Thea lay still and heard her mother’s firm step receding along the bare floor of the trunk loft. There was no sham about her mother, she reflected. Her mother knew a great many things of which she never talked, and all the church people were forever chattering about things of which they knew nothing. She liked her mother.
Now for Mexican Town and the Kohlers! She meant to run in on the old woman without warning, and hug her.
X
Spanish Johnny had no shop of his own, but he kept a table and an order-book in one corner of the drug store where paints and wall-paper were sold, and he was sometimes to be found there for an hour or so about noon. Thea had gone into the drug store to have a friendly chat with the proprietor, who used to lend her books from his shelves. She found Johnny there, trimming rolls of wall-paper for the parlor of Banker Smith’s new house. She sat down on the top of his table and watched him.
“Johnny,” she said suddenly, “I want you to write down the words of that Mexican serenade you used to sing; you know, ‘Rosa de Noche.’ It’s an unusual song. I’m going to study it. I know enough Spanish for that.”
Johnny looked up from his roller with his bright, affable smile. “Si, but it is low for you, I think; voz contralto. It is low for me.”
“Nonsense. I can do more with my low voice than I used to. I’ll show you. Sit down and write it out for me, please.” Thea beckoned him with the short yellow pencil tied to his order-book.
Johnny ran his fingers through his curly black hair. “If you wish. I do not know if that serenata all right for young ladies. Down there it is more for married ladies. They sing it for husbands—or somebody else, may-bee.” Johnny’s eyes twinkled and he apologized gracefully with his shoulders. He sat down at the table, and while Thea looked over his arm, began to write the song down in a long, slanting script, with highly ornamental capitals. Presently he looked up. “This-a song not exactly Mexican,” he said thoughtfully. “It come from farther down; Brazil, Venezuela, may-bee. I learn it from some fellow down there, and he learn it from another fellow. It is-a most like Mexican, but not quite.” Thea did not release him, but pointed to the paper. There were three verses of the song in all, and when Johnny had written them down, he sat looking at them meditatively, his head on one side. “I don’ think for a high voice, señorita,” he objected with polite persistence. “How you accompany with piano?”
“Oh, that will be easy enough.”
“For you, may-bee!” Johnny smiled and drummed on the table with the tips of his agile brown fingers. “You know something? Listen, I tell you.” He rose and sat down on the table beside her, putting his foot on the chair. He loved to talk at the hour of noon. “When you was a little girl, no bigger than that, you come to my house one day ’bout noon, like this, and I was in the door, playing guitar. You was barehead, barefoot; you run away from home. You stand there and make a frown at me an’ listen. By ’n by you say for me to sing. I sing some lil’ ting, and then I say for you to sing with me. You don’ know no words, of course, but you take the air and you sing it justa beauti-ful! I never see a child do that, outside Mexico. You was, oh, I do’ know—seven year, may-bee. By ’n by the preacher come look for you and begin for scold. I say, ‘Don’ scold, Meester Kronborg. She come for hear guitar. She gotta some music in her, that child. Where she get?’ Then he tell me ’bout your gran’papa play oboe in the old country. I never forgetta that time.” Johnny chuckled softly.