Torvenius sat at his piano, his head flung back, his eyes half closed. Reflections of the changing light trembled around his tormented face. At that moment it looked beautiful to her, illuminated by an inner flame. But only for a moment.

Those hours in the cinematograph theatre, which held shows on Saturday evenings from seven to nine, were Franziska’s Sunday. For she didn’t observe Sunday any more, and since she had stopped going to church she no longer believed in God.

Those were hard days, full to the brim with work, and on many Saturday evenings Franzi felt tired to death. Her head was ringing, her fingers were cramped and her joints creaked. She felt pain from her fingertips to her shoulders. The worst of it was that then she began to doubt herself, and doubt hurt more than her aching joints. Yet she overcame it and remained strong; otherwise she wouldn’t have endured that life so long. She could be mercilessly stern with herself; she had to be. When she played a piece that she knew by heart and her memory suddenly faltered, if only for a second, she did not wait for it to fail her entirely, but sentenced herself to copy the whole piece out from its thunderous opening chords to the fine-drawn arabesques of the finale, which seemed so immaterial yet were so indescribably difficult. She sat up in bed for nights on end, an old drawing-board of her father’s on her knees, writing until the pen dropped from her fingers. But when she woke in the morning and could hardly move her knees—the heavy board had almost crippled them—she felt young. At long, long last she was happy, chosen by life as one among thousands, she sensed the air of a great future blowing towards her; then she rose above her sisters, above old Torvenius, above all the dull people of the dingy, grey little town, and above herself too, above the imperfect Franziska of yesterday who had made a mistake in the fifty-eighth bar of Schubert’s Sonata in F sharp minor. If she expected superhuman achievement of herself, she also expected boundless gifts from life. That gave her eye the gleam of one transfigured, it gave strength to her slender figure with its delicate limbs and beauty to her angular features; it ennobled her. But it also made her empty, heartless, cold to the point of severity, sensitive to her fingertips and also, as with all arrogant people, deep inside herself as defenceless as a child.

VI

IN FEBRUARY OF THE NEXT YEAR Franziska went to Prague, where Leonore Constanza was giving a piano recital. It was a long journey; the dull droning of the train sounded dispirited and subterranean. Mist lay over the empty fields, now deeply furrowed in winter, and hovered around the arc lamps that swayed above the broad streets from barely visible cables. Mist drifted outside the display windows of shops, waiting; mist rose from the whole grand breadth of Wenceslas Square to its upper end, where a mighty bronze equestrian statue menacingly guards a pillared palace, a statue full of physical power, heroic and yet as gentle as a prince from the Thousand and One Nights outside a magic castle.

But the old building where her sister lived was a dismal sight. The dark staircase was crooked as a hunched back, the steps as rotten as an old man’s teeth. A year ago, Minna had gone into domestic service here with a retired general and his wife. Franziska rang the bell; an old woman put her alabaster-white face out of the door, and turned a parchment ear in her direction.

“I’d like to speak to Fräulein Minna,” said Franziska.

“Minna?” replied the deaf old lady, smiling. She pronounced the name as if she had never heard it, then waved a tremulous hand, closed the door, and shot the bolt.

Franzi waited. Down below electric trams were ringing their bells, footsteps passed the building, she heard people speaking a foreign language. She felt tired to death, tired as she had never been since childhood. Then someone came to the door, opened its two wings, and the chain rattled. Breathing hard, her sister took her in her arms, hugging her with painful fervour.

“I knew at once it was you,” said Minna. “Have you been waiting long? And how long can you stay? I’m not letting you go in a hurry! I have to work now, but the master and mistress will be out this evening, and then …”

“The master and mistress? What kind of talk is that?” asked Franzi.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” said Minna, and as if apologizing, “You mustn’t be cross, you know. Don’t you remember? I was unwell.”

“You poor thing,” said Franzi.