1
The next afternoon they all drove in a high, wide brake with an awning,
five miles out into the country to have tea at a forest-inn. The inn
appeared at last standing back from the wide roadway along which they
had come, creamy-white and grey-roofed, long and low and with
overhanging eaves, close against the forest. They pulled up and Pastor
Lahmann dropped the steps and got out. Miriam who was sitting next to
the door felt that the long sitting in two rows confronted in the hard
afternoon light, bumped and shaken and teased with the crunchings and
slitherings of the wheels the grinding and squeaking of the brake, had
made them all enemies. She had sat tense and averted, seeing the general
greenery, feeling that the cool flowing air might be great happiness,
conscious of each form and each voice, of the insincerity of the
exclamations and the babble of conversation that struggled above the
noise of their going, half seeing Pastor Lahmann opposite to her, a
little insincerely smiling man in an alpaca suit and a soft felt hat.
She got down the steps without his assistance. With whom should she take
refuge? ... no Minna. There were long tables and little round tables
standing about under the trees in front of the inn. Some students in
Polytechnik uniform were leaning out of an upper window.
The landlord came out. Everyone was out of the brake and standing about.
Tall Fräulein was taking short padding steps towards the inn-door. A
strong grip came on Miriam's arm and she was propelled rapidly along
towards the farther greenery. Gertrude was talking to her in loud
rallying tones, asking questions in German and answering them herself.
Miriam glanced round at her face. It was crimson and quivering with
laughter. The strong laughter and her strong features seemed to hide the
peculiar roughness of her skin and coarseness of her hair. They made the
round of one of the long tables. When they were on the far side Gertrude
said, "I think you'll see a friend of mine to-day, Henderson."
"D'you mean Erica's brother?"
"There's his chum anyhow at yondah window."
"Oh, I say."
"Hah! Spree, eh? Happy thought of Lily's to bring us here."
Miriam pondered, distressed. "You must tell me which it is if we see
him."
Their party was taking possession of a long table near by. Returning to
her voluble talk, Gertrude steered Miriam towards them.
As they settled round the table under the quiet trees the first part of
the waltz movement of Weber's "Invitation" sounded out through the upper
window. The brilliant tuneless passages bounding singly up the piano,
flowing down entwined, were shaped by an iron rhythm.
Everyone stirred. Smiles broke. Fräulein lifted her head until her chin
was high, smiled slowly until the fullest width was reached and made a
little chiding sound in her throat.
Pastor Lahmann laughed with raised eyebrows. "Ah! la valse ... les
étudiants."
The window was empty. The assault settled into a gently-leaping,
heavily-thudding waltz.
As the waiter finished clattering down a circle of cups and saucers in
front of Fräulein, the unseen iron hands dropped tenderly into the
central melody of the waltz. The notes no longer bounded and leaped but
went dreaming along in an even slow swinging movement.
It seemed to Miriam that the sound of a far-off sea was in them, and the
wind and the movement of distant trees and the shedding and pouring of
far-away moonlight. One by one, delicately and quietly the young men's
voices dropped in, and the sea and the wind and the trees and the
pouring moonlight came near.
When the music ceased Miriam hoped she had not been gazing at the
window. It frightened and disgusted her to see that all the girls seemed
to be sitting up and ... being bright ... affected. She could hardly
believe it. She flushed with shame.... Fast, horrid ... perfect
strangers ... it was terrible ... it spoilt everything. Sitting up like
that and grimacing.... It was different for Gertrude. How happy Gertrude
must be. She was sitting with her elbows on the table laughing out
across the table about something.... Millie was not being horrid. She
looked just as usual, pudgy and babyish and surprised and half resentful
... it was her eyebrows. Miriam began looking at eyebrows.
There was a sudden silence all round the table. Standing at Fräulein's
side was a young student holding his peaked cap in his hand and bowing
with downcast eyes. Above his pallid scarred face his hair stood
upright. He bowed at the end of each phrase. Miriam's heart bounded in
anticipation. Would Fräulein let them dance after tea, on the grass?
But Fräulein with many smiles and kind words denied the young man's
formally repeated pleadings. They finished tea to the strains of a
funeral march.
2
They were driving swiftly along through the twilight. The warm scents of
the woods stood across the roadway. They breathed them in. Sitting at
the forward end of the brake, Miriam could turn and see the shining of
the road and the edges of the high woods.
Underneath the awning, faces were growing dim. Warm at her side was
Emma. Emma's hand was on her arm under a mass of fern and grasses.
Voices quivered and laughed. Miriam looked again and again at Pastor
Lahmann sitting almost opposite to her, next to Fräulein Pfaff. She
could look at him more easily than at either of the girls. She felt that
only he could feel the beauty of the evening exactly as she did. Several
times she met and quietly contemplated his dark eyes. She felt that
there was someone in those eyes who was neither tiresome nor tame. She
was looking at someone to whom those boys and that dead wife were
nothing. At first he had met her eyes formally, then with obvious
embarrassment, and at last simply and gravely. She felt easy and happy
in this communion. Dimly she was conscious that it sustained her, it
gave her dignity and poise. She thought that its meaning must, if she
observed it at all, be quite obvious to Fräulein and must reveal her to
her. Presently her eyes were drawn to meet Fräulein's and she read there
a disgust and a loathing such as she had never seen. The woods receded,
the beauty dropped out of them. The crunching of the wheels sounded out
suddenly. What was the good of the brake-load of grimacing people?
Miriam wanted to stop it and get out and stroll home along the edge of
the wood with the quiet man.
"Haben die Damen vielleicht ein Rad verloren?"
A deep voice on the steps of the brake.... "Have the ladies lost a
wheel, perhaps?" Miriam translated helplessly to herself during a
general outbreak of laughter....
In a moment a brake overtook them and drove alongside in the twilight.
The drivers whipped up their horses. The two vehicles raced and rumbled
along keeping close together. Fräulein called to their driver to desist.
The students slackened down too and began singing at random, one against
the other; those on the near side standing up and bowing and laughing. A
bouquet of fern fronds came in over Judy's head, missing the awning and
falling against Clara's knees. She rose and flung it back and then
everyone seemed to be standing up and laughing and throwing.
They drove home, slowly, side by side, shouting and singing and
throwing. Warm, blinding masses of fragrant grass came from the
students' brake and were thrown to and fro through the darkness lit by
the lamps of the two carriages.