27
“What a melancholy ditty, chick.”
Miriam laughed and dropped into the accompaniment of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” “Listen, mother ... there was a monk who sang this so beautifully in a church that he had to be stopped.” She played through the “Ave Maria” and looked round. Mrs. Henderson was sitting stiffly in a stiff straight chair with her hands twisted in her lap. “Oh bother,” thought Miriam, “she’s feeling hysterical ... and it’s my turn this time. What on earth shall I do?” The word had come up through the years. Sarah had seen “attacks of hysteria....” Was she going to have one now ... laugh and cry and say dreadful things and then be utterly exhausted? Good Lord, how fearful. And what was the good? She “couldn’t help it.” That was why you had to be firm with hysterical people. But there was no need, now. Everything was better. Two of them married; the boys ready to look after everything. It was simply irritating ... and the sun just coming round into the green of the conservatory....
She sat impatient, feeling young and strong and solid with joy on the piano stool. Couldn’t mother see her, sitting there in a sort of blaze of happy strength? She swung impatiently round to the keyboard and glanced at the open album. There was silence in the room. Her heart beat anxiously ... some German printer had printed those notes ... in pain and illness perhaps—but pain and illness in Germany, not in this dreadful little room where despair was shut in.... “Comus,” “The Seven Ages of Man,” “The Arctic Regions,” beautiful bindings on the little old inlaid table, things belonging to those sunny beginnings and ending with that awful agonised figure sitting there silent. She cleared her throat and stretched a hand out over the notes of a chord without striking it. Something was gaining on her. Something awful and horrible.
“Play something cheerful, chickie,” said her mother, in a dreadful deep trembling voice. Suddenly Miriam knew, in horror, that the voice wanted to scream, to bellow. Bellow ... that huge, tall woman striding about on the common at Worthing ... bellowing ... mad—madness. She summoned, desperately, something in herself, and played a thing she disliked, wondering why she chose it. Her hands played carefully, holding to the rhythm, carefully avoiding pressure and emphasis. Nothing could happen as long as she could keep on playing like that. It made the music seem like a third person in the room. It was a new way of playing. She would try it again when she was alone. It made the piece wonderful ... traceries of tone shaping themselves one after another, intertwining, and stopping against the air ... tendrils on a sunlit wall.... She had a clear conviction of manhood ... that strange hard feeling that was always twining between her and the things people wanted her to do and to be. Manhood with something behind it that understood. This time it was welcome. It served. She asserted it, sadly feeling it mould the lines of her face.