Part 13

On the appointed day the married ladies sailed about the pension dressed like upholstered chairs, and the unmarried ladies like draped muslin dressing-table covers. Frau Godowska pinned a rose in the centre of her reticule; another blossom was tucked in the mazy folds of a white antimacassar thrown across her breast. The gentlemen wore black coats, white silk ties and ferny buttonholes tickling the chin.

The floor of the salon was freshly polished, chairs and benches arranged, and a row of little flags strung across the ceiling—they flew and jigged in the draught with all the enthusiasm of family washing. It was arranged that I should sit beside Frau Godowska, and that the Herr Professor and Sonia should join us when their share of the concert was over.

“That will make you feel quite one of the performers,” said the Herr Professor genially. “It is a great pity that the English nation is so unmusical. Never mind! To-night you shall hear something—we have discovered a nest of talent during the rehearsals.”

“What do you intend to recite, Fräulein Sonia?”

She shook back her hair. “I never know until the last moment. When I come on the stage I wait for one moment and then I have the sensation as though something struck me here,”—she placed her hand upon her collar brooch—“and... words come!”

“Bend down a moment,” whispered her mother. “Sonia, love, your skirt safety-pin is showing at the back. Shall I come outside and fasten it properly for you, or will you do it yourself?”

“Oh, mamma, please don’t say such things,” Sonia flushed and grew very angry. “You know how sensitive I am to the slightest unsympathetic impression at a time like this.... I would rather my skirt dropped off my body—”

“Sonia—my heart!”

A bell tinkled.

The waiter came in and opened the piano. In the heated excitement of the moment he entirely forgot what was fitting, and flicked the keys with the grimy table napkin he carried over his arm. The Frau Oberlehrer tripped on the platform followed by a very young gentleman, who blew his nose twice before he hurled his handkerchief into the bosom of the piano.

“Yes, I know you have no love for me, And no forget-me-not. No love, no heart, and no forget-me-not.”

sang the Frau Oberlehrer, in a voice that seemed to issue from her forgotten thimble and have nothing to do with her.

“Ach, how sweet, how delicate,” we cried, clapping her soothingly. She bowed as though to say, “Yes, isn’t it?” and retired, the very young gentleman dodging her train and scowling.

The piano was closed, an arm-chair was placed in the centre of the platform. Fräulein Sonia drifted towards it. A breathless pause. Then, presumably, the winged shaft struck her collar brooch. She implored us not to go into the woods in trained dresses, but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles. Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the wrists. We were thrilled and silent. The Herr Professor, beside me, abnormally serious, his eyes bulging, pulled at his moustache ends. Frau Godowska adopted that peculiarly detached attitude of the proud parent. The only soul who remained untouched by her appeal was the waiter, who leaned idly against the wall of the salon and cleaned his nails with the edge of a programme. He was “off duty” and intended to show it.

“What did I say?” shouted the Herr Professor under cover of tumultuous applause, “tem-per-ament! There you have it. She is a flame in the heart of a lily. I know I am going to play well. It is my turn now. I am inspired. Fräulein Sonia”—as that lady returned to us, pale and draped in a large shawl—“you are my inspiration. To-night you shall be the soul of my trombone. Wait only.”

To right and left of us people bent over and whispered admiration down Fräulein Sonia’s neck. She bowed in the grand style.

“I am always successful,” she said to me. “You see, when I act I am. In Vienna, in the plays of Ibsen we had so many bouquets that the cook had three in the kitchen. But it is difficult here. There is so little magic. Do you not feel it? There is none of that mysterious perfume which floats almost as a visible thing from the souls of the Viennese audiences. My spirit starves for want of that.” She leaned forward, chin on hand. “Starves,” she repeated.

The Professor appeared with his trombone, blew into it, held it up to one eye, tucked back his shirt cuffs and wallowed in the soul of Sonia Godowska. Such a sensation did he create that he was recalled to play a Bavarian dance, which he acknowledged was to be taken as a breathing exercise rather than an artistic achievement. Frau Godowska kept time to it with a fan.

Followed the very young gentleman who piped in a tenor voice that he loved somebody, “with blood in his heart and a thousand pains.” Fräulein Sonia acted a poison scene with the assistance of her mother’s pill vial and the arm-chair replaced by a “chaise longue”; a young girl scratched a lullaby on a young fiddle; and the Herr Professor performed the last sacrificial rites on the altar of the afflicted children by playing the National Anthem.

“Now I must put mamma to bed,” whispered Fräulein Sonia. “But afterwards I must take a walk. It is imperative that I free my spirit in the open air for a moment. Would you come with me as far as the railway station and back?”

“Very well, then, knock on my door when you’re ready.”

Thus the modern soul and I found ourselves together under the stars.

“What a night!” she said. “Do you know that poem of Sappho about her hands in the stars.... I am curiously sapphic. And this is so remarkable—not only am I sapphic, I find in all the works of all the greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself—some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.”

“But what a bother,” said I.

“I do not know what you mean by ‘bother’; is it rather the curse of my genius....” She paused suddenly, staring at me. “Do you know my tragedy?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“My tragedy is my mother. Living with her I live with the coffin of my unborn aspirations. You heard that about the safety-pin to-night. It may seem to you a little thing, but it ruined my three first gestures. They were—”

“Impaled on a safety-pin,” I suggested.