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

Bowers had all the qualities which go to make a good teacher⁠—except generosity and warmth. His intelligence was of a high order, his taste never at fault. He seldom worked with a voice without improving it, and in teaching the delivery of oratorio he was without a rival. Singers came from far and near to study Bach and Handel with him. Even the fashionable sopranos and contraltos of Chicago, St. Paul, and St. Louis (they were usually ladies with very rich husbands, and Bowers called them the “pampered jades of Asia”) humbly endured his sardonic humor for the sake of what he could do for them. He was not at all above helping a very lame singer across, if her husband’s checkbook warranted it. He had a whole bag of tricks for stupid people, “life-preservers,” he called them. “Cheap repairs for a cheap ’un,” he used to say, but the husbands never found the repairs very cheap. Those were the days when lumbermen’s daughters and brewers’ wives contended in song; studied in Germany and then floated from saengerfest to saengerfest. Choral societies flourished in all the rich lake cities and river cities. The soloists came to Chicago to coach with Bowers, and he often took long journeys to hear and instruct a chorus. He was intensely avaricious, and from these semiprofessionals he reaped a golden harvest. They fed his pockets and they fed his ever-hungry contempt, his scorn of himself and his accomplices. The more money he made, the more parsimonious he became. His wife was so shabby that she never went anywhere with him, which suited him exactly. Because his clients were luxurious and extravagant, he took a revengeful pleasure in having his shoes halfsoled a second time, and in getting the last wear out of a broken collar. He had first been interested in Thea Kronborg because of her bluntness, her country roughness, and her manifest carefulness about money. The mention of Harsanyi’s name always made him pull a wry face. For the first time Thea had a friend who, in his own cool and guarded way, liked her for whatever was least admirable in her.

Thea was still looking at the musical paper, her grammar unopened on the windowsill, when Bowers sauntered in a little before two o’clock. He was smoking a cheap cigarette and wore the same soft felt hat he had worn all last winter. He never carried a cane or wore gloves.

Thea followed him from the reception-room into the studio. “I may cut my lesson out tomorrow, Mr. Bowers. I have to hunt a new boarding-place.”

Bowers looked up languidly from his desk where he had begun to go over a pile of letters. “What’s the matter with the Studio Club? Been fighting with them again?”

“The Club’s all right for people who like to live that way. I don’t.”

Bowers lifted his eyebrows. “Why so tempery?” he asked as he drew a check from an envelope postmarked “Minneapolis.”

“I can’t work with a lot of girls around. They’re too familiar. I never could get along with girls of my own age. It’s all too chummy. Gets on my nerves. I didn’t come here to play kindergarten games.” Thea began energetically to arrange the scattered music on the piano.

Bowers grimaced good-humoredly at her over the three checks he was pinning together. He liked to play at a rough game of banter with her. He flattered himself that he had made her harsher than she was when she first came to him; that he had got off a little of the sugarcoating Harsanyi always put on his pupils.

“The art of making yourself agreeable never comes amiss, Miss Kronborg. I should say you rather need a little practice along that line. When you come to marketing your wares in the world, a little smoothness goes farther than a great deal of talent sometimes. If you happen to be cursed with a real talent, then you’ve got to be very smooth indeed, or you’ll never get your money back.” Bowers snapped the elastic band around his bankbook.

Thea gave him a sharp, recognizing glance. “Well, that’s the money I’ll have to go without,” she replied.

“Just what do you mean?”

“I mean the money people have to grin for. I used to know a railroad man who said there was money in every profession that you couldn’t take. He’d tried a good many jobs,” Thea added musingly; “perhaps he was too particular about the kind he could take, for he never picked up much. He was proud, but I liked him for that.”

Bowers rose and closed his desk. “Mrs. Priest is late again. By the way, Miss Kronborg, remember not to frown when you are playing for Mrs. Priest. You did not remember yesterday.”

“You mean when she hits a tone with her breath like that? Why do you let her? You wouldn’t let me.”

“I certainly would not. But that is a mannerism of Mrs. Priest’s. The public like it, and they pay a great deal of money for the pleasure of hearing her do it. There she is. Remember!”

Bowers opened the door of the reception-room and a tall, imposing woman rustled in, bringing with her a glow of animation which pervaded the room as if half a dozen persons, all talking gayly, had come in instead of one. She was large, handsome, expansive, uncontrolled; one felt this the moment she crossed the threshold. She shone with care and cleanliness, mature vigor, unchallenged authority, gracious good-humor, and absolute confidence in her person, her powers, her position, and her way of life; a glowing, overwhelming self-satisfaction, only to be found where human society is young and strong and without yesterdays. Her face had a kind of heavy, thoughtless beauty, like a pink peony just at the point of beginning to fade. Her brown hair was waved in front and done up behind in a great twist, held by a tortoiseshell comb with gold filigree. She wore a beautiful little green hat with three long green