XVII
The summer flew by. Thea was glad when Ray
Kennedy had a Sunday in town and could take her
driving. Out among the sand hills she could forget the
"new room" which was the scene of wearing and fruitless
labor. Dr. Archie was away from home a good deal that
year. He had put all his money into mines above Colo-
rado Springs, and he hoped for great returns from them.
In the fall of that year, Mr. Kronborg decided that Thea
ought to show more interest in church work. He put it to
her frankly, one night at supper, before the whole family.
"How can I insist on the other girls in the congregation
being active in the work, when one of my own daughters
manifests so little interest?"
"But I sing every Sunday morning, and I have to give
up one night a week to choir practice," Thea declared
rebelliously, pushing back her plate with an angry deter-
mination to eat nothing more.
"One night a week is not enough for the pastor's daugh-
ter," her father replied. "You won't do anything in the
sewing society, and you won't take part in the Christian
Endeavor or the Band of Hope. Very well, you must make
it up in other ways. I want some one to play the organ
and lead the singing at prayer-meeting this winter. Deacon
Potter told me some time ago that he thought there would
be more interest in our prayer-meetings if we had the organ.
Miss Meyers don't feel that she can play on Wednesday
nights. And there ought to be somebody to start the hymns.
Mrs. Potter is getting old, and she always starts them too
high. It won't take much of your time, and it will keep
people from talking."
This argument conquered Thea, though she left the
table sullenly. The fear of the tongue, that terror of little
towns, is usually felt more keenly by the minister's family
than by other households. Whenever the Kronborgs
wanted to do anything, even to buy a new carpet, they had
to take counsel together as to whether people would talk.
Mrs. Kronborg had her own conviction that people talked
when they felt like it, and said what they chose, no matter
how the minister's family conducted themselves. But she
did not impart these dangerous ideas to her children. Thea
was still under the belief that public opinion could be
placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would
mistake you for one of themselves.
Mrs. Kronborg did not have any particular zest for
prayer-meetings, and she stayed at home whenever she had
a valid excuse. Thor was too old to furnish such an excuse
now, so every Wednesday night, unless one of the children
was sick, she trudged off with Thea, behind Mr. Kronborg.
At first Thea was terribly bored. But she got used to prayer-
meeting, got even to feel a mournful interest in it.
The exercises were always pretty much the same. After
the first hymn her father read a passage from the Bible,
usually a Psalm. Then there was another hymn, and then
her father commented upon the passage he had read and,
as he said, "applied the Word to our necessities." After
a third hymn, the meeting was declared open, and the old
men and women took turns at praying and talking. Mrs.
Kronborg never spoke in meeting. She told people firmly
that she had been brought up to keep silent and let the
men talk, but she gave respectful attention to the others,
sitting with her hands folded in her lap.
The prayer-meeting audience was always small. The
young and energetic members of the congregation came
only once or twice a year, "to keep people from talking."
The usual Wednesday night gathering was made up of old
women, with perhaps six or eight old men, and a few sickly
girls who had not much interest in life; two of them, in-
deed, were already preparing to die. Thea accepted the
mournfulness of the prayer-meetings as a kind of spiritual
discipline, like funerals. She always read late after she
went home and felt a stronger wish than usual to live and
to be happy.
The meetings were conducted in the Sunday-School
room, where there were wooden chairs instead of pews;
an old map of Palestine hung on the wall, and the bracket
lamps gave out only a dim light. The old women sat
motionless as Indians in their shawls and bonnets; some of
them wore long black mourning veils. The old men drooped
in their chairs. Every back, every face, every head said
"resignation." Often there were long silences, when you
could hear nothing but the crackling of the soft coal in the
stove and the muffled cough of one of the sick girls.
There was one nice old lady,--tall, erect, self-respect-
ing, with a delicate white face and a soft voice. She never
whined, and what she said was always cheerful, though she
spoke so nervously that Thea knew she dreaded getting
up, and that she made a real sacrifice to, as she said, "tes-
tify to the goodness of her Saviour." She was the mother of
the girl who coughed, and Thea used to wonder how she
explained things to herself. There was, indeed, only one
woman who talked because she was, as Mr. Kronborg said,
"tonguey." The others were somehow impressive. They
told about the sweet thoughts that came to them while
they were at their work; how, amid their household tasks,
they were suddenly lifted by the sense of a divine Presence.
Sometimes they told of their first conversion, of how in
their youth that higher Power had made itself known to
them. Old Mr. Carsen, the carpenter, who gave his ser-
vices as janitor to the church, used often to tell how, when
he was a young man and a scoffer, bent on the destruction
of both body and soul, his Saviour had come to him in the
Michigan woods and had stood, it seemed to him, beside
the tree he was felling; and how he dropped his axe and
knelt in prayer "to Him who died for us upon the tree."
Thea always wanted to ask him more about it; about his
mysterious wickedness, and about the vision.
Sometimes the old people would ask for prayers for their
absent children. Sometimes they asked their brothers and
sisters in Christ to pray that they might be stronger
against temptations. One of the sick girls used to ask
them to pray that she might have more faith in the times
of depression that came to her, "when all the way before
seemed dark." She repeated that husky phrase so often,
that Thea always remembered it.
One old woman, who never missed a Wednesday night,
and who nearly always took part in the meeting, came all
the way up from the depot settlement. She always wore a
black crocheted "fascinator" over her thin white hair, and
she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad termin-
ology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads,
and she always prayed "for the boys on the road, who know
not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy
divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our
Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to
Eternity." She used to speak, too, of "the engines that
race with death"; and though she looked so old and little
when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her
prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made
one think of the deep black canyons, the slender trestles,
the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes
that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves,
much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over
the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks
are worn by water. There are many ways of describing
that color of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or
like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness
and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old
human creatures, who have worked hard and who have
always been poor.
One bitterly cold night in December the prayer-meeting
seemed to Thea longer than usual. The prayers and the
talks went on and on. It was as if the old people were
afraid to go out into the cold, or were stupefied by the hot
air of the room. She had left a book at home that she was
impatient to get back to. At last the Doxology was sung,
but the old people lingered about the stove to greet each
other, and Thea took her mother's arm and hurried out to
the frozen sidewalk, before her father could get away. The
wind was whistling up the street and whipping the naked
cottonwood trees against the telegraph poles and the sides
of the houses. Thin snow clouds were flying overhead, so
that the sky looked gray, with a dull phosphorescence.
The icy streets and the shingle roofs of the houses were
gray, too. All along the street, shutters banged or windows
rattled, or gates wobbled, held by their latch but shaking
on loose hinges. There was not a cat or a dog in Moonstone
that night that was not given a warm shelter; the cats
under the kitchen stove, the dogs in barns or coal-sheds.
When Thea and her mother reached home, their mufflers
were covered with ice, where their breath had frozen. They
hurried into the house and made a dash for the parlor and
the hard-coal burner, behind which Gunner was sitting on
a stool, reading his Jules Verne book. The door stood open
into the dining-room, which was heated from the parlor.
Mr. Kronborg always had a lunch when he came home
from prayer-meeting, and his pumpkin pie and milk were
set out on the dining-table. Mrs. Kronborg said she
thought she felt hungry, too, and asked Thea if she didn't
want something to eat.
"No, I'm not hungry, mother. I guess I'll go upstairs."
"I expect you've got some book up there," said Mrs.
Kronborg, bringing out another pie. "You'd better bring
it down here and read. Nobody'll disturb you, and it's
terrible cold up in that loft."
Thea was always assured that no one would disturb her
if she read downstairs, but the boys talked when they came
in, and her father fairly delivered discourses after he had
been renewed by half a pie and a pitcher of milk.
"I don't mind the cold. I'll take a hot brick up for my
feet. I put one in the stove before I left, if one of the boys
hasn't stolen it. Good-night, mother." Thea got her brick
and lantern, and dashed upstairs through the windy loft.
She undressed at top speed and got into bed with her brick.
She put a pair of white knitted gloves on her hands, and
pinned over her head a piece of soft flannel that had been
one of Thor's long petticoats when he was a baby. Thus
equipped, she was ready for business. She took from her
table a thick paper-backed volume, one of the "line" of
paper novels the druggist kept to sell to traveling men.
She had bought it, only yesterday, because the first sen-
tence interested her very much, and because she saw, as
she glanced over the pages, the magical names of two
Russian cities. The book was a poor translation of "Anna
Karenina." Thea opened it at a mark, and fixed her eyes
intently upon the small print. The hymns, the sick girl,
the resigned black figures were forgotten. It was the night
of the ball in Moscow.
Thea would have been astonished if she could have
known how, years afterward, when she had need of them,
those old faces were to come back to her, long after they
were hidden away under the earth; that they would seem
to her then as full of meaning, as mysteriously marked by
Destiny, as the people who danced the mazurka under the
elegant Korsunsky.
