fill up
the hour after they had all read a page. She had just reached the
conclusion that they must do some sort of writing when Fraulein Pfaff
came, and still affable and smiling had ushered the girls to their
mending and sent Miriam off to the saal.

16

As she flew upstairs for her music, saying, "I'm all right. I can do it
all right," she was half-conscious that her provisional success with her
class had very little to do with her bounding joy. That success had not
so much given her anything to be glad about--it had rather removed an
obstacle of gladness which was waiting to break forth. She was going to
stay on. That was the point. She would stay in this wonderful place.. ..
She came singing down through the quiet house--the sunlight poured from
bedroom windows through open doors. She reached the quiet saal. Here
stood the great piano, its keyboard open under the light of the French
window opposite the door through which she came. Behind the great closed
swing doors the girls were talking over their raccommodage. Miriam paid
not even need to try to ignore them. She felt strong and independent.
She would play, to herself. She would play something she knew perfectly,
a Grieg lyric or a movement from a Beethoven Sonata... on this gorgeous
piano... and let herself go, and listen. That was music... not playing
things, but listening to Beethoven.... It must be Beethoven... Grieg was
different... acquired... like those strange green figs Pater had brought
from Tarring... Beethoven had always been real.

It was all growing clearer and clearer.... She chose the first part of
the first movement of the Sonata Pathetique. That she knew she could
play faultlessly. It was the last thing she had learned, and she had
never grown weary of practising slowly through its long bars of chords.
She had played it at her last music-lesson... dear old Stroodie walking
up and down the long drilling-room.... "Steady the bass"; "grip the
chords," then standing at her side and saying in the thin light sneery
part of his voice, "You can... you've got hands like umbrellas"... and
showing her how easily she could stretch two notes beyond his own span.
And then marching away as she played and crying out to her standing
under the high windows at the far end of the room, "Let it go! Let it
go!"

And she had almost forgotten her wretched self, almost heard the
music....

She felt for the pedals, lifted her hands a span above the piano as