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

here. Mr. Harsanyi’s pupils, even the dumb ones, had more⁠—well, more of everything, it seems to me. The people I have to play accompaniments for are discouraging. The professionals, like Katharine Priest and Miles Murdstone, are worst of all. If I have to play ‘The Messiah’ much longer for Mrs. Priest, I’ll go out of my mind!” Thea brought her foot down sharply on the bare floor.

Mrs. Harsanyi looked down at the foot in perplexity. “You mustn’t wear such high heels, my dear. They will spoil your walk and make you mince along. Can’t you at least learn to avoid what you dislike in these singers? I was never able to care for Mrs. Priest’s singing.”

Thea was sitting with her chin lowered. Without moving her head she looked up at Mrs. Harsanyi and smiled; a smile much too cold and desperate to be seen on a young face, Mrs. Harsanyi felt. “Mrs. Harsanyi, it seems to me that what I learn is just to dislike. I dislike so much and so hard that it tires me out. I’ve got no heart for anything.” She threw up her head suddenly and sat in defiance, her hand clenched on the arm of the chair. “Mr. Harsanyi couldn’t stand these people an hour, I know he couldn’t. He’d put them right out of the window there, frizzes and feathers and all. Now, take that new soprano they’re all making such a fuss about, Jessie Darcey. She’s going on tour with a symphony orchestra and she’s working up her repertory with Bowers. She’s singing some Schumann songs Mr. Harsanyi used to go over with me. Well, I don’t know what he would do if he heard her.”

“But if your own work goes well, and you know these people are wrong, why do you let them discourage you?”

Thea shook her head. “That’s just what I don’t understand myself. Only, after I’ve heard them all afternoon, I come out frozen up. Somehow it takes the shine off of everything. People want Jessie Darcey and the kind of thing she does; so what’s the use?”

Mrs. Harsanyi smiled. “That stile you must simply vault over. You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?”

“Well, if I had somebody like Mr. Harsanyi, perhaps I wouldn’t fret about them. He was the teacher for me. Please tell him so.”

Thea rose and Mrs. Harsanyi took her hand again. “I am sorry you have to go through this time of discouragement. I wish Andor could talk to you, he would understand it so well. But I feel like urging you to keep clear of Mrs. Priest and Jessie Darcey and all their works.”

Thea laughed discordantly. “No use urging me. I don’t get on with them at all. My spine gets like a steel rail when they come near me. I liked them at first, you know. Their clothes and their manners were so fine, and Mrs. Priest is handsome. But now I keep wanting to tell them how stupid they are. Seems like they ought to be informed, don’t you think so?” There was a flash of the shrewd grin that Mrs. Harsanyi remembered. Thea pressed her hand. “I must go now. I had to give my lesson hour this morning to a Duluth woman who has come on to coach, and I must go and play ‘On Mighty Pens’ for her. Please tell Mr. Harsanyi that I think oratorio is a great chance for bluffers.”

Mrs. Harsanyi detained her. “But he will want to know much more than that about you. You are free at seven? Come back this evening, then, and we will go to dinner somewhere, to some cheerful place. I think you need a party.”

Thea brightened. “Oh, I do! I’ll love to come; that will be like old times. You see,” she lingered a moment, softening, “I wouldn’t mind if there were only one of them I could really admire.”

“How about Bowers?” Mrs. Harsanyi asked as they were approaching the stairway.

“Well, there’s nothing he loves like a good fakir, and nothing he hates like a good artist. I always remember something Mr. Harsanyi said about him. He said Bowers was the cold muffin that had been left on the plate.”

Mrs. Harsanyi stopped short at the head of the stairs and said decidedly: “I think Andor made a mistake. I can’t believe that is the right atmosphere for you. It would hurt you more than most people. It’s all wrong.”

“Something’s wrong,” Thea called back as she clattered down the stairs in her high heels.

II

During that winter Thea lived in so many places that sometimes at night when she left Bowers’s studio and emerged into the street she had to stop and think for a moment to remember where she was living now and what was the best way to get there.

When she moved into a new place her eyes challenged the beds, the carpets, the food, the mistress of the house. The boardinghouses were wretchedly conducted and Thea’s complaints sometimes took an insulting form. She quarreled with one landlady after another and moved on. When she moved into a new room, she was almost sure to hate it on sight and to begin planning to hunt another place before she unpacked her trunk. She was moody and contemptuous toward her fellow boarders, except toward the young men, whom she treated with a careless familiarity which they usually misunderstood. They liked her, however, and when she left the house after a storm, they helped her to move her things and came to see her after she got settled in a new place. But she moved so often that they soon ceased to follow her. They could see no reason for keeping up with a girl who, under her jocularity, was cold, self-centered, and unimpressionable. They soon felt that she did not admire them.

Thea used to waken up in the night and wonder why she was so unhappy. She would have been amazed if she had known how much the people whom she met in Bowers’s