The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (best reads .TXT) 📕

“He’s cared a good deal. He doesn’t know as much about such things as you do. Of course you’ve been a great deal more help to me than anyone else ever has,” Thea said quietly. The black clock on the mantel began to strike. She listened to the five strokes and then said, “I’d have liked your helping me eight months ago. But now, you’d simply be keeping me.”

“You weren’t ready for it eight months ago.” Fred leaned back at last in his chair. “You simply weren’t ready for it. You were too tired. You were too timid. Your whole tone was too low. You couldn’t rise from a chair like that”⁠—she had started up apprehensively and gone toward the window.⁠—“You were fumbling and awkward. Since then you’ve come into your personality. You were always locking horns with it before. You were a sullen little drudge eight months ago, afraid of being caught at either looking or moving like yourself. Nobody could tell anything about you. A voice is not an instrument that’s found ready-made. A voice is personality. It can be as big as a circus and as common as dirt.⁠—There’s good money in that kind, too, but I don’t happen to be interested in them.⁠—Nobody could tell much about what you might be able to do, last winter. I divined more than anybody else.”

“Yes, I know you did.” Thea walked over to the old-fashioned mantel and held her hands down to the glow of the fire. “I owe so much to you, and that’s what makes things hard. That’s why I have to get away from you altogether. I depend on you for so many things. Oh, I did even last winter, in Chicago!” She knelt down by the grate and held her hands closer to the coals. “And one thing leads to another.”

Ottenburg watched her as she bent toward the fire. His glance brightened a little. “Anyhow, you couldn’t look as you do now, before you knew me. You were clumsy. And whatever you do now, you do splendidly. And you can’t cry enough to spoil your face for more than ten minutes. It comes right back, in spite of you. It’s only since you’ve known me that you’ve let yourself be beautiful.”

Without rising she turned her face away. Fred went on impetuously. “Oh, you can turn it away from me, Thea; you can take it away from me! All the same⁠—” his spurt died and he fell back. “How can you turn on me so, after all!” he sighed.

“I haven’t. But when you arranged with yourself to take me in like that, you couldn’t have been thinking very kindly of me. I can’t understand how you carried it through, when I was so easy, and all the circumstances were so easy.”

Her crouching position by the fire became threatening. Fred got up, and Thea also rose.

“No,” he said, “I can’t make you see that now. Some time later, perhaps, you will understand better. For one thing, I honestly could not imagine that words, names, meant so much to you.” Fred was talking with the desperation of a man who has put himself in the wrong and who yet feels that there was an idea of truth in his conduct. “Suppose that you had married your brakeman and lived with him year after year, caring for him even less than you do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you would have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has a name in good standing. To me, that seems⁠—sickening!” He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs up to the hearth for her.

“Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea.” He began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down compliantly. “Don’t you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? They never have an individual idea or experience. A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learn the dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays. Everything is secondhand with them. Why, you couldn’t live like that.”

Thea sat looking toward the mantel, her eyes half closed, her chin level, her head set as if she were enduring something. Her hands, very white, lay passive on her dark gown. From the window corner Fred looked at them and at her. He shook his head and flashed an angry, tormented look out into the blue twilight over the Square, through which muffled cries and calls and the clang of car bells came up from the street. He turned again and began to pace the floor, his hands in his pockets.

“Say what you will, Thea Kronborg, you are not that sort of person. You will never sit alone with a pacifier and a novel. You won’t subsist on what the old ladies have put into the bottle for you. You will always break through into the realities. That was the first thing Harsanyi found out about you; that you couldn’t be kept on the outside. If you’d lived in Moonstone all your life and got on with the discreet brakeman, you’d have had just the same nature. Your children would have been the realities then, probably. If they’d been commonplace, you’d have killed them with driving. You’d have managed some way to live twenty times as much as the people around you.”

Fred paused. He sought along the shadowy ceiling and heavy mouldings for words. When he began again, his voice was lower, and