her three sisters had all studied piano, and all sang well, but none of
them had talent. Their father had played the oboe in an orchestra in
Sweden, before he came to America to better his fortunes. He had even
known Jenny Lind. A child with talent had to be kept at the piano; so
twice a week in summer and once a week in winter Thea went over the
gulch to the Kohlers’, though the Ladies’ Aid Society thought it was not
proper for their preacher’s daughter to go “where there was so much
drinking.” Not that the Kohler sons ever so much as looked at a glass of
beer. They were ashamed of their old folks and got out into the world as
fast as possible; had their clothes made by a Denver tailor and their
necks shaved up under their hair and forgot the past. Old Fritz and
Wunsch, however, indulged in a friendly bottle pretty often. The two men
were like comrades; perhaps the bond between them was the glass wherein
lost hopes are found; perhaps it was common memories of another country;
perhaps it was the grapevine in the garden—knotty, fibrous shrub, full
of homesickness and sentiment, which the Germans have carried around the
world with them.
As Thea approached the house she peeped between the pink sprays of the
tamarisk hedge and saw the Professor and Mrs. Kohler in the garden,
spading and raking. The garden looked like a relief-map now, and gave no
indication of what it would be in August; such a jungle! Pole beans and
potatoes and corn and leeks and kale and red cabbage—there would even
be vegetables for which there is no American name. Mrs. Kohler was
always getting by mail packages of seeds from Freeport and from the old
country. Then the flowers! There were big sunflowers for the canary
bird, tiger lilies and phlox and zinnias and lady’s-slippers and
portulaca and hollyhocks,—giant hollyhocks. Beside the fruit trees
there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa, and a balm-of-Gilead, two
lindens, and even a ginka,—a rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped
like butterflies, which shivered, but never bent to the wind.
This morning Thea saw to her delight that the two oleander trees, one
white and one red, had been brought up from their winter quarters in the
cellar. There is hardly a German family in the most arid parts of Utah,
New Mexico, Arizona, but has its oleander trees. However loutish the
American-born sons of the family may be, there was never one who refused
to give his muscle to the back-breaking task of getting those tubbed
trees down into the cellar in the fall and up into the sunlight in the
spring. They may strive to avert the day, but they grapple with the tub
at last.
When Thea entered the gate, her professor leaned his spade against the
white post that supported the turreted dove-house, and wiped his face
with his shirt-sleeve; someway he never managed to have a handkerchief
about him. Wunsch was short and stocky, with something rough and
bear-like about his shoulders. His face was a dark, bricky red, deeply
creased rather than wrinkled, and the skin was like loose leather over
his neck band—he wore a brass collar button but no collar. His hair was
cropped close; iron-gray bristles on a bullet-like head. His eyes were
always suffused and bloodshot. He had a coarse, scornful mouth, and
irregular, yellow teeth, much worn at the edges. His hands were square
and red, seldom clean, but always alive, impatient, even sympathetic.
