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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 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 departm...
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