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 vaguely1. 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 minor2 sonata3, which he had heard Clara Schumann play at a festival in Leipsic. Though his powers of execution were at such a low ebb4, 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 sonatas5 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 ardor6 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 foes7 she had long been seeking, seized them as if they were destined8 for her and she for them. Whatever she did well, she took for granted. Her eagerness aroused all the young Hungarian’s chivalry10. Instinctively11 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 afterward12 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 chatter13 much, even in the stimulating14 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 partially15 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 thoroughly16 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 passionately18. “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 trampled19 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 exhausted20 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 decided21; 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 cape22 went out and walked, hurrying through the streets like Christian23 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 glided24 away from the sand hills that autumn morning, was far from her. She had come to Chicago to be with it, and it had deserted25 her, leaving in its place a painful longing26, an unresigned despair.
Harsanyi knew that his interesting pupil—“the savage27 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 boundless28 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 misery29. She would sit crouching30 forward, her elbows on her knees, her brows drawn31 together and her gray-green eyes smaller than ever, reduced to mere32 pin-points of cold, piercing light. Sometimes, while she listened, she would swallow hard, two or three times, and look nervously33 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 sullen34 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 choir35, 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 sentimental36 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, ornamented37 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 kindly38, 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, graceful39 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 frail40 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 rumpling41 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 reindeer42 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............