by the time thea’s fifteenth birthday came round, she was established as a music teacher in moonstone. the new room had been added to the house early in the spring, and thea had been giving her lessons there since the middle of may. she liked the personal independence which was accorded her as a wage-earner. the family questioned her comings and goings very little. she could go buggy-riding with ray kennedy, for instance, without taking gunner or axel. she could go to spanish johnny’s and sing part songs with the mexicans, and nobody objected.
thea was still under the first excitement of teaching, and was terribly in earnest about it. if a pupil did not get on well, she fumed and fretted. she counted until she was hoarse. she listened to scales in her sleep. wunsch had taught only one pupil seriously, but thea taught twenty. the duller they were, the more furiously she poked and prodded them. with the little girls she was nearly always patient, but with pupils older than herself, she sometimes lost her temper. one of her mistakes was to let herself in for a calling-down from mrs. livery johnson. that lady appeared at the kronborgs’ one morning and announced that she would allow no girl to stamp her foot at her daughter grace. she added that thea’s bad manners with the older girls were being talked about all over town, and that if her temper did not speedily improve she would lose all her advanced pupils. thea was frightened. she felt she could never bear the disgrace, if such a thing happened. besides, what would her father say, after he had gone to the expense of building an addition to the house? mrs. johnson demanded an apology to grace. thea said she was willing to make it. mrs. johnson said that hereafter, since she had taken lessons of the best piano teacher in grinnell, iowa, she herself would decide what pieces grace should study. thea readily consented to that, and mrs. johnson rustled away to tell a neighbor woman that thea kronborg could be meek enough when you went at her right.
thea was telling ray about this unpleasant encounter as they were driving out to the sand hills the next sunday.
“she was stuffing you, all right, thee,” ray reassured her. “there’s no general dissatisfaction among your scholars. she just wanted to get in a knock. i talked to the piano tuner the last time he was here, and he said all the people he tuned for expressed themselves very favorably about your teaching. i wish you didn’t take so much pains with them, myself.”
“but i have to, ray. they’re all so dumb. they’ve got no ambition,” thea exclaimed irritably. “jenny smiley is the only one who isn’t stupid. she can read pretty well, and she has such good hands. but she don’t care a rap about it. she has no pride.”
ray’s face was full of complacent satisfaction as he glanced sidewise at thea, but she was looking off intently into the mirage, at one of those mammoth cattle that are nearly always reflected there. “do you find it easier to teach in your new room?” he asked.
“yes; i’m not interrupted so much. of course, if i ever happen to want to practice at night, that’s always the night anna chooses to go to bed early.”
“it’s a darned shame, thee, you didn’t cop that room for yourself. i’m sore at the padre about that. he ought to give you that room. you could fix it up so pretty.”
“i didn’t want it, honest i didn’t. father would have let me have it. i like my own room better. somehow i can think better in a little room. besides, up there i am away from everybody, and i can read as late as i please and nobody nags me.”
“a growing girl needs lots of sleep,” ray providently remarked.
thea moved restlessly on the buggy cushions. “they need other things more,” she muttered. “oh, i forgot. i brought something to show you. look here, it came on my birthday. wasn’t it nice of him to remember?” she took from her pocket a postcard, bent in the middle and folded, and handed it to ray. on it was a white dove, perched on a wreath of very blue forget-me-nots, and “birthday greetings” in gold letters. under this was written, “from a. wunsch.”
ray turned the card over, examined the postmark, and then began to laugh.
“concord, kansas. he has my sympathy!”
“why, is that a poor town?”
“it’s the jumping-off place, no town at all. some houses dumped down in the middle of a cornfield. you get lost in the corn. not even a saloon to keep things going; sell whiskey without a license at the butcher shop, beer on ice with the liver and beefsteak. i wouldn’t stay there over sunday for a ten-dollar bill.”
“oh, dear! what do you suppose he’s doing there? maybe he just stopped off there a few days to tune pianos,” thea suggested hopefully.
ray gave her back the card. “he’s headed in the wrong direction. what does he want to get back into a grass country for? now, there are lots of good live towns down on the santa fé, and everybody down there is musical. he could always get a job playing in saloons if he was dead broke. i’ve figured out that i’ve got no years of my life to waste in a methodist country where they raise pork.”
“we must stop on our way back and show this card to mrs. kohler. she misses him so.”
“by the way, thee, i hear the old woman goes to church every sunday to hear you sing. fritz tells me he has to wait till two o’clock for his sunday dinner these days. the church people ought to give you credit for that, when they go for you.”
thea shook her head and spoke in a tone of resignation. “they’ll always go for me, just as they did for wunsch. it wasn’t because he drank they went for him; not really. it was something else.”
“you want to salt your money down, thee, and go to chicago and take some lessons. then you come back, and wear a long feather and high heels and put on a few airs, and that’ll fix ’em. that’s what they like.”
“i’ll never have money enough to go to chicago. mother meant to lend me some, i think, but now they’ve got hard times back in nebraska, and her farm don’t bring her in anything. takes all the tenant can raise to pay the taxes. don’t let’s talk about that. you promised to tell me about the play you went to see in denver.”
any one would have liked to hear ray’s simple and clear account of the performance he had seen at the tabor grand opera house—maggie mitchell in little barefoot—and any one would have liked to watch his kind face. ray looked his best out of doors, when his thick red hands were covered by gloves, and the dull red of his sunburned face somehow seemed right in the light and wind. he looked better, too, with his hat on; his hair was thin and dry, with no particular color or character, “regular willy-boy hair,” as he himself described it. his eyes were pale beside the reddish bronze of his skin. they had the faded look often seen in the eyes of men who have lived much in the sun and wind and who have been accustomed to train their vision upon distant objects.
ray realized that thea’s life was dull and exacting, and that she missed wunsch. he knew she worked hard, that she put up with a great many little annoyances, and that her duties as a teacher separated her more than ever from the boys and girls of her own age. he did everything he could to provide recreation for her. he brought her candy and magazines and pineapples—of which she was very fond—from denver, and kept his eyes and ears open for anything that might interest her. he was, of course, living for thea. he had thought it all out carefully and had made up his mind just when he would speak to her. when she was seventeen, then he would tell her his plan and ask her to marry him. he would be willing to wait two, or even three years, until she was twenty, if she thought best. by that time he would surely have got in on something: copper, oil, gold, silver, sheep,—something.
meanwhile, it was pleasure enough to feel that she depended on him more and more, that she leaned upon his steady kindness. he never broke faith with himself about her; he never hinted to her of his hopes for the future, never suggested that she might be more intimately confidential with him, or talked to her of the thing he thought about so constantly. he had the chivalry which is perhaps the proudest possession of his race. he had never embarrassed her by so much as a glance. sometimes, when they drove out to the sand hills, he let his left arm lie along the back of the buggy seat, but it never came any nearer to thea than that, never touched her. he often turned to her a face full of pride, and frank admiration, but his glance was never so intimate or so penetrating as dr. archie’s. his blue eyes were clear and shallow, friendly, uninquiring. he rested thea because he was so different; because, though he often told her interesting things, he never set lively fancies going in her head; because he never misunderstood her, and because he never, by any chance, for a single instant, understood her! yes, with ray she was safe; by him she would never be discovered!
