II
SO Thea did not go to a boarding-house 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 back yard 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 back yard,
and she understood that in the winter she must carry up
her own coal and kindling from the bin. There was no fur-
nace 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 mat-
tress 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 wall-paper 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 snow-storm, on Christmas
Eve, with greens hanging about the stone doorway and
arched windows. There was something warm and home,
like about this picture, and Thea grew fond of it. One
day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped
at a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples
bust of Julius Caesar. This she had framed, and hung it on
the big bare wall behind her stove. It was a curious choice,
but she was at the age when people do inexplicable
things. She had been interested in Caesar's "Commen-
taries" when she left school to begin teaching, and she
loved to read about great generals; but these facts would
scarcely explain her wanting that grim bald head to share
her daily existence. It seemed a strange freak, when she
bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen
said to Mrs. Lorch, "no pictures of the composers at all."
Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the
mother better. Old Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a
red face, always shining as if she had just come from the
stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several colors. Her
own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another,
and her false front still another. Her clothes always smelled
of savory cooking, except when she was dressed for church
or KAFFEEKLATSCH, and then she smelled of bay rum or of
the lemon-verbena sprig which she tucked inside her puffy
black kid glove. Her cooking justified all that Mr. Larsen
had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished
before.
The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,--Irene, her mother
called her,--was a different sort of woman altogether.
She was perhaps forty years old, angular, big-boned, with
large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry, yellow hair,
the bang tightly frizzed. She was pale, anaemic, and senti-
mental. She had married the youngest son of a rich, arro-
gant Swedish family who were lumber merchants in St.
Paul. There she dwelt during her married life. Oscar
Andersen was a strong, full-blooded fellow who had counted
on a long life and had been rather careless about his busi-
ness affairs. He was killed by the explosion of a steam
boiler in the mills, and his brothers managed to prove that
he had very little stock in the big business. They had
strongly disapproved of his marriage and they agreed
among themselves that they were entirely justified in de-
frauding his widow, who, they said, "would only marry
again and give some fellow a good thing of it." Mrs. Ander-
sen would not go to law with the family that had always
snubbed and wounded her--she felt the humiliation of be-
ing thrust out more than she felt her impoverishment; so
she went back to Chicago to live with her widowed mother
on an income of five hundred a year. This experience had
given her sentimental nature an incurable hurt. Something
withered away in her. Her head had a downward droop;
her step was soft and apologetic, even in her mother's
house, and her smile had the sickly, uncertain flicker that
so often comes from a secret humiliation. She was affable
and yet shrinking, like one who has come down in the
world, who has known better clothes, better carpets, bet-
ter people, brighter hopes. Her husband was buried in the
Andersen lot in St. Paul, with a locked iron fence around
it. She had to go to his eldest brother for the key when she
went to say good-bye to his grave. She clung to the Swedish
Church because it had been her husband's church.
As her mother had no room for her household belongings,
Mrs. Andersen had brought home with her only her bed-
room set, which now furnished her own room at Mrs.
Lorch's. There she spent most of her time, doing fancy-
work or writing letters to sympathizing German friends
in St. Paul, surrounded by keepsakes and photographs of
the burly Oscar Andersen. Thea, when she was admitted
to this room, and shown these photographs, found her-
self wondering, like the Andersen family, why such a lusty,
gay-looking fellow ever thought he wanted this pallid,
long-cheeked woman, whose manner was always that of
withdrawing, and who must have been rather thin-blooded
even as a girl.
Mrs. Andersen was certainly a depressing person. It
sometimes annoyed Thea very much to hear her insinuat-
ing knock on the door, her flurried explanation of why she
had come, as she backed toward the stairs. Mrs. Andersen
admired Thea greatly. She thought it a distinction to be
even a "temporary soprano"--Thea called herself so quite
seriously--in the Swedish Church. She also thought it
distinguished to be a pupil of Harsanyi's. She considered
Thea very handsome, very Swedish, very talented. She
fluttered about the upper floor when Thea was practicing.
In short, she tried to make a heroine of her, just as Tillie
Kronborg had always done, and Thea was conscious of
something of the sort. When she was working and heard
Mrs. Andersen tip-toeing past her door, she used to shrug
her shoulders and wonder whether she was always to have
a Tillie diving furtively about her in some disguise or other.
At the dressmaker's Mrs. Andersen recalled Tillie even
more painfully. After her first Sunday in Mr. Larsen's
choir, Thea saw that she must have a proper dress for
morning service. Her Moonstone party dress might do to
wear in the evening, but she must have one frock that could
stand the light of day. She, of course, knew nothing about
Chicago dressmakers, so she let Mrs. Andersen take her to
a German woman whom she recommended warmly. The
German dressmaker was excitable and dramatic. Concert
dresses, she said, were her specialty. In her fitting-room
there were photographs of singers in the dresses she had
made them for this or that SANGERFEST. She and Mrs. An-
dersen together achieved a costume which would have
warmed Tillie Kronborg's heart. It was clearly intended
for a woman of forty, with violent tastes. There seemed to
be a piece of every known fabric in it somewhere. When
it came home, and was spread out on her huge bed, Thea
looked it over and told herself candidly that it was "a
horror." However, her money was gone, and there was
nothing to do but make the best of the dress. She never
wore it except, as she said, "to sing in," as if it were an
unbecoming uniform. When Mrs. Lorch and Irene told her
that she "looked like a little bird-of-Paradise in it," Thea
shut her teeth and repeated to herself words she had
learned from Joe Giddy and Spanish Johnny.
In these two good women Thea found faithful friends,
and in their house she found the quiet and peace which
helped her to support the great experiences of that winter.
