Pages: 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 [1-41] [41-72] |
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...
[Next page]