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 talented,
she's not quick. But when she does get an idea, it fills her
up to the eyes. She had my room so reeking of a song this
afternoon that I couldn't stay there."
Mrs. Harsanyi looked up quickly, "`Die Lorelei,' you
mean? One couldn't think of anything else anywhere in
the house. I thought she was possessed. But don't you
think her voice is wonderful sometimes?"
Harsanyi tasted his wine slowly. "My dear, I've told
you before that I don't know what I think about Miss
Kronborg, except that I'm glad there are not two of her.
I sometimes wonder whether she is not glad. Fresh as she
is at it all, I've occasionally fancied that, if she knew how,
she would like to--diminish." He moved his left hand
out into the air as if he were suggesting a DIMINUENDO to
an orchestra.
