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

and your talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you.” She stood for a moment as if she were tortured by uncertainty, then turned suddenly back to him. “Don’t talk about these things any more now,” she entreated. “It isn’t that I want to keep anything from you. The trouble is that I’ve got nothing to keep⁠—except (you know as well as I) that feeling. I told you about it in Chicago once. But it always makes me unhappy to talk about it. It will spoil the day. Will you go for a climb with me?” She held out her hands with a smile so eager that it made Ottenburg feel how much she needed to get away from herself.

He sprang up and caught the hands she put out so cordially, and stood swinging them back and forth. “I won’t tease you. A word’s enough to me. But I love it, all the same. Understand?” He pressed her hands and dropped them. “Now, where are you going to drag me?”

“I want you to drag me. Over there, to the other houses. They are more interesting than these.” She pointed across the gorge to the row of white houses in the other cliff. “The trail is broken away, but I got up there once. It’s possible. You have to go to the bottom of the canyon, cross the creek, and then go up hand over hand.”

Ottenburg, lounging against the sunny wall, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, looked across at the distant dwellings. “It’s an awful climb,” he sighed, “when I could be perfectly happy here with my pipe. However⁠—” He took up his stick and hat and followed Thea down the water trail. “Do you climb this path every day? You surely earn your bath. I went down and had a look at your pool the other afternoon. Neat place, with all those little cottonwoods. Must be very becoming.”

“Think so?” Thea said over her shoulder, as she swung round a turn.

“Yes, and so do you, evidently. I’m becoming expert at reading your meaning in your back. I’m behind you so much on these single-foot trails. You don’t wear stays, do you?”

“Not here.”

“I wouldn’t, anywhere, if I were you. They will make you less elastic. The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there’s a fortune in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when they’re well set up.”

Thea switched a piñon branch back at him. “Oh, I’ll never get fat! That I can promise you.”

Fred smiled, looking after her. “Keep that promise, no matter how many others you break,” he drawled.

The upward climb, after they had crossed the stream, was at first a breathless scramble through underbrush. When they reached the big boulders, Ottenburg went first because he had the longer leg-reach, and gave Thea a hand when the step was quite beyond her, swinging her up until she could get a foothold. At last they reached a little platform among the rocks, with only a hundred feet of jagged, sloping wall between them and the cliff-houses.

Ottenburg lay down under a pine tree and declared that he was going to have a pipe before he went any farther. “It’s a good thing to know when to stop, Thea,” he said meaningly.

“I’m not going to stop now until I get there,” Thea insisted. “I’ll go on alone.”

Fred settled his shoulder against the tree-trunk. “Go on if you like, but I’m here to enjoy myself. If you meet a rattler on the way, have it out with him.”

She hesitated, fanning herself with her felt hat. “I never have met one.”

“There’s reasoning for you,” Fred murmured languidly.

Thea turned away resolutely and began to go up the wall, using an irregular cleft in the rock for a path. The cliff, which looked almost perpendicular from the bottom, was really made up of ledges and boulders, and behind these she soon disappeared. For a long while Fred smoked with half-closed eyes, smiling to himself now and again. Occasionally he lifted an eyebrow as he heard the rattle of small stones among the rocks above. “In a temper,” he concluded; “do her good.” Then he subsided into warm drowsiness and listened to the locusts in the yuccas, and the tap-tap of the old woodpecker that was never weary of assaulting the big pine.

Fred had finished his pipe and was wondering whether he wanted another, when he heard a call from the cliff far above him. Looking up, he saw Thea standing on the edge of a projecting crag. She waved to him and threw her arm over her head, as if she were snapping her fingers in the air.

As he saw her there between the sky and the gulf, with that great wash of air and the morning light about her, Fred recalled the brilliant figure at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s. Thea was one of those people who emerge, unexpectedly, larger than we are accustomed to see them. Even at this distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity⁠—a kind of brilliancy of motion⁠—of a personality that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things. Lying still, with his hands under his head, Ottenburg rhetorically addressed the figure in the air. “You are the sort that used to run wild in Germany, dressed in their hair and a piece of skin. Soldiers caught ’em in nets. Old Nathanmeyer,” he mused, “would like a peep at her now. Knowing old fellow. Always buying those Zorn etchings of peasant girls bathing. No sag in them either. Must be the cold climate.” He sat up. “She’ll begin to pitch rocks on me if I don’t move.” In response to another impatient gesture from the crag, he rose and began swinging slowly up the trail.

It was the afternoon of that long day. Thea was lying on a blanket in the door of her rock house. She and Ottenburg had come back from their climb and