Her mind went on amazed at the rushing together of her ideas on music, at the amount of certainty she had accumulated. Any of these things she declared to herself played, really played, would be better than Alma’s Chopin. The Wilsons had discovered “good” music, as so many English people had, but they were all wrong about music; nearly all English people were. Only in England would either the song or the solo have been possible. The song was innocent, the solo was an insult. The player’s air of superiority to other music was insufferable; her way of playing out bar by bar of the rain on the roof as if she were giving a lesson was a piece of intellectual snobbery. Chopin she had never met, never felt or glimpsed. Chopin was a shape, an endless delicate stern rhythm as stern as anything in music; all he was came through that, could come only through it and she played tricks with the shape, falsified all the values, outdid the worst trickery of the music she was deprecating. At the end of the performance which was applauded with a subdued reverence, Miriam eased her agony by humming the opening phase of the motive again and again in her brain and very nearly aloud, it was such a perfect rhythmic drop. For long she was haunted and tortured by Alma’s horrible holding back of the third note for emphasis where there was no emphasis … it was like … finding a wart at the dropping end of a fine tendril, she was telling herself furiously while she fended off Alma’s cajoling efforts to make her join in a game of cards. She felt too angry and too suffering—what was this wrong thing about music in all English people—even if she had not been too shy to exhibit her large hands and her stupidity at cards. So they were going to play cards, actually cards. The room felt cold to her in her long suppressed anger and misery. She began to wish the Pinners would go. Sitting by the fire shivering and torpid she listened to Mrs. Pinner’s outcries and the elaboration between the rounds of jests that she felt were weekly jests. Sitting there dully listening she began to have a sort of insight into the way these jests were made, it was a thing that could be cultivated. Her tired brain experimented. Certain things she heard she knew she would remember; she felt she would repeat them—with an air of originality. They would seem very brilliant in any of her circles—though the girls did that sort of thing rather well; but in a less “refined” way; that was true! This was the sort of thing the girls did; only their way was not half so clever … if she did, everyone would wonder what was the matter with her; and she would not be able to keep it up, without a great deal of practice; and it would keep out something else … but perhaps for some people there was something in it; it was their way. It had always been Alma’s way a little. Only now she did it better. Perhaps … it was like Chopin’s shape. … They do not know how angry I have been … they are quite amiable. I am simply horrid … wanting Alma to know I know she’s wrong quite as much as I care for Chopin; perhaps more … no; if anybody had played, I should be happy; perfectly happy … what does that mean … because real musicians are not at all nice people … “a queer soft lot.” But why are the English so awful about music? They are poets. Why are they not musicians? I hope I shall never hear Alma play Beethoven. As long as she plays Chopin like that I shall never like her. … Perhaps English people ought never to play, only to listen to music. They are not innocent enough to play. They cannot forget themselves.
At ten o’clock they trooped into the kitchen. Miriam, half asleep and starving for food, eagerly ate large biscuits too hungry to care much for Alma’s continued resentment of her failure to join the card party and her unconcealed contempt of her sudden return to animation at the prospect of nourishment. She had never felt so hungry.
Going at last to her room Miriam found its gleaming freshness warm and firelit. Warm fresh deeps of softly coloured room that were complete before she came in with her candle. She stood a moment imagining the emptiness. The April night air was streaming gently in from meadows. Going across to the window she hesitated near the flowered curtain. It stirred gently; but not in that way as if moved by ghostly fingers. The meadows here were different. They might grow the same again. But woods and meadows were always there, away from London. One could go to them. They were going on all the time. All the time in London spring and summer and autumn were passing unseen. But this was not the time. They were different here. She pulled a deep wicker chair close up to the exciting white ash-sprinkled hearth. The evening she had left in the flames downstairs was going on up here. Tomorrow, today, in a few hours she would be sitting with them again, facing flames; no one else there. She sat with her eyes on the flames. A clock struck two. … I’ve got to them at last, the people I ought to be with. The books in the corner showed their bindings and opened their pages here and there. They made a little sick patch on her heart. They approved of them. Other people approved of things. Nothing had been done yet that anybody could approve of … the something village
