XI The song of the lark | ||
11. XI
DR. ARCHIE saw nothing of Thea during the following week. After several fruitless efforts, he succeeded in getting a word with her over the telephone, but she sounded so distracted and driven that he was glad to say good-night and hang up the instrument. There were, she told him, rehearsals not only for "Walkure," but also for "Gotterdammerung," in which she was to sing Waltraute two weeks later.
On Thursday afternoon Thea got home late, after an exhausting rehearsal. She was in no happy frame of mind. Madame Necker, who had been very gracious to her that night when she went on to complete Gloeckler's performance of Sieglinde, had, since Thea was cast to sing the part instead of Gloeckler in the production of the "Ring," been chilly and disapproving, distinctly hostile. Thea had always felt that she and Necker stood for the same sort of endeavor, and that Necker recognized it and had a cordial feeling for her. In Germany she had several times sung Brangaena to Necker's Isolde, and the older artist had let her know that she thought she sang it beautifully. It was a bitter disappointment to find that the approval of so honest an artist as Necker could not stand the test of any significant recognition by the management. Madame Necker was forty, and her voice was failing just when her powers were at their height. Every fresh young voice was an enemy, and this one was accompanied by gifts which she could not fail to recognize.
Thea had her dinner sent up to her apartment, and it was a very poor one. She tasted the soup and then indignantly put on her wraps to go out and hunt a dinner. As she was going to the elevator, she had to admit that she
While she was undressing—Therese was brushing out her Sieglinde wig in the trunk-room—she went on chiding herself bitterly. "And how am I ever going to get to sleep in this state?" she kept asking herself. "If I don't sleep, I'll be perfectly worthless to-morrow. I'll go down there to-morrow and make a fool of myself. If I'd let that laundry alone with whatever nigger has stolen it— why did I undertake to reform the management of this hotel to-night? After to-morrow I could pack up and leave the place. There's the Phillamon—I liked the rooms there better, anyhow—and the Umberto—" She began going over the advantages and disadvantages of different apartment hotels. Suddenly she checked herself. "What am I doing this for? I can't move into another hotel to-night. I'll keep this up till morning. I shan't sleep a wink."
Should she take a hot bath, or shouldn't she? Sometimes it relaxed her, and sometimes it roused her and fairly put her beside herself. Between the conviction that she must sleep and the fear that she couldn't, she hung paralyzed.
She rushed into her bathroom and locked the door. She would risk the bath, and defer the encounter with the bed a little longer. She lay in the bath half an hour. The warmth of the water penetrated to her bones, induced pleasant reflections and a feeling of well-being. It was very nice to have Dr. Archie in New York, after all, and to see him get so much satisfaction out of the little companionship she was able to give him. She liked people who got on, and who became more interesting as they grew older. There was Fred; he was much more interesting now than he had been at thirty. He was intelligent about music, and he must be very intelligent in his business, or he would not be at the head of the Brewers' Trust. She respected that kind of intelligence and success. Any success was good. She herself had made a good start, at any rate, and now, if she could get to sleep— Yes, they were all more interesting than they used to be. Look at Harsanyi, who had been so long retarded; what a place he had made for himself in Vienna. If she could get to sleep, she would show him something to-morrow that he would understand.
She got quickly into bed and moved about freely between the sheets. Yes, she was warm all over. A cold, dry breeze was coming in from the river, thank goodness! She tried to think about her little rock house and the Arizona sun and the blue sky. But that led to memories which were still too disturbing. She turned on her side, closed her eyes, and tried an old device.
She entered her father's front door, hung her hat and coat on the rack, and stopped in the parlor to warm her hands at the stove. Then she went out through the dining-room, where the boys were getting their lessons at the long table; through the sitting-room, where Thor was asleep in
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
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:—
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
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 beweint
Wär' mir gowonnen.
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:—
So nenn ich diech!"
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,
As the curtain fell, Harsanyi turned to his wife. "At last," he sighed, "somebody with enough! Enough voice and talent and beauty, enough physical power. And such a noble, noble style!"
"I can scarcely believe it, Andor. I can see her now, that clumsy girl, hunched up over your piano. I can see her shoulders. She always seemed to labor so with her back. And I shall never forget that night when you found her voice."
The audience kept up its clamor until, after many reappearances with the tenor, Kronborg came before the curtain alone. The house met her with a roar, a greeting that was almost savage in its fierceness. The singer's eyes, sweeping the house, rested for a moment on Harsanyi, and she waved her long sleeve toward his box.
"She ought to be pleased that you are here," said Mrs. Harsanyi. "I wonder if she knows how much she owes to you."
"She owes me nothing," replied her husband quickly. "She paid her way. She always gave something back, even then."
"I remember you said once that she would do nothing common," said Mrs. Harsanyi thoughtfully.
"Just so. She might fail, die, get lost in the pack. But if she achieved, it would be nothing common. There are people whom one can trust for that. There is one way in which they will never fail." Harsanyi retired into his own reflections.
After the second act Fred Ottenburg brought Archie to the Harsanyis' box and introduced him as an old friend of Miss Kronborg. The head of a musical publishing house joined them, bringing with him a journalist and the president of a German singing society. The conversation was
The chorus director said something about "dramatic temperament." The journalist insisted that it was "explosive force," "projecting power."
Ottenburg turned to Harsanyi. "What is it, Mr. Harsanyi? Miss Kronborg says if there is anything in her, you are the man who can say what it is."
The journalist scented copy and was eager. "Yes, Harsanyi. You know all about her. What's her secret?"
Harsanyi rumpled his hair irritably and shrugged his shoulders. "Her secret? It is every artist's secret,"—he waved his hand,—"passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials."
The lights went out. Fred and Archie left the box as the second act came on.
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. That afternoon nothing new came to Thea Kronborg, no enlightenment, no inspiration. She merely came into full possession of things she had been refining and perfecting for so long. Her inhibitions chanced to be fewer than usual, and, within herself, she entered into the inheritance that she herself had laid up, into the
Often when she sang, the best she had was unavailable; she could not break through to it, and every sort of distraction and mischance came between it and her. But this afternoon the closed roads opened, the gates dropped. What she had so often tried to reach, lay under her hand. She had only to touch an idea to make it live.
While she was on the stage she was conscious that every movement was the right movement, that her body was absolutely the instrument of her idea. Not for nothing had she kept it so severely, kept it filled with such energy and fire. All that deep-rooted vitality flowered in her voice, her face, in her very finger-tips. She felt like a tree bursting into bloom. And her voice was as flexible as her body; equal to any demand, capable of every nuance. With the sense of its perfect companionship, its entire trustworthiness, she had been able to throw herself into the dramatic exigencies of the part, everything in her at its best and everything working together.
The third act came on, and the afternoon slipped by. Thea Kronborg's friends, old and new, seated about the house on different floors and levels, enjoyed her triumph according to their natures. There was one there, whom nobody knew, who perhaps got greater pleasure out of that afternoon than Harsanyi himself. Up in the top gallery a gray-haired little Mexican, withered and bright as a string of peppers beside a'dobe door, kept praying and cursing under his breath, beating on the brass railing and shouting "Bravo! Bravo!" until he was repressed by his neighbors.
He happened to be there because a Mexican band was to be a feature of Barnum and Bailey's circus that year. One of the managers of the show had traveled about the Southwest, signing up a lot of Mexican musicians at low wages, and had brought them to New York. Among them
When Thea Kronborg came out of the stage entrance on Fortieth Street, the sky was still flaming with the last rays of the sun that was sinking off behind the North River. A little crowd of people was lingering about the door—musicians from the orchestra who were waiting for their comrades, curious young men, and some poorly dressed girls who were hoping to get a glimpse of the singer. She bowed graciously to the group, through her veil, but she did not look to the right or left as she crossed the sidewalk to her cab. Had she lifted her eyes an instant and glanced out through her white scarf, she must have seen the only man in the crowd who had removed his hat when she emerged, and who stood with it crushed up in his hand. And she would have known him, changed as he was. His lustrous black hair was full of gray, and his face was a good deal worn by the extasi, so that it seemed to have shrunk away from his shining eyes and teeth and left them too prominent. But she would have known him. She passed so near that he could have touched her, and he did not put on his hat until her taxi had snorted away. Then he walked down Broadway with his hands in his overcoat pockets, wearing a smile which embraced all the stream of life that passed him and the lighted towers that rose into the limpid blue of the evening sky. If the singer, going home exhausted in her cab, was wondering what was the good of it all, that smile, could she have seen it, would have answered her. It is the only commensurate answer.
Here we must leave Thea Kronborg. From this time on the story of her life is the story of her achievement. The growth of an artist is an intellectual and spiritual
XI The song of the lark | ||