I.
They hated the piano. They had pushed it away against the dark outside wall. Its strings were stiff with cold, and when the rain came its wooden hammers swelled so that two notes struck together in the bass.
The piano-tuner made them move it to the inner wall in the large, bright place that belonged to the cabinet. Mamma was annoyed because Mary had taken the piano-tuner's part.
Mamma loved the cabinet. She couldn't bear to see it standing in the piano's dark corner where the green Chinese bowls hardly showed behind the black glimmer of the panes. The light fell full on the ragged, faded silk of the piano, and on the long scar across its lid. It was like a poor, shabby relation.
It stood there in the quiet room, with its lid shut, patient, reproachful, waiting for you to come and play on it.
When Mary thought of the piano her heart beat faster, her fingers twitched, the full, sensitive tips tingled and ached to play. When she couldn't play she lay awake at night thinking of the music.
She was trying to learn the Sonato Appassionata, going through it bar by bar, slowly and softly, so that nobody outside the room should hear it. That was better than not playing it at all. But sometimes you would forget, and as soon as you struck the loud chords in the first movement Papa would come in and stop you. And the Sonata would go on sounding inside you, trying to make you play it, giving you no peace.
Towards six o'clock she listened for his feet in the flagged passage. When the front door slammed behind him she rushed to the piano. There might be a whole hour before Roddy fetched him from the Buck Hotel. If you could only reach the last movement, the two thundering chords, and then—the Presto.
The music beat on the thick stone walls of the room and was beaten back, its fine, live throbbing blunted by overtones of discord. You longed to open all the doors and windows of the house, to push back the stone walls and let it out.
Terrible minutes to six when Mamma's face watched and listened, when she knew what you were thinking. You kept on looking at the clock, you wondered whether this time Papa would really go. You hoped—
Mamma's eyes hurt you. They said, "She doesn't care what becomes of him so long as she can play."