15
How strong Mrs. Kronen was.... How huge and strong she had looked standing in the hall while Mr. Corrie said cruel laughing little things about the billiard-room floor.... “She’ll paint Madonna lilies on the table next.” ... Mrs. Kronen saying nothing, smiling more and more without moving her face, growing bigger and stronger and taller as Mr. Corrie grumbled and Mr. Kronen fidgeted, cross and disappointed by the hall fire and then suddenly lifting her head and singing, a great flourish of clear strong notes filling the hall and pealing up through the house as she swept into the drawing-room.
Singing song after song to her own loud accompaniment, great emphatic sweeps of song, so that everyone came and sat about in the room listening and waiting, the men staring at the back of her head as she sat at the piano. Waiting, for music—they did not know they were waiting for music, waiting for her to stop getting between them and the music. They admired her, her magnificent singing and waited, unsatisfied, in the sweetness of the lamp-lit flower-filled room that her music did not touch. She sang on and on and they all grew smaller and smaller in the great sea of sound, more and more hopelessly waiting.
16
And Mrs. Corrie had sat deep in her large chair, dead and drowned. Dead because of something she had never known. Dead in ignorance and living bravely on—her sweet thin voice rising above the gloom where she lay hid—a gloom where there were no thoughts. Nearly all women were like that, living in a gloom where there were no thoughts. If anyone could persuade her that she was alive she would do nothing but rush about and dance and sing ... how irritating that would be ... making men smile and trot about and look silly ... no room for ideas; except in smoking-rooms—and—laboratories.... She was a good woman; a God woman; the sweetness of her bones and her thin sweet voice of tears and laughter were of God. Everyone knew that and worshipped her. Men’s ideas were devilish; clever and mean.... Was God a woman? Was God really irritating? No one could endure God really.... Men could not.... Women were of God in some way. That is what men could never forgive; the superiority of women.... “Perhaps I can’t stand women because I’m a sort of horrid man.”
Mrs. Kronen was a sort of man too. She was not perplexed. But she was a woman too—because she was not mean and petty and fussy as men are ... sitting tall and square at the piano with the square tall form of her husband standing ready to turn the pages—her strong baritone voice rolling out, “Ai-me-moi ... car ton charme-est étrange ... et-je-t’ai-me.”