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

Thea came back to the corner and stood there irresolutely. An old man approached her. He, too, seemed to be waiting for a car. He wore an overcoat with a black fur collar, his gray mustache was waxed into little points, and his eyes were watery. He kept thrusting his face up near hers. Her hat blew off and he ran after it⁠—a stiff, pitiful skip he had⁠—and brought it back to her. Then, while she was pinning her hat on, her cape blew up, and he held it down for her, looking at her intently. His face worked as if he were going to cry or were frightened. He leaned over and whispered something to her. It struck her as curious that he was really quite timid, like an old beggar. “Oh, let me alone!” she cried miserably between her teeth. He vanished, disappeared like the Devil in a play. But in the meantime something had got away from her; she could not remember how the violins came in after the horns, just there. When her cape blew up, perhaps⁠—Why did these men torment her? A cloud of dust blew in her face and blinded her. There was some power abroad in the world bent upon taking away from her that feeling with which she had come out of the concert hall. Everything seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under her cape. If one had that, the world became one’s enemy; people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it under, to make one let go of it. Thea glared round her at the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines of lights, and she was not crying now. Her eyes were brighter than even Harsanyi had ever seen them. All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; they should never have it. They might trample her to death, but they should never have it. As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would have it, have it⁠—it! Under the old cape she pressed her hands upon her heaving bosom, that was a little girl’s no longer.

One afternoon in April, Theodore Thomas, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, had turned out his desk light and was about to leave his office in the Auditorium Building, when Harsanyi appeared in the doorway. The conductor welcomed him with a hearty handgrip and threw off the overcoat he had just put on. He pushed Harsanyi into a chair and sat down at his burdened desk, pointing to the piles of papers and railway folders upon it.

“Another tour, clear to the coast. This traveling is the part of my work that grinds me, Andor. You know what it means: bad food, dirt, noise, exhaustion for the men and for me. I’m not so young as I once was. It’s time I quit the highway. This is the last tour, I swear!”

“Then I’m sorry for the ‘highway.’ I remember when I first heard you in Pittsburg, long ago. It was a lifeline you threw me. It’s about one of the people along your highway that I’ve come to see you. Whom do you consider the best teacher for voice in Chicago?”

Mr. Thomas frowned and pulled his heavy mustache. “Let me see; I suppose on the whole Madison Bowers is the best. He’s intelligent, and he had good training. I don’t like him.”

Harsanyi nodded. “I thought there was no one else. I don’t like him, either, so I hesitated. But I suppose he must do, for the present.”

“Have you found anything promising? One of your own students?”

“Yes, sir. A young Swedish girl from somewhere in Colorado. She is very talented, and she seems to me to have a remarkable voice.”

“High voice?”

“I think it will be; though her low voice has a beautiful quality, very individual. She has had no instruction in voice at all, and I shrink from handing her over to anybody; her own instinct about it has been so good. It is one of those voices that manages itself easily, without thinning as it goes up; good breathing and perfect relaxation. But she must have a teacher, of course. There is a break in the middle voice, so that the voice does not all work together; an unevenness.”

Thomas looked up. “So? Curious; that cleft often happens with the Swedes. Some of their best singers have had it. It always reminds me of the space you so often see between their front teeth. Is she strong physically?”

Harsanyi’s eye flashed. He lifted his hand before him and clenched it. “Like a horse, like a tree! Every time I give her a lesson, I lose a pound. She goes after what she wants.”

“Intelligent, you say? Musically intelligent?”

“Yes; but no cultivation whatever. She came to me like a fine young savage, a book with nothing written in it. That is why I feel the responsibility of directing her.” Harsanyi paused and crushed his soft gray hat over his knee. “She would interest you, Mr. Thomas,” he added slowly. “She has a quality⁠—very individual.”

“Yes; the Scandinavians are apt to have that, too. She can’t go to Germany, I suppose?”

“Not now, at any rate. She is poor.”

Thomas frowned again “I don’t think Bowers a really first-rate man. He’s too petty to be really first-rate; in his nature, I mean. But I dare say he’s the best you can do, if you can’t give her time enough yourself.”

Harsanyi waved his hand. “Oh, the time is nothing⁠—she may have all