The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (best reads .TXT) 📕

table; through the sitting-room, where Thor was asleep in his cot bed, his dress and stocking hanging on a chair. In the kitchen she stopped for her lantern and her hot brick. She hurried up the back stairs and through the windy loft to her own glacial room. The illusion was marred only by the consciousness that she ought to brush her teeth before she went to bed, and that she never used to do it. Why⁠—? The water was frozen solid in the pitcher, so she got over that. Once between the red blankets there was a short, fierce battle with the cold; then, warmer⁠—warmer. She could hear her father shaking down the hard-coal burner for the night, and the wind rushing and banging down the village street. The boughs of the cottonwood, hard as bone, rattled against her gable. The bed grew softer and warmer. Everybody was warm and well downstairs. The sprawling old house had gathered them all in, like a hen, and had settled down over its brood. They were all warm in her father’s house. Softer and softer. She was asleep. She slept ten hours without turning over. From sleep like that, one awakes in shining armor.

On Friday afternoon there was an inspiring audience; there was not an empty chair in the house. Ottenburg and Dr. Archie had seats in the orchestra circle, got from a ticket broker. Landry had not been able to get a seat, so he roamed about in the back of the house, where he usually stood when he dropped in after his own turn in vaudeville was over. He was there so often and at such irregular hours that the ushers thought he was a singer’s husband, or had something to do with the electrical plant.

Harsanyi and his wife were in a box, near the stage, in the second circle. Mrs. Harsanyi’s hair was noticeably gray, but her face was fuller and handsomer than in those early years of struggle, and she was beautifully dressed. Harsanyi himself had changed very little. He had put on his best afternoon coat in honor of his pupil, and wore a pearl in his black ascot. His hair was longer and more bushy than he used to wear it, and there was now one gray lock on the right side. He had always been an elegant figure, even when he went about in shabby clothes and was crushed with work. Before the curtain rose he was restless and nervous, and kept looking at his watch and wishing he had got a few more letters off before he left his hotel. He had not been in New York since the advent of the taxicab, and had allowed himself too much time. His wife knew that he was afraid of being disappointed this afternoon. He did not often go to the opera because the stupid things that singers did vexed him so, and it always put him in a rage if the conductor held the tempo or in any way accommodated the score to the singer.

When the lights went out and the violins began to quaver their long D against the rude figure of the basses, Mrs. Harsanyi saw her husband’s fingers fluttering on his knee in a rapid tattoo. At the moment when Sieglinde entered from the side door, she leaned toward him and whispered in his ear, “Oh, the lovely creature!” But he made no response, either by voice or gesture. Throughout the first scene he sat sunk in his chair, his head forward and his one yellow eye rolling restlessly and shining like a tiger’s in the dark. His eye followed Sieglinde about the stage like a satellite, and as she sat at the table listening to Siegmund’s long narrative, it never left her. When she prepared the sleeping draught and disappeared after Hunding, Harsanyi bowed his head still lower and put his hand over his eye to rest it. The tenor⁠—a young man who sang with great vigor, went on:⁠—

Wälse! Wälse!
Wo ist dein Schwert?

Harsanyi smiled, but he did not look forth again until Sieglinde reappeared. She went through the story of her shameful bridal feast and into the Walhall’ music, which she always sang so nobly, and the entrance of the one-eyed stranger:⁠—

Mir allein
Weckte das Auge.

Mrs. Harsanyi glanced at her husband, wondering whether the singer on the stage could not feel his commanding glance. On came the crescendo:⁠—

Was je ich verlor,
Was je ich beweint
Wär’ mir gewonnen

(All that I have lost,
All that I have mourned,
Would I then have won.)

Harsanyi touched his wife’s arm softly.

Seated in the moonlight, the Volsung pair began their loving inspection of each other’s beauties, and the music born of murmuring sound passed into her face, as the old poet said⁠—and into her body as well. Into one lovely attitude after another the music swept her, love impelled her. And the voice gave out all that was best in it. Like the spring, indeed, it blossomed into memories and prophecies, it recounted and it foretold, as she sang the story of her friendless life, and of how the thing which was truly herself, “bright as the day, rose to the surface” when in the hostile world she for the first time beheld her Friend. Fervently she rose into the hardier feeling of action and daring, the pride in hero-strength and hero-blood, until in a splendid burst, tall and shining like a Victory, she christened him:⁠—

Siegmund⁠—
So nenn ich dich!

Her impatience for the sword swelled with her anticipation of his act, and throwing her arms above her head, she fairly tore a sword out of the empty air for him, before Nothung had left the tree. In höchster Trunkenheit, indeed, she burst out with the flaming cry of their kinship: “If you are Siegmund, I am Sieglinde!” Laughing, singing, bounding, exulting⁠—with their passion and their sword⁠—the Volsungs ran out into the spring night.

As the curtain fell, Harsanyi turned to his wife.