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Mrs. Bailey came up herself to do Miriam’s room on Sunday morning. Miriam wondered as she came archly in after a brisk tap on the door how she knew that her visit caused dismay. The visit of the little maid did not break into anything. It only meant standing for a minute or so by the window longing for the snuffling and shuffling to be over. But if Mrs. Bailey were coming up every Sunday morning.... She stood at Mrs. Bailey’s disposal sheepishly smiling, in the middle of the room.—You didn’t expect to see me, young lady—Miriam broadened her smile.—I want to talk to you—They stood confronted in the room just as they had done the first time Mrs. Bailey had been there with her and they had settled about the rent. Only that then the room had seemed large and real and at once inhabited, the crown of the large house and the reality of all the unknown rooms. Now it seemed to be at a disadvantage, one of Mrs. Bailey’s unconsidered attics, apart from the life that was beginning to flow all round her downstairs. Something in Mrs. Bailey’s face when she said I was wondering if you would give Sissie a few French lessons spoke the energy of the new feeling and thought. Miriam was astounded. She called up a vision of Sissie’s pale steady grey-blue eyes, her characterless hair, her thickset swiftly ambling little figure. She was the kind of girl who after good schooling could spend a year in France and come back unable to speak French. But if Mrs. Bailey wished it she would have to learn from somebody.... So she conspired with an easy contemptuous conscience and they stood murmuring over the plan, Mrs. Bailey producing one by one, fearfully, in a low motherly encouraging tone the things she had arranged beforehand in her own mind. Before she went she bustled to the window and tweaked the ends of the little Madras muslin curtains. Why don’t you go down to the drawn-room for a while—she asked tweaking and flicking.—You’ll have it all to yourself. Mr. Elsing’s gone out. I should go down if I was you and get a warm up.—Miriam thanked her and promised to go and wondered whether the Norwegian’s name was Helsing or Elsen. When Mrs. Bailey had gone she walked busily about her affronted room. It must be Helsing. A man named Elsen would be shorter and stouter and kindly. Of course she would not go down to the drawing-room. She ransacked her Saratoga trunk and found a Havet and a phrase book. She would teach Sissie the rules of French pronunciation and two or three phrases every day and make some sort of beginning of syntax with Havet. There would be no difficulty in filling up the quarter of an hour. But it would be teaching in the bad cruel old-fashioned way. To begin at once with Piccola or Le Roi des Montagnes and talk to her in the character of a Frenchman wanting to become a boarder would be the best.... But Sissie would not grasp that slow way. It would be too long before she began to see that she was learning anything ... But the smattering of phrases and rules from a book handed out without any trouble to herself on her way to her room and before she wanted to go out was too little to give in exchange for a proper breakfast ready for her in a warm room every day and the option of having single meals at any time for a very small sum ... because the Baileys were trying to turn themselves into an English family prepared to receive foreigners who wanted to learn English she had promised the lessons as if she thought the plan good....
She crept downstairs through the silent empty house, pausing at the open drawing-room door to listen to the faint far-away subterranean sounds coming from the kitchen. All the furniture seemed to be waiting for someone or something. That was a console table. She must have noticed the jar on it as she came into the room, or somewhere else, it looked so familiar. One ought to know the name of the material it was made of. It was like a coarse veined agate. In the narrow strip of mirror that ran from the table high up the wall between the two french windows stood the heavy self-conscious reflection of the elegant jug. It was elegant and complete; the heavy minutely moulded flowers and leaves festooned about its tapering curves did not destroy its elegance. It stood out alone and complete against the reflected strip of shabby room. Extraordinary. Where had it come from? It was an imitation of something. A reflection of some other life. Had it ever been seen by anybody who knew the kind of life it was meant to be surrounded by? She backed into an obstacle and turned with her hand upon the low velvet back of a little circular chair. Its narrow circular strip of back was supported by little wooden pillars. She took possession of it. The coiled spring of the seat showed its humpy outline through the velvet and gave way crookedly under her when she sat down. But she felt she was in her place in the room; out amongst its strange spaces. In front of her about the fireside were two large armchairs upholstered in shabby Utrecht velvet and a wicker chair with a woolwork cushion on its seat and a dingy antimacassar worked in crewels thrown over its high back. To her right stood a small battered three-tiered lacquer and bamboo tea-table, and beyond it a large circular table polished and inlaid and strewn with dingy books occupied the end of the room between the fireplace and the wall. On the other side of the fireplace stood a chiffonier in black wood supporting and reflecting in its little mirror a large square deeply carved dusty brown wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Crowding against the chiffonier was a large shabby bamboo tea-table and a scatter of velvet-seated drawing-room chairs with carved dusty abruptly curving backs and legs. Away to the left rose one of the high french windows. The dingy cream lace curtains almost meeting across it, went up and up from the dusty floor and ended high up, under a red woollen valence hanging from a heavy gilt cornice. Between the curtains she could catch a glimpse of the balcony railings and strips between them of the brown brickwork of the opposite house. She stared at the vague scatter of vases and bowls and small ornaments standing in front of the large overmantel and dimly reflected in its dusty mirror. Two tall vases on the mantelshelf holding dried grasses carried her eyes up to two short vases holding dried grasses standing on the wooden-pillared brackets of the overmantel, and back again to themselves. She rose and turned away to shake off their influence and turned back again at once to see what had attracted her attention. Satsuma; at either end of the mantelpiece shutting in the scatter of vases and bowls two large squat rounded Satsuma basins—with arched lids. On the centre of each lid was a little gilded knob. Extraordinary. Unlike any Satsuma she had ever seen. Where had they come from? She wandered about the room, eagerly taking in battered chairs and more little tables and whatnots and faded pictures on the faded walls. What was it that had risen in her mind as she came into the room? She recalled the moment of coming in. The piano ... the quiet shock of it standing there with the shut-in waiting look of a piano, confronting the large stillness of the room.... Turning to face it she passed into the world of drawing-room pianos; the rosewood case, the faded rose silk pleating strained taut, its margin hidden under a rosewood trellis; the little tarnished sconces, for shaded candles, the small leather-topped easily twirling stool with its single thick deeply carved leg, a lady sitting, tinkling and flourishing delicately through airs with variations; an English piano, perfectly wrought and finished, music swathed and hidden in elegance ... “a little music” ... but chiefly the seated form, the small cooped body, the voluminous draperies bulging over the stool and spreading in under the keyboard and down about the floor, the elegantly straying arms and mincing hands, the arch swaying of the head and shoulders, the face bent delicately in the becoming play of light.... She opened the lid. It went back from the keys till it lay flat, presenting a little music-stand folded into the sweep of its upper edge. Mustiness rose from the keys. They were loose and yellow with age. Softly struck notes shattered the silence of the room. She stood listening with loudly beating heart. The door would open and show a face with surprised eyes staring into her betrayed consciousness. The house remained silent. Her fingers strayed forward and ran up a scale. The notes were all run down but they rang fairly true to each other.
Moszkowski’s Serenade sounded fearfully pathetic; as if the piano were heart-broken. It could be made to do better. Both the pedals worked, the soft one producing a woolly sweetness, the loud a metallic shallow brilliance of tone. She shut the heavy softly closing loose-handled door very carefully. Its cold china knob told her callously that her real place was in the little room upstairs with the bedroom crockery cold in the mid-morning light. But she had already shut the door. She came shyly back to the piano and sat down and played carefully and obediently piece after piece remembered from her schooldays. They left the room triumphantly silent and heavy all round her. If she got up and went away it would be as if she had not played at all. She could not sit here playing Chopin. It would be like deliberately speaking a foreign language suddenly, to assert yourself. Playing pianissimo she slowly traced a few phrases of a nocturne. They revealed all the flat dejection of the register. With the soft pedal down she pressed out the notes in a vain attempt to key them up. Through their mournful sagging the magic shape came out. She could not stay her hands. Presently she no longer heard the false tones. The notes sounded soft and clear and true into her mind weaving and interweaving the sight of moonlit waters, the sound of summer leaves flickering in the darkness, the trailing of dusk across misty meadows, the stealing of dawn over grass, the faint vision of the Taj Mahal set in dark trees, white Indian moonlight outlining the trees and pouring over the pale facade; over all a hovering haunting consoling voice pure and clear, in a shape, passing as the pictures faintly came and cleared and melted and changed upon a vast soft darkness, like a silver thread through everything in the world. Closing in upon her from the schoolgirl pieces still echoing in the room came sudden abrupt little scenes from all the levels of her life, deep-rooted moments still alive within her challenging and promising as when she had left them, driven relentlessly on.... The last chord of the nocturne brought the room sharply back. It was unchanged; lifeless and unmoved; nothing had passed to it from the little circle where she sat enclosed.... Her heart swelled and tears rose in her eyes. The room was old and experienced, full like her inmost mind of the unchanging past. Nothing in her life had any meaning for it. It waited impassively for the passing to and fro of people who would leave no impression. She had exposed herself and it meant nothing in the room. Life had passed her by and her playing had become a sentimental exhibition of unneeded life.... She was wretched and feeble and tired.... Life has passed me by; that is the truth. I am no longer a person. My playing would be the nauseating record of an uninteresting failure to people who have lived or a pandering to the sentimental memories of people whom life has passed by ...—you played that like a snail crossed in love—perhaps he was right. But something had gone wrong because I played with the intention of commenting on Alma’s way of playing.... That was not all. It did not end there. There was something in music when one played alone, without thoughts. Something present, and new. Not affected by life or by any kind of people.... In Beethoven. Beethoven was the answer to the silence of the room. She imagined a sonata ringing out into it, and defiantly attacked a remembered fragment. It crashed into the silence. The uncaring room might rock and sway. Its rickety furniture shatter to bits. Something must happen under the outbreak of her best reality. She was on firm ground. The room was nowhere. She cast sidelong half-fearful exultant glances. The room woke into an affronted silence. She felt astonishment at the sudden loud outbreak of assertions turning to scornful disgust. Entrenched behind the disgust something was declaring that she had no right to her understanding of the music; no business to get away into it and hide her defects and get out of things and escape the proper exposure of her failure. In a man it would have been excusable. The room would have listened with respectful flattering indulgent tolerance till it was over and then have relapsed untouched. This dingy woman playing with the directness and decision of a man was like some strange beast in the room.... It was too late to go back. She could only rush on re-affirming her assertion, shouting in a din that must be reaching up and down the house and echoing out into the street the thing that was stronger than the feeling that had prompted her appeal for sympathy. It was the everlasting parting of the ways, the wrenching away that always came.... The Baileys were going on downstairs with their planning, the Norwegian busy with his cold watchful grappling with England; all of them far away, flouted. The room became a background indistinguishable from any other indifferent background. All round her was height and depth, a sense of vastness and grandeur beyond anything to be seen or heard, yet stretching back like a sheltering wing over the past to her earliest memories and forward ahead out of sight. The piano had changed. It gave out a depth and fulness of tone. By careful management she could avoid the abrupt contrast between the action of the pedals. Presently the glowing and aching of the muscles of her forearms forced her to leave off. She swung round. The forgotten room was filled with friendly light. Triumphant echoes filled its wide spaces, pressed against the windows, filtered out into the quiet street out and away into London. When the room was still there was an unbroken stillness in the house and the street. Striking thinly across it came the tones of the solitary unaccompanied violin.