The “Grand Evening Concert” was a tame, spiritless affair. Catherine’s pianoforte solo was introduced at the commencement to tide over that difficult period during which the local élite (feeling it somewhat beneath their status to appear punctually at the advertised time) were shuffling and fussing into the reserved front seats. Her appearance on the platform was greeted with a few desultory claps. The piano (grand only architecturally) was placed wrongly; the sound-board was not raised, and it appeared to be nobody’s business to raise it for her. She played amidst a jangle of discordant noises: the rustle of paper bags and silk dresses, the clatter of an overturned chair, the sibilant murmur of several score incandescent gas lamps. All through there was the buzz of conversation, and if she looked up from the keyboard she could see the gangways full of late-comers streaming to their seats, standing up to take off their cloaks, making frantic signals to others for whom they had kept seats vacant, passing round bags of sweets, bending down to put their hats under the seat, diving acrobatically into obscure pockets to find coppers for the programme girls, doing anything, in fact, except listen to her playing. Somehow this careless, good-humoured indifference gave her vast confidence. She felt not the least trace of nervousness, and she played perhaps better than she had ever done before. She had even time to think of subsidiary matters. A naked incandescent light lit up the keyboard from the side nearest the rear of the platform, and she deliberately tossed her head at such an angle that the red cloud of her hair should lie in the direct line of vision between a large part of the audience and the incandescent light. She knew the effect of that. At intervals, too, she bent her head low to the keyboard for intricate treble eccentricities. She crossed her hands whenever possible, and flung them about with wild abandon. It would be absurd to say she forgot her audience; on the contrary, she was remembering her audience the whole time that she was playing. And during the six or seven minutes that Liszt’s Concert Study in A flat lasted, her mind was registering vague regrets. She regretted that nobody had thought to raise the sound-board for her. She regretted the omission of all those little stylish affectations which in the first thrill of appearing on the platform she had forgotten all about. She had not polished her hands with her handkerchief before starting. She had not adjusted the music-stool. She had not pushed back the music-rest as far as it would go. She had not played the chord and arpeggio inversions of A flat major and paused dramatically before beginning the composition of Liszt. All these things she had forgotten. People would think she was an inexperienced player. Anyhow, she made up as well as she could for her initial deficiencies during the progress of the piece. She “swanked,” according to the popular expression. She was very conscious of the effect her hair was or ought to be producing....
As a matter of fact, nobody was either looking at her or listening to her with any particular interest or eagerness.
She was awakened from her egoistic dreams by the half-hearted applause of those people who by divine instinct know when a piece is coming to an end several bars ahead, and start their applause at the last bar but one.... She bowed graciously in front of the piano, and tripped lightly behind the scenes. The applause did not justify an encore.... She had made up her mind as she played the concluding chords of the Concert Study: If I am given an encore, I will do all those things I omitted to do before: I will polish my hands, adjust the stool, push back the music-rest, have the sound-board lifted, run up with arpeggios on the tonic....
But she was not given an encore.
In the artists’ room behind the scenes nobody took much notice of her. Fred Hitchcock, a local tenor with baritone leanings, was giving final frenzied directions to his accompanist, a large-featured female with an excessively low and powdered neck.
“Go slow over that twiddly bit,” he whispered, catching hold of her to lead her on to the platform. “And don’t forget to give me the leading note in the adagio.” His hoarse voice merged into the buzz of sound that came down the corridor leading to the platform.
She overheard a conversation.
“What was that thing that girl played?”
“What girl?”
“The girl with the red hair.”