Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly. He only knew it looked and sounded wonderful. He could have watched forever her little hands that were like white birds. He had never seen anything more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano.
Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano. It jarred him; but it made him smile. The little hands were marvelous the way they flew, the way they leaped across great spaces of piano.
Alice herself was satisfied. She had brought out the air; she had made it sing above the confusion of the bass and treble that evidently had had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already assured her that they were impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew.
Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster. The glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers. The schoolmaster recited the "Pied Piper of Hamelin." A young lady who had come over from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about the miller.
Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes, she sang.
"Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!"
sang the young lady from Morfe. Alice could see that she sang for Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear.
The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping. To Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be associated with the song of the young lady from Morfe. She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her (he wasn't) and she strove by look and manner to detach herself. As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young lady from Morfe.
When it ceased there rose from the piano that was its grave the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. It rose in splendor and defiance; Alice's defiance of the young lady from Morfe. It brought down the schoolhouse in a storm of clapping and thumping, of "Bravos" and "Encores." Even Rowcliffe said, "Bravo!"
But Alice, still seated at the piano, smiled and signaled.