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else. There were always flowers, too. To-night there was a little orange
tree, with oranges on it, that one of Harsanyi's pupils had sent him at
Thanksgiving time. After Harsanyi had finished his soup and a glass of
red Hungarian wine, he lost his fagged look and became cordial and
witty. He persuaded Thea to drink a little wine to-night. The first time
she dined with them, when he urged her to taste the glass of sherry
beside her plate, she astonished them by telling them that she "never
drank."
Harsanyi was then a man of thirty-two. He was to have a very brilliant
career, but he did not know it then. Theodore Thomas was perhaps the
only man in Chicago who felt that Harsanyi might have a great future.
Harsanyi belonged to the softer Slavic type, and was more like a Pole
than a Hungarian. He was tall, slender, active, with sloping, graceful
shoulders and long arms. His head was very fine, strongly and delicately
modelled, and, as Thea put it, "so independent." A lock of his thick
brown hair usually hung over his forehead. His eye was wonderful; full
of light and fire when he was interested, soft and thoughtful when he
was tired or melancholy. The meaning and power of two very fine eyes
must all have gone into this one--the right one, fortunately, the one
next his audience when he played. He believed that the glass eye which
gave one side of his face such a dull, blind look, had ruined his
career, or rather had made a career impossible for him. Harsanyi lost
his eye when he was twelve years old, in a Pennsylvania mining town
where explosives happened to be kept too near the frame shanties in
which the company packed newly arrived Hungarian families.
His father was a musician and a good one, but he had cruelly over-worked
the boy; keeping him at the piano for six hours a day and making him
play in cafes and dance halls for half the night. Andor ran away and
crossed the ocean with an uncle, who smuggled him through the port as
one of his own many children. The explosion in which Andor was hurt
killed a score of people, and he was thought lucky to get off with an
eye. He still had a clipping from a Pittsburg paper, giving a list of
the dead and injured. He appeared as "Harsanyi, Andor, left eye and
slight injuries about the head." That was his first American "notice";
and he kept it. He held no grudge against the coal company; he
understood that the accident was merely one of the things that are bound
to happen in the
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