Cold was banished, by day and by night. For a fortnight taken from the rawest depths of the London winter there would be no waste of life in mere endurance.
She discovered the source of the stable warmth in an unsightly row of pipes at the side of the large window, bent over like hairpins and scorching to the touch. The concentrated heat revived her weary nerves. At the end of the coil there was a regulator. Turning it she found the heat of the pipes diminish and hurriedly reversed the movement and glanced out at the frozen world and loved the staunch metallic warmth and the flavour of timber added to it in this room whose walls and furniture were all of naked wood.
Turning to it in greeting she found it seem less small. It was small but made spacious by light. Light came from a second window that was now calling—a small square beside the bed with the high astonishing smooth billow of covering oddly encased in thin sprigged cotton—offering mountains not yet seen.
The way to it was endless across the short room from whose four quarters there streamed, as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought up opposite the window as if on another day of life and glanced out carelessly at a distant group of pinnacles darkening in a twilight that was not grey but lit wanly in its fading, by snow.
The little servant came in with the promised tea and made, as she set it upon the little table with the red and white check cover of remembered German cafés, bent over it in her short-skirted check dress and squab of sleek flaxen hair, a picture altogether German. She answered questions gravely, responsibility speaking even in the smile that shone from her plump toil-sheened young face, telling the story of how she and her like, permanently toiling, were the price of happiness for visitors. But this she did not know. She was happy. Liked being busy and smiling and being smiled at and shutting the door very carefully.
Some movement of hers had set swinging an electric bulb hanging by a cord above the little table. Over the head of the bed there was another. Light and warmth in profusion—in a cheap room in a modest hotel.
Switching on the light that concentrated on the table and its loaded little tray and transformed the room to a sitting-room, “I’m in Switzerland,” she said aloud to the flowered earthenware and bright nickel, and sat down to revel in freedom and renewal and at once got up again realising that hurry had gone from her days and flung off her blouse and found hot water set waiting on the washstand and was presently at the table in negligee and again ecstatically telling it her news.
The familiar sound of tea pouring into a cup heightened the surrounding strangeness. In the stillness of the room it was like a voice announcing her installation, and immediately from downstairs there came as if in answer the sound of a piano, crisply and gently touched, seeming not so much to break the stillness as to reveal what lay within it.
She set down her teapot and listened and for a moment could have believed that the theme was playing itself only in her mind, that it had come back to her because once again she was within the strange happiness of being abroad. Through all the years she had tried in vain to recall it, and now it came, to welcome her, piling joy on joy, setting its seal upon the days ahead and taking her back to her Germany where life had been lived to music that had flowed over its miseries and made its happinesses hardly to be borne.
For an instant she was back in it, passing swiftly from scene to scene of the months in Waldstrasse and coming to rest in a summer’s evening: warm light upon the garden, twilight in the saal. Leaving it she turned to the other scenes, freshly revived, faithfully fulfilling their remembered promise to endure in her forever, but each one as she paused in it changed to the summer’s evening she had watched from the darkening saal, the light upon the little high-walled garden, making space and distance with the different ways it fell on trees and grass and clustering shrubs, falling full on the hushed group of girls turned towards it with Fräulein Pfaff in their midst disarmed to equality by the surrounding beauty, making a little darkness in the summerhouse where Solomon shone in her white dress. And going back to it now it seemed as though some part of her must have lived continuously there so that she was everywhere at once, in saal and garden and summerhouse and out, beyond the enclosing walls, in the light along the spacious forbidden streets.
She relived the first moment of knowing gladly and without feeling of disloyalty how far a Sommerabend outdoes a summer’s evening, how the evening beauty was intensified by the deeps of poetry in the Germans all about her, and remembered her fear lest one of the English should sound an English voice and break the spell. And how presently Clara Bergmann, unasked, had retreated into the shadowy saal and played this ballade and in just this way, the way of slipping it into the stillness.
“Man soll sich des Lebens freuen, im Berg und Thal. In so was kann sich ein’ Engländerin nie hineinleben.”
Perhaps not, but in that small group of English there had been two who would in spite of homesickness have given anything just to go on, on any terms, existing in Germany.
It is their joy; the joyful
