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

middle, brushed smoothly back from her low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her head in two thick braids. It was growing gray about the temples, but after the manner of yellow hair it seemed only to have grown paler there, and had taken on a color like that of English primroses. Her eyes were clear and untroubled; her face smooth and calm, and, as Ray said, “strong.”

Thea and Ray, up in the sunny cupola, were laughing and talking. Ray got great pleasure out of seeing her face there in the little box where he so often imagined it. They were crossing a plateau where great red sandstone boulders lay about, most of them much wider at the top than at the base, so that they looked like great toadstools.

“The sand has been blowing against them for a good many hundred years,” Ray explained, directing Thea’s eyes with his gloved hand. “You see the sand blows low, being so heavy, and cuts them out underneath. Wind and sand are pretty high-class architects. That’s the principle of most of the Cliff-Dweller remains down at Canyon de Chelly. The sandstorms had dug out big depressions in the face of a cliff, and the Indians built their houses back in that depression.”

“You told me that before, Ray, and of course you know. But the geography says their houses were cut out of the face of the living rock, and I like that better.”

Ray sniffed. “What nonsense does get printed! It’s enough to give a man disrespect for learning. How could them Indians cut houses out of the living rock, when they knew nothing about the art of forging metals?” Ray leaned back in his chair, swung his foot, and looked thoughtful and happy. He was in one of his favorite fields of speculation, and nothing gave him more pleasure than talking these things over with Thea Kronborg. “I’ll tell you, Thee, if those old fellows had learned to work metals once, your ancient Egyptians and Assyrians wouldn’t have beat them very much. Whatever they did do, they did well. Their masonry’s standing there today, the corners as true as the Denver Capitol. They were clever at most everything but metals; and that one failure kept them from getting across. It was the quicksand that swallowed ’em up, as a race. I guess civilization proper began when men mastered metals.”

Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not use them to show off, but because they seemed to him more adequate than colloquial speech. He felt strongly about these things, and groped for words, as he said, “to express himself.” He had the lamentable American belief that “expression” is obligatory. He still carried in his trunk, among the unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the title-page of which was written “Impressions on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H. Kennedy.” The pages of that book were like a battlefield; the laboring author had fallen back from metaphor after metaphor, abandoned position after position. He would have admitted that the art of forging metals was nothing to this treacherous business of recording impressions, in which the material you were so full of vanished mysteriously under your striving hand. “Escaping steam!” he had said to himself, the last time he tried to read that notebook.

Thea didn’t mind Ray’s travel-lecture expressions. She dodged them, unconsciously, as she did her father’s professional palaver. The light in Ray’s pale-blue eyes and the feeling in his voice more than made up for the stiffness of his language.

“Were the Cliff-Dwellers really clever with their hands, Ray, or do you always have to make allowance and say, ‘That was pretty good for an Indian’?” she asked.

Ray went down into the car to give some instructions to Giddy. “Well,” he said when he returned, “about the aborigines: once or twice I’ve been with some fellows who were cracking burial mounds. Always felt a little ashamed of it, but we did pull out some remarkable things. We got some pottery out whole; seemed pretty fine to me. I guess their women were their artists. We found lots of old shoes and sandals made out of yucca fiber, neat and strong; and feather blankets, too.”

“Feather blankets? You never told me about them.”

“Didn’t I? The old fellows⁠—or the squaws⁠—wove a close netting of yucca fiber, and then tied on little bunches of down feathers, overlapping, just the way feathers grow on a bird. Some of them were feathered on both sides. You can’t get anything warmer than that, now, can you?⁠—or prettier. What I like about those old aborigines is, that they got all their ideas from nature.”

Thea laughed. “That means you’re going to say something about girls’ wearing corsets. But some of your Indians flattened their babies’ heads, and that’s worse than wearing corsets.”

“Give me an Indian girl’s figure for beauty,” Ray insisted. “And a girl with a voice like yours ought to have plenty of lung-action. But you know my sentiments on that subject. I was going to tell you about the handsomest thing we ever looted out of those burial mounds. It was on a woman, too, I regret to say. She was preserved as perfect as any mummy that ever came out of the pyramids. She had a big string of turquoises around her neck, and she was wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with little yellow feathers that must have come off wild canaries. Can you beat that, now? The fellow that claimed it sold it to a Boston man for a hundred and fifty dollars.”

Thea looked at him admiringly. “Oh, Ray, and didn’t you get anything off her, to remember her by, even? She must have been a princess.”

Ray took a wallet from the pocket of the coat that was hanging beside him, and drew from it a little lump wrapped in worn tissue paper. In a moment a stone, soft and blue as a robin’s egg, lay in the hard palm of