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Oh, I must just tell you that at my lesson yesterday I played the Ernst F sharp minor concerto, -the virtuoso, firework thing, you know, with Kloster putting in bits of the orchestra part on the piano every now and then because he wanted to see what I could do in the way of gymnastics. He laughed when I had finished, and patted my shoulder, and said, "Very good acrobatics.
The scene is rather pretty, if one admired scenes. Beyond Liegnitz and the Schwartzwasser, northwestward, right opposite to the King's, rise other Heights called of Pfaffendorf, which guard the two streams AFTER their uniting. Kloster Wahlstatt, a famed place, lies visible to southeast, few miles off.
And he was dumb. I can't get over it. I've not seen Bernd since, as he is frightfully busy and wasn't able to come yesterday at all, but he's coming to lunch today, and perhaps he'll be able to explain Kloster.
You see, Kloster hadn't been able to have me go to him till yesterday, which was Saturday, and not then till the afternoon, so that I had had all Friday and most of Saturday to be at a loose end in, except for practising, and though I had got here prepared to find everybody very charming and kind it was somehow gradually conveyed to me, though for ages I thought it must be imagination, that Frau Berg and the other boarders and the Mittagsgaste dislike me.
One of his pupils, who brought the note, had been ordered to pilot me safely to the house, it being late, and as we walked and Kloster drove in somebody's car he was there already when we arrived, busy opening beer bottles and looking much more appropriate than he had done an hour earlier.
She, being married and mature, can dabble if she likes in other sets, can come down as a bright patroness from another world and clean her feathers in a refreshing mud bath, as Kloster put it, commenting on his supper party at my lesson last Friday; but she would carefully keep her young daughter out of it. They made me play after supper.
I stood wondering rather confusedly, as one wonders when first one wakes from a dream and sees familiar things again and doesn't quite understand. Kloster got up and came and took the Strad from me. I could see his face in the dusk, and thought it looked queer. He lifted up my hands one after the other, and kissed them.
"It is doing you good already," he said, looking at me as we went down the four nights of stairs, so Kloster had been telling him, too, that story about too much work. Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn't get as much talk with him as I had hoped, for I like him very much, and so would you, little mother.
Kloster and Bernd are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached, critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird, the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit.
I feel quite solemn, it's such a great new adventure, Kloster can't see me till Saturday, but the moment I've had a bath and tidied up I shall get out my fiddle and see if I've forgotten how to play it between London and Berlin. If only I can be sure you aren't going to be too lonely!
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