You’re not stupid.
They’re a pleasure to you among a lot of other pleasures.
It gives you a feeling of warmth and satisfaction to look at them.
To walk through a gallery is a very agreeable way of passing an idle hour.
What more can you want?
But you see, I’ve always been poor, often hungry, and sometimes terribly lonely.
They’ve been riches to me, food and drink and company.
When I was working and my employer had nagged me to distraction I used to slip into the Louvre at the luncheon hour and her scolding didn’t matter any more.
And when my mother died and I had nobody left, it comforted me.
During those long months when Robert was in prison before the trial and I was pregnant, I think I should have gone mad and killed myself if it hadn’t been that I could go there, where nobody knew me and nobody stared at me, and be alone with my friends.
It was rest and peace.
It gave me courage.
It wasn’t so much the great well-known masterpieces that helped me, it was the smaller, shyer pictures that no one noticed, and I felt they were pleased that I looked at them.
I felt that nothing really mattered so very much, because everything passed.
Patience!
Patience!
That’s what I learnt there.
And I felt that above all the horror and misery and cruelty of the world, there was something that helped you to bear it, something that was greater and more important than all that, the spirit of man and the beauty he created.
Is it really strange that that little picture I showed you this morning should mean so much to me?”
To make the most of the fine weather they walked up the busy Boulevard St. Michel and when they got to the top turned into the gardens of the Luxembourg.
They sat down and, talking little, idly watched the nurses, no longer, alas, wearing the long satin streamers of a generation ago, trundling prams, the old ladies in black who walked with sober gait in charge of little children, and the elderly gentlemen, with thick scarves up to their noses, who paced up and down immersed in thought; with friendly hearts they looked at the long-legged boys and girls who ran about playing games, and when a pair of young students passed wondered what it was they so earnestly discussed.
It seemed not a public park, but a private garden for the people on the left bank, and the scene had a moving intimacy.
But the chilly rays of the waning sun gave it withal a certain melancholy, for within the iron grille that separated it from the bustle of the great city, the garden had a singular air of unreality, and you had a feeling that those old people who trod the gravel paths, those children whose cries made a cheerful hubbub, were ghosts taking phantom walks or playing phantom games, who at dusk would dissolve, like the smoke of a cigarette, into the oncoming darkness.
It was growing very cold, and Charley and Lydia wandered back, silent friendly companions, to the hotel.
When they got to their room Lydia took out of her suit-case a thin sheaf of piano pieces.
“I brought some of the things Robert used to play.
I play so badly and we haven’t got a piano at Alexey’s.
D’you think you could play them?”
Charley looked at the music.
It was Russian.
Some of the pieces were familiar to him.
“I think so,” he said.
“There’s a piano downstairs and there’ll be nobody in the salon now.
Let’s go down.”
The piano badly wanted tuning. It was an upright.
The keyboard was yellow with age and because it was seldom played on the notes were stiff.
There was a long music stool and Lydia sat down by Charley’s side.
He put on the rack a piece by Scriabin that he knew and after a few resounding chords to try the instrument began to play.
Lydia followed the score and turned the pages for him.
Charley had had as good masters as could be found in London, and he had worked hard.
He had played at concerts at school and afterwards at Cambridge, so that he had acquired confidence.
He had a light, pleasant touch.
He enjoyed playing.
“There,” he said when he came to the end of the piece.
He was not displeased with himself.
He knew that he had played it according to the composer’s intention and with the clear, neat straightforwardness that he liked in piano-playing.
“Play something else,” said Lydia.
She chose a piece.
It was an arrangement for the piano of folk songs and folk dances by a composer of whom Charley had never heard.
It startled him to see the name of Robert Berger written in a firm, bold hand on the cover.