head that was not overcome by the
stupefying heat and smell in the car. "There's a girl for
you," he thought as he stopped by Thea's chair.
"Like to have the window up a little?" he asked.
Thea smiled up at him, not misunderstanding his friendliness.
"The girl behind me is sick; she can't stand a draft.
What time is it, please?"
He took out his open-faced watch and held it before her
eyes with a knowing look. "In a hurry?" he asked. "I'll
leave the end door open and air you out. Catch a wink;
the time'll go faster."
Thea nodded good-night to him and settled her head
back on her pillow, looking up at the oil lamps. She was
going back to Moonstone for her summer vacation, and
she was sitting up all night in a day-coach because that
seemed such an easy way to save money. At her age discomfort
was a small matter, when one made five dollars a
day by it. She had confidently expected to sleep after the
car got quiet, but in the two chairs behind her were a sick
girl and her mother, and the girl had been coughing steadily
since ten o'clock. They had come from somewhere in
Pennsylvania, and this was their second night on the road.
The mother said they were going to Colorado "for her
daughter's lungs." The daughter was a little older than
Thea, perhaps nineteen, with patient dark eyes and curly
brown hair. She was pretty in spite of being so sooty and
travel-stained. She had put on an ugly figured satine
kimono over her loosened clothes. Thea, when she boarded
the train in Chicago, happened to stop and plant her
heavy telescope on this seat. She had not intended to
remain there, but the sick girl had looked up at her with
an eager smile and said, "Do sit there, miss. I'd so much
rather not have a gentleman in front of me."
After the girl began to cough there were no empty seats
left, and if there had been Thea could scarcely have changed
without hurting her feelings. The mother turned on her
side and went to sleep; she was used to the cough. But the
girl lay wide awake, her eyes fixed on the roof of the car, as
Thea's were. The two girls must have seen very different
things there.
Thea fell to going over her winter in Chicago. It was
only under unusual or uncomfortable conditions like these
that she could keep her mind fixed upon herself or her own
affairs for any length of time. The rapid motion and the
vibration of the wheels under her seemed to give her
thoughts rapidity and clearness. She had taken twenty
very expensive lessons from Madison Bowers, but she did
not yet know what he thought of her or of her ability. He
was different from any man with whom she had ever had
to do. With her other teachers she had felt a personal
relation; but with him she did not. Bowers was a cold,
bitter, avaricious man, but he knew a great deal about
voices. He worked with a voice as if he were in a laboratory,
conducting a series of experiments. He was conscientious
and industrious, even capable of a certain cold fury
when he was working with an interesting voice, but Harsanyi
declared that he had the soul of a shrimp, and could
no more make an artist than a throat specialist could.
Thea realized that he had taught her a great deal in twenty
lessons.
Although she cared so much less for Bowers than for
Harsanyi, Thea was, on the whole, happier since she had
been studying with him than she had been before. She
had always told herself that she studied piano to fit herself
to be a music teacher. But she never asked herself
why she was studying voice. Her voice, more than any
other part of her, had to do with that confidence, that sense
of wholeness and inner well-being that she had felt at moments
ever since she could remember.
Of this feeling Thea had never spoken to any human
being until that day when she told Harsanyi that "there
had always been—something." Hitherto she had felt
but one obligation toward it—secrecy; to protect it even
from herself. She had always believed that by doing all
that was required of her by her family, her teachers, her
pupils, she kept that part of herself from being caught up
in the meshes of common things. She took it for granted
that some day, when she was older, she would know a
great deal more about it. It was as if she had an appointment
to meet the rest of herself sometime, somewhere.
It was moving to meet her and she was moving to meet
it. That meeting awaited her, just as surely as, for the
poor girl in the seat behind her, there awaited a hole in
the earth, already dug.
For Thea, so much had begun with a hole in the earth.
Yes, she reflected, this new part of her life had all begun that
morning when she sat on the clay bank beside Ray Kennedy,
under the flickering shade of the cottonwood tree.
She remembered the way Ray had looked at her that
morning. Why had he cared so much? And Wunsch, and
Dr. Archie, and Spanish Johnny, why had they? It was
something that had to do with her that made them care,
but it was not she. It was something they believed in, but
it was not she. Perhaps each of them concealed another
person in himself, just as she did. Why was it that they
seemed to feel and to hunt for a second person in her and
not in each other? Thea frowned up at the dull lamp in
the roof of the car. What if one's second self could somehow
speak to all these second selves? What if one could
bring them out, as whiskey did Spanish Johnny's? How
deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one
knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was
to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden
things in people responded. Her mother—even her mother
had something of that sort which replied to music.
Thea found herself listening for the coughing behind
her and not hearing it. She turned cautiously and looked
back over the head-rest of her chair. The poor girl had
fallen asleep. Thea looked at her intently. Why was she so
afraid of men? Why did she shrink into herself and avert
her face whenever a man passed her chair? Thea thought
she knew; of course, she knew. How horrible to waste
away like that, in the time when one ought to be growing
fuller and stronger and rounder every day. Suppose there
were such a dark hole open for her, between to-night and
that place where she was to meet herself? Her eyes narrowed.
She put her hand on her breast and felt how
warm it was; and within it there was a full, powerful
pulsation. She smiled—though she was ashamed of it
—with the natural contempt of strength for weakness,
with the sense of physical security which makes the savage
merciless. Nobody could die while they felt like that inside.
The springs there were wound so tight that it would
be a long while before there was any slack in them. The
life in there was rooted deep. She was going to have a few
things before she died. She realized that there were a great
many trains dashing east and west on the face of the continent
that night, and that they all carried young people
who meant to have things. But the difference was that
she was going to get them! That was all. Let people try to
stop her! She glowered at the rows of feckless bodies that
lay sprawled in the chairs. Let them try it once! Along
with the yearning that came from some deep part of her,
that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of
cockiness, a determination to get ahead. Well, there are
passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion
will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed
and beaten under.
Having told herself once more that she meant to grab a
few things, Thea went to sleep.
She was wakened in the morning by the sunlight, which
beat fiercely through the glass of the car window upon her
face. She made herself as clean as she could, and while the
people all about her were getting cold food out of their
lunch-baskets she escaped into the dining-car. Her thrift
did not go to the point of enabling her to carry a lunch-basket. At that early hour there were few people in the
dining-car. The linen was white and fresh, the darkies were
trim and smiling, and the sunlight gleamed pleasantly upon
the silver and the glass water-bottles. On each table there
was a slender vase with a single pink rose in it. When Thea
sat down she looked into her rose and thought it the most
beautiful thing in the world; it was wide open, recklessly
offering its yellow heart, and there were drops of water on
the petals. All the future was in that rose, all that one
would like to be. The flower put her in an absolutely regal
mood. She had a whole pot of coffee, and scrambled eggs
with chopped ham, utterly disregarding the astonishing
price they cost. She had faith enough in what she could
do, she told herself, to have eggs if she wanted them. At
the table opposite her sat a man and his wife and little boy
—Thea classified them as being "from the East." They
spoke in that quick, sure staccato, which Thea, like Ray
Kennedy, pretended to scorn and secretly admired. People
who could use words in that confident way, and who
spoke them elegantly, had a great advantage in life, she
reflected. There were so many words which she could not
pronounce in speech as she had to do in singing. Language
was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it
could give one away. But the most important thing was
that one should not pretend to be what one was not.
When she paid her check she consulted the waiter.
"Waiter, do you suppose I could buy one of those roses?
I'm out of the day-coach, and there is a sick girl in there.
I'd like to take her a cup of coffee and one of those flowers."
The waiter liked nothing better than advising travelers
less sophisticated than himself. He told Thea there were
a few roses left in the icebox and he would get one. He
took the flower and the coffee into the day-coach. Thea
pointed out the girl, but she did not accompany him. She
hated thanks and never received them gracefully. She
stood outside on the platform to get some fresh air into
her lungs. The train was crossing the Platte River now,
and the sunlight was so intense that it seemed to quiver
in little flames on the glittering sandbars, the scrub willows,
and the curling, fretted shallows.
Thea felt that she was coming back to her own land.
She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she "believed
in immigration," and so did Thea believe in it. This earth
seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where
refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance.
The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability
and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries
gave the spirit a wider range. Wire fences might mark
the end of a man's pasture, but they could not shut in his
thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over flat
lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the
larks sang—and one's heart sang there, too. Thea was
glad that this was her country, even if one did not learn to
speak elegantly there. It was, somehow, an honest country,
and there was a new song in that blue air which had
never been sung in the world before. It was hard to tell
about it, for it had nothing to do with words; it was like
the light of the desert at noon, or the smell of the sagebrush
after rain; intangible but powerful. She had the sense of
going back to a friendly soil, whose friendship was somehow
going to strengthen her; a naive, generous country
that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike
power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant
flowers.
As she drew in that glorious air Thea's mind went back
to Ray Kennedy. He, too, had that feeling of empire; as
if all the Southwest really belonged to him because he had
knocked about over it so much, and knew it, as he said,
"like the blisters on his own hands." That feeling, she
reflected, was the real element of companionship between
her and Ray. Now that she was going back to Colorado,
she realized this as she had not done before.
