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 Moon-
stone, 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 wayward-
ness. 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 prepara-
tion 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 varia-
tion in the routine of teaching. But for Thea Kronborg,
that winter was almost beyond enduring. She always re-
membered 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 com-
fortless. Her letters to Dr. Archie were brief and business-
like. She was not apt to chatter much, even in the stim-
ulating 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 noth-
ing 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 evapo-
rating. 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, every-
thing 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 sav-
age 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 in-
troduced 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. Some-
times, 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 chil-
dren, 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 ap-
parent 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 per-
sonality which takes hold of audiences. Moreover, Miss
Kronborg was not in the least sentimental about her hus-
band. 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, orna-
mented 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 ani-
mals 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 child-
ren to the lounge in the corner, and played for them the
game with which she used to amuse Thor for hours to-
gether 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. Har-
sanyi, from his low chair, watched them, smiling. The boy
was on his knees, jumping up and down with the excite-
ment 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 chil-
dren 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, be-
cause 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. Har-
sanyi 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 mean-
ing 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 impos-
sible for him. Harsanyi lost his eye when he was twelve
years old, in a Pennsylvania mining town where explo-
sives 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 clip-
ping 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 acci-
dent was merely one of the things that are bound to hap-
pen 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 after-
noon, 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 any-
thing about singing. I guess that's why I never said any-
thing 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 mea-
sure him for new ones. His neckties she usually made her-
self, 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 con-
versation 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 mo-
ment, 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 hus-
band'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, remember-
ing 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 in-
troductory 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 accom-
paniment. 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 re-
flected; 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, pro-
duced 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!"
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