and yet tragic, ominous, insistent, and rending:
“Bread! Wages!”
Ludwika Żmińska’s narrow eyebrows knit only slightly, but enough to make her face look cooler and more austere than before. Artful smirks flitted over the swarthy face of the Frenchwoman lolling in the armchair. Marta herself felt that she played badly. She no longer had the touch for those garlands of tender notes that long ago had seemed a melody fit for angels. Her fingers had lost their adroitness and floundered, not always striking accurately. She made mistakes in certain passages; she pressed the pedal unnecessarily; she left out entire measures. She lost her way on the keyboard and stopped to search for it.
“Mais c’est une petite horreur qu’elle joue là.” The Frenchwoman spoke in an undertone, but Marta heard her.
“Chut! Mademoiselle Delphine!” Ludwika Żmińska whispered.
Marta struck the last chord of the wistfully romantic piece. “I must play better!” she said to herself. At once, without raising her eyes or her hands from the keyboard, she began to play Zientarski’s dolorous Nocturne.
But she did not play any better; she played even worse. The composition was more difficult. She felt pain and stiffness in her fingers, which were long out of practice. She sensed that her playing was not making a favorable impression on the woman on whom her fervent hopes depended. She felt that her awkward touch on the keyboard was depriving her of one of the few tools that she had so counted on to help her obtain gainful work. Every false note from her fingers was tearing away one of the few threads by which her own and her child’s welfare hung.
“Elle touche faux, madame! Hé! Hé! Comme elle touche faux!” the Frenchwoman cried again, glancing around with her laughing eyes and resting her graceful feet on an armchair close by.
“Chut, je vous en prie, Mademoiselle Delphine!” the proprietress repeated, drawing herself up with displeasure.
Marta rose from the grand piano. Her blushes turned to purple blotches; her eyes flashed with chagrin. It had happened! A tool she had relied on had fallen from her hands; a thread she might have followed to find a new profession had been severed irreparably. She knew now that she would be given no employment as a music teacher. She did not lower her eyes, but marched with a steady step to the table where the two other women were sitting.
“I never had any talent for music,” she began in a voice that was rather soft but not muffled or trembling. “I studied it for nine years, but what one has no gift for, one forgets easily. And for five years after I was married I did not play at all.”
She smiled a little as she spoke. The Frenchwoman’s bright eyes were fixed on her and it made her uncomfortable. She was afraid of seeing pity in them, or a sneer. But the Frenchwoman did not understand Marta’s Polish. She yawned widely and loudly.
“Eh bien! Madame!” She turned to the proprietress. “Finish with me. I have only a few words to add. When will the countess arrive?”
“In a few days.”
“Did you write to her about the conditions I laid down?”
“Yes, and she accepted them.”
“So my four hundred rubles are certain?”
“Absolutely.”
“And my little niece will be able to stay with me?”
“Yes.”
“And I will have my own room, a servant of my own, horses for riding whenever I like, and two months’ holiday?”
“The countess agreed to all the conditions.”
“Very good,” said the Frenchwoman, rising. “I will visit you again in a few days to learn if the countess has arrived. But if she does not come or send for me in a week, I will break the contract. I do not want or need to wait any longer. I can get ten such positions. Bonjour, madame.”
She nodded to the proprietress and to Marta, and then left. On the threshold she pulled her bright red hood over her head; as she opened the door, she hummed a French song off key. For the first time in her life Marta felt something resembling jealousy. As she listened to the French governess’s conversation with the owner of the agency, she thought:
“Four hundred rubles and permission to have a little niece with her! A separate room, a servant, horses, a long vacation! Good heavens! So many conditions! This woman’s situation is so fortunate, so wonderful, although she does not seem either well educated or very attractive! If I could get four hundred rubles a year and have Jasia with me. . . .”
“Madame!” she exclaimed. “I would be overjoyed to take such a position.”
Żmińska thought for a moment.
“That is not absolutely impossible, but it would not be easy, and that is why I doubt that it would be advisable for you. Surely you acknowledge that in my relations with the people coming to me, it is my duty to be candid. With your French, which is well enough, though not quite Parisian, and your limited training in music—almost none—you could only teach beginners’ lessons, madame.”
“What does that mean?” Marta asked with a pounding heart.
“That means that you would receive six hundred, eight hundred, or at most a thousand złotys yearly.”
Without even a moment’s reflection Marta said:
“I would agree to that salary if I could be accepted with my little daughter.”
Ludwika Żmińska’s eyes, which had expressed the sort of hope that inspires ideas, now grew cold.
“Ah! You are not alone. You have a child . . .”
“A four-year-old girl, calm, gentle. She would never cause trouble for anyone.”
“I believe you,” Żmińska said. “Nonetheless I cannot give you the smallest hope of getting work with a child.”
Marta stared at her in surprise.
“Madame,” she said after a moment, “the person who just left was hired with permission to keep a small relative with her, and many, many other benefits. Is she so well educated?”
“No. Her education is no better than average. But she is a foreigner.”
The stern proprietress smiled for the first time during their conversation, and her cold eyes looked at Marta’s face as if to say:
“What? You did not know this? Where do you come from?”
Marta came from her native village, where roses bloomed and nightingales sang; from a beautiful residence on Graniczna Street, a warm place with four handsome walls that stood between her and the surrounding world. She came from a realm in which first the naïveté and limited awareness of a growing girl prevailed, then the joy and limited awareness of a young married woman. She came from the quarters of society in which a woman lowers her eyes, and so she sees, asks, and knows nothing. She did not know, or she may have heard in passing, something to the effect that what Jove may do, an ox may not. Ludwika Żmińska’s cold but comprehending eyes, with irony wandering through them, looked at her
