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

Mr. Larsen seemed to have forgotten his hostility toward him, and addressed him frankly as soon as he entered. He stood holding his violin, and as Thea sat down he pointed to her with his bow:⁠—

“I have just been telling Miss Kronborg that though I cannot promise her anything permanent, I might give her something for the next few months. My soprano is a young married woman and is temporarily indisposed. She would be glad to be excused from her duties for a while. I like Miss Kronborg’s singing very much, and I think she would benefit by the instruction in my choir. Singing here might very well lead to something else. We pay our soprano only eight dollars a Sunday, but she always gets ten dollars for singing at funerals. Miss Kronborg has a sympathetic voice, and I think there would be a good deal of demand for her at funerals. Several American churches apply to me for a soloist on such occasions, and I could help her to pick up quite a little money that way.”

This sounded lugubrious to Dr. Archie, who had a physician’s dislike of funerals, but he tried to accept the suggestion cordially.

“Miss Kronborg tells me she is having some trouble getting located,” Mr. Larsen went on with animation, still holding his violin. “I would advise her to keep away from boardinghouses altogether. Among my parishioners there are two German women, a mother and daughter. The daughter is a Swede by marriage, and clings to the Swedish Church. They live near here, and they rent some of their rooms. They have now a large room vacant, and have asked me to recommend someone. They have never taken boarders, but Mrs. Lorch, the mother, is a good cook⁠—at least, I am always glad to take supper with her⁠—and I think I could persuade her to let this young woman partake of the family table. The daughter, Mrs. Andersen, is musical, too, and sings in the Mozart Society. I think they might like to have a music student in the house. You speak German, I suppose?” he turned to Thea.

“Oh, no; a few words. I don’t know the grammar,” she murmured.

Dr. Archie noticed that her eyes looked alive again, not frozen as they had looked all morning. “If this fellow can help her, it’s not for me to be standoffish,” he said to himself.

“Do you think you would like to stay in such a quiet place, with old-fashioned people?” Mr. Larsen asked. “I shouldn’t think you could find a better place to work, if that’s what you want.”

“I think mother would like to have me with people like that,” Thea replied. “And I’d be glad to settle down most anywhere. I’m losing time.”

“Very well, there’s no time like the present. Let us go to see Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen.”

The minister put his violin in its case and caught up a black-and-white checked traveling-cap that he wore when he rode his high Columbia wheel. The three left the church together.

So Thea did not go to a boardinghouse after all. When Dr. Archie left Chicago she was comfortably settled with Mrs. Lorch, and her happy reunion with her trunk somewhat consoled her for his departure.

Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the Swedish Reform Church, in an old square frame house, with a porch supported by frail pillars, set in a damp yard full of big lilac bushes. The house, which had been left over from country times, needed paint badly, and looked gloomy and despondent among its smart Queen Anne neighbors. There was a big backyard with two rows of apple trees and a grape arbor, and a warped walk, two planks wide, which led to the coal bins at the back of the lot. Thea’s room was on the second floor, overlooking this backyard, and she understood that in the winter she must carry up her own coal and kindling from the bin. There was no furnace in the house, no running water except in the kitchen, and that was why the room rent was small. All the rooms were heated by stoves, and the lodgers pumped the water they needed from the cistern under the porch, or from the well at the entrance of the grape arbor. Old Mrs. Lorch could never bring herself to have costly improvements made in her house; indeed she had very little money. She preferred to keep the house just as her husband built it, and she thought her way of living good enough for plain people.

Thea’s room was large enough to admit a rented upright piano without crowding. It was, the widowed daughter said, “a double room that had always before been occupied by two gentlemen”; the piano now took the place of a second occupant. There was an ingrain carpet on the floor, green ivy leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned walnut furniture. The bed was very wide, and the mattress thin and hard. Over the fat pillows were “shams” embroidered in Turkey red, each with a flowering scroll⁠—one with “Gute’ Nacht,” the other with “Guten Morgen.” The dresser was so big that Thea wondered how it had ever been got into the house and up the narrow stairs. Besides an old horsehair armchair, there were two low plush “spring-rockers,” against the massive pedestals of which one was always stumbling in the dark. Thea sat in the dark a good deal those first weeks, and sometimes a painful bump against one of those brutally immovable pedestals roused her temper and pulled her out of a heavy hour. The wallpaper was brownish yellow, with blue flowers. When it was put on, the carpet, certainly, had not been consulted. There was only one picture on the wall when Thea moved in: a large colored print of a brightly lighted church in a snowstorm, on Christmas Eve, with greens hanging about the stone doorway and arched windows. There was something warm and homelike about this picture, and Thea grew fond