by Willa Cather
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 u
s? 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 dining room 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 vo
ice 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.
