Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 12

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Even walks were incalculable excepting on Sat.u.r.days, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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--Fraulein 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 Fraulein 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 hounding 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 Sat.u.r.day throng along the great Georgstra.s.se--a foreign paradise, with its great bright cafes 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 coat made her too warm and b.u.mped 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 trouble. 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 antic.i.p.ated, a complete failure of her role of English teacher. The three weeks' haphazard curriculum had brought only one repet.i.tion 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 Fraulein Pfaff did not, in face of the general absence of method, at all disturb her. Mademoiselle's cla.s.ses 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 Fraulein 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."

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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 Waldstra.s.se 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 Fraulein 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 Fraulein 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 Waldstra.s.se 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.

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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 Fraulein 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 doglike 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.

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Even Emma had a "jungling." 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.

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Miriam felt ashamed of her share in the hairdresser and the chemist.

Emma's jungling 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 Fraulein thinking she was talking and influencing them was keeping her... in Germany.

CHAPTER VI

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Fraulein Pfaff came to the breakfast-table a little late in a grey stuff dress with a cream-coloured ruching about the collar-band and ruchings against her long brown wrists. The girls were already in their places, and as soon as grace was said she began talking in a gentle decisive voice.

"Martins' sponge-bags"--her face creased for her cavernous smile--"are both large and strong--beautiful gummi-bags, each large enough to contain a family of sponges."

The table listened intently. Miriam tried to remember the condition of her side of the garret. She saw Judy's scarlet flush across the table.

"Millie," went on Fraulein, "is the owner of a damp-proof hold-all for the bath which is a veritable monument."

"Monument?" laughed a German voice apprehensively.

"Fancy a monument on your washstand," t.i.ttered Jimmie.

Fraulein raised her voice slightly, still smiling. Miriam heard her own name and stiffened. "Miss Henderson is an Englishwoman too--and our little Ulrica joins the English party." Fraulein's voice had thickened and grown caressing. Perhaps no one was in trouble. Ulrica bowed.

Her wide-open startled eyes and the outline of her pale face remained unchanged. Still gentle and tender-voiced Fraulein reached Judy and the Germans. All was well. Soaps and sponges could go in the English bags.

Judy's downcast crimson face began to recover its normal clear flush, and the Germans joined in the general rejoicing. They were to go, Miriam gathered, in the afternoon to the baths.... She had never been to a public baths.... She wished Fraulein could know there were two bathrooms in the house at Barnes, and then wondered whether in German baths one was left to oneself or whether there, too, there would be some woman superintending.

Fraulein jested softly on about her children and their bath. Gertrude and Jimmie recalled incidents of former bathings--the stories went on until breakfast had prolonged itself into a sitting of happy adventurers. The room was very warm, and coffee-scented. Clara at her corner sat with an outstretched arm nearly touching Fraulein Pfaff who was sitting forward glowing and shedding the light of her dark young eyes on each in turn. There were many elbows on the table. Judy's head was raised and easy. Miriam noticed that the whiteness of her neck was whiter than those strange bright patches where her eyelashes shone.

Ulrica's eyes went from face to face as she listened and Miriam fed upon the outlines of her head.

She wished she could place her hands on either side of its slenderness and feel the delicate skull and gaze undisturbed into the eyes.

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