KAREN’S taxi stopped at the gates of an old house in Kennington. It was a beautiful, if somewhat battered, old house with its double flight of steps like two drooping wings springing from the faded peacock blue of the front door, its apron of grass adorned with red geraniums in a stone urn, and its pair of gates that would still have opened to allow a carriage and pair to sweep up and discharge its contents with dignity into the shelter of the doorway, had such a thing as a carriage and pair still existed in London.
    This, however, was in the year 1937; the day when the citizens of Kennington drove up to their front doors was over. The taxi had neither time nor petrol to waste turning into out-of-date drives. It stopped by the kerb and its stout driver shot out an arm and a thick hand to open the door without even getting out of his seat. “Here y’are. Number Ten.”
    Karen jumped out. So this was where she was going to live. This was the house where, at last, she was going to get all the music she wanted. She stared at it with an adoration that had nothing to do with its eighteenth-century beauty, of which she perceived nothing. She sniffed the warm September air, staled by the packed millions who shared it, but marvellously freshened by the flowers of Kennington Park just over the way. “Lovely,” she whispered to herself. “It’s London.”
    The taxi-driver, who caught the whisper but didn’t mind a bit of enthusiasm when they were as young as this, limbered up and got down from his seat after all. He pulled out Karen’s two suitcases and said, “What about ringing that bell,” in a fatherly manner, by way of bringing her back to hard facts.
    “Oh, yes—” cried Karen, and sprang for the nearest curve of steps. The quicker her life of music began the better.
    But there was no necessity to ring the bell. The door opened and there was a woman in a tweed suit, looking as if she was just in from a country walk. She was a tall woman with a decisive nose set in a brown thin face, now wearing its professional smile. Mrs. Salet, wife of Claude Salet, Mus.D., never pretended to herself or anyone else that she liked these students who pranced up her dignified front steps, but who with their two and a half or three guineas a week made those same steps possible. She bore them just as she bore their music, which surged round the house, out of the windows, through the doors, even eddying out into her precious garden. Was there ever so vociferous a profession, so obstreperous an art? she some­times wondered. Even an actor did not stamp up and down his room all day learning his lines out loud, at all events not for hours together. A painter painted in silence —or at least could paint in silence. A writer positively avoided noise. Music, however, must be churned into sound, unescapable sound, for at least four hours a day by a young thing such as this one now leaping towards her.
    Karen, her new blue music case given her by Rosalba in hand, regarded the smile with a touch of anxiety. This must be Mrs. Salet, a musician. Rosalba, who had found this heavenly lodging place, had said that in it they were all musicians, the whole household of them. “A nest of singing birds” was her Elizabethan description of No. 10 Kennington Crescent. This, then, was presumably the mother bird, the presiding hen anyway. Oh, well, the nightingale itself was a plain, tweedy sort of bird if it came to that, and yet a supreme musician if ever there was one.
    “How do you do? You’re Emmeline Turner, aren’t you?” said Mrs. Salet, with a firm handclasp.
    Karen faltered. It was damping to find she was expected to be Emmeline Turner.
    “No, I’m Karen.”
    “Oh, of course. Karen Forrest. Stupid of me. The scholarship girl, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “I remember now. Perfectly. Claude was much interested. He was so sure you would have talent.” But Mrs. Salet’s glance showed clearly how, in her opinion, Claude’s hopes were doomed to fade. “You know you don’t look like a scholar or I should never have made that mistake. We’ve had several here and they all without exception were dark with those particularly bright black eyes. Not at all like you. And how old are you?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “You don’t look it. You’re piano, I’m afraid.”
    Karen said she was afraid she was.
    “Such a pity. This Emmeline Turner who hasn’t come yet—must have missed her train, I think—is a pianist too, and we’ve only got three pianos. You’ll have to fight it out amongst yourselves. Why don’t people learn the violin more? Or something like a flute that you can practise anywhere. Ah, good girl.”
    The morsel of approval thrown at her concerned Karen’s two suitcases. Thank goodness that was all, Mrs. Salet was thinking. Not the dressed-up kind who covered the place with powder and the towels with lipstick. Not another singer like Cynthia. Nor one of those beady-eyed, precocious youngsters, marvellously trained for their particular purpose but marvellously untrained for any other. Rather a pleasing child, in fact, with her bumpy forehead and enormous enquiring grey eyes. If one ever liked music students, or, in fact, if one ever liked girls at all, one might grow to like this-one. “I’ll show you your room,” she said, seized the biggest suitcase in a slim but surprisingly strong hand, and led the way up the shallow, leisurely staircase to the little room under the roof, the smallest room in the house, that was to be Karen’s.
    Karen looked at her half-attic and thought it lovely, particularly with that tree-top looking in at the window. It was an ample window for an attic and the bottom half of the sash was wide open. She looked out and ventured, “What a nice garden you’ve got.”
    It was the happiest shot. The professional smile left Mrs. Salet’s face and an entirely natural one, which made her look quite young, took its place.
    “Yes. And a garden in London is something to possess. I’d lived all my life in the country when I married, and Claude promised me a garden, whatever happened. I will say he’s kept his promise.” She leant out of the window and looked with loving eyes on the square of grass below, set in its border of flowers and shadowing trees. “This house must have had a beautiful garden once upon a time. That’s a mulberry tree over there, and it’s a pear against your window. It used to have delicious little brown pears, but lately it’s given that up. Too old. But you should see the blossom in spring.”
    “I shall see the blossom in spring!” cried Karen, responding at once, as she invariably did.
    “I’ve pretty well discovered what will and what won’t grow in this horrible old London. I was putting in my daffodils and tulips when you came—” the warmth in
Mrs. Salet’s voice ebbed. “But you’re much too young for gardens. Gardening is the consolation of old age.”
    “I’m not at all too young,” said Karen, eager to give whatever was wanted, “Your dahlias are lovely. And that red stuff on the roof, is that yours too?”
    “That’s the roof of the music-room. It used to be stables, and after that a garage. I always wish it could be a greenhouse—but then you see, I’m not musical.”
    Karen stared.
    “Not musical?”
    “Not in the least. I don’t really like it.”
    Karen gasped at this appalling heresy.
    “But I thought you all—Rosalba said you all made music all day long—”
    “Rosalba? Let me think—who exactly is Rosalba? Ought I to know?”
    “She told us about you. She sent me here. She is a great friend of Mr. —” (or did one say Doctor ?) “your husband. Rosalba Mersey-White.”
    “Ah, yes, I think I remember. A well-off lady with a passion for music. Claude has such a lot of these musical friends. I rather think he stays with her when he’s adjudi­cating in the West Country. 1 suppose she meant this is a musical household. Well, of course it is that. Four of you students besides Claude—he’s been away, examining, but he’ll be back to-night. And then there’s Andrew, our son. We had that music-room done up for him. A quiet place where he could compose.”
    “Compose?” Karen looked reverently at the long low roof streaming with the scarlet and gold of its Virginia creeper. “Does he really compose music in there?”
    “He did. Not now. He’s away. In Germany. Study­ing with a man called Steinberg.” Mrs. Salet jerked out her gritty little facts as if they were hard to part with. She hesitated; then went on, her eyes on her garden. “You’re at King’s School of Music, and you’re bound to hear about him, specially if they know you’re here, so I may as well tell you.”
    “Please do.”
    “Andy was a very remarkable little boy. They said at King’s that he was the most promising child they had ever had. They gave him a junior scholarship for piano, and then a senior one, and then one for composition. I can tell you they thought the world of him.”
    She paused and Karen breathed, “They must have,” to fill in.
    “It was all very disappointing.”
    “Why? What happened?”
    Mrs. Salet seemed to want to tell her and Karen was, naturally, dying to know what misfortune could possibly have befallen a person who had won no less than three scholarships. Three . . .
    “I don’t attempt to understand these things that musicians seem to feel so very acutely. Andy wouldn’t write his music the way they wanted. He could play the
classics all right—he played one of those great Beethoven concertos with the orchestra at a concert, and even I could see he was something out of the way—but nothing would make him compose properly, following rules, and so on. Very awkward because his father is on the staff at King’s, and he’s rather particularly orthodox. In the end, Andy lost his temper—he’s got a frightful temper, I’m afraid—and said unforgivable things—at least Claude says they were unforgivable—and shot off to Germany.”
    Karen’s mind darted back to the day she was tried for her scholarship. Those four august men and the fifth with
white hair who darted in so suddenly and made her read a frightful song in manuscript—could anyone have rows, ordinary rows, with such tremendous people? Apparently this Andy could.
    “He’s with someone enormously modern now, this man Steinberg, but he hardly ever writes, and I’ve no idea what he’s doing. Still composing, of course. Nothing would ever stop him. I always knew when he was in that music‑room. He had a way of making the piano chatter—quite different from anyone else. Poor Claude, it used to make him quite ill to hear it—” Mrs. Salet’s mouth twisted into a wry smile at the memory of poor Claude—“I rather liked it. No connection with music that one could see, but it went very well with gardening.”
    “But was it his own composition he was playing?”
    “I expect so. He called the music-room ‘The Urge’ because he said he reached for music paper the moment he got into it. Same idea as that awful man who reaches for his pistol when he hears the word ‘culture,’ only the other way round. Piles of it he wrote.”
    “Oh, but he must be marvellous.” Karen was struck almost dumb by the picture conjured up. “Could I see some?”
    “No. He took most of it with him and Claude tore up the rest—”
    At that moment a rich stream of sound from a contralto voice poured from the music-room. “One two three four five six SEVEN eight ni-ne ten—“ it sang, and Karen murmured ‘Handel’s Largo’ delightedly. Wonderful. Here was one of the birds beginning to sing her very first afternoon.
    Mrs. Salet frowned. “It’s Cynthia. She’s got an engage-ment to sing in a church—a wedding I think it is—and she can never learn anything. She counts and sings and sings and counts, and still she’s always wrong.”
    “But what a heavenly voice,” said Karen reverently. Then the cool thin, penetrating sound of an oboe began, cutting through the world’s best-loved classic like wire through butter, and again she was ecstatic. “A shep­herd—”
    But Mrs. Salet was frowning more fiercely.   I have one
rule and one only, and there it is being broken. You must practise with your window shut. None of you musicians have the slightest consideration for your neighbours. That’s Topsy. I’ve told her before I will not have it.” And she was gone.
    Karen continued to lean out of the window listening to the glorious voice, so incorrect but so beautiful, and the oboe, so suddenly reduced to the thinnest thread of delicious sound. Then the gong crashed and they both ceased.