THE SONG OF THE LARK
I
Thea and Dr. Archie had been gone from Moonstone four days. On the
afternoon of the nineteenth of October they were in a street-car,
riding through the depressing, unkept wastes of North Chicago, on their
way to call upon the Reverend Lars Larsen, a friend to whom Mr.
Kronborg had written. Thea was still staying at the rooms of the Young
Women’s Christian Association, and was miserable and homesick there.
The housekeeper watched her in a way that made her uncomfortable.
Things had not gone very well, so far. The noise and confusion of a big
city tired and disheartened her. She had not had her trunk sent to the
Christian Association rooms because she did not want to double cartage
charges, and now she was running up a bill for storage on it. The
contents of her gray telescope were becoming untidy, and it seemed
impossible to keep one’s face and hands clean in Chicago. She felt as
if she were still on the train, traveling without enough clothes to
keep clean. She wanted another nightgown, and it did not occur to her
that she could buy one. There were other clothes in her trunk that she
needed very much, and she seemed no nearer a place to stay than when
she arrived in the rain, on that first disillusioning morning.
Dr. Archie had gone at once to his friend Hartley Evans, the throat
specialist, and had asked him to tell him of a good piano teacher and
direct him to a good boarding-house. Dr. Evans said he could easily
tell him who was the best piano teacher in Chicago, but that most
students’ boarding-houses were “abominable places, where girls got poor
food for body and mind.” He gave Dr. Archie several addresses, however,
and the doctor went to look the places over. He left Thea in her room,
for she seemed tired and was not at all like herself. His inspection of
boardinghouses was not encouraging. The only place that seemed to him
at all desirable was full, and the mistress of the house could not give
Thea a room in which she could have a piano. She said Thea might use
the piano in her parlor; but when Dr. Archie went to look at the parlor
he found a girl talking to a young man on one of the corner sofas.
Learning that the boarders received all their callers there, he gave up
that house, too, as hopeless.
So when they set out to make the acquaintance of Mr. Larsen on the
afternoon he had appointed, the question of a lodging was still
undecided. The Swedish Reform Church was in a sloughy, weedy district,
near a group of factories. The church itself was a very neat little
building. The parsonage, next door, looked clean and comfortable, and
there was a well-kept yard about it, with a picket fence. Thea saw
several little children playing under a swing, and wondered why
ministers always had so many. When they rang at the parsonage door, a
capable-looking Swedish servant girl answered the bell and told them
that Mr. Larsen’s study was in the church, and that he was waiting for
them there.
Mr. Larsen received them very cordially. The furniture in his study was
so new and the pictures were so heavily framed, that Thea thought it
looked more like the waiting-room of the fashionable Denver dentist to
whom Dr. Archie had taken her that summer, than like a preacher’s
study. There were even flowers in a glass vase on the desk. Mr. Larsen
was a small, plump man, with a short, yellow beard, very white teeth,
and a little turned-up nose on which he wore gold-rimmed eye-glasses.
He looked about thirty-five, but he was growing bald, and his thin,
hair was parted above his left ear and brought up over the bare spot on
the top of his head. He looked cheerful and agreeable. He wore a blue
coat and no cuffs.
After Dr. Archie and Thea sat down on a slippery leather couch, the
minister asked for an outline of Thea’s plans. Dr. Archie explained
that she meant to study piano with Andor Harsanyi; that they had
already seen him, that Thea had played for him and he said he would be
glad to teach her.
Mr. Larsen lifted his pale eyebrows and rubbed his plump white hands
together. “But he is a concert pianist already. He will be very
expensive.”
“That’s why Miss Kronborg wants to get a church position if possible.
She has not money enough to see her through the winter. There’s no use
her coming all the way from Colorado and studying with a second-rate
teacher. My friends here tell me Harsanyi is the best.”
“Oh, very likely! I have heard him play with Thomas. You Western people
do things on a big scale. There are half a dozen teachers that I should
think—However, you know what you want.” Mr. Larsen showed his contempt
for such extravagant standards by a shrug. He felt that Dr. Archie was
trying to impress him. He had succeeded, indeed, in bringing out the
doctor’s stiffest manner. Mr. Larsen went on to explain that he managed
the music in his church himself, and drilled his choir, though the
tenor was the official choirmaster. Unfortunately there were no
vacancies in his choir just now. He had his four voices, very good
ones. He looked away from Dr. Archie and glanced at Thea. She looked
troubled, even a little frightened when he said this, and drew in her
lower lip. She, certainly, was not pretentious, if her protector was.
He continued to study her. She was sitting on the lounge, her knees far
apart, her gloved hands lying stiffly in her lap, like a country girl.
Her turban, which seemed a little too big for her, had got tilted in
the wind,—it was always windy in that part of Chicago,—and she looked
tired. She wore no veil, and her hair, too, was the worse for the wind
and dust. When he said he had all the voices he required, he noticed
that her gloved hands shut tightly. Mr. Larsen reflected that she was
not, after all, responsible for the lofty manner of her father’s
physician; that she was not even responsible for her father, whom he
remembered as a tiresome fellow. As he watched her tired, worried face,
he felt sorry for her.
“All the same, I would like to try your voice,” he said, turning
pointedly away from her companion. “I am interested in voices. Can you
sing to the violin?”
“I guess so,” Thea replied dully. “I don’t know. I never tried.”
Mr. Larsen took his violin out of the case and began to tighten the
keys. “We might go into the lecture-room and see how it goes. I can’t
tell much about a voice by the organ. The violin is really the proper
instrument to try a voice.” He opened a door at the back of his study,
pushed Thea gently through it, and looking over his shoulder to Dr.
Archie said, “Excuse us, sir. We will be back soon.”
Dr. Archie chuckled. All preachers were alike, officious and on their
dignity; liked to deal with women and girls, but not with men. He took
up a thin volume from the minister’s desk. To his amusement it proved
to be a book of “Devotional and Kindred Poems; by Mrs. Aurelia S.
Larsen.” He looked them over, thinking that the world changed very
little. He could remember when the wife of his father’s minister had
published a volume of verses, which all the church members had to buy
and all the children were encouraged to read. His grandfather had made
a face at the book and said, “Puir body!” Both ladies seemed to have
chosen the same subjects, too: Jephthah’s Daughter, Rizpah, David’s
Lament for Absalom, etc. The doctor found the book very amusing.
The Reverend Lars Larsen was a reactionary Swede. His father came to
Iowa in the sixties, married a Swedish girl who was ambitious, like
himself, and they moved to Kansas and took up land under the Homestead
Act. After that, they bought land and leased it from the Government,
acquired land in every possible way. They worked like horses, both of
them; indeed, they would never have used any horse-flesh they owned as
they used themselves. They reared a large family and worked their sons
and daughters as mercilessly as they worked themselves; all of them but
Lars. Lars was the fourth son, and he was born lazy. He seemed to bear
the mark of overstrain on the part of his parents. Even in his cradle
he was an example of physical inertia; anything to lie still. When he
was a growing boy his mother had to drag him out of bed every morning,
and he had to be driven to his chores. At school he had a model
“attendance record,” because he found getting his lessons easier than
farm work. He was the only one of the family who went through the high
school, and by the time he graduated he had already made up his mind to
study for the ministry, because it seemed to him the least laborious of
all callings. In so far as he could see, it was the only business in
which there was practically no competition, in which a man was not all
the time pitted against other men who were willing to work themselves
to death. His father stubbornly opposed Lars’s plan, but after keeping
the boy at home for a year and finding how useless he was on the farm,
he sent him to a theological seminary—as much to conceal his laziness
from the neighbors as because he did not know what else to do with him.
Larsen, like Peter Kronborg, got on well in the ministry, because he
got on well with the women. His English was no worse than that of most
young preachers of American parentage, and he made the most of his
skill with the violin. He was supposed to exert a very desirable
influence over young people and to stimulate their interest in church
work. He married an American girl, and when his father died he got his
share of the property—which was very considerable. He invested his
money carefully and was that rare thing, a preacher of independent
means. His white, well-kept hands were his result,—the evidence that he
had worked out his life successfully in the way that pleased him. His
Kansas brothers hated the sight of his hands.
Larsen liked all the softer things of life,—in so far as he knew about
them. He slept late in the morning, was fussy about his food, and read
a great many novels, preferring sentimental ones. He did not smoke, but
he ate a great deal of candy “for his throat,” and always kept a box of
chocolate drops in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. He always
bought season tickets for the symphony concerts, and he played his
violin for women’s culture clubs. He did not wear cuffs, except on
Sunday, because he believed that a free wrist facilitated his violin
practice. When he drilled his choir he always held his hand with the
little and index fingers curved higher than the other two, like a noted
German conductor he had seen. On the whole, the Reverend Larsen was not
an insincere man; he merely spent his life resting and playing, to make
up for the time his forebears had wasted grubbing in the earth. He was
simple-hearted and kind; he enjoyed his candy and his children and his
sacred cantatas. He could work energetically at almost any form of
play.
Dr. Archie was deep in “The Lament of Mary Magdalen,” when Mr. Larsen
and Thea came back to the study. From the minister’s expression he
judged that Thea had succeeded in interesting him.
Mr. Larsen seemed to have forgotten his hostility toward him, and
addressed him frankly as soon as he entered. He stood holding his
violin, and as Thea sat down he pointed to her with his bow:—
“I have just been telling Miss Kronborg that though I cannot promise
her anything permanent, I might give her something for the next few
months. My soprano is a young married woman and is temporarily
indisposed. She would be glad to be excused from her duties for a
while. I like Miss Kronborg’s singing very much, and I think she would
benefit by the instruction in my choir. Singing here might very well
lead to something else. We pay our soprano only eight dollars a Sunday,
but she always gets ten dollars for singing at funerals. Miss Kronborg
has a sympathetic voice, and I think there would be a good deal of
demand for her at funerals. Several American churches apply to me for a
soloist on such occasions, and I could help her to pick up quite a
little money that way.”
This sounded lugubrious to Dr. Archie, who had a physician’s dislike of
funerals, but he tried to accept the suggestion cordially.
“Miss Kronborg tells me she is having some trouble getting located,”
Mr. Larsen went on with animation, still holding his violin. “I would
advise her to keep away from boarding-houses altogether. Among my
parishioners there are two German women, a mother and daughter. The
daughter is a Swede by marriage, and clings to the Swedish Church. They
live near here, and they rent some of their rooms. They have now a
large room vacant, and have asked me to recommend some one. They have
never taken boarders, but Mrs. Lorch, the mother, is a good cook,—at
least, I am always glad to take supper with her,—and I think I could
persuade her to let this young woman partake of the family table. The
daughter, Mrs. Andersen, is musical, too, and sings in the Mozart
Society. I think they might like to have a music student in the house.
You speak German, I suppose?” he turned to Thea.
“Oh, no; a few words. I don’t know the grammar,” she murmured.
Dr. Archie noticed that her eyes looked alive again, not frozen as they
had looked all morning. “If this fellow can help her, it’s not for me
to be stand-offish,” he said to himself.
“Do you think you would like to stay in such a quiet place, with
old-fashioned people?” Mr. Larsen asked. “I shouldn’t think you could
find a better place to work, if that’s what you want.”
“I think mother would like to have me with people like that,” Thea
replied. “And I’d be glad to settle down most anywhere. I’m losing
time.”
“Very well, there’s no time like the present. Let us go to see Mrs.
Lorch and Mrs. Andersen.”
The minister put his violin in its case and caught up a black-and-white
checked traveling-cap that he wore when he rode his high Columbia
wheel. The three left the church together.
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 furnace 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 mattress 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 “Commentaries” 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
sentimental. She had married the youngest son of a rich, arrogant
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 business 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 defrauding his widow, who, they said, “would only marry
again and give some fellow a good thing of it.” Mrs. Andersen would not
go to law with the family that had always snubbed and wounded her—she
felt the humiliation of being 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, better 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 bedroom set, which now furnished her
own room at Mrs. Lorch’s. There she spent most of her time, doing
fancywork 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 herself 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 insinuating 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 _Sängerfest_. She and Mrs. Andersen 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.
III
Andor Harsanyi had never had a pupil in the least like Thea Kronborg.
He had never had one more intelligent, and he had never had one so
ignorant. When Thea sat down to take her first lesson from him, she had
never heard a work by Beethoven or a composition by Chopin. She knew
their names vaguely. Wunsch had been a musician once, long before he
wandered into Moonstone, but when Thea awoke his interest there was not
much left of him. From him Thea had learned something about the works
of Gluck and Bach, and he used to play her some of the compositions of
Schumann. In his trunk he had a mutilated score of the F sharp minor
sonata, which he had heard Clara Schumann play at a festival in
Leipsic. Though his powers of execution were at such a low ebb, he used
to play at this sonata for his pupil and managed to give her some idea
of its beauty. When Wunsch was a young man, it was still daring to like
Schumann; enthusiasm for his work was considered an expression of
youthful waywardness. Perhaps that was why Wunsch remembered him best.
Thea studied some of the _Kinderszenen_ with him, as well as some
little sonatas by Mozart and Clementi. But for the most part Wunsch
stuck to Czerny and Hummel.
Harsanyi found in Thea a pupil with sure, strong hands, one who read
rapidly and intelligently, who had, he felt, a richly gifted nature.
But she had been given no direction, and her ardor was unawakened. She
had never heard a symphony orchestra. The literature of the piano was
an undiscovered world to her. He wondered how she had been able to work
so hard when she knew so little of what she was working toward. She had
been taught according to the old Stuttgart method; stiff back, stiff
elbows, a very formal position of the hands. The best thing about her
preparation was that she had developed an unusual power of work. He
noticed at once her way of charging at difficulties. She ran to meet
them as if they were foes she had long been seeking, seized them as if
they were destined for her and she for them. Whatever she did well, she
took for granted. Her eagerness aroused all the young Hungarian’s
chivalry. Instinctively one went to the rescue of a creature who had so
much to overcome and who struggled so hard. He used to tell his wife
that Miss Kronborg’s hour took more out of him than half a dozen other
lessons. He usually kept her long over time; he changed her lessons
about so that he could do so, and often gave her time at the end of the
day, when he could talk to her afterward and play for her a little from
what he happened to be studying. It was always interesting to play for
her. Sometimes she was so silent that he wondered, when she left him,
whether she had got anything out of it. But a week later, two weeks
later, she would give back his idea again in a way that set him
vibrating.
All this was very well for Harsanyi; an interesting variation in the
routine of teaching. But for Thea Kronborg, that winter was almost
beyond enduring. She always remembered it as the happiest and wildest
and saddest of her life. Things came too fast for her; she had not had
enough preparation. There were times when she came home from her lesson
and lay upon her bed hating Wunsch and her family, hating a world that
had let her grow up so ignorant; when she wished that she could die
then and there, and be born over again to begin anew. She said
something of this kind once to her teacher, in the midst of a bitter
struggle. Harsanyi turned the light of his wonderful eye upon her—poor
fellow, he had but one, though that was set in such a handsome head—and
said slowly: “Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder
than the other time, and longer. Your mother did not bring anything
into the world to play piano. That you must bring into the world
yourself.”
This comforted Thea temporarily, for it seemed to give her a chance.
But a great deal of the time she was comfortless. Her letters to Dr.
Archie were brief and businesslike. She was not apt to chatter much,
even in the stimulating company of people she liked, and to chatter on
paper was simply impossible for her. If she tried to write him anything
definite about her work, she immediately scratched it out as being only
partially true, or not true at all. Nothing that she could say about
her studies seemed unqualifiedly true, once she put it down on paper.
Late one afternoon, when she was thoroughly tired and wanted to
struggle on into the dusk, Harsanyi, tired too, threw up his hands and
laughed at her. “Not to-day, Miss Kronborg. That sonata will keep; it
won’t run away. Even if you and I should not waken up to-morrow, it
will be there.”
Thea turned to him fiercely. “No, it isn’t here unless I have it—not
for me,” she cried passionately. “Only what I hold in my two hands is
there for me!”
Harsanyi made no reply. He took a deep breath and sat down again. “The
second movement now, quietly, with the shoulders relaxed.”
There were hours, too, of great exaltation; when she was at her best
and became a part of what she was doing and ceased to exist in any
other sense. There were other times when she was so shattered by ideas
that she could do nothing worth while; when they trampled over her like
an army and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them. She
sometimes came home from a late lesson so exhausted that she could eat
no supper. If she tried to eat, she was ill afterward. She used to
throw herself upon the bed and lie there in the dark, not thinking, not
feeling, but evaporating. That same night, perhaps, she would waken up
rested and calm, and as she went over her work in her mind, the
passages seemed to become something of themselves, to take a sort of
pattern in the darkness. She had never learned to work away from the
piano until she came to Harsanyi, and it helped her more than anything
had ever helped her before.
She almost never worked now with the sunny, happy contentment that had
filled the hours when she worked with Wunsch—“like a fat horse turning
a sorgum mill,” she said bitterly to herself. Then, by sticking to it,
she could always do what she set out to do. Now, everything that she
really wanted was impossible; a _cantabile_ like Harsanyi’s, for
instance, instead of her own cloudy tone. No use telling her she might
have it in ten years. She wanted it now. She wondered how she had ever
found other things interesting: books, “Anna Karenina”—all that seemed
so unreal and on the outside of things. She was not born a musician,
she decided; there was no other way of explaining it.
Sometimes she got so nervous at the piano that she left it, and
snatching up her hat and cape went out and walked, hurrying through the
streets like Christian fleeing from the City of Destruction. And while
she walked she cried. There was scarcely a street in the neighborhood
that she had not cried up and down before that winter was over. The
thing that used to lie under her cheek, that sat so warmly over her
heart when she glided away from the sand hills that autumn morning, was
far from her. She had come to Chicago to be with it, and it had
deserted her, leaving in its place a painful longing, an unresigned
despair.
Harsanyi knew that his interesting pupil—“the savage blonde,” one of
his male students called her—was sometimes very unhappy. He saw in her
discontent a curious definition of character. He would have said that a
girl with so much musical feeling, so intelligent, with good training
of eye and hand, would, when thus suddenly introduced to the great
literature of the piano, have found boundless happiness. But he soon
learned that she was not able to forget her own poverty in the richness
of the world he opened to her. Often when he played to her, her face
was the picture of restless misery. She would sit crouching forward,
her elbows on her knees, her brows drawn together and her gray-green
eyes smaller than ever, reduced to mere pin-points of cold, piercing
light. Sometimes, while she listened, she would swallow hard, two or
three times, and look nervously from left to right, drawing her
shoulders together. “Exactly,” he thought, “as if she were being
watched, or as if she were naked and heard some one coming.”
On the other hand, when she came several times to see Mrs. Harsanyi and
the two babies, she was like a little girl, jolly and gay and eager to
play with the children, who loved her. The little daughter, Tanya,
liked to touch Miss Kronborg’s yellow hair and pat it, saying, “Dolly,
dolly,” because it was of a color much oftener seen on dolls than on
people. But if Harsanyi opened the piano and sat down to play, Miss
Kronborg gradually drew away from the children, retreated to a corner
and became sullen or troubled. Mrs. Harsanyi noticed this, also, and
thought it very strange behavior.
Another thing that puzzled Harsanyi was Thea’s apparent lack of
curiosity. Several times he offered to give her tickets to concerts,
but she said she was too tired or that it “knocked her out to be up
late.” Harsanyi did not know that she was singing in a choir, and had
often to sing at funerals, neither did he realize how much her work
with him stirred her and exhausted her. Once, just as she was leaving
his studio, he called her back and told her he could give her some
tickets that had been sent him for Emma Juch that evening. Thea
fingered the black wool on the edge of her plush cape and replied, “Oh,
thank you, Mr. Harsanyi, but I have to wash my hair to-night.”
Mrs. Harsanyi liked Miss Kronborg thoroughly. She saw in her the making
of a pupil who would reflect credit upon Harsanyi. She felt that the
girl could be made to look strikingly handsome, and that she had the
kind of personality which takes hold of audiences. Moreover, Miss
Kronborg was not in the least sentimental about her husband. Sometimes
from the show pupils one had to endure a good deal. “I like that girl,”
she used to say, when Harsanyi told her of one of Thea’s _gaucheries_.
“She doesn’t sigh every time the wind blows. With her one swallow
doesn’t make a summer.”
Thea told them very little about herself. She was not naturally
communicative, and she found it hard to feel confidence in new people.
She did not know why, but she could not talk to Harsanyi as she could
to Dr. Archie, or to Johnny and Mrs. Tellamantez. With Mr. Larsen she
felt more at home, and when she was walking she sometimes stopped at
his study to eat candy with him or to hear the plot of the novel he
happened to be reading.
One evening toward the middle of December Thea was to dine with the
Harsanyis. She arrived early, to have time to play with the children
before they went to bed. Mrs. Harsanyi took her into her own room and
helped her take off her country “fascinator” and her clumsy plush cape.
Thea had bought this cape at a big department store and had paid $16.50
for it. As she had never paid more than ten dollars for a coat before,
that seemed to her a large price. It was very heavy and not very warm,
ornamented with a showy pattern in black disks, and trimmed around the
collar and the edges with some kind of black wool that “crocked” badly
in snow or rain. It was lined with a cotton stuff called “farmer’s
satin.” Mrs. Harsanyi was one woman in a thousand. As she lifted this
cape from Thea’s shoulders and laid it on her white bed, she wished
that her husband did not have to charge pupils like this one for their
lessons. Thea wore her Moonstone party dress, white organdie, made with
a “V” neck and elbow sleeves, and a blue sash. She looked very pretty
in it, and around her throat she had a string of pink coral and tiny
white shells that Ray once brought her from Los Angeles. Mrs. Harsanyi
noticed that she wore high heavy shoes which needed blacking. The choir
in Mr. Larsen’s church stood behind a railing, so Thea did not pay much
attention to her shoes.
“You have nothing to do to your hair,” Mrs. Harsanyi said kindly, as
Thea turned to the mirror. “However it happens to lie, it’s always
pretty. I admire it as much as Tanya does.”
Thea glanced awkwardly away from her and looked stern, but Mrs.
Harsanyi knew that she was pleased. They went into the living-room,
behind the studio, where the two children were playing on the big rug
before the coal grate. Andor, the boy, was six, a sturdy, handsome
child, and the little girl was four. She came tripping to meet Thea,
looking like a little doll in her white net dress—her mother made all
her clothes. Thea picked her up and hugged her. Mrs. Harsanyi excused
herself and went to the dining-room. She kept only one maid and did a
good deal of the housework herself, besides cooking her husband’s
favorite dishes for him. She was still under thirty, a slender,
graceful woman, gracious, intelligent, and capable. She adapted herself
to circumstances with a well-bred ease which solved many of her
husband’s difficulties, and kept him, as he said, from feeling cheap
and down at the heel. No musician ever had a better wife. Unfortunately
her beauty was of a very frail and impressionable kind, and she was
beginning to lose it. Her face was too thin now, and there were often
dark circles under her eyes.
Left alone with the children, Thea sat down on Tanya’s little chair—she
would rather have sat on the floor, but was afraid of rumpling her
dress—and helped them play “cars” with Andor’s iron railway set. She
showed him new ways to lay his tracks and how to make switches, set up
his Noah’s ark village for stations and packed the animals in the open
coal cars to send them to the stockyards. They worked out their
shipment so realistically that when Andor put the two little reindeer
into the stock car, Tanya snatched them out and began to cry, saying
she wasn’t going to have all their animals killed.
Harsanyi came in, jaded and tired, and asked Thea to go on with her
game, as he was not equal to talking much before dinner. He sat down
and made pretense of glancing at the evening paper, but he soon dropped
it. After the railroad began to grow tiresome, Thea went with the
children to the lounge in the corner, and played for them the game with
which she used to amuse Thor for hours together behind the parlor stove
at home, making shadow pictures against the wall with her hands. Her
fingers were very supple, and she could make a duck and a cow and a
sheep and a fox and a rabbit and even an elephant. Harsanyi, from his
low chair, watched them, smiling. The boy was on his knees, jumping up
and down with the excitement of guessing the beasts, and Tanya sat with
her feet tucked under her and clapped her frail little hands. Thea’s
profile, in the lamplight, teased his fancy. Where had he seen a head
like it before?
When dinner was announced, little Andor took Thea’s hand and walked to
the dining-room with her. The children always had dinner with their
parents and behaved very nicely at table. “Mamma,” said Andor seriously
as he climbed into his chair and tucked his napkin into the collar of
his blouse, “Miss Kronborg’s hands are every kind of animal there is.”
His father laughed. “I wish somebody would say that about my hands,
Andor.”
When Thea dined at the Harsanyis before, she noticed that there was an
intense suspense from the moment they took their places at the table
until the master of the house had tasted the soup. He had a theory that
if the soup went well, the dinner would go well; but if the soup was
poor, all was lost. To-night he tasted his soup and smiled, and Mrs.
Harsanyi sat more easily in her chair and turned her attention to Thea.
Thea loved their dinner table, because it was lighted by candles in
silver candle-sticks, and she had never seen a table so lighted
anywhere else. There were always flowers, too. To-night there was a
little orange tree, with oranges on it, that one of Harsanyi’s pupils
had sent him at Thanksgiving time. After Harsanyi had finished his soup
and a glass of red Hungarian wine, he lost his fagged look and became
cordial and witty. He persuaded Thea to drink a little wine to-night.
The first time she dined with them, when he urged her to taste the
glass of sherry beside her plate, she astonished them by telling them
that she “never drank.”
Harsanyi was then a man of thirty-two. He was to have a very brilliant
career, but he did not know it then. Theodore Thomas was perhaps the
only man in Chicago who felt that Harsanyi might have a great future.
Harsanyi belonged to the softer Slavic type, and was more like a Pole
than a Hungarian. He was tall, slender, active, with sloping, graceful
shoulders and long arms. His head was very fine, strongly and
delicately modelled, and, as Thea put it, “so independent.” A lock of
his thick brown hair usually hung over his forehead. His eye was
wonderful; full of light and fire when he was interested, soft and
thoughtful when he was tired or melancholy. The meaning and power of
two very fine eyes must all have gone into this one—the right one,
fortunately, the one next his audience when he played. He believed that
the glass eye which gave one side of his face such a dull, blind look,
had ruined his career, or rather had made a career impossible for him.
Harsanyi lost his eye when he was twelve years old, in a Pennsylvania
mining town where explosives happened to be kept too near the frame
shanties in which the company packed newly arrived Hungarian families.
His father was a musician and a good one, but he had cruelly
over-worked the boy; keeping him at the piano for six hours a day and
making him play in cafes and dance halls for half the night. Andor ran
away and crossed the ocean with an uncle, who smuggled him through the
port as one of his own many children. The explosion in which Andor was
hurt killed a score of people, and he was thought lucky to get off with
an eye. He still had a clipping from a Pittsburg paper, giving a list
of the dead and injured. He appeared as “Harsanyi, Andor, left eye and
slight injuries about the head.” That was his first American “notice”;
and he kept it. He held no grudge against the coal company; he
understood that the accident was merely one of the things that are
bound to happen in the general scramble of American life, where every
one comes to grab and takes his chance.
While they were eating dessert, Thea asked Harsanyi if she could change
her Tuesday lesson from afternoon to morning. “I have to be at a choir
rehearsal in the afternoon, to get ready for the Christmas music, and I
expect it will last until late.”
Harsanyi put down his fork and looked up. “A choir rehearsal? You sing
in a church?”
“Yes. A little Swedish church, over on the North side.”
“Why did you not tell us?”
“Oh, I’m only a temporary. The regular soprano is not well.”
“How long have you been singing there?”
“Ever since I came. I had to get a position of some kind,” Thea
explained, flushing, “and the preacher took me on. He runs the choir
himself. He knew my father, and I guess he took me to oblige.”
Harsanyi tapped the tablecloth with the ends of his fingers. “But why
did you never tell us? Why are you so reticent with us?”
Thea looked shyly at him from under her brows. “Well, it’s certainly
not very interesting. It’s only a little church. I only do it for
business reasons.”
“What do you mean? Don’t you like to sing? Don’t you sing well?”
“I like it well enough, but, of course, I don’t know anything about
singing. I guess that’s why I never said anything about it. Anybody
that’s got a voice can sing in a little church like that.”
Harsanyi laughed softly—a little scornfully, Thea thought. “So you have
a voice, have you?”
Thea hesitated, looked intently at the candles and then at Harsanyi.
“Yes,” she said firmly; “I have got some, anyway.”
“Good girl,” said Mrs. Harsanyi, nodding and smiling at Thea. “You must
let us hear you sing after dinner.”
This remark seemingly closed the subject, and when the coffee was
brought they began to talk of other things. Harsanyi asked Thea how she
happened to know so much about the way in which freight trains are
operated, and she tried to give him some idea of how the people in
little desert towns live by the railway and order their lives by the
coming and going of the trains. When they left the diningroom the
children were sent to bed and Mrs. Harsanyi took Thea into the studio.
She and her husband usually sat there in the evening.
Although their apartment seemed so elegant to Thea, it was small and
cramped. The studio was the only spacious room. The Harsanyis were
poor, and it was due to Mrs. Harsanyi’s good management that their
lives, even in hard times, moved along with dignity and order. She had
long ago found out that bills or debts of any kind frightened her
husband and crippled his working power. He said they were like bars on
the windows, and shut out the future; they meant that just so many
hundred dollars’ worth of his life was debilitated and exhausted before
he got to it. So Mrs. Harsanyi saw to it that they never owed anything.
Harsanyi was not extravagant, though he was sometimes careless about
money. Quiet and order and his wife’s good taste were the things that
meant most to him. After these, good food, good cigars, a little good
wine. He wore his clothes until they were shabby, until his wife had to
ask the tailor to come to the house and measure him for new ones. His
neckties she usually made herself, and when she was in shops she always
kept her eye open for silks in very dull or pale shades, grays and
olives, warm blacks and browns.
When they went into the studio Mrs. Harsanyi took up her embroidery and
Thea sat down beside her on a low stool, her hands clasped about her
knees. While his wife and his pupil talked, Harsanyi sank into a
_chaise longue_ in which he sometimes snatched a few moments’ rest
between his lessons, and smoked. He sat well out of the circle of the
lamplight, his feet to the fire. His feet were slender and well shaped,
always elegantly shod. Much of the grace of his movements was due to
the fact that his feet were almost as sure and flexible as his hands.
He listened to the conversation with amusement. He admired his wife’s
tact and kindness with crude young people; she taught them so much
without seeming to be instructing. When the clock struck nine, Thea
said she must be going home.
Harsanyi rose and flung away his cigarette. “Not yet. We have just
begun the evening. Now you are going to sing for us. I have been
waiting for you to recover from dinner. Come, what shall it be?” he
crossed to the piano.
Thea laughed and shook her head, locking her elbows still tighter about
her knees. “Thank you, Mr. Harsanyi, but if you really make me sing,
I’ll accompany myself. You couldn’t stand it to play the sort of things
I have to sing.”
As Harsanyi still pointed to the chair at the piano, she left her stool
and went to it, while he returned to his _chaise longue_. Thea looked
at the keyboard uneasily for a moment, then she began “Come, ye
Disconsolate,” the hymn Wunsch had always liked to hear her sing. Mrs.
Harsanyi glanced questioningly at her husband, but he was looking
intently at the toes of his boots, shading his forehead with his long
white hand. When Thea finished the hymn she did not turn around, but
immediately began “The Ninety and Nine.” Mrs. Harsanyi kept trying to
catch her husband’s eye; but his chin only sank lower on his collar.
“There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,
But one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold.”
Harsanyi looked at her, then back at the fire.
“Rejoice, for the Shepherd has found his sheep.”
Thea turned on the chair and grinned. “That’s about enough, isn’t it?
That song got me my job. The preacher said it was sympathetic,” she
minced the word, remembering Mr. Larsen’s manner.
Harsanyi drew himself up in his chair, resting his elbows on the low
arms. “Yes? That is better suited to your voice. Your upper tones are
good, above G. I must teach you some songs. Don’t you know
anything—pleasant?”
Thea shook her head ruefully. “I’m afraid I don’t. Let me see—Perhaps,”
she turned to the piano and put her hands on the keys. “I used to sing
this for Mr. Wunsch a long while ago. It’s for contralto, but I’ll try
it.” She frowned at the keyboard a moment, played the few introductory
measures, and began:
“Ach, ich habe sie verloren,”
She had not sung it for a long time, and it came back like an old
friendship. When she finished, Harsanyi sprang from his chair and
dropped lightly upon his toes, a kind of _entre-chat_ that he sometimes
executed when he formed a sudden resolution, or when he was about to
follow a pure intuition, against reason. His wife said that when he
gave that spring he was shot from the bow of his ancestors, and now
when he left his chair in that manner she knew he was intensely
interested. He went quickly to the piano.
“Sing that again. There is nothing the matter with your low voice, my
girl. I will play for you. Let your voice out.” Without looking at her
he began the accompaniment. Thea drew back her shoulders, relaxed them
instinctively, and sang.
When she finished the aria, Harsanyi beckoned her nearer. “Sing _ah—ah_
for me, as I indicate.” He kept his right hand on the keyboard and put
his left to her throat, placing the tips of his delicate fingers over
her larynx. “Again,—until your breath is gone.—Trill between the two
tones, always; good! Again; excellent!—Now up,—stay there. E and F. Not
so good, is it? F is always a hard one.—Now, try the half-tone.—That’s
right, nothing difficult about it.—Now, pianissimo, _ah—ah_. Now, swell
it, _ah—ah_.—Again, follow my hand.—Now, carry it down.—Anybody ever
tell you anything about your breathing?”
“Mr. Larsen says I have an unusually long breath,” Thea replied with
spirit.
Harsanyi smiled. “So you have, so you have. That was what I meant. Now,
once more; carry it up and then down, _ah—ah_.” He put his hand back to
her throat and sat with his head bent, his one eye closed. He loved to
hear a big voice throb in a relaxed, natural throat, and he was
thinking that no one had ever felt this voice vibrate before. It was
like a wild bird that had flown into his studio on Middleton Street
from goodness knew how far! No one knew that it had come, or even that
it existed; least of all the strange, crude girl in whose throat it
beat its passionate wings. What a simple thing it was, he reflected;
why had he never guessed it before? Everything about her indicated
it,—the big mouth, the wide jaw and chin, the strong white teeth, the
deep laugh. The machine was so simple and strong, seemed to be so
easily operated. She sang from the bottom of herself. Her breath came
from down where her laugh came from, the deep laugh which Mrs. Harsanyi
had once called “the laugh of the people.” A relaxed throat, a voice
that lay on the breath, that had never been forced off the breath; it
rose and fell in the air-column like the little balls which are put to
shine in the jet of a fountain. The voice did not thin as it went up;
the upper tones were as full and rich as the lower, produced in the
same way and as unconsciously, only with deeper breath.
At last Harsanyi threw back his head and rose. “You must be tired, Miss
Kronborg.”
When she replied, she startled him; he had forgotten how hard and full
of burs her speaking voice was. “No,” she said, “singing never tires
me.”
Harsanyi pushed back his hair with a nervous hand. “I don’t know much
about the voice, but I shall take liberties and teach you some good
songs. I think you have a very interesting voice.”
“I’m glad if you like it. Good-night, Mr. Harsanyi.” Thea went with
Mrs. Harsanyi to get her wraps.
When Mrs. Harsanyi came back to her husband, she found him walking
restlessly up and down the room.
“Don’t you think her voice wonderful, dear?” she asked.
“I scarcely know what to think. All I really know about that girl is
that she tires me to death. We must not have her often. If I did not
have my living to make, then—” he dropped into a chair and closed his
eyes. “How tired I am. What a voice!”
IV
After that evening Thea’s work with Harsanyi changed somewhat. He
insisted that she should study some songs with him, and after almost
every lesson he gave up half an hour of his own time to practicing them
with her. He did not pretend to know much about voice production, but
so far, he thought, she had acquired no really injurious habits. A
healthy and powerful organ had found its own method, which was not a
bad one. He wished to find out a good deal before he recommended a
vocal teacher. He never told Thea what he thought about her voice, and
made her general ignorance of anything worth singing his pretext for
the trouble he took. That was in the beginning. After the first few
lessons his own pleasure and hers were pretext enough. The singing came
at the end of the lesson hour, and they both treated it as a form of
relaxation.
Harsanyi did not say much even to his wife about his discovery. He
brooded upon it in a curious way. He found that these unscientific
singing lessons stimulated him in his own study. After Miss Kronborg
left him he often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner,
with his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his brain
which he had sometimes lost for weeks together under the grind of
teaching. He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as
he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him;
something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was
feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than
ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him
curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him.
Why all this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one
must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that
rouses one’s imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often
wearied him, but she never bored him. Under her crudeness and brusque
hardness, he felt there was a nature quite different, of which he never
got so much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when she
sang. It was toward this hidden creature that he was trying, for his
own pleasure, to find his way. In short, Harsanyi looked forward to his
hour with Thea for the same reason that poor Wunsch had sometimes
dreaded his; because she stirred him more than anything she did could
adequately explain.
One afternoon Harsanyi, after the lesson, was standing by the window
putting some collodion on a cracked finger, and Thea was at the piano
trying over “Die Lorelei” which he had given her last week to practice.
It was scarcely a song which a singing master would have given her, but
he had his own reasons. How she sang it mattered only to him and to
her. He was playing his own game now, without interference; he
suspected that he could not do so always.
When she finished the song, she looked back over her shoulder at him
and spoke thoughtfully. “That wasn’t right, at the end, was it?”
“No, that should be an open, flowing tone, something like this,”—he
waved his fingers rapidly in the air. “You get the idea?”
“No, I don’t. Seems a queer ending, after the rest.”
Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the pocket of his
velvet coat. “Why so? Shipwrecks come and go, _Märchen_ come and go,
but the river keeps right on. There you have your open, flowing tone.”
Thea looked intently at the music. “I see,” she said dully. “Oh, I
see!” she repeated quickly and turned to him a glowing countenance. “It
is the river.—Oh, yes, I get it now!” She looked at him but long enough
to catch his glance, then turned to the piano again. Harsanyi was never
quite sure where the light came from when her face suddenly flashed out
at him in that way. Her eyes were too small to account for it, though
they glittered like green ice in the sun. At such moments her hair was
yellower, her skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly
been turned up inside of her. She went at the song again:
“Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Das ich so traurig bin.”
A kind of happiness vibrated in her voice. Harsanyi noticed how much
and how unhesitatingly she changed her delivery of the whole song, the
first part as well as the last. He had often noticed that she could not
think a thing out in passages. Until she saw it as a whole, she
wandered like a blind man surrounded by torments. After she once had
her “revelation,” after she got the idea that to her—not always to
him—explained everything, then she went forward rapidly. But she was
not always easy to help. She was sometimes impervious to suggestion;
she would stare at him as if she were deaf and ignore everything he
told her to do. Then, all at once, something would happen in her brain
and she would begin to do all that he had been for weeks telling her to
do, without realizing that he had ever told her.
To-night Thea forgot Harsanyi and his finger. She finished the song
only to begin it with fresh enthusiasm.
“Und das hat mit ihrem singen
Die Lorelei gethan.”
She sat there singing it until the darkening room was so flooded with
it that Harsanyi threw open a window.
“You really must stop it, Miss Kronborg. I shan’t be able to get it out
of my head to-night.”
Thea laughed tolerantly as she began to gather up her music. “Why, I
thought you had gone, Mr. Harsanyi. I like that song.”
That evening at dinner Harsanyi sat looking intently into a glass of
heavy yellow wine; boring into it, indeed, with his one eye, when his
face suddenly broke into a smile.
“What is it, Andor?” his wife asked.
He smiled again, this time at her, and took up the nutcrackers and a
Brazil nut. “Do you know,” he said in a tone so intimate and
confidential that he might have been speaking to himself,—“do you know,
I like to see Miss Kronborg get hold of an idea. In spite of being so
talented, she’s not quick. But when she does get an idea, it fills her
up to the eyes. She had my room so reeking of a song this afternoon
that I couldn’t stay there.”
Mrs. Harsanyi looked up quickly, “‘Die Lorelei,’ you mean? One couldn’t
think of anything else anywhere in the house. I thought she was
possessed. But don’t you think her voice is wonderful sometimes?”
Harsanyi tasted his wine slowly. “My dear, I’ve told you before that I
don’t know what I think about Miss Kronborg, except that I’m glad there
are not two of her. I sometimes wonder whether she is not glad. Fresh
as she is at it all, I’ve occasionally fancied that, if she knew how,
she would like to—diminish.” He moved his left hand out into the air as
if he were suggesting a _diminuendo_ to an orchestra.
V
By the first of February Thea had been in Chicago almost four months,
and she did not know much more about the city than if she had never
quitted Moonstone. She was, as Harsanyi said, incurious. Her work took
most of her time, and she found that she had to sleep a good deal. It
had never before been so hard to get up in the morning. She had the
bother of caring for her room, and she had to build her fire and bring
up her coal. Her routine was frequently interrupted by a message from
Mr. Larsen summoning her to sing at a funeral. Every funeral took half
a day, and the time had to be made up. When Mrs. Harsanyi asked her if
it did not depress her to sing at funerals, she replied that she “had
been brought up to go to funerals and didn’t mind.”
Thea never went into shops unless she had to, and she felt no interest
in them. Indeed, she shunned them, as places where one was sure to be
parted from one’s money in some way. She was nervous about counting her
change, and she could not accustom herself to having her purchases sent
to her address. She felt much safer with her bundles under her arm.
During this first winter Thea got no city consciousness. Chicago was
simply a wilderness through which one had to find one’s way. She felt
no interest in the general briskness and zest of the crowds. The crash
and scramble of that big, rich, appetent Western city she did not take
in at all, except to notice that the noise of the drays and street-cars
tired her. The brilliant window displays, the splendid furs and stuffs,
the gorgeous flower-shops, the gay candy-shops, she scarcely noticed.
At Christmas-time she did feel some curiosity about the toy-stores, and
she wished she held Thor’s little mittened fist in her hand as she
stood before the windows. The jewelers’ windows, too, had a strong
attraction for her—she had always liked bright stones. When she went
into the city she used to brave the biting lake winds and stand gazing
in at the displays of diamonds and pearls and emeralds; the tiaras and
necklaces and earrings, on white velvet. These seemed very well worth
while to her, things worth coveting.
Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen often told each other it was strange that
Miss Kronborg had so little initiative about “visiting points of
interest.” When Thea came to live with them she had expressed a wish to
see two places: Montgomery Ward and Company’s big mail-order store, and
the packing-houses, to which all the hogs and cattle that went through
Moonstone were bound. One of Mrs. Lorch’s lodgers worked in a
packing-house, and Mrs. Andersen brought Thea word that she had spoken
to Mr. Eckman and he would gladly take her to Packingtown. Eckman was a
toughish young Swede, and he thought it would be something of a lark to
take a pretty girl through the slaughter-houses. But he was
disappointed. Thea neither grew faint nor clung to the arm he kept
offering her. She asked innumerable questions and was impatient because
he knew so little of what was going on outside of his own department.
When they got off the street-car and walked back to Mrs. Lorch’s house
in the dusk, Eckman put her hand in his overcoat pocket—she had no
muff—and kept squeezing it ardently until she said, “Don’t do that; my
ring cuts me.” That night he told his roommate that he “could have
kissed her as easy as rolling off a log, but she wasn’t worth the
trouble.” As for Thea, she had enjoyed the afternoon very much, and
wrote her father a brief but clear account of what she had seen.
One night at supper Mrs. Andersen was talking about the exhibit of
students’ work she had seen at the Art Institute that afternoon.
Several of her friends had sketches in the exhibit. Thea, who always
felt that she was behindhand in courtesy to Mrs. Andersen, thought that
here was an opportunity to show interest without committing herself to
anything. “Where is that, the Institute?” she asked absently.
Mrs. Andersen clasped her napkin in both hands. “The Art Institute? Our
beautiful Art Institute on Michigan Avenue? Do you mean to say you have
never visited it?”
“Oh, is it the place with the big lions out in front? I remember; I saw
it when I went to Montgomery Ward’s. Yes, I thought the lions were
beautiful.”
“But the pictures! Didn’t you visit the galleries?”
“No. The sign outside said it was a pay-day. I’ve always meant to go
back, but I haven’t happened to be down that way since.”
Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen looked at each other. The old mother
spoke, fixing her shining little eyes upon Thea across the table. “Ah,
but Miss Kronborg, there are old masters! Oh, many of them, such as you
could not see anywhere out of Europe.”
“And Corots,” breathed Mrs. Andersen, tilting her head feelingly. “Such
examples of the Barbizon school!” This was meaningless to Thea, who did
not read the art columns of the Sunday _Inter-Ocean_ as Mrs. Andersen
did.
“Oh, I’m going there some day,” she reassured them. “I like to look at
oil paintings.”
One bleak day in February, when the wind was blowing clouds of dirt
like a Moonstone sandstorm, dirt that filled your eyes and ears and
mouth, Thea fought her way across the unprotected space in front of the
Art Institute and into the doors of the building. She did not come out
again until the closing hour. In the street-car, on the long cold ride
home, while she sat staring at the waistcoat buttons of a fat
strap-hanger, she had a serious reckoning with herself. She seldom
thought about her way of life, about what she ought or ought not to do;
usually there was but one obvious and important thing to be done. But
that afternoon she remonstrated with herself severely. She told herself
that she was missing a great deal; that she ought to be more willing to
take advice and to go to see things. She was sorry that she had let
months pass without going to the Art Institute. After this she would go
once a week.
The Institute proved, indeed, a place of retreat, as the sand hills or
the Kohlers’ garden used to be; a place where she could forget Mrs.
Andersen’s tiresome overtures of friendship, the stout contralto in the
choir whom she so unreasonably hated, and even, for a little while, the
torment of her work. That building was a place in which she could relax
and play, and she could hardly ever play now. On the whole, she spent
more time with the casts than with the pictures. They were at once more
simple and more perplexing; and some way they seemed more important,
harder to overlook. It never occurred to her to buy a catalogue, so she
called most of the casts by names she made up for them. Some of them
she knew; the Dying Gladiator she had read about in “Childe Harold”
almost as long ago as she could remember; he was strongly associated
with Dr. Archie and childish illnesses. The Venus di Milo puzzled her;
she could not see why people thought her so beautiful. She told herself
over and over that she did not think the Apollo Belvedere “at all
handsome.” Better than anything else she liked a great equestrian
statue of an evil, cruel-looking general with an unpronounceable name.
She used to walk round and round this terrible man and his terrible
horse, frowning at him, brooding upon him, as if she had to make some
momentous decision about him.
The casts, when she lingered long among them, always made her gloomy.
It was with a lightening of the heart, a feeling of throwing off the
old miseries and old sorrows of the world, that she ran up the wide
staircase to the pictures. There she liked best the ones that told
stories. There was a painting by Gérôme called “The Pasha’s Grief”
which always made her wish for Gunner and Axel. The Pasha was seated on
a rug, beside a green candle almost as big as a telegraph pole, and
before him was stretched his dead tiger, a splendid beast, and there
were pink roses scattered about him. She loved, too, a picture of some
boys bringing in a newborn calf on a litter, the cow walking beside it
and licking it. The Corot which hung next to this painting she did not
like or dislike; she never saw it.
But in that same room there was a picture—oh, that was the thing she
ran upstairs so fast to see! That was her picture. She imagined that
nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her. That was a
picture indeed. She liked even the name of it, “The Song of the Lark.”
The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in
the girl’s heavy face—well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was
there. She told herself that that picture was “right.” Just what she
meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain. But to her the
word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked
at the picture.
Before Thea had any idea how fast the weeks were flying, before Mr.
Larsen’s “permanent” soprano had returned to her duties, spring came;
windy, dusty, strident, shrill; a season almost more violent in Chicago
than the winter from which it releases one, or the heat to which it
eventually delivers one. One sunny morning the apple trees in Mrs.
Lorch’s back yard burst into bloom, and for the first time in months
Thea dressed without building a fire. The morning shone like a holiday,
and for her it was to be a holiday. There was in the air that sudden,
treacherous softness which makes the Poles who work in the
packing-houses get drunk. At such times beauty is necessary, and in
Packingtown there is no place to get it except at the saloons, where
one can buy for a few hours the illusion of comfort, hope,
love,—whatever one most longs for.
Harsanyi had given Thea a ticket for the symphony concert that
afternoon, and when she looked out at the white apple trees her doubts
as to whether she ought to go vanished at once. She would make her work
light that morning, she told herself. She would go to the concert full
of energy. When she set off, after dinner, Mrs. Lorch, who knew Chicago
weather, prevailed upon her to take her cape. The old lady said that
such sudden mildness, so early in April, presaged a sharp return of
winter, and she was anxious about her apple trees.
The concert began at two-thirty, and Thea was in her seat in the
Auditorium at ten minutes after two—a fine seat in the first row of the
balcony, on the side, where she could see the house as well as the
orchestra. She had been to so few concerts that the great house, the
crowd of people, and the lights, all had a stimulating effect. She was
surprised to see so many men in the audience, and wondered how they
could leave their business in the afternoon. During the first number
Thea was so much interested in the orchestra itself, in the men, the
instruments, the volume of sound, that she paid little attention to
what they were playing. Her excitement impaired her power of listening.
She kept saying to herself, “Now I must stop this foolishness and
listen; I may never hear this again”; but her mind was like a glass
that is hard to focus. She was not ready to listen until the second
number, Dvorak’s Symphony in E minor, called on the programme, “From
the New World.” The first theme had scarcely been given out when her
mind became clear; instant composure fell upon her, and with it came
the power of concentration. This was music she could understand, music
from the New World indeed! Strange how, as the first movement went on,
it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the
grass-grown wagon trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the
wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.
When the first movement ended, Thea’s hands and feet were cold as ice.
She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted
something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of
the Largo, she knew that what she wanted was exactly that. Here were
the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that
wakened and chirped in the early morning; the reaching and reaching of
high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was
home in it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement
of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed
something despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was
born; a soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a
past it could not recall.
If Thea had had much experience in concert-going, and had known her own
capacity, she would have left the hall when the symphony was over. But
she sat still, scarcely knowing where she was, because her mind had
been far away and had not yet come back to her. She was startled when
the orchestra began to play again—the entry of the gods into Walhalla.
She heard it as people hear things in their sleep. She knew scarcely
anything about the Wagner operas. She had a vague idea that “Rhinegold”
was about the strife between gods and men; she had read something about
it in Mr. Haweis’s book long ago. Too tired to follow the orchestra
with much understanding, she crouched down in her seat and closed her
eyes. The cold, stately measures of the Walhalla music rang out, far
away; the rainbow bridge throbbed out into the air, under it the
wailing of the Rhine daughters and the singing of the Rhine. But Thea
was sunk in twilight; it was all going on in another world. So it
happened that with a dull, almost listless ear she heard for the first
time that troubled music, ever-darkening, ever-brightening, which was
to flow through so many years of her life.
When Thea emerged from the concert hall, Mrs. Lorch’s predictions had
been fulfilled. A furious gale was beating over the city from Lake
Michigan. The streets were full of cold, hurrying, angry people,
running for street-cars and barking at each other. The sun was setting
in a clear, windy sky, that flamed with red as if there were a great
fire somewhere on the edge of the city. For almost the first time Thea
was conscious of the city itself, of the congestion of life all about
her, of the brutality and power of those streams that flowed in the
streets, threatening to drive one under. People jostled her, ran into
her, poked her aside with their elbows, uttering angry exclamations.
She got on the wrong car and was roughly ejected by the conductor at a
windy corner, in front of a saloon. She stood there dazed and
shivering. The cars passed, screaming as they rounded curves, but
either they were full to the doors, or were bound for places where she
did not want to go. Her hands were so cold that she took off her tight
kid gloves. The street lights began to gleam in the dusk. A young man
came out of the saloon and stood eyeing her questioningly while he lit
a cigarette. “Looking for a friend to-night?” he asked. Thea drew up
the collar of her cape and walked on a few paces. The young man
shrugged his shoulders and drifted away.
Thea came back to the corner and stood there irresolutely. An old man
approached her. He, too, seemed to be waiting for a car. He wore an
overcoat with a black fur collar, his gray mustache was waxed into
little points, and his eyes were watery. He kept thrusting his face up
near hers. Her hat blew off and he ran after it—a stiff, pitiful skip
he had—and brought it back to her. Then, while she was pinning her hat
on, her cape blew up, and he held it down for her, looking at her
intently. His face worked as if he were going to cry or were
frightened. He leaned over and whispered something to her. It struck
her as curious that he was really quite timid, like an old beggar. “Oh,
let me _Alone!_” she cried miserably between her teeth. He vanished,
disappeared like the Devil in a play. But in the mean time something
had got away from her; she could not remember how the violins came in
after the horns, just there. When her cape blew up, perhaps—Why did
these men torment her? A cloud of dust blew in her face and blinded
her. There was some power abroad in the world bent upon taking away
from her that feeling with which she had come out of the concert hall.
Everything seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under her
cape. If one had that, the world became one’s enemy; people, buildings,
wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it under, to make one let go of
it. Thea glared round her at the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets,
the long lines of lights, and she was not crying now. Her eyes were
brighter than even Harsanyi had ever seen them. All these things and
people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they
were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her.
Very well; they should never have it. They might trample her to death,
but they should never have it. As long as she lived that ecstasy was
going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but
she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. She
could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the
brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would
have it, have it,—it! Under the old cape she pressed her hands upon her
heaving bosom, that was a little girl’s no longer.
VI
One afternoon in April, Theodore Thomas, the conductor of the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, had turned out his desk light and was about to
leave his office in the Auditorium Building, when Harsanyi appeared in
the doorway. The conductor welcomed him with a hearty hand-grip and
threw off the overcoat he had just put on. He pushed Harsanyi into a
chair and sat down at his burdened desk, pointing to the piles of
papers and railway folders upon it.
“Another tour, clear to the coast. This traveling is the part of my
work that grinds me, Andor. You know what it means: bad food, dirt,
noise, exhaustion for the men and for me. I’m not so young as I once
was. It’s time I quit the highway. This is the last tour, I swear!”
“Then I’m sorry for the ‘highway.’ I remember when I first heard you in
Pittsburg, long ago. It was a life-line you threw me. It’s about one of
the people along your highway that I’ve come to see you. Whom do you
consider the best teacher for voice in Chicago?”
Mr. Thomas frowned and pulled his heavy mustache. “Let me see; I
suppose on the whole Madison Bowers is the best. He’s intelligent, and
he had good training. I don’t like him.”
Harsanyi nodded. “I thought there was no one else. I don’t like him,
either, so I hesitated. But I suppose he must do, for the present.”
“Have you found anything promising? One of your own students?”
“Yes, sir. A young Swedish girl from somewhere in Colorado. She is very
talented, and she seems to me to have a remarkable voice.”
“High voice?”
“I think it will be; though her low voice has a beautiful quality, very
individual. She has had no instruction in voice at all, and I shrink
from handing her over to anybody; her own instinct about it has been so
good. It is one of those voices that manages itself easily, without
thinning as it goes up; good breathing and perfect relaxation. But she
must have a teacher, of course. There is a break in the middle voice,
so that the voice does not all work together; an unevenness.”
Thomas looked up. “So? Curious; that cleft often happens with the
Swedes. Some of their best singers have had it. It always reminds me of
the space you so often see between their front teeth. Is she strong
physically?”
Harsanyi’s eye flashed. He lifted his hand before him and clenched it.
“Like a horse, like a tree! Every time I give her a lesson, I lose a
pound. She goes after what she wants.”
“Intelligent, you say? Musically intelligent?”
“Yes; but no cultivation whatever. She came to me like a fine young
savage, a book with nothing written in it. That is why I feel the
responsibility of directing her.” Harsanyi paused and crushed his soft
gray hat over his knee. “She would interest you, Mr. Thomas,” he added
slowly. “She has a quality—very individual.”
“Yes; the Scandinavians are apt to have that, too. She can’t go to
Germany, I suppose?”