1
The crossing was over. They were arriving. The movement of the little
steamer that had collected the passengers from the packet-boat drove the
raw air against Miriam's face. In her tired brain the grey river and the
flat misty shores slid constantly into a vision of the gaslit
dining-room at home ... the large clear glowing fire, the sounds of the
family voices. Every effort to obliterate the picture brought back again
the moment that had come at the dinner-table as they all sat silent for
an instant with downcast eyes and she had suddenly longed to go on for
ever just sitting there with them all.
Now, in the boat she wanted to be free for the strange grey river and
the grey shores. But the home scenes recurred relentlessly. Again and
again she went through the last moments ... the good-byes, the
unexpected convulsive force of her mother's arms, her own dreadful
inability to give any answering embrace. She could not remember saying a
single word. There had been a feeling that came like a tide carrying her
away. Eager and dumb and remorseful she had gone out of the house and
into the cab with Sarah, and then had come the long sitting in the
loop-line train ... "talk about something" ... Sarah sitting opposite
and her unchanged voice saying "What shall we talk about?" And then a
long waiting, and the brown leather strap swinging against the yellow
grained door, the smell of dust and the dirty wooden flooring, with the
noise of the wheels underneath going to the swinging tune of one of
Heller's "Sleepless Nights." The train had made her sway with its
movements. How still Sarah seemed to sit, fixed in the old life. Nothing
had come but strange cruel emotions.
After the suburban train nothing was distinct until the warm snowflakes
were drifting against her face through the cold darkness on Harwich
quay. Then, after what seemed like a great loop of time spent going
helplessly up a gangway towards "the world" she had stood, face to face
with the pale polite stewardess in her cabin. "I had better have a
lemon, cut in two," she had said, feeling suddenly stifled with fear.
For hours she had lain despairing, watching the slowly swaying walls of
her cabin or sinking with closed eyes through invertebrate dipping
spaces. Before each releasing paroxysm she told herself "this is like
death; one day I shall die, it will be like this."
She supposed there would be breakfast soon on shore, a firm room and a
teapot and cups and saucers. Cold and exhaustion would come to an end.
She would be talking to her father.
2
He was standing near her with the Dutchman who had helped her off the
boat and looked after her luggage. The Dutchman was listening,
deferentially. Miriam saw the strong dark blue beam of his eyes.
"Very good, very good," she heard him say, "fine education in German
schools."
Both men were smoking cigars.
She wanted to draw herself upright and shake out her clothes.
"Select," she heard, "excellent staff of masters ... daughters of
gentlemen."
"Pater is trying to make the Dutchman think I am being taken as a pupil
to a finishing school in Germany." She thought of her lonely pilgrimage
to the West End agency, of her humiliating interview, of her
heart-sinking acceptance of the post, the excitements and misgivings she
had had, of her sudden challenge of them all that evening after dinner,
and their dismay and remonstrance and reproaches--of her fear and
determination in insisting and carrying her point and making them begin
to be interested in her plan.
But she shared her father's satisfaction in impressing the Dutchman. She
knew that she was at one with him in that. She glanced at him. There
could be no doubt that he was playing the rôle of the English gentleman.
Poor dear. It was what he had always wanted to be. He had sacrificed
everything to the idea of being a "person of leisure and cultivation."
Well, after all, it was true in a way. He was--and he had, she knew,
always wanted her to be the same and she _was_ going to finish her
education abroad ... in Germany.... They were nearing a little low quay
backed by a tremendous saffron-coloured hoarding announcing in black
letters "Sunlight Zeep."
3
"Did you see, Pater; did you _see_?"
They were walking rapidly along the quay.
"Did you see? Sunlight _Zeep_!"
She listened to his slightly scuffling stride at her side.
Glancing up she saw his face excited and important. He was not
listening. He was being an English gentleman, "emerging" from the Dutch
railway station.
"Sunlight _Zeep_," she shouted. "_Zeep_, Pater!"
He glanced down at her and smiled condescendingly.
"Ah, yes," he admitted with a laugh.
There were Dutch faces for Miriam--men, women and children coming
towards her with sturdy gait.
"They're talking Dutch! They're all talking _Dutch_!"
The foreign voices, the echoes in the little narrow street, the flat
waterside effect of the sounds, the bright clearness she had read of,
brought tears to her eyes.
"The others _must_ come here," she told herself, pitying them all.
They had an English breakfast at the Victoria Hotel and went out and
hurried about the little streets. They bought cigars and rode through
the town on a little tramway. Presently they were in a train watching
the Dutch landscape go by. One level stretch succeeded another. Miriam
wanted to go out alone under the grey sky and walk over the flat fields
shut in by poplars.
She looked at the dykes and the windmills with indifferent eyes, but her
desire for the flat meadows grew.
Late at night, seated wide-awake opposite her sleeping companion,
rushing towards the German city, she began to think.
4
It was a fool's errand.... To undertake to go to the German school and
teach ... to be going there ... with nothing to give. The moment would
come when there would be a class sitting round a table waiting for her
to speak. She imagined one of the rooms at the old school, full of
scornful girls.... How was English taught? How did you begin? English
grammar ... in German? Her heart beat in her throat. She had never
thought of that ... the rules of English grammar? Parsing and
analysis.... Anglo-Saxon prefixes and suffixes ... gerundial
infinitive.... It was too late to look anything up. Perhaps there would
be a class to-morrow.... The German lessons at school had been
dreadfully good.... Fräulein's grave face ... her perfect knowledge of
every rule ... her clear explanations in English ... her examples....
All these things were there, in English grammar.... And she had
undertaken to teach them and could not even speak German.
Monsieur ... had talked French all the time ... dictées ... lectures ...
Le Conscrit ... Waterloo ... La Maison Déserte ... his careful voice
reading on and on ... until the room disappeared.... She must do that
for her German girls. Read English to them and make them happy.... But
first there must be verbs ... there had been cahiers of them ... first,
second, third conjugation.... It was impudence, an impudent invasion ...
the dreadful clever, foreign school.... They would laugh at her.... She
began to repeat the English alphabet.... She doubted whether, faced with
a class, she could reach the end without a mistake.... She reached Z and
went on to the parts of speech.
5
There would be a moment when she must have an explanation with the
Fräulein. Perhaps she could tell her that she found the teaching was
beyond her scope and then find a place somewhere as a servant. She
remembered things she had heard about German servants--that whenever
they even dusted a room they cleaned the windows and on Sundays they
waited at lunch in muslin dresses and afterwards went to balls. She
feared even the German servants would despise her. They had never been
allowed into the kitchen at home except when there was jam-making ...
she had never made a bed in her life.... A shop? But that would mean
knowing German and being quick at giving change. Impossible. Perhaps she
could find some English people in Hanover who would help her. There was
an English colony she knew, and an English church. But that would be
like going back. That must not happen. She would rather stay abroad on
any terms--away from England--English people. She had scented something,
a sort of confidence, everywhere, in her hours in Holland, the brisk
manner of the German railway officials and the serene assurance of the
travelling Germans she had seen, confirmed her impression. Away out
here, the sense of imminent catastrophe that had shadowed all her life
so far, had disappeared. Even here in this dim carriage, with disgrace
ahead she felt that there was freedom somewhere at hand. Whatever
happened she would hold to that.
6
She glanced up at her small leather hand-bag lying in the rack and
thought of the solid money in her purse. Twenty-five shillings. It was a
large sum and she was to have more as she needed.
She glanced across at the pale face with its point of reddish beard, the
long white hands laid one upon the other on the crossed knees. He had
given her twenty-five shillings and there was her fare and his, and his
return fare and her new trunk and all the things she had needed. It must
be the end of taking money from him. She was grown up. She was the
strong-minded one. She must manage. With a false position ahead and
after a short space, disaster, she must get along.
The peaceful Dutch fields came to her mind. They looked so secure. They
had passed by too soon. We have always been in a false position, she
pondered. Always lying and pretending and keeping up a show--never
daring to tell anybody.... Did she want to tell anybody? To come out
into the open and be helped and have things arranged for her and do
things like other people? No.... No.... "Miriam always likes to be
different"--"Society is no boon to those not sociable." Dreadful things
... and the girls laughing together about them. What did they really
mean?
"Society is no boon to those not sociable"--on her birthday-page in
Ellen Sharpe's birthday-book. Ellen handed it to her going upstairs and
had chanted the words out to the others and smiled her smile ... she had
not asked her to write her name ... was it unsociable to dislike so many
of the girls.... Ellen's people were in the Indian ... her thoughts
hesitated.... Sivvle ... something grand--All the grand girls were
horrid ... somehow mean and sly ... Sivvle ... _Sivvle_ ... _Civil!_ Of
course! Civil _what_?
Miriam groaned. She was a governess now. Someone would ask her that
question. She would ask Pater before he went.... No, she would not....
If only he would answer a question simply, and not with a superior air
as if he had invented the thing he was telling about. She felt she had a
right to all the knowledge there was, without fuss ... oh, without
fuss--without fuss and--emotion.... I _am_ unsociable, I suppose--she
mused. She could not think of anyone who did not offend her. I don't
like men and I loathe women. I am a misanthrope. So's Pater. He despises
women and can't get on with men. We are different--it's us, him and me.
He's failed us because he's different and if he weren't we should be
like other people. Everything in the railway responded and agreed. Like
other people ... horrible.... She thought of the fathers of girls she
knew--the Poole girls, for instance, they were to be "independent"
trained and certificated--she envied that--but her envy vanished when
she remembered how heartily she had agreed when Sarah called them
"sharp" and "knowing."
Mr. Poole was a business man ... common ... trade.... If Pater had kept
to Grandpa's business they would be trade, too--well-off, now--all
married. Perhaps as it was he had thought they would marry.
7
She thought sleepily of her Wesleyan grandparents, gravely reading the
"Wesleyan Methodist Recorder," the shop at Babington, her father's
discontent, his solitary fishing and reading, his discovery of music ...
science ... classical music in the first Novello editions ... Faraday
... speaking to Faraday after lectures. Marriage ... the new house ...
the red brick wall at the end of the garden where young peach-trees were
planted ... running up and downstairs and singing ... both of them
singing in the rooms and the garden ... she sometimes with her hair down
and then when visitors were expected pinned in coils under a little cap
and wearing a small hoop ... the garden and lawns and shrubbery and the
long kitchen-garden and the summer-house under the oaks beyond and the
pretty old gabled "town" on the river and the woods all along the river
valley and the hills shining up out of the mist. The snow man they both
made in the winter--the birth of Sarah and then Eve ... his studies and
book-buying--and after five years her own disappointing birth as the
third girl, and the coming of Harriett just over a year later ... her
mother's illness, money troubles--their two years at the sea to retrieve
... the disappearance of the sunlit red-walled garden always in full
summer sunshine with the sound of bees in it or dark from windows ...
the narrowing of the house-life down to the Marine Villa--with the sea
creeping in--wading out through the green shallows, out and out till you
were more than waist deep--shrimping and prawning hour after hour for
weeks together ... poking in the rock pools, watching the sun and the
colours in the strange afternoons ... then the sudden large house at
Barnes with the "drive" winding to the door.... He used to come home
from the City and the Constitutional Club and sometimes instead of
reading "The Times" or the "Globe" or the "Proceedings of the British
Association" or Herbert Spencer, play Pope Joan or Jacoby with them all,
or Table Billiards and laugh and be "silly" and take his turn at being
"bumped" by Timmy going the round of the long dining-room table, tail in
the air; he had taken Sarah and Eve to see "Don Giovanni" and "Winter's
Tale" and the new piece, "Lohengrin." No one at the tennis-club had seen
that. He had good taste. No one else had been to Madame Schumann's
Farewell ... sitting at the piano with her curtains of hair and her
dreamy smile ... and the Philharmonic Concerts. No one else knew about
the lectures at the Royal Institution, beginning at nine on Fridays....
No one else's father went with a party of scientific men "for the
advancement of science" to Norway or America, seeing the Falls and the
Yosemite Valley. No one else took his children as far as Dawlish for the
holidays, travelling all day, from eight until seven ... no esplanade,
the old stone jetty and coves and cowrie shells....