“Does she?” said Mrs. Craven. “Yes. She’s got a singing chin. Sing us a pretty song, my dear.”
As she fluttered the leaves of her Schumann album she saw Mrs. Craven sit back with closed eyes, and Mrs. Corrie still sitting forward in her chair with her hands clasped on her knees gazing with a sad white face into the flames.
“Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht,” sang Miriam, and thought of Germany. Her listeners did not trouble her. They would not understand. No English person would quite understand—the need, that the Germans understood so well—the need to admit the beauty of things ... the need of the strange expression of music, making the beautiful things more beautiful and of words when they were together in the beauty of the poems. Music and poetry told everything—whether you understood the music or the words—they put you in the mood that made things shine—then heart-break or darkness did not matter. Things go on shining in the end; German landscapes and German sunshine and German towns were full of this knowledge. In England there was something besides—something hard.
“’Menjous, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Corrie, as she rose from the piano.
“If we lived aright we should all be singing,” said Mrs. Craven, “it’s natural.”
4
“You look a duck.”
Miriam stood still at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hall. Mrs. Staple-Craven was standing under the largest lamp near the fireplace looking up at a tall man in a long ulster. Grizzled hair and a long face with a long pointed grizzled beard—she was staring up at him with her eyes “like saucers” and her face pink, white, gold, “like a full moon”—how awful for him ... he’d come down from town probably in a smoking carriage, talking, and there she was and he had to say something.
“I’ve just had my bath,” said Mrs. Craven, without altering the angle of her gaze.
“You look a duck,” said the tall man fussily, half turning away.