The Song of the Lark Willa Cather (free ebooks romance novels .TXT) 📖

deaf and ignore everything he told her to do. Then, all at once, something would happen in her brain and she would begin to do all that he had been for weeks telling her to do, without realizing that he had ever told her.

Tonight Thea forgot Harsanyi and his finger. She finished the song only to begin it with fresh enthusiasm.

Und das hat mit ihrem singen
Die Lorelei gethan

She sat there singing it until the darkening room was so flooded with it that Harsanyi threw open a window.

“You really must stop it, Miss Kronborg. I shan’t be able to get it out of my head tonight.”

Thea laughed tolerantly as she began to gather up her music. “Why, I thought you had gone, Mr. Harsanyi. I like that song.”

That evening at dinner Harsanyi sat looking intently into a glass of heavy yellow wine; boring into it, indeed, with his one eye, when his face suddenly broke into a smile.

“What is it, Andor?” his wife asked.

He smiled again, this time at her, and took up the nutcrackers and a Brazil nut. “Do you know,” he said in a tone so intimate and confidential that he might have been speaking to himself⁠—“do you know, I like to see Miss Kronborg get hold of an idea. In spite of being so talented, she’s not quick. But when she does get an idea, it fills her up to the eyes. She had my room so reeking of a song this afternoon that I couldn’t stay there.”

Mrs. Harsanyi looked up quickly, “ ’Die Lorelei,’ you mean? One couldn’t think of anything else anywhere in the house. I thought she was possessed. But don’t you think her voice is wonderful sometimes?”

Harsanyi tasted his wine slowly. “My dear, I’ve told you before that I don’t know what I think about Miss Kronborg, except that I’m glad there are not two of her. I sometimes wonder whether she is not glad. Fresh as she is at it all, I’ve occasionally fancied that, if she knew how, she would like to⁠—diminish.” He moved his left hand out into the air as if he were suggesting a diminuendo to an orchestra.

V

By the first of February Thea had been in Chicago almost four months, and she did not know much more about the city than if she had never quitted Moonstone. She was, as Harsanyi said, incurious. Her work took most of her time, and she found that she had to sleep a good deal. It had never before been so hard to get up in the morning. She had the bother of caring for her room, and she had to build her fire and bring up her coal. Her routine was frequently interrupted by a message from Mr. Larsen summoning her to sing at a funeral. Every funeral took half a day, and the time had to be made up. When Mrs. Harsanyi asked her if it did not depress her to sing at funerals, she replied that she “had been brought up to go to funerals and didn’t mind.”

Thea never went into shops unless she had to, and she felt no interest in them. Indeed, she shunned them, as places where one was sure to be parted from one’s money in some way. She was nervous about counting her change, and she could not accustom herself to having her purchases sent to her address. She felt much safer with her bundles under her arm.

During this first winter Thea got no city consciousness. Chicago was simply a wilderness through which one had to find one’s way. She felt no interest in the general briskness and zest of the crowds. The crash and scramble of that big, rich, appetent Western city she did not take in at all, except to notice that the noise of the drays and streetcars tired her. The brilliant window displays, the splendid furs and stuffs, the gorgeous flower-shops, the gay candy-shops, she scarcely noticed. At Christmas-time she did feel some curiosity about the toy-stores, and she wished she held Thor’s little mittened fist in her hand as she stood before the windows. The jewelers’ windows, too, had a strong attraction for her⁠—she had always liked bright stones. When she went into the city she used to brave the biting lake winds and stand gazing in at the displays of diamonds and pearls and emeralds; the tiaras and necklaces and earrings, on white velvet. These seemed very well worth while to her, things worth coveting.

Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen often told each other it was strange that Miss Kronborg had so little initiative about “visiting points of interest.” When Thea came to live with them she had expressed a wish to see two places: Montgomery Ward and Company’s big mail-order store, and the packinghouses, to which all the hogs and cattle that went through Moonstone were bound. One of Mrs. Lorch’s lodgers worked in a packinghouse, and Mrs. Andersen brought Thea word that she had spoken to Mr. Eckman and he would gladly take her to Packingtown. Eckman was a toughish young Swede, and he thought it would be something of a lark to take a pretty girl through the slaughterhouses. But he was disappointed. Thea neither grew faint nor clung to the arm he kept offering her. She asked innumerable questions and was impatient because he knew so little of what was going on outside of his own department. When they got off the streetcar and walked back to Mrs. Lorch’s house in the dusk, Eckman put her hand in his overcoat pocket⁠—she had no muff⁠—and kept squeezing it ardently until she said, “Don’t do that; my ring cuts me.” That night he told his roommate that he “could have kissed her as easy as rolling off a log, but she wasn’t worth the trouble.” As for Thea, she had enjoyed the afternoon very much, and wrote her father a brief but clear account of what she had seen.

One night at supper Mrs. Andersen was talking about the exhibit of students’ work she