Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 10

4

Certainly it was wrong to listen to sermons... stultifying... unless they were intellectual... lectures like Mr. Brough's... that was as bad, because they were not sermons.... either kind was bad and ought not to be allowed... a homily... sermons... homilies... a quiet homily might be something rather nice... and have not _Charity_--sounding bra.s.s and tinkling cymbal.... Caritas... I have _none_ I am sure.... Fraulein Pfaff would listen. She would smile afterwards and talk about a "schone Predigt"--certainly.... If she should ask about the sermon? Everything would come out then.

What would be the good? Fraulein would not understand. It would be better to pretend. She could not think of any woman who would understand. And she would be obliged to live somewhere. She must pretend to somebody. She wanted to go on, to see the spring. But must she always be pretending? Would it always be that... living with exasperating women who did not understand... pretending... grimacing?... Were German women the same? She wished she could tell Eve the things she was beginning to feel about women. These English girls were just the same. Millie...

sweet lovely Millie.... How she wished she had never spoken to her.

Never said, "Are you fond of crochet?"... Millie saying, "You must know all my people," and then telling her a list of names and describing all her family. She had been so pleased for the first moment. It had made her feel suddenly happy to hear an English voice talking familiarly to her in the saal. And then at the end of a few moments she had known she never wanted to hear anything more of Millie and her people. It seemed strange that this girl talking about her brothers' hobbies and the colour of her sister's hair was the Millie she had first seen the night of the Vorspielen with the "Madonna" face and no feet. Millie was smug. Millie would smile when she was a little older--and she would go respectfully to church all her life--Miriam had felt a horror even of the work-basket Millie had been tidying during their conversation--and Millie had gone upstairs, she knew, feeling that they had "begun to be friends" and would be different the next time they met. It was her own fault. What had made her speak to her? She was like that.... Eve had told her. She got excited and interested in people and then wanted to throw them up. It was not true. She did not want to throw them up.

She wanted them to leave her alone.... She had not been excited about Millie. It was Ulrica... Ulrica... Ulrica... Ulrica... sitting up at breakfast with her lovely head and her great eyes--her thin fingers peeling an egg.... She had made them all look so "common." Ulrica was different. Was she? Yes, Ulrica was different... Ulrica peeling an egg and she, afterwards like a mad thing had gone into the saal and talked to Millie in a vulgar, familiar way, no doubt.

And that had led to that dreadful talk with Gertrude. Gertrude's voice sounding suddenly behind her as she stood looking out of the saal window and their talk. She wished Gertrude had not told her about Hugo Wieland and the skating. She was sure she would not have liked Erica Wieland.

She was glad she had left. "She was my chum," Gertrude had said, "and he taught us all the outside edge and taught me figure-skating."

It was funny--improper--that these schoolgirls should go skating with other girls' brothers. She had been so afraid of Gertrude that she had pretended to be interested and had joked with her--she, Miss Henderson, the governess had said--knowingly, "Let's see, he's the clean-shaven one, isn't he?"

"_Rather_," Gertrude had said with a sort of winking grimace....

5

They were singing a hymn. The people near her had not moved. n.o.body had moved. The whole church was sitting down, singing a hymn. What wonderful people.... Like a sort of tea-party... everybody sitting about--not sitting up to the table... happy and comfortable.

Emma had found her place and handed her a big hymn-book with the score.

There was time for Miriam to read the first line and recognise the original of "Now thank we all our G.o.d", before the singing had reached the third syllable. She hung over the book.

"Nun--dank--et--Al--le--Gott." Now--thank--all--G.o.d. She read that first line again and felt how much better the thing was without the "we"

and the "our." What a perfect phrase.... The hymn rolled on and she recognised that it was the tune she knew--the hard square tune she and Eve had called it--and Harriett used to mark time to it in jerks, a jerk to each syllable, with a twisted glove-finger tip just under the book ledge with her left hand, towards Miriam. But sung as these Germans sang it, it did not jerk at all. It did not sound like a "proclamation" or an order. It was... somehow... everyday. The notes seemed to hold her up.

This was--Luther--Germany--the Reformation--solid and quiet. She glanced up and then hung more closely over her book. It was the stained-gla.s.s windows that made the Schloss Kirche so dark. One movement of her head showed her that all the windows within sight were dark with rich colour, and there was oak everywhere--great shelves and galleries and juttings of dark wood, great carved ma.s.ses and a high dim roof, and strange s.p.a.ces of light; twilight, and light like moonlight and people, not many people, a troop, a little army under the high roof, with the great shadows all about them. "Nun danket alle Gott." There was nothing to object to in that. Everybody could say that. Everybody--Fraulein, Gertrude, all these little figures in the church, the whole world. "Now thank, all, G.o.d!"... Emma and Marie were chanting on either side of her.

Immediately behind her sounded the quavering voice of an old woman. They all felt it. She must remember that.... Think of it every day.

CHAPTER V

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 att.i.tude. 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 cla.s.s. He would begin lecturing, almost before he was inside the door. He taught from a book, sitting with downcast eyes, his round red ma.s.s 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. Fraulein 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 whitehaired 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 att.i.tude of the Englishman and of Monsieur, her one Frenchman, towards her s.e.x 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 indifference to them.

3

She began to recognise now with a glow of grat.i.tude that her own teachers, those who were enthusiastic about their subjects--the albino, her dear Monsieur with his cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages, 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.

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-princ.i.p.al--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 Fraulein 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 Fraulein 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 cla.s.s" 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 Aesthetic Movement or felt troubled about the state of Ireland and India. Perhaps she would have grown up a Churchwoman... and "ladylike." 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.