Then she looked at Einar, who smiled ruefully and shrugged his slender shoulders. Dagmar was in the background among the bouquets of flowers, looking at all the ribbon bows one after another, as if expecting to find her name on one of them somewhere.

La Constanza, her gaze still bent on Franzi, thought: well, at least this isn’t a music student from the Conservatory. The music students always play ostentatiously and are always slipshod. Well, perhaps not really always ostentations, but slipshod, yes. “What does this young lady want?” she asked Einar, in tones as grave as if the elegant young Swede were Franziska’s conscience incarnate.

Franziska went red and looked so simple and touching, with her childishly shining eyes, that La Constanza softened.

The child could be related to me, she thought. I must have a niece of about her age somewhere in Bohemia.

“Do sit down,” she said kindly, and Franziska plucked up courage.

“I want to play to you, Madame,” she said, coming straight to the point.

Ah, so that’s it, thought La Constanza. Really, I would far, far rather people asked me for money. “Play to me? Not today, surely?”

“I have to leave this evening, and I don’t know when I shall be back here again. Please, Madame …” Her lips were trembling.

A child, thought La Constanza.

Einar and Dagmar were whispering. Dagmar had eaten nothing since first thing in the morning, since her voice was thought to have more brilliance if she sang on an empty stomach, so by now she was ravenously hungry and was urging Einar to leave.

“Now, now, my dear young lady,” Einar told Franziska, “you can see that this won’t do.”

“Why not?” asked La Constanza. “It will do if I say so. So quick, come along!”

She stood up, dropped the album on the floor, and returned to the concert hall with Franzi. With the audience gone, the empty hall looked enormous, as if lying in the mist. The organ with its silver pipes resembled a row of snow-covered trees, and warm, musty air hovered above the empty seats. Two servants were going along the walls putting out the red emergency lights.

“Very well then, sit down and play!” La Constanza commanded.

Einar smiled at Dagmar. When La Constanza said “Very well then,” it was a sign of her bad temper, and his little sister Dagmar’s hungry stomach would be avenged. Einar was so pleased at this prospect that he even shook the brunette pianist’s bony hand and promised her to put her name down to come and see Madame Constanza tomorrow.

VIII

“WHAT SHALL I PLAY?” asked Franziska despairingly, sensing the general hostility around her.

Madame Constanza’s shrug said: whatever you like. But her voice said, “Whatever you can.”

Einar, a very handsome young man who had some knowledge of music, was the famous pianist’s lover. He was still of an age when a man can regard his mistress’s success as his own and feel proud of her. Now it flattered him that Madame Leonore Constanza was about to sit in judgement like a goddess incarnate deciding what was good and what was bad. Ignoring his sister when she dug her elbow into his ribs, he re-lit the candles in the two silver holders and handed Franzi the portfolio of sheet music that she had brought with her. But Franzi’s hands, almost of their own accord, had already begun to play Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 111, his last, gravest and grandest.

Franziska closed her eyes, suddenly hearing her own playing as if it came from another world. The chords of the introduction trembled, flickered—but then, as if struck like a spark from the rock, came the theme of the Allegro, the imperishable, titanic motif that no longer sounds like music and melody but like a wild cry, a blow struck by a bronze hammer. Franzi gave a start. She listened to herself, she looked up, and with her eyes on the two pale pairs of lights burning in the silver holders before her she saw the flames tremble, move away from her, bend down and then, in the first long pause in the music, hover silently, solemnly up into the heights. Through their pale translucence she saw the dark eyes of her mother, for whom she had played this sonata on the evening before she died, was startled by the sight of her tired, work-worn hands, freezing cold and wrapped in her old black apron, once again she saw the stern smile on her mouth, and heard her say something she had never said to her before. For the diminutive of her name, ‘Franzi’, had also been her father’s name, and her mother, so cold and cutting towards everyone else, was never anything but gentle and maternal to her husband. When the old school caretaker came home on a Saturday evening tired out after work—for that was the day when the schoolhouse was cleaned and tidied for the week ahead, with all its benches and blackboards, its tiled stove sooty from a week’s use, its dusty stairways and corridors—when he came home, pale and exhausted, the children had to leave the living-room, and only Franziska was allowed to stay if she happened to be playing the piano.

He would come in, his small, pale, bearded face bent, his cap in his hand, and sit down in the corner by the stove. He never had to ask for anything. The girls’ mother was all solicitude, brought him whatever he wanted and placed it in front of him, and her smile gilded everything.