V
The children in the primary grades were sometimes
required to make relief maps of Moonstone in sand.
Had they used colored sands, as the Navajo medicine men
do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have indicated
the social classifications of Moonstone, since these con-
formed to certain topographical boundaries, and every
child understood them perfectly.
The main business street ran, of course, through the
center of the town. To the west of this street lived all the
people who were, as Tillie Kronborg said, "in society."
Sylvester Street, the third parallel with Main Street on the
west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings were
built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from
the court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie's
house, its big yard and garden surrounded by a white paling
fence. The Methodist Church was in the center of the
town, facing the court-house square. The Kronborgs lived
half a mile south of the church, on the long street that
stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement. This
was the first street west of Main, and was built up only on
one side. The preacher's house faced the backs of the brick
and frame store buildings and a draw full of sunflowers
and scraps of old iron. The sidewalk which ran in front
of the Kronborgs' house was the one continuous sidewalk
to the depot, and all the train men and roundhouse em-
ployees passed the front gate every time they came up-
town. Thea and Mrs. Kronborg had many friends among
the railroad men, who often paused to chat across the fence,
and of one of these we shall have more to say.
In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street,
toward the deep ravine which, farther south, wound by
Mexican Town, lived all the humbler citizens, the people
who voted but did not run for office. The houses were little
story-and-a-half cottages, with none of the fussy archi-
tectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street.
They nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Vir-
ginia creeper; their occupants had no social pretensions to
keep up. There were no half-glass front doors with door-
bells, or formidable parlors behind closed shutters. Here
the old women washed in the back yard, and the men sat
in the front doorway and smoked their pipes. The people
on Sylvester Street scarcely knew that this part of the
town existed. Thea liked to take Thor and her express
wagon and explore these quiet, shady streets, where the
people never tried to have lawns or to grow elms and pine
trees, but let the native timber have its way and spread in
luxuriance. She had many friends there, old women who
gave her a yellow rose or a spray of trumpet vine and
appeased Thor with a cooky or a doughnut. They called
Thea "that preacher's girl," but the demonstrative was
misplaced, for when they spoke of Mr. Kronborg they
called him "the Methodist preacher."
Dr. Archie was very proud of his yard and garden, which
he worked himself. He was the only man in Moonstone
who was successful at growing rambler roses, and his
strawberries were famous. One morning when Thea was
downtown on an errand, the doctor stopped her, took her
hand and went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly
always did when they met.
"You haven't been up to my place to get any straw-
berries yet, Thea. They're at their best just now. Mrs.
Archie doesn't know what to do with them all. Come up
this afternoon. Just tell Mrs. Archie I sent you. Bring a
big basket and pick till you are tired."
When she got home Thea told her mother that she didn't
want to go, because she didn't like Mrs. Archie.
"She is certainly one queer woman," Mrs. Kronborg
assented, "but he's asked you so often, I guess you'll have
to go this time. She won't bite you."
After dinner Thea took a basket, put Thor in his baby-
buggy, and set out for Dr. Archie's house at the other end
of town. As soon as she came within sight of the house,
she slackened her pace. She approached it very slowly,
stopping often to pick dandelions and sand-peas for Thor
to crush up in his fist.
It was his wife's custom, as soon as Dr. Archie left the
house in the morning, to shut all the doors and windows
to keep the dust out, and to pull down the shades to keep
the sun from fading the carpets. She thought, too, that
neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house was closed
up. She was one of those people who are stingy without
motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it.
She must have known that skimping the doctor in heat
and food made him more extravagant than he would have
been had she made him comfortable. He never came home
for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and
shreds of food. No matter how much milk he bought, he
could never get thick cream for his strawberries. Even
when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in smooth,
ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-
hand, to dilute it before it got to the breakfast table. The
butcher's favorite joke was about the kind of meat he sold
Mrs. Archie. She felt no interest in food herself, and she
hated to prepare it. She liked nothing better than to have
Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days--he often went
chiefly because he was hungry--and to be left alone to
eat canned salmon and to keep the house shut up from
morning until night.
Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said,
"they ate too much and broke too much"; she even said
they knew too much. She used what mind she had in
devising shifts to minimize her housework. She used to
tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would
be no housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married,
she had been always in a panic for fear she would have
children. Now that her apprehensions on that score had
grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having dust
in the house as she had once been of having children in it.
If dust did not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said.
She would take any amount of trouble to avoid trouble.
Why, nobody knew. Certainly her husband had never
been able to make her out. Such little, mean natures are
among the darkest and most baffling of created things.
There is no law by which they can be explained. The or-
dinary incentives of pain and pleasure do not account for
their behavior. They live like insects, absorbed in petty
activities that seem to have nothing to do with any genial
aspect of human life.
Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, "liked to gad."
She liked to have her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and
to be out of it--anywhere. A church social, a prayer
meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no prefer-
ence. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit
for hours in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, lis-
tening to the talk of the women who came in, watching
them while they tried on hats, blinking at them from her
corner with her sharp, restless little eyes. She never talked
much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town and
she had a sharp ear for racy anecdotes--"traveling men's
stories," they used to be called in Moonstone. Her clicking
laugh sounded like a typewriting machine in action, and,
for very pointed stories, she had a little screech.
Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years,
and when she was Belle White she was one of the "pretty"
girls in Lansing, Michigan. She had then a train of suitors.
She could truly remind Archie that "the boys hung around
her." They did. They thought her very spirited and were
always saying, "Oh, that Belle White, she's a case!" She
used to play heavy practical jokes which the young men
thought very clever. Archie was considered the most
promising young man in "the young crowd," so Belle
selected him. She let him see, made him fully aware, that
she had selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who
could not withstand such enlightenment. Belle's family
were sorry for him. On his wedding day her sisters looked
at the big, handsome boy--he was twenty-four--as he
walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they looked
at each other. His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant
face, his gentle, protecting arm, made them uncomfort-
able. Well, they were glad that he was going West at once,
to fulfill his doom where they would not be onlookers. Any-
how, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off their
hands.
More than that, Belle seemed to have got herself off her
hands. Her reputed prettiness must have been entirely
the result of determination, of a fierce little ambition. Once
she had married, fastened herself on some one, come to
port,--it vanished like the ornamental plumage which
drops away from some birds after the mating season. The
one aggressive action of her life was over. She began to
shrink in face and stature. Of her harum-scarum spirit
there was nothing left but the little screech. Within a few
years she looked as small and mean as she was.
Thor's chariot crept along. Thea approached the house
unwillingly. She didn't care about the strawberries, any-
how. She had come only because she did not want to hurt
Dr. Archie's feelings. She not only disliked Mrs. Archie,
she was a little afraid of her. While Thea was getting the
heavy baby-buggy through the iron gate she heard some
one call, "Wait a minute!" and Mrs. Archie came running
around the house from the back door, her apron over her
head. She came to help with the buggy, because she was
afraid the wheels might scratch the paint off the gate-
posts. She was a skinny little woman with a great pile of
frizzy light hair on a small head.
"Dr. Archie told me to come up and pick some straw-
berries," Thea muttered, wishing she had stayed at home.
Mrs. Archie led the way to the back door, squinting and
shading her eyes with her hand. "Wait a minute," she said
again, when Thea explained why she had come.
She went into her kitchen and Thea sat down on the
porch step. When Mrs. Archie reappeared she carried in
her hand a little wooden butter-basket trimmed with
fringed tissue paper, which she must have brought home
from some church supper. "You'll have to have something
to put them in," she said, ignoring the yawning willow
basket which stood empty on Thor's feet. "You can have
this, and you needn't mind about returning it. You know
about not trampling the vines, don't you?"
Mrs. Archie went back into the house and Thea leaned
over in the sand and picked a few strawberries. As soon as
she was sure that she was not going to cry, she tossed the
little basket into the big one and ran Thor's buggy along
the gravel walk and out of the gate as fast as she could push
it. She was angry, and she was ashamed for Dr. Archie. She
could not help thinking how uncomfortable he would be if
he ever found out about it. Little things like that were the
ones that cut him most. She slunk home by the back way,
and again almost cried when she told her mother about it.
Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband's
supper. She laughed as she dropped a new lot into the hot
grease. "It's wonderful, the way some people are made,"
she declared. "But I wouldn't let that upset me if I was
you. Think what it would be to live with it all the time.
You look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and
take a dime and go downtown and get an ice-cream soda.
That'll make you feel better. Thor can have a little of the
ice-cream if you feed it to him with a spoon. He likes it,
don't you, son?" She stooped to wipe his chin. Thor was
only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite true
that he liked ice-cream.
