Soon after Anna became a church member she began to remonstrate with Thea about practicing—playing “secular music”—on Sunday. One Sunday the dispute in the parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in the kitchen. She listened judicially and told Anna to read the chapter about how Naaman the leper was permitted to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Thea went back to the piano, and Anna lingered to say that, since she was in the right, her mother should have supported her.
“No,” said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, “I can’t see it that way, Anna. I never forced you to practice, and I don’t see as I should keep Thea from it. I like to hear her, and I guess your father does. You and Thea will likely follow different lines, and I don’t see as I’m called upon to bring you up alike.”
Anna looked meek and abused. “Of course all the church people must hear her. Ours is the only noisy house on this street. You hear what she’s playing now, don’t you?”
Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. “Yes; it’s the Blue Danube waltzes. I’m familiar with ‘em. If any of the church people come at you, you just send ‘em to me. I ain’t afraid to speak out on occasion, and I wouldn’t mind one bit telling the Ladies’ Aid a few things about standard composers.” Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and added thoughtfully, “No, I wouldn’t mind that one bit.”
Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a week, and Mrs. Kronborg suspected that she held a larger place than usual in her daughter’s prayers; but that was another thing she didn’t mind.
Although revivals were merely a part of the year’s work, like examination week at school, and although Anna’s piety impressed her very little, a time came when Thea was perplexed about religion. A scourge of typhoid broke out in Moonstone and several of Thea’s schoolmates died of it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the ground, and wondered a good deal about them. But a certain grim incident, which caused the epidemic, troubled her even more than the death of her friends.
Early in July, soon after Thea’s fifteenth birthday, a particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone in an empty box car. Thea was sitting in the hammock in the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty screening nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry face covered with black hair. It was just before suppertime when he came along, and the street smelled of fried potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing the air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked over the fence. She hoped he would not stop at their gate, for her mother never turned any one away, and this was the dirtiest and most utterly wretched-looking tramp she had ever seen. There was a terrible odor about him, too. She caught it even at that distance, and put her handkerchief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she knew that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled a little faster.
A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped in an empty shack over on the east edge of town, beside the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable sort of show there. He told the boys who went to see what he was doing, that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained a filthy clown’s suit, and his box held half a dozen rattlesnakes.
Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons. There she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in the clown’s suit, his face shaved and painted white,—the sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,—and his eyes wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him, and he panted to the tune of “Marching through Georgia.” After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp exhibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now pass the hat, and that when the onlookers had contributed the sum of one dollar, he would eat “one of these living reptiles.” The crowd began to cough and murmur, and the saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested the wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried him away to the calaboose.
The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,—an old hut with a barred window and a padlock on the door. The tramp was utterly filthy and there was no way to give him a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake vagrants, so after the constable had detained the tramp for twenty-four hours, he released him and told him to “get out of town, and get quick.” The fellow’s rattlesnakes had been killed by the saloon keeper. He hid in a box car in the freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the next station, but he was found and put out. After that he was seen no more. He had disappeared and left no trace except an ugly, stupid word, chalked on the black paint of the seventy-five-foot standpipe which was the reservoir for the Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to the English officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a comment on life which the defeated, along the hard roads of the world, sometimes bawl at the victorious.
A week after the tramp excitement had passed over, the city water began to smell and to taste. The Kronborgs had a well in their back yard and did not use city water, but they heard the complaints of their neighbors. At first people said that the town well was full of rotting cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-station convinced the mayor that the water left the well untainted. Mayors reason slowly, but, the well being eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the standpipe—there was no other track for it to go in. The standpipe amply rewarded investigation. The tramp had got even with Moonstone. He had climbed the standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and roll of ticking. The city council had a mild panic and passed a new ordinance about tramps. But the fever had already broken out, and several adults and half a dozen children died of it.
Thea had always found everything that happened in Moonstone exciting, disasters particularly so. It was gratifying to read sensational Moonstone items in the Denver paper. But she wished she had not chanced to see the tramp as he came into town that evening, sniffing the supper-laden air. His face remained unpleasantly clear in her memory, and her mind struggled with the problem of his behavior as if it were a hard page in arithmetic. Even when she was practicing, the drama of the tramp kept going on in the back of her head, and she was constantly trying to make herself realize what pitch of hatred or despair could drive a man to do such a hideous thing. She kept seeing him in his bedraggled clown suit, the white paint on his roughly shaven face, playing his accordion before the saloon. She had noticed his lean body, his high, bald forehead that sloped back like a curved metal lid. How could people fall so far out of fortune? She tried to talk to Ray Kennedy about her perplexity, but Ray would not discuss things of that sort with her. It was in his sentimental conception of women that they should be deeply religious, though men were at liberty to doubt and finally to deny. A picture called “The Soul Awakened,” popular in Moonstone parlors, pretty well interpreted Ray’s idea of woman’s spiritual nature.
One evening when she was haunted by the figure of the tramp, Thea went up to Dr. Archie’s office. She found him sewing up two bad gashes in the face of a little boy who had been kicked by a mule. After the boy had been bandaged and sent away with his father, Thea helped the doctor wash and put away the surgical instruments. Then she dropped into her accustomed seat beside his desk and began to talk about the tramp. Her eyes were hard and green with excitement, the doctor noticed.
“It seems to me, Dr. Archie, that the whole town’s to blame. I’m to blame, myself. I know he saw me hold my nose when he went by. Father’s to blame. If he believes the Bible, he ought to have gone to the calaboose and cleaned that man up and taken care of him. That’s what I can’t understand; do people believe the Bible, or don’t they? If the next life is all that matters, and we’re put here to get ready for it, then why do we try to make money, or learn things, or have a good time? There’s n
ot one person in Moonstone that really lives the way the New Testament says. Does it matter, or don’t it?”
Dr. Archie swung round in his chair and looked at her, honestly and leniently. “Well, Thea, it seems to me like this. Every people has had its religion. All religions are good, and all are pretty much alike. But I don’t see how we could live up to them in the sense you mean. I’ve thought about it a good deal, and I can’t help feeling that while we are in this world we have to live for the best things of this world, and those things are material and positive. Now, most religions are passive, and they tell us chiefly what we should not do.” The doctor moved restlessly, and his eyes hunted for something along the opposite wall: “See here, my girl, take out the years of early childhood and the time we spend in sleep and dull old age, and we only have about twenty able, waking years. That’s not long enough to get acquainted with half the fine things that have been done in the world, much less to do anything ourselves. I think we ought to keep the Commandments and help other people all we can; but the main thing is to live those twenty splendid years; to do all we can and enjoy all we can.”
Dr. Archie met his little friend’s searching gaze, the look of acute inquiry which always touched him.
“But poor fellows like that tramp—” she hesitated and wrinkled her forehead.
The doctor leaned forward and put his hand protectingly over hers, which lay clenched on the green felt desktop. “Ugly accidents happen, Thea; always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don’t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don’t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.” He saw tears on her cheeks, and he remembered that he had never seen her cry before, not even when she crushed her finger when she was little. He rose and walked to the window, came back and sat down on the edge of his chair.
“Forget the tramp, Thea. This is a great big world, and I want you to get about and see it all. You’re going to Chicago some day, and do something with that fine voice of yours. You’re going to be a number one musician and make us proud of you. Take Mary Anderson, now; even the tramps are proud of her. There isn’t a tramp along the ‘Q’ system who hasn’t heard of her. We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid.”
They had a long talk. Thea felt that Dr. Archie had never let himself out to her so much before. It was the most grown-up conversation she had ever had with him. She left his office happy, flattered and stimulated. She ran for a long while about the white, moonlit streets, looking up at the stars and the bluish night, at the quiet houses sunk in black shade, the glittering sand hills. She loved the familiar trees, and the people in those little houses, and she loved the unknown world beyond Denver. She felt as if she were being pulled in two, between the desire to go away forever and the desire to stay forever. She had only twenty years—no time to lose.
Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie’s office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window—or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls.
XIX
It is well for its peace of mind that the traveling public takes railroads so much for granted. The only men who are incurably nervous about railway travel are the railroad operatives. A railroad man never forgets that the next run may be his turn.
On a single-track road, like that upon which Ray Kennedy worked, the freight trains make their way as best they can between passenger trains. Even when there is such a thing as a freight time-schedule, it is merely a form. Along the one track dozens of fast and slow trains dash in both directions, kept from collision only by the brains in the dispatcher’s office. If one passenger train is late, the whole schedule must be revised in an instant; the trains following must be warned, and those moving toward the belated train must be assigned new meeting-places.
Between the shifts and modifications of the passenger schedule, the freight trains play a game of their own. They have no right to the track at any given time, but are supposed to be on it when it is free, and to make the best time they can between passenger trains. A freight train, on a single-track road, gets anywhere at all only by stealing bases.
Ray Kennedy had stuck to the freight service, although he had had opportunities to go into the passenger service at higher pay. He always regarded railroading as a temporary makeshift, until he “got into something,” and he disliked the passenger service. No brass buttons for him, he said; too much like a livery. While he was railroading he would wear a jumper, thank you!
The wreck that “caught” Ray was a very commonplace one; nothing thrilling about it, and it got only six lines in the Denver papers. It happened about daybreak one morning, only thirty-two miles from home.
At four o’clock in the morning Ray’s train had stopped to take water at Saxony, having just rounded the long curve which lies south of that station. It was Joe Giddy’s business to walk back along the curve about three hundred yards and put out torpedoes to warn any train which might be coming up from behind—a freight crew is not notified of trains following, and the brakeman is supposed to protect his train. Ray was so fussy about the punctilious observance of orders that almost any brakeman would take a chance once in a while, from natural perversity.
When the train stopped for water that morning, Ray was at the desk in his caboose, making out his report. Giddy took his torpedoes, swung off the rear platform, and glanced back at the curve. He decided that he would not go back to flag this time. If anything was coming up behind, he could hear it in plenty of time. So he ran forward to look after a hot journal that had been bothering him. In a general way, Giddy’s reasoning was sound. If a freight train, or even a passenger train, had been coming up behind them, he could have heard it in time. But as it happened, a light engine, which made no noise at all, was coming,—ordered out to help with the freight that was piling up at the other end of the division. This engine got no warning, came round the curve, struck the caboose, went straight through it, and crashed into the heavy lumber car ahead.
The Kronborgs were just sitting down to breakfast, when the night telegraph operator dashed into the yard at a run and hammered on the front door. Gunner answered the knock, and the telegraph operator told him he wanted to see his father a minute, quick. Mr. Kronborg appeared at the door, napkin in hand. The operator was pale and panting.
“Fourteen was wrecked down at Saxony this morning,” he shouted, “and Kennedy’s all broke up. We’re sending an engine down with the doctor, and the operator at Saxony says Kennedy wants you to come along with us and bring your girl.” He stopped for breath.
Mr. Kronborg took off his glasses and began rubbing them with his napkin.
“Bring—I don’t understand,” he muttered. “How did this happen?”
“No time for that, sir. Getting the engine out now. Your girl, Thea. You’ll surely do that for the poor chap. Everybody knows he thinks the world of her.” Seeing that Mr. Kronborg showed no indication of having made up his mind, the operator turned to Gunner. “Call your sister, kid. I’m going to ask the girl herself,” he blurted out.
“Yes, yes, certainly. Daughter,” Mr. Kronborg called. He had somewhat recovered himself and reached to the hall hatrack for his hat.
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Just as Thea came out on the front porch, before the operator had had time to explain to her, Dr. Archie’s ponies came up to the gate at a brisk trot. Archie jumped out the moment his driver stopped the team and came up to the bewildered girl without so much as saying good-morning to any one. He took her hand with the sympathetic, reassuring graveness which had helped her at more than one hard time in her life. “Get your hat, my girl. Kennedy’s hurt down the road, and he wants you to run down with me. They’ll have a car for us. Get into my buggy, Mr. Kronborg. I’ll drive you down, and Larry can come for the team.”
The driver jumped out of the buggy and Mr. Kronborg and the doctor got in. Thea, still bewildered, sat on her father’s knee. Dr. Archie gave his ponies a smart cut with the whip.
When they reached the depot, the engine, with one car attached, was standing on the main track. The engineer had got his steam up, and was leaning out of the cab impatiently. In a moment they were off. The run to Saxony took forty minutes. Thea sat still in her seat while Dr. Archie and her father talked about the wreck. She took no part in the conversation and asked no questions, but occasionally she looked at Dr. Archie with a frightened, inquiring glance, which he answered by an encouraging nod. Neither he nor her father said anything about how badly Ray was hurt. When the engine stopped near Saxony, the main track was already cleared. As they got out of the car, Dr. Archie pointed to a pile of ties.
“Thea, you’d better sit down here and watch the wreck crew while your father and I go up and look Kennedy over. I’ll come back for you when I get him fixed up.”
The two men went off up the sand gulch, and Thea sat down and looked at the pile of splintered wood and twisted iron that had lately been Ray’s caboose. She was frightened and absent-minded. She felt that she ought to be thinking about Ray, but her mind kept racing off to all sorts of trivial and irrelevant things. She wondered whether Grace Johnson would be furious when she came to take her music lesson and found nobody there to give it to her; whether she had forgotten to close the piano last night and whether Thor would get into the new room and mess the keys all up with his sticky fingers; whether Tillie would go upstairs and make her bed for her. Her mind worked fast, but she could fix it upon nothing. The grasshoppers, the lizards, distracted her attention and seemed more real to her than poor Ray.