Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 11

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 Fraulein 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 ap.r.o.n, was plaintive about it in her conscientious German nearly every morning. The Martins, when the sense of Fraulein 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 a.s.surance 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 "wasche"

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 Fraulein 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.

Fraulein, who generally went to the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bal.u.s.trade, "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 Fraulein's room opposite the saal on the ground floor. The appearance of Anna was the signal for bounding antic.i.p.ations. 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 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 wa 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 circ.u.mspect 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 ma.s.seuse, 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, a.s.sailed 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 gla.s.s. 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 t.i.tle in her own right. Gertrude had gone through her trial, prolonged by some slight complication, without an anesthetic, 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 ma.s.s 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 coa.r.s.e 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 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 acc.u.mulated 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 a.s.sured 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 cla.s.ses 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 Fraulein. 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 gla.s.ses of sweet syrup and biscuits--were, if Fraulein 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 Fraulein'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 Georgstra.s.se 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.

Fraulein 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 he 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 att.i.tudes. 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 eclair--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 Fraulein 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 Fraulein reached Gertrude and beamed affectionately in response to her careless "Schokolade und ein Biskuit." Miriam and the Bergmanns were alone in their excesses.