PART IV
THE ANCIENT PEOPLE
I
THE San Francisco Mountain lies in Northern Arizona,
above Flagstaff, and its blue slopes and snowy summit
entice the eye for a hundred miles across the desert. About
its base lie the pine forests of the Navajos, where the great
red-trunked trees live out their peaceful centuries in that
sparkling air. The PINONS and scrub begin only where the
forest ends, where the country breaks into open, stony
clearings and the surface of the earth cracks into deep can-
yons. The great pines stand at a considerable distance from
each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks
alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos
are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their
language is not a communicative one, and they never
attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over
their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each
tree has its exalted power to bear.
That was the first thing Thea Kronborg felt about the
forest, as she drove through it one May morning in Henry
Biltmer's democrat wagon--and it was the first great
forest she had ever seen. She had got off the train at Flag-
staff that morning, rolled off into the high, chill air when
all the pines on the mountain were fired by sunrise, so that
she seemed to fall from sleep directly into the forest.
Old Biltmer followed a faint wagon trail which ran south-
east, and which, as they traveled, continually dipped lower,
falling away from the high plateau on the slope of which
Flagstaff sits. The white peak of the mountain, the snow
gorges above the timber, now disappeared from time to
time as the road dropped and dropped, and the forest closed
behind the wagon. More than the mountain disappeared
as the forest closed thus. Thea seemed to be taking very
little through the wood with her. The personality of which
she was so tired seemed to let go of her. The high, spark-
ling air drank it up like blotting-paper. It was lost in the
thrilling blue of the new sky and the song of the thin wind
in the PINONS. The old, fretted lines which marked one off,
which defined her,--made her Thea Kronborg, Bowers's
accompanist, a soprano with a faulty middle voice,--were
all erased.
So far she had failed. Her two years in Chicago had not
resulted in anything. She had failed with Harsanyi, and
she had made no great progress with her voice. She had
come to believe that whatever Bowers had taught her was
of secondary importance, and that in the essential things
she had made no advance. Her student life closed behind
her, like the forest, and she doubted whether she could
go back to it if she tried. Probably she would teach music
in little country towns all her life. Failure was not so tragic
as she would have supposed; she was tired enough not to
care.
She was getting back to the earliest sources of gladness
that she could remember. She had loved the sun, and the
brilliant solitudes of sand and sun, long before these other
things had come along to fasten themselves upon her and
torment her. That night, when she clambered into her big
German feather bed, she felt completely released from the
enslaving desire to get on in the world. Darkness had once
again the sweet wonder that it had in childhood.
