1
During those early days Miriam realised that school-routine, as she knew
it--the planned days--the regular unvarying succession of lessons and
preparations, had no place in this new world. Even the masters' lessons,
coming in from outside and making a kind of framework of appointments
over the otherwise fortuitously occupied days, were, she soon found, not
always securely calculable. Herr Kapellmeister Bossenberger would be
heard booming and intoning in the hall unexpectedly at all hours. He
could be heard all over the house. Miriam had never seen him, but she
noticed that great haste was always made to get a pupil to the saal and
that he taught impatiently. He shouted and corrected and mimicked. Only
Millie's singing, apparently, he left untouched. You could hear her
lilting away through her little high songs as serenely as she did at
Vorspielen.
Miriam was at once sure that he found his task of teaching these girls
an extremely tiresome one.
Probably most teachers found teaching tiresome. But there was something
peculiar and new to her in Herr Bossenberger's attitude. She tried to
account for it ... German men despised women. Why did they teach them
anything at all?
The same impression, the sense of a half-impatient, half-exasperated
tuition came to her from the lectures of Herr Winter and Herr Schraub.
Herr Winter, a thin tall withered-looking man with shabby hair and bony
hands whose veins stood up in knots, drummed on the table as he taught
botany and geography. The girls sat round bookless and politely
attentive and seemed, the Germans at least, to remember all the facts
for which he appealed during the last few minutes of his hour. Miriam
could never recall anything but his weary withered face.
Herr Schraub, the teacher of history, was, she felt, almost openly
contemptuous of his class. He would begin lecturing, almost before he
was inside the door. He taught from a book, sitting with downcast eyes,
his round red mass of face--expressionless save for the bristling spikes
of his tiny straw-coloured moustache and the rapid movements of his
tight rounded little lips--persistently averted from his pupils. For the
last few minutes of his time he would, ironically, his eyes fixed ahead
of him at a point on the table, snap questions--indicating his aim with
a tapping finger, going round the table like a dealer at cards. Surely
the girls must detest him.... The Germans made no modification of their
polite attentiveness. Amongst the English only Gertrude and the Martins
found any answers for him. Miriam, proud of sixth-form history essays
and the full marks she had generally claimed for them, had no memory for
facts and dates; but she made up her mind that were she ever so prepared
with a correct reply, nothing should drag from her any response to these
military tappings. Fräulein presided over these lectures from the corner
of the sofa out of range of the eye of the teacher and horrified Miriam
by voicelessly prompting the girls whenever she could. There was no kind
of preparation for these lessons.
2
Miriam mused over the difference between the bearing of these men and
that of the masters she remembered and tried to find words. What was it?
Had her masters been more--respectful than these Germans were? She felt
they had. But it was not only that. She recalled the men she remembered
teaching week by week through all the years she had known them ... the
little bolster-like literature master, an albino, a friend of Browning,
reading, reading to them as if it were worth while, as if they were
equals ... interested friends--that had never struck her at the time....
But it was true--she could not remember ever having felt a schoolgirl
... or being "talked down" to ... dear Stroodie, the music-master, and
Monsieur--old white-haired Monsieur, dearest of all, she could hear his
gentle voice pleading with them on behalf of his treasures ... the
drilling-master with his keen, friendly blue eye ... the briefless
barrister who had taught them arithmetic in a baritone voice, laughing
all the time but really wanting them to get on.
What was it she missed? Was it that her old teachers were "gentlemen"
and these Germans were not? She pondered over this and came to the
conclusion that the whole attitude of the Englishman and of Monsieur,
her one Frenchman, towards her sex was different from that of these
Germans. It occurred to her once in a flash during these puzzled musings
that the lessons she had had at school would not have been given more
zestfully, more as if it were worth while, had she and her schoolfellows
been boys. Here she could not feel that. The teaching was grave enough.
The masters felt the importance of what they taught ... she felt that
they were formal, reverently formal, "pompous" she called it, towards
the facts that they flung out down the long schoolroom table, but that
the relationship of their pupils to these facts seemed a matter of less
than indifference to them.
3
She began to recognise now with a glow of gratitude that her own
teachers, those who were enthusiastic about their subjects--the albino,
her dear Monsieur with his classic French prose, a young woman who had
taught them logic and the beginning of psychology--that strange, new
subject--were at least as enthusiastic about getting her and her mates
awake and into relationship with something. They cared somehow.
She recalled the albino, his face and voice generally separated from his
class by a book held vertically, close to his left eye, while he blocked
the right eye with his free hand--his faintly wheezy tones bleating
triumphantly out at the end of a passage from "The Ring and the Book,"
as he lowered his volume and bent beaming towards them all, his right
eye still blocked, for response. Miss Donne, her skimpy skirt powdered
with chalk, explaining a syllogism from the blackboard, turning quietly
to them, her face all aglow, her chalky hands gently pressed together,
"Do you _see_? Does anyone _see_?" Monsieur, spoiling them, sharpening
their pencils, letting them cheat over their pages of rules, knowing
quite well that each learned only one and directing his questioning
accordingly, Monsieur dreaming over the things he read to them,
repeating passages, wandering from his subject, making allusions here
and there--and all of them, she, at any rate, and Lilla--she knew,
often--in paradise. How rich and friendly and helpful they all seemed.
4
She began to wonder whether hers had been in some way a specially good
school. Things _had_ mattered there. Somehow the girls had been made to
feel they mattered. She remembered even old Stroodie--the least attached
member of the staff--asking her suddenly, once, in the middle of a
music-lesson what she was going to do with her life and a day when the
artistic vice-principal--who was a connection by marriage of Holman
Hunt's and had met Ruskin, Miriam knew, several times--had gone from
girl to girl round the collected fifth and sixth forms asking them each
what they would best like to do in life. Miriam had answered at once
with a conviction born that moment that she wanted to "write a book." It
irritated her when she remembered during these reflections that she had
not been able to give to Fräulein Pfaff's public questioning any
intelligible account of the school. She might at least have told her of
the connection with Ruskin and Browning and Holman Hunt, whereas her
muddled replies had led Fräulein to decide that her school had been "a
kind of high school." She knew it had not been this. She felt there was
something questionable about a high school. She was beginning to think
that her school had been very good. Pater had seen to that--that was one
of the things he had steered and seen to. There had been a school they
might have gone to higher up the hill where one learned needlework even
in the "first class" as they called it instead of the sixth form as at
her school, and "Calisthenics" instead of drilling--and something called
elocution--where the girls were "finished." It was an expensive school.
Had the teachers there taught the girls ... as if they had no minds?
Perhaps that school was more like the one she found herself in now? She
wondered and wondered. What was she going to do with her life after all
these years at the good school? She began bit by bit to understand her
agony on the day of leaving. It was there she belonged. She ought to go
back and go on.
One day she lay twisted and convulsed, face downwards on her bed at the
thought that she could never go back and begin. If only she could really
begin now, knowing what she wanted.... She would talk now with those
teachers.... Isn't it all wonderful! Aren't things wonderful! Tell me
some more.... She felt sure that if she could go back, things would get
clear. She would talk and think and understand.... She did not linger
over that. It threatened a storm whose results would be visible. She
wondered what the other girls were doing--Lilla? She had heard nothing
of her since that last term. She would write to her one day, perhaps.
Perhaps not.... She would have to tell her that she was a governess.
Lilla would think that very funny and would not care for her now that
she was so old and worried....
5
Woven through her retrospective appreciations came a doubt. She wondered
whether, after all, her school had been right. Whether it ought to have
treated them all so seriously. If she had gone to the other school she
was sure she would never have heard of the Æsthetic Movement or felt
troubled about the state of Ireland and India. Perhaps she would have
grown up a Churchwoman ... and "lady-like." Never.
She could only think that somehow she must be "different"; that a
sprinkling of the girls collected in that school were different, too.
The school she decided was new--modern--Ruskin. Most of the girls
perhaps had not been affected by it. But some had. She had. The thought
stirred her. She had. It was mysterious. Was it the school or herself?
Herself to begin with. If she had been brought up differently, it could
not, she felt sure, have made her very different--for long--nor taught
her to be affable--to smile that smile she hated so. The school had done
something to her. It had not gone against the things she found in
herself. She wondered once or twice during these early weeks what she
would have been like if she had been brought up with these German girls.
What they were going to do with their lives was only too plain. All but
Emma, she had been astounded to discover, had already a complete outfit
of house-linen to which they were now adding fine embroideries and
laces. All could cook. Minna had startled her one day by exclaiming with
lit face, "Ach, ich koche so _schrecklich_ gern!" ... Oh, I am so
frightfully fond of cooking.... And they were placid and serene, secure
in a kind of security Miriam had never met before. They did not seem to
be in the least afraid of the future. She envied that. Their eyes and
their hands were serene.... They would have houses and things they could
do and understand, always.... How they must want to begin, she mused....
What a prison school must seem.
She thought of their comfortable German homes, of ruling and shopping
and directing and being looked up to.... German husbands.
That thought she shirked. Emma in particular she could not contemplate
in relation to a German husband.
In any case one day these girls would be middle-aged ... as Clara looked
now ... they would look like the German women on the boulevards and in
the shops.
In the end she ceased to wonder that the German masters dealt out their
wares to these girls so superciliously.
And yet ... German music, a line of German poetry, a sudden light on
Clara's face....
6
There was one other teacher, a Swiss and some sort of minister she
supposed as everyone called him the Herr Pastor. She wondered whether he
was in any sense the spiritual adviser of the school and regarded him
with provisional suspicion. She had seen him once, sitting short and
very black and white at the head of the schoolroom table. His black
beard and dark eyes as he sat with his back to the window made his face
gleam like a mask. He had spoken very rapidly as he told the girls the
life-story of some poet.
7
The time that was not taken up by the masters and the regular succession
of rich and savoury meals--wastefully plentiful they seemed to
Miriam--was filled in by Fräulein Pfaff with occupations devised
apparently from hour to hour. On a master's morning the girls collected
in the schoolroom one by one as they finished their bed-making and
dusting. On other days the time immediately after breakfast was full of
uncertainty and surmise. Judging from the interchange between the four
first-floor bedrooms whose doors were always open during this bustling
interval, Miriam, listening apprehensively as she did her share of work
on the top floor, gathered that the lack of any planned programme was a
standing annoyance to the English girls. Millie, still imperfectly
acclimatised, carrying out her duties in a large bibbed apron, was
plaintive about it in her conscientious German nearly every morning. The
Martins, when the sense of Fräulein as providence was strong upon them
made their beds vindictively, rapping out sarcasms to be alternately
mocked and giggled at by Jimmie who was generally heard, as the gusts
subsided, dispensing the comforting assurance that it wouldn't last for
ever. Miriam once heard even Judy grumbling to herself in a mumbling
undertone as she carried the lower landing's collective "wäsche"
upstairs to the back attic to await the quarterly waschfrau.
The German side of the landing was uncritical. On free mornings the
Germans had one preoccupation. It was generally betrayed by Emma in a
loud excited whisper, aimed across the landing: "Gehen wir zu Kreipe? Do
we go to Kreipe's?" "Kreipe, Kreipe," Minna and Clara would chorus
devoutly from their respective rooms. Gertrude on these occasions always
had an air of knowledge and would sometimes prophesy. To what extent
Fräulein did confide in the girl and how much was due to her experience
of the elder woman's habit of mind Miriam could never determine. But her
prophecies were always fulfilled.
Fräulein, who generally went to the basement kitchen from the
breakfast-table, would be heard on the landing towards the end of the
busy half-hour, rallying and criticising the housemaids in her gentle
caustic voice. She never came to the top floor. Miriam and Mademoiselle,
who agreed in accomplishing their duties with great despatch and
spending any spare time sitting in their jackets on their respective
beds reading or talking, would listen for her departure. There was
always a moment when they knew that the excitement was over and the
landing stricken into certainty. Then Mademoiselle would flit to the top
of the stairs and demand, leaning over the balustrade, "Eh bien! Eh
bien!" and someone would retail directions.
Sometimes Anna would appear in her short, chequered cotton dress,
shawled and with her market basket on her arm, and would summon Gertrude
alone or with Solomon Martin to Fräulein's room opposite the saal on the
ground floor. The appearance of Anna was the signal for bounding
anticipations. It nearly always meant a holiday and an expedition.
8
During the cold weeks after Miriam's arrival there were no expeditions;
and very commonly uncertainty was prolonged by a provisional
distribution of the ten girls between the kitchen and the five pianos.
In this case neither she nor Mademoiselle received any instructions.
Mademoiselle would go to the saal with needlework, generally the lighter
household mending. The saal piano at practising time was allotted to the
pupil to whom the next music lesson was due, and Mademoiselle spent the
greater part of her time installed, either awaiting the possible arrival
of Herr Bossenberger or presiding over his lessons when he came. Miriam,
unprovided for, sitting in the schoolroom with a book, awaiting events,
would watch her disappear unconcernedly through the folding doors, every
time with fresh wonder. She did not want to take her place, though it
would have meant listening to Herr Bossenberger's teaching and a quiet
alcove of freedom from the apprehensive uncertainty that hung over so
many of her hours. It seemed to her odd, not quite the thing, to have a
third person in the room at a music lesson. She tried to imagine a
lesson being given to herself under these conditions. The thought was
abhorrent. And Mademoiselle, of all people. Miriam could see her sitting
in the saal, wrapped in all the coolness of her complete insensibility
to music, her eyes bent on her work, the quick movements of her small,
thin hands, the darting gleam of her thimble, the dry way she had of
clearing her throat, a gesture that was an accentuation of the slightly
metallic quality of her voice, and expressed, for Miriam, in sound, that
curious sense of circumspect frugality she was growing to realise as
characteristic of Mademoiselle's face in repose.
The saal doors closed, the little door leading into the hall became the
centre of Miriam's attention. Before long, sometimes at the end of ten
minutes, this door would open and the day become eventful. She had
already taken Clara, with Emma, to make a third, three times to her
masseuse, sitting for half an hour in a room above a chemist's shop so
stuffy beyond anything in her experience that she had carried away
nothing but the sense of its closely-interwoven odours, a dim picture of
Clara in a saffron-coloured wrapper and the shocked impression of the
resounding thwackings undergone by her. Emma was paying a series of
visits to the dentist and might appear at the schoolroom door with
frightened eyes, holding it open--"Hendchen! Ich muss zum Zahnarzt."
Miriam dreaded these excursions. The first time Miriam had accompanied
her Emma had had "gas." Miriam, assailed by a loud scream followed by
the peremptory voices of two white-coated, fiercely moustached
operators, one of whom seemed to be holding Emma in the chair, had
started from her sofa in the background. "Brutes!" she had declared and
reached the chair-side voluble in unintelligible German to find Emma
serenely emerging from unconsciousness. Once she had taken Gertrude to
the dentist--another dentist, an elderly man, practising in a frock-coat
in a heavily-furnished room with high sash windows, the lower sashes
filled with stained glass. There had been a driving March wind and
Gertrude with a shawl round her face had battled gallantly along
shouting through her shawl. Miriam had made out nothing clearly, but the
fact that the dentist's wife had a title in her own right. Gertrude had
gone through her trial, prolonged by some slight complication, without
an anæsthetic, in alternations of tense silence and great gusts of her
hacking laughter. Miriam, sitting strained in the far background near a
screen covered with a mass of strange embroideries, wondered how she
really felt. That, she realised with a vision of Gertrude going on
through life in smart costumes, one would never know.
9
The thing Miriam dreaded most acutely was a visit with Minna to her
aurist. She learned with horror that Minna was obliged every few months
to submit to a series of small operations at the hands of the tall,
scholarly-looking man, with large, clear, impersonal eyes, who carried
on his practice high up in a great block of buildings in a small faded
room with coarse coffee-coloured curtains at its smudgy windows. The
character of his surroundings added a great deal to her abhorrence of
his attentions to Minna.
The room was densely saturated with an odour which she guessed to be
that of stale cigar-smoke. It seemed so tangible in the room that she
looked about at first for visible signs of its presence. It was like an
invisible dry fog and seemed to affect her breathing.
Coming and going upon the dense staleness of the room and pervading the
immediate premises was a strange savoury pungency. Miriam could not at
first identify it. But as the visits multiplied and she noticed the same
odour standing in faint patches here and there about the stairways and
corridors of the block, it dawned upon her that it must be
onions--onions freshly frying but with a quality of accumulated richness
that she could not explain. But the fact of the dominating kitchen side
by side with the consulting-room made her speculate. She imagined the
doctor's wife, probably in that kitchen, a hard-browed bony North German
woman. She saw the clear-eyed man at his meals; and imagined his
slippers. There were dingy books in the room where Minna started and
moaned.
She compared this entourage with her recollection of her one visit to an
oculist in Harley Street. His stately house, the exquisite freshness of
his appointments and his person stood out now. The English she assured
herself were more refined than the Germans. Even the local doctor at
Barnes whose effect upon her mother's perpetual ill-health, upon Eve's
nerves and Sarah's mysterious indigestion was so impermanent that the
very sound of his name exasperated her, had something about him that she
failed entirely to find in this German--something she could respect. She
wondered whether the professional classes in Germany were all like this
specialist and living in this way. Minna's parents she knew were paying
large fees.
10
These dreaded expeditions brought a compensation.
Her liking for Minna grew with each visit. She wondered at her. Here she
was with her nose and her ear--she was subject to rheumatism too--it
would always, Miriam reflected, be doctor's treatment for her. She
wondered at her perpetual cheerfulness. She saw her with a pang of pity,
going through life with her illnesses, capped in defiance of all the
care she bestowed on her person, with her disconcerting nose, a nose she
reflected, that would do splendidly for charades.
11
On several occasions a little contingent selected from the pianos and
kitchen had appeared in the schoolroom and settled down to read German
with Fräulein. Miriam had been despatched to a piano. After these
readings the mid-morning lunching-plates of sweet custard-like soup or
chocolate soup or perhaps glasses of sweet syrup and biscuits--were, if
Fräulein were safely out of earshot, voluble indignation meetings. If
she were known to be in the room beyond the little schoolroom, lunch was
taken in silence except for Gertrude's sallies, cheerful generalisations
from Minna or Jimmie, and grudging murmurs of response.
On the mornings of Fräulein's German readings the school never went to
Kreipe's. Going to Kreipe's Miriam perceived was a sign of fair weather.
They had been twice since her coming. Sitting at a little marble-topped
table with the Bergmanns near the window and overlooking the full flood
of the Georgstrasse Miriam felt a keen renewal of the sense of being
abroad. Here she sat, in the little enclosure of this upper room above a
shopful of strange Delikatessen, securely adrift. Behind her she felt,
not home but the German school where she belonged. Here they all sat,
free. Germany was all around them. They were in the midst of it.
Fräulein Pfaff seemed far away.... How strange of her to send them
there.... She glanced towards the two tables of English girls in the
centre of the room wondering whether they felt as she did.... They had
come to Germany. They were sharing it with her. It must be changing
them. They must be different for having come. They would all go back she
supposed. But they would not be the same as those who had never come.
She was sure they felt something of this. They were sitting about in
easy attitudes. How English they all looked ... for a moment she wanted
to go and sit with them--just sit with them, rejoice in being abroad; in
having got away. She imagined all their people looking in and seeing
them so thoroughly at home in this little German restaurant free from
home influences, in a little world of their own. She felt a pang of
response as she heard their confidently raised voices. She could see
they were all, even Judy, a little excited. They chaffed each other.
Gertrude had taken everyone's choice between coffee and chocolate and
given an order.
Orders for schocolade were heard from all over the room. There were only
women there--wonderful German women in twos and threes--ladies out
shopping, Miriam supposed. She managed intermittently to watch three or
four of them and wondered what kind of conversation made them so
emphatic--whether it was because they held themselves so well and "spoke
out" that everything they said seemed so important. She had never seen
women with so much decision in their bearing. She found herself drawing
herself up.
She heard German laughter about the room. The sounds excited her and she
watched eagerly for laughing faces.... They were different.... The
laughter sounded differently and the laughing faces were different. The
eyes were expressionless as they laughed--or evil ... they had that same
knowing way of laughing as though everything were settled--but they did
not pretend to be refined as Englishwomen did ... they had the same
horridness ... but they were ... jolly.... They could shout if they
liked.
Three cups of thick-looking chocolate, each supporting a little hillock
of solid cream arrived at her table. Clara ordered cakes.
At the first sip, taken with lips that slid helplessly on the
surprisingly thick rim of her cup Miriam renounced all the beverages she
had ever known as unworthy.
She chose a familiar-looking éclair--Clara and Emma ate cakes that
seemed to be alternate slices of cream and very spongy coffee-coloured
cake and then followed Emma's lead with an open tartlet on which plump
green gooseberries stood in a thick brown syrup.
12
During dinner Fräulein Pfaff went the round of the table with questions
as to what had been consumed at Kreipe's. The whole of the table on her
right confessed to one Kuchen with their chocolate. In each case she
smiled gravely and required the cake to be described. The meaning of the
pilgrimage of enquiry came to Miriam when Fräulein reached Gertrude and
beamed affectionately in response to her careless "Schokolade und ein
Biskuit." Miriam and the Bergmanns were alone in their excesses.
13
Even walks were incalculable excepting on Saturdays, when at noon Anna
turned out the schoolrooms. Then--unless to Miriam's great satisfaction
it rained and they had a little festival shut in in holiday mood in the
saal, the girls playing and singing, Anna loudly obliterating the
week-days next door and the secure harbour of Sunday ahead--they went
methodically out and promenaded the streets of Hanover for an hour.
These Saturday walks were a recurring humiliation. If they had occurred
daily, some crisis, she felt sure would have arisen for her.
The little party would file out under the leadership of
Gertrude--Fräulein Pfaff smiling parting directions adjuring them to
come back safe and happy to the beehive and stabbing at them all the
while, Miriam felt, with her keen eye--through the high doorway that
pierced the high wall and then--charge down the street. Gertrude alone,
having been in Hanover and under Fräulein Pfaff's care since her ninth
year, was instructed as to the detail of their tour and she swung
striding on ahead, the ends of her long fur boa flying out in the March
wind, making a flourishing scrollwork round her bounding tailor-clad
form--the Martins, short-skirted and thick-booted, with hard cloth
jackets and hard felt hats, and short thick pelerines almost running on
either side, Jimmie, Millie and Judy hard behind. Miriam's
ever-recurring joyous sense of emergence and her longing to go leisurely
and alone along these wonderful streets, to go on and on at first and
presently to look, had to give way to the necessity of keeping Gertrude
and her companions in sight. On they went relentlessly through the
Saturday throng along the great Georgstrasse--a foreign paradise, with
its great bright cafés and the strange promising detail of its
shops--tantalisingly half seen.
She hated, too, the discomfort of walking thus at this pace through
streets along pavements in her winter clothes. They hampered her
horribly. Her heavy three-quarter length cloth coat made her too warm
and bumped against her as she hurried along--the little fur pelerine
which redeemed its plainness tickled her neck and she felt the outline
of her stiff hat like a board against her uneasy forehead. Her
inflexible boots soon tired her.... But these things she could have
endured. They were not the main source of her troubles. She could have
renounced the delights all round her, made terms with the discomforts
and looked for alleviations. But it was during these walks that she
began to perceive that she was making, in a way she had not at all
anticipated, a complete failure of her rôle of English teacher. The
three weeks' haphazard curriculum had brought only one repetition of her
English lesson in the smaller schoolroom; and excepting at meals, when
whatever conversation there was was general and polyglot, she was never,
in the house, alone with her German pupils. The cessation of the fixed
readings arranged with her that first day by Fräulein Pfaff did not, in
face of the general absence of method, at all disturb her.
Mademoiselle's classes had, she discovered, except for the weekly
mending long since lapsed altogether. These walks, she soon realised,
were supposed to be her and her pupils' opportunity. No doubt Fräulein
Pfaff believed that they represented so many hours of English
conversation--and they did not. It was cheating, pure and simple. She
thought of fee-paying parents, of the probable prospectus. "French and
English governesses."
14
Her growing conviction and the distress of it were confirmed each week
by a spectacle she could not escape and was rapidly growing to hate.
Just in front of her and considerably behind the flying van, her full
wincey skirt billowing out beneath what seemed to Miriam a dreadfully
thin little close-fitting stockinette jacket, trotted Mademoiselle--one
hand to the plain brim of her large French hat, and obviously
conversational with either Minna and Elsa or Clara and Emma on either
side of her. Generally it was Minna and Elsa, Minna brisk and trim and
decorous as to her neat plaid skirt, however hurried, and Elsa showing
her distress by the frequent twisting of one or other of her ankles
which looked, to Miriam, like sticks above her high-heeled shoes.
Mademoiselle's broad hat-brim flapped as her head turned from one
companion to the other. Sometimes Miriam caught the mocking tinkle of
her laughter. That all three were interested, too, Miriam gathered from
the fact that they could not always be relied upon to follow Gertrude.
The little party had returned one day in two separate groups,
fortunately meeting before the Waldstrasse gate was reached, owing to
Mademoiselle's failure to keep Gertrude in sight. There was no doubt,
too, that the medium of their intercourse was French, for Mademoiselle's
knowledge of German had not, for all her six months at the school, got
beyond a few simple and badly managed words and phrases. Miriam felt
that this French girl was perfectly carrying out Fräulein Pfaff's
design. She talked to her pupils, made them talk; the girls were amused
and happy and were picking up French. It was admirable and it was
wonderful to Miriam because she felt quite sure that Mademoiselle had no
clear idea in her own mind that she was carrying out any design at all.
That irritated Miriam. Mademoiselle liked talking to her girls. Miriam
was beginning to know that she did not want to talk to her girls. Almost
from the first she had begun to know it. She felt sure that if Fräulein
Pfaff had been invisibly present at any one of her solitary
conversational encounters with these German girls she would have been
judged and condemned. Elsa Speier had been the worst. Miriam could see
as she thought of her, the angle of the high garden wall of a corner
house in Waldstrasse and above it a blossoming almond tree. "How lovely
that tree is," she had said. She remembered trying hard to talk and to
make her talk and making no impression upon the girl. She remembered
monosyllables and the pallid averted face and Elsa's dreadful ankles.
She had walked along intent and indifferent and presently she had felt a
sort of irritation rise through her struggling. And then further on in
the walk, she could not remember how it had arisen, there was a moment
when Elsa had said with unmoved, averted face hurriedly, "My fazzer is
offitser"--and it seemed to Miriam as if this were the answer to
everything she had tried to say, to her remark about the almond-tree and
everything else; and then she felt that there was nothing more to be
said between them. They were both quite silent. Everything seemed
settled. Miriam's mind called up a picture of a middle-aged man in a
Saxon blue uniform--all voice and no brains--and going to take to
gardening in his old age--and longed to tell Elsa of her contempt for
all military men. Clearly she felt Elsa's and Elsa's mother's feeling
towards herself. Elsa's mother had thin ankles, too, and was like Elsa
intent and cold and dead. She could imagine Elsa in society now--hard
and thin and glittery--she would be stylish--military men's women always
were. The girl had avoided being with her during walks since then, and
they never voluntarily addressed one another. Minna and the Bergmanns
had talked to her. Minna responded to everything she said in her eager
husky voice--not because she was interested Miriam felt, but because she
was polite, and it had tired her once or twice dreadfully to go on
"making conversation" with Minna. She had wanted to like being with
these three. She felt she could give them something. It made her full of
solicitude to glance at either of them at her side. She had longed to
feel at home with them and to teach them things worth teaching; they
seemed pitiful in some way, like children in her hands. She did not know
how to begin. All her efforts and their efforts left them just as
pitiful.
15
Each occasion left her more puzzled and helpless. Now and again she
thought there was going to be a change. She would feel a stirring of
animation in her companions. Then she would discover that someone was
being discussed, generally one of the girls; or perhaps they were
beginning to tell her something about Fräulein Pfaff, or talking about
food. These topics made her feel ill at ease at once. Things were going
wrong. It was not to discuss such things that they were together out in
the air in the wonderful streets and boulevards of Hanover. She would
grow cold and constrained, and the conversation would drop.
And then, suddenly, within a day or so of each other, dreadful things
had happened.
The first had come on the second occasion of her going with Minna to see
Dr. Dieckel. Minna, as they were walking quietly along together had
suddenly begun in a broken English which soon turned to shy, fluent,
animated German, to tell about a friend, an _apotheker_, a man, Miriam
gathered--missing many links in her amazement--in a shop, the chemist's
shop where her parents dealt, in the little country town in Pomerania
which was her home. Minna was so altered, looked so radiantly happy
whilst she talked about this man that Miriam had wanted to put out a
hand and touch her. Afterwards she could recall the sound of her voice
as it was at that moment with its yearning and its promise and its
absolute confidence, Minna was so certain of her happiness--at the end
of each hurried little phrase her voice sounded like a chord--like three
strings sounding at once on some strange instrument.
And soon afterwards Emma had told her very gravely, with Clara walking a
little aloof, her dog-like eyes shining as she gazed into the distance,
of a "most beautiful man" with a brown moustache, with whom Clara was in
love. He was there in the town, in Hanover, a hair-specialist, treating
Clara's thin short hair.
16
Even Emma had a "jüngling." He had a very vulgar surname, too vulgar to
be spoken; it was breathed against Miriam's shoulder in the half-light.
Miriam was begged to forget it at once and to remember only the
beautiful little name that preceded it.
At the time she had timidly responded to all these stories and had felt
glad that the confidences had come to her.
Mademoiselle, she knew, had never received them.
But after these confidences there were no more serious attempts at
general conversation.
17
Miriam felt ashamed of her share in the hairdresser and the chemist.
Emma's jüngling might possibly be a student.... She grieved over the
things that she felt were lying neglected, "things in general" she felt
sure she ought to discuss with the girls ... improving the world ...
leaving it better than you found it ... the importance of life ...
sleeping and dreaming that life was beauty and waking and finding it was
duty ... making things better, reforming ... being a reformer.... Pater
always said young people always wanted to reform the universe ...
perhaps it was so ... and nothing could be done. Clearly she was not the
one to do anything. She could do nothing even with these girls and she
was nearly eighteen.
Once or twice she wondered whether they ever had thoughts about things
... she felt they must; if only she were not shy, if she had a different
manner, she would find out. She knew she despised them as they were. She
could do nothing. Her fine ideas were no good. She did less than silly
little Mademoiselle. And all the time Fräulein thinking she was talking
and influencing them was keeping her ... in Germany.