With him, she felt, the whole living world had died.

Only music still lived on. Nothing spoke to her as the old piano did, she never revealed her mind to anyone as she did when, alone in the dark room, she let the notes intoxicate her. Her father had given her her first lessons; when he died she was on her own. She had inherited his ability to improvise, and could spend hours extemporizing on some image or memory. Ideas came to her of their own accord; she often closed her eyes, or looked at the church with the delicate grille over its windows to make it harder for sparrows and pigeons to nest there. She would play for a long time without thinking at all, and thought anyone who wanted to could play like that. It gave her happiness, a faint kind of happiness, but happiness all the same.

When she was fifteen one Herr von Kornhen, an impoverished aristocrat who had been working as a sales representative for an insurance company, died suddenly.

Franziska happened to pass the church where the body was laid out before burial; there was a touch of mystery about the circumstances of the man’s death, and some people spoke of suicide, but the priest, who had been a good friend of his, was able to reconcile a church funeral with his own conscience.

Franziska’s dress brushed past the church porch. There was deathly silence in the tall building, and Franziska thought of the dead man lying there outstretched in his open coffin, with the rope in a noose around his neck or the mark of the fatal bullet on his forehead.

Her mother had forbidden her to attend the funeral mass, but Franziska couldn’t resist. She found a frisson of dread alluring.

Green darkness lay over the nave of the church; grey clouds of incense hovered in the air with heavy fragrance. The dead man’s son was kneeling beside the coffin, which in fact was closed. He was slender, with curly blond hair, and the way his small, white hands shook as he held them above the dark wood was more touching than any tears. Sweet organ music came down from the organ loft, little bells rang. The chirruping of birds flying up was light as a cool wind.

Franziska shuddered. She slowly retreated, her face always turned to the altar where pale candles burned. With a last glance she saw the old priest gently helping the young man to his feet. She dreamed of that fine, pale, boyish face. Her nights and her piano playing were full of it for a long time. His name was Erwin. The following year a woman musician, a foreigner, came to the small north Bohemian town and gave a recital in the dance-hall of its only inn. Franziska was impressed when she heard the first notes of the violin; after the first movement of the first sonata, however, she was deeply moved, trembling with excitement, and turned so pale that her mother, taking her in a firm hold, made her go home. Franziska never forgave her for that.

From that day on she thought she saw that she lacked the elemental strength for creativity, that she would never be able to rise above the moment, its sorrows and its joys, and that her semi-spontaneous improvising meant the certain ruin of her art.

She forced herself not to touch the keyboard for three weeks and then, at an age when others already had moderate achievements to their name, started to study the first systematic rudiments of playing the piano all over again.

Her ailing mother had engaged a young country girl to help with the heaviest of the work about the house. Franziska persuaded her to dismiss the girl, let Franziska herself do the work, and pay her what she would have paid the maid.

IV

YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE UNTHINKING ENERGY. Franziska knew nothing about life, nothing about art; she thought she could conquer both with her bare hands. She used the money she had earned to pay for piano lessons from an old organist who had once been an organ virtuoso in Leipzig, but Torvenius was as devoted to drink as to music, and the flexor tendons of his left hand had been cut with a broken beer glass during a brawl in a tavern. Now that he had been obliged to come home to the town of his birth he wished to avenge himself on life for doing him such an injustice, and his revenge consisted in drinking himself unconscious almost daily and beating a little dog called Orla, although the dirty, semi-feral animal was the only creature he loved, and he showed his affection for it in clumsy caresses.

He envied, hated and despised Franziska. Only the bitterest, most dire need could induce him to help her. He intended to torment her by setting her the most difficult exercises, but a character like Franziska’s knew no weariness. When she had been washing clothes until late at night in the damp laundry-room, or hauling baskets of coal and wood up the stairs from the cellar, she still found time to practise and to read theoretical books and scores. Anything seemed to her easy by comparison to the three weeks she had spent weaning herself off her free improvisations. For those had provided her only truly cheerful, happy times.