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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!"
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 un-
der 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 in-
teresting 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 ir-
ritant 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.
One afternoon Harsanyi, after the lesson, was standing
by the window putting some collodion on a cracked finger,
and Thea was at the piano trying over "Die Lorelei"
which he had given her last week to practice. It was scarcely
a song which a singing master would have given her, but
he had his own reasons. How she sang it mattered only to
him and to her. He was playing his own game now, without
interference; he suspected that he could not do so always.
When she finished the song, she looked back over her
shoulder at him and spoke thoughtfully. "That wasn't
right, at the end, was it?"
"No, that should be an open, flowing tone, something
like this,"--he waved his fingers rapidly in the air. "You
get the idea?"
"No, I don't. Seems a queer ending, after the rest."
Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the
pocket of his velvet coat. "Why so? Shipwrecks come and
go, MARCHEN come and go, but the river keeps right on.
There you have your open, flowing tone."
Thea looked intently at the music. "I see," she said
dully. "Oh, I see!" she repeated quickly and turned to
him a glowing countenance. "It is the river.-- Oh, yes,
I get it now!" She looked at him but long enough to catch
his glance, then turned to the piano again. Harsanyi was
never quite sure where the light came from when her face
suddenly flashed out at him in that way. Her eyes were
too small to account for it, though they glittered like green
ice in the sun. At such moments her hair was yellower, her
skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly
been turned up inside of her. She went at the song again:
"ICH WEISS NICHT, WAS SOLL ES BEDEUTEN,
DAS ICH SO TRAURIG BIN."
A kind of happiness vibrated in her voice. Harsanyi no-
ticed how much and how unhesitatingly she changed her
delivery of the whole song, the first part as well as the last.
He had often noticed that she could not think a thing out
in passages. Until she saw it as a whole, she wandered like
a blind man surrounded by torments. After she once had
her "revelation," after she got the idea that to her--not
always to him--explained everything, then she went for-
ward rapidly. But she was not always easy to help. She
was sometimes impervious to suggestion; she would stare
at him as if she were deaf and ignore everything he told her
to do. Then, all at once, something would happen in her
brain and she would begin to do all that he had been for
weeks telling her to do, without realizing that he had ever
told her.
To-night Thea forgot Harsanyi and his finger. She
finished the song only to begin it with fresh enthusiasm.
"UND DAS HAT MIT IHREM SINGEN
DIE LORELEI GETHAN."
She sat there singing it until the darkening room was so
flooded with it that Harsanyi threw open a window.
"You really must stop it, Miss Kronborg. I shan't be
able to get it out of my head to-night."
Thea laughed tolerantly as she began to gather up her
music. "Why, I thought you had gone, Mr. Harsanyi. I
like that song."
That evening at dinner Harsanyi sat looking intently
into a glass of heavy yellow wine; boring into it, indeed,
with his one eye, when his face suddenly broke into a
smile.
"What is it, Andor?" his wife asked.
He smiled again, this time at her, and took up the nut-
crackers and a Brazil nut. "Do you know," he said in a
tone so intimate and confidential that he might have been
speaking to himself,--"do you know, I like to see Miss
Kronborg get hold of an idea. In spite of being so t...
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