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

Archie was passionately stirred for her. “I’ve always believed in you, Thea; always believed,” he muttered.

She smiled and closed her eyes. “They save me: the old things, things like the Kohlers’ garden. They are in everything I do.”

“In what you sing, you mean?”

“Yes. Not in any direct way,”⁠—she spoke hurriedly⁠—“the light, the color, the feeling. Most of all the feeling. It comes in when I’m working on a part, like the smell of a garden coming in at the window. I try all the new things, and then go back to the old. Perhaps my feelings were stronger then. A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude. I am more or less of an artist now, but then I was nothing else. When I went with you to Chicago that first time, I carried with me the essentials, the foundation of all I do now. The point to which I could go was scratched in me then. I haven’t reached it yet, by a long way.”

Archie had a swift flash of memory. Pictures passed before him. “You mean,” he asked wonderingly, “that you knew then that you were so gifted?”

Thea looked up at him and smiled. “Oh, I didn’t know anything! Not enough to ask you for my trunk when I needed it. But you see, when I set out from Moonstone with you, I had had a rich, romantic past. I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it. Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth. And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory. When we’ve got it all out⁠—the last, the finest thrill of it, the brightest hope of it,”⁠—she lifted her hand above her head and dropped it⁠—“then we stop. We do nothing but repeat after that. The stream has reached the level of its source. That’s our measure.”

There was a long, warm silence. Thea was looking hard at the floor, as if she were seeing down through years and years, and her old friend stood watching her bent head. His look was one with which he used to watch her long ago, and which, even in thinking about her, had become a habit of his face. It was full of solicitude, and a kind of secret gratitude, as if to thank her for some inexpressible pleasure of the heart. Thea turned presently toward the piano and began softly to waken an old air:⁠—

Ca’ the yowes to the knowes,
Ca’ them where the heather grows,
Ca’ them where the burnie rowes,
My bonnie dear-ie.

Archie sat down and shaded his eyes with his hand. She turned her head and spoke to him over her shoulder. “Come on, you know the words better than I. That’s right.”

We’ll gae down by Clouden’s side,
Through the hazels spreading wide,
O’er the waves that sweetly glide,
To the moon sae clearly.
Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear,
Thou’rt to love and Heav’n sae dear,
Nocht of ill may come thee near,
My bonnie dear-ie!

“We can get on without Landry. Let’s try it again, I have all the words now. Then we’ll have ‘Sweet Afton.’ Come: ‘Ca’ the yowes to the knowes’⁠—”

X

Ottenburg dismissed his taxicab at the 91st Street entrance of the Park and floundered across the drive through a wild spring snowstorm. When he reached the reservoir path he saw Thea ahead of him, walking rapidly against the wind. Except for that one figure, the path was deserted. A flock of gulls were hovering over the reservoir, seeming bewildered by the driving currents of snow that whirled above the black water and then disappeared within it. When he had almost overtaken Thea, Fred called to her, and she turned and waited for him with her back to the wind. Her hair and furs were powdered with snowflakes, and she looked like some rich-pelted animal, with warm blood, that had run in out of the woods. Fred laughed as he took her hand.

“No use asking how you do. You surely needn’t feel much anxiety about Friday, when you can look like this.”

She moved close to the iron fence to make room for him beside her, and faced the wind again. “Oh, I’m well enough, in so far as that goes. But I’m not lucky about stage appearances. I’m easily upset, and the most perverse things happen.”

“What’s the matter? Do you still get nervous?”

“Of course I do. I don’t mind nerves so much as getting numbed,” Thea muttered, sheltering her face for a moment with her muff. “I’m under a spell, you know, hoodooed. It’s the thing I want to do that I can never do. Any other effects I can get easily enough.”

“Yes, you get effects, and not only with your voice. That’s where you have it over all the rest of them; you’re as much at home on the stage as you were down in Panther Canyon⁠—as if you’d just been let out of a cage. Didn’t you get some of your ideas down there?”

Thea nodded. “Oh, yes! For heroic parts, at least. Out of the rocks, out of the dead people. You mean the idea of standing up under things, don’t you, meeting catastrophe? No fussiness. Seems to me they must have been a reserved, somber people, with only a muscular language, all their movements for a purpose; simple, strong, as if they were dealing with fate barehanded.” She put her gloved fingers on Fred’s arm. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough. I don’t know if I’d ever have got anywhere without Panther Canyon. How did you know that was the one thing to do for me? It’s the sort of thing nobody ever helps one to, in this world. One can learn how to sing, but no singing teacher can give anybody what I got down there. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. Anything else would have done as well. It