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 heartbroken. 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 midmorning 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 façade; 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. …