She was no longer the woman who could inflict such stern and infuriatingly unfair punishment for a dirty mark on a shabby old dress or the loss of a small coin, who scolded her daughters with such harsh, ugly, sometimes hurtful words—it was a gentle, devoted, maternally soft hand that stroked her husband’s eyelids as she spoke to him in a sweet, soft, girlish voice. And after many years, after an endless wretched and deeply depressing widowhood, she suddenly found that mouth, those eyes, that voice again with her last words on the evening before her death, as Franzi sat at the piano. It was through the candlelight that Franziska had last seen her mother’s fading eyes shine with a kindly radiance—and the solemn, tremendous architecture of this Beethoven sonata had been her mother’s gateway to death. She passed through it with her tired, calloused hands wrapped in a black apron, her grey head bent, her eyes sunk so deep in the dust of time that she could no longer separate today from what had once been. Now the same notes surged up, rolled away in the irresistible rhythm of the austere fugal movement, voice answering voice, shone like white crests against a blue infinity, and then the last note died away like the sound of a giant stepping into a dark cavern.

Einar had gone out quietly and come back again, and now, eyes widening, he was looking at La Constanza and Dagmar. La Constanza still stood motionless by the piano, the little bunch of lily of the valley in her lowered, trembling hand, Dagmar had tears in her blue eyes. Dagmar shed tears very easily.

“Go on,” said La Constanza. Only now did Franzi come to her senses and realize that the first movement was over.

She began the Arietta, that infinitely simple, sweet melody whose theme is perhaps the most limpid that Beethoven ever wrote. But it did not remain clear, simple and sweet. It went down into the depths, with extraordinary passion the notes dug their way out of the bottomless ground beneath. It was as if Beethoven, old, deaf and ugly, abandoned by all the world, had written this final Adagio for himself alone, calling out to the unfathomable melody as it opened its eyes to turn you to stone like the Medusa. You couldn’t understand the notes any more now, there was no reason, no structure, no sense in them, but they cried out, they reached with iron hands for the turbulent human soul and shook it to the depths of its being.

And whether the closing section was the rejoicing of cherubim or the song of lost souls in hell—there was no other language in the world except the language of music that could say that, and no one but Beethoven who understood this language.

IX

“GOOD, GOOD,” said La Constanza after a moment’s silence. “Come with us, will you?” She wrapped herself in the fine, fringed white Spanish shawl that flowed down her queenly figure. Outside, her motor car was waiting, vibrating like a living creature.

“When do you leave?” asked La Constanza.

“At eleven thirty-five from the North-West Station, Madame,” said Franzi.

Einar took out his watch, a fine gold timepiece that he wore dangling from a little red leather strap. “We have only three-quarters-of-an-hour, then,” he said regretfully, not that there was really anything to regret, but he was nothing if not courteous.

La Constanza tucked her spray of lily of the valley into her shawl, and thought for a moment. “Oh, my goodness!” she suddenly exclaimed. “Where are our flowers?”

“I’m sorry,” said Einar “but there were so many of them that I put them in a carriage to go from the green-room to the Majestic. So now the hotel staff will open the carriage door expecting to find La Constanza among the flowers.”

“Ah, good,” said La Constanza, mollified. “Our dear Einar thinks of everything, excellent fellow!” She gave him her hand, which he devotedly kissed.

How good she is, thought Einar. I feel she has never loved anyone before as she loves me! And secure in his happiness, he turned to Franziska. “We must offer you our special thanks for giving us a recital of your own after we had finished ours.”

“Oh, be quiet, Einar,” said La Constanza. “In the first place it wasn’t a recital, just one sonata—that’s like the difference between a handsome man in black tie and tails and a real musician—and in the second place leave the poor girl alone, she knows what she’s doing, and we’re not likely to hear that particular sonata played so well by anyone. Anyone, I say, not even Rosenthal.”

Franziska smiled very slightly, and although it was dark La Constanza saw her.

“Don’t get ideas above yourself,” she said. “Rosenthal doesn’t want to play Beethoven, that’s all. Those who can still play him today don’t want to. Well, I suppose they’re right; when it really comes to it they can’t. Rubinstein was the last who could play him.” (She pronounced his name very deliberately: Rubin-stein.) “And why can’t anyone play him today? Because the conservatories have systematically ruined them all. Who was your teacher, young lady?”

“Heinrich Torvenius.”

“Torvenius? He sounds like a teacher of Latin, am I right? Nothing wrong with that. The fact is, one can learn even from a Latin teacher. Yes, look at the girl,” she said to Dagmar and Einar, who were sitting opposite, “she comes from a place without any high ideas of culture or any conservatory.