“Would you like one of these?” she asked, holding a banknote up to the light. Franzi shook her head.

“Don’t be silly,” said Minna. “You need the money more than I do. I mean, you have to buy your ticket for the recital, remember, and I’m sure it’s expensive.” She pressed two notes into Franzi’s reluctant hand.

Then they were both silent. Minna bent down to her little case again and locked it. “You must go now,” she said, coming back into the circle of lamplight. “It must be time for the recital, isn’t it? What a pity you can’t stay longer.” She took her sister’s face between her hands. “How thin you are! But your hair is looking beautiful! You know, the General’s wife’s granddaughter sometimes comes here in the evening, and I’m allowed to do her hair before she goes out to the theatre. She has lovely hair too, but yours is really quite different—and a thousand times prettier. Off you go now, and give my love to our sister Henriette, tell her—no, you don’t really need to tell her anything, just say I’m all right, only sometimes I’d like to be with the two of you for a little while, in spite of everything—oh no, don’t be sad, darling, everything’s all right just the way it is. You leave me and go now!”

Franzi could think of no answer. She looked at her sister for a long time, and held out her hand. Then, as they parted, Minna turned Franziska’s thin face up in the kindly, gentle light of the tiny lamp, and kissed her mouth as she took her last step out of the room.

“Goodbye, and be happy! Write soon!” said Minna. She stood in the doorway holding up the little lamp to light her sister through the darkness of the attic.

When the lamplight showed nothing but the dusty junk stored up there, Minna slowly went back into her small room, double-locked the door, took off her apron, folded it up, extinguished the light and sat down on the little case in the corner.

VII

FRANZISKA ARRIVED at the concert hall much too early. The piano still looked dark and plain on the bare stage, until a servant flung the lid up noisily and placed two silver candle-holders with four candles burning unsteadily in them beside the empty music stand.

The organ shone gently in the background.

The staff of the hall, wearing burgundy-red livery with silver braid, were still standing around idly, chatting and smiling. Their smiles were confident and yet servile.

Franzi ignored their surprised expressions, took out the scores she had bought recently and began immersing herself in them, hearing every note as it would sound at home on her own piano, which looked broad in the chest but sounded short-winded. Meanwhile a number of ladies passed by with a rustle of skirts—then, suddenly, the lights went up in the hall, and the audience applauded.

Madame Leonore Constanza stood at the front of the stage, a young, tall and elegant figure, wearing a dress with a silk train embroidered in silver that almost clinked as she walked forward. A heavy pearl necklace—perhaps too heavy—shone around her throat. La Constanza bowed—or no, it was more like a beast of prey taking its first steps into freedom and stretching. Then she took her place at the piano and began to play Liszt’s symphonic Sonata in B.

She sat there perfectly at ease, her fixed, almost animal gaze turned on a dark corner of the hall. Only her hands moved. Her rings with their coloured gems sparkled showily. Those hands were like bold, white-limbed creatures, beings with an existence of their own, creatures that could do nothing else but play, and went their own way almost against the will of this magnificent woman, floating, dancing, then pressing down to the ground heavily, weightily, like leopards overpowered by their own strength.

When those hands at last fell still loud applause broke out, sounding brutal and merciless in the silence, an acclamation flung almost violently at the pianist’s feet, and broke in thunder on the walls of a hall that was well accustomed to such sounds.

Suddenly Franziska felt impatient, tired and disappointed. All this is play-acting, she thought, not a note of it is genuine. A musical automaton can do as much. And now she was merely waiting for the end of the recital, feeling embittered as she counted off the pieces on her fingers.

Then, after a short interval, a Swedish singer came on stage, a very pretty, lively woman with a superabundance of hair the colour of sunlight falling over her pale forehead, and with an equally blond young man accompanying her on the piano she began singing the aria “Ah perfido”. It was an aria that surely had darkly glowing, intensely Italian eyes, but when Dagmar Johannsen sang it, it suddenly became sunnily blonde and blue-eyed, with a note of longing in it for the cool sea and wide, yellow fields of rye on the coasts of northern waters.

Now there was only one work to come: Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy.

What a pity about the evening, thought Franziska, with the intense negativity that the young can feel. It wasn’t worth the trouble of travelling to Prague. And yet she saw with regret, with unassuaged hunger, that the four candles on the piano were now far more than half burned down.

Then Madame Constanza struck the first throbbing, restless notes of the Allegro, a movement full of the sense of spring.

Good heavens, thought Franzi, is this the same music I spent two months tormenting my fingers with, are these the twenty pages that it took me three winter nights to copy out?

La Constanza sat there, no longer rigid and magnificently cold with only her hands almost too much alive. Now she bowed her head, dull light fell on the nape of her neck, her dark hair glowed and tossed.