Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 16

"The day, ja. Lily's restless."

Miriam stood looking at her laughing face and listening to her hoa.r.s.e, whispering voice. Gertrude turned and went downstairs.

Miriam followed her, cold and sick and shivering, and presently glad to be her a.s.sistant as she bustled about the empty kitchen.

Upstairs the other girls were getting ready for the outing.

13

Starting out along the dusty field-girt roadway leading from the railway station to the little town of Hoddenheim through the hot sunshine, Miriam was already weary and fearful of the hours that lay ahead.

They would bring tests; and opportunities for Fraulein to see all her incapability. Fraulein had thrown her thick gauze veil back over her large hat and was walking with short footsteps, quickly along the centre of the roadway throwing out exclamations of delight, calling to the girls in a singing voice to cast away the winter, to fill their lungs, fill their hearts with spring.

She rallied them to observation.

Miriam could not remember having seen men working in fields. They troubled her. They looked up with strange eyes. She wished they were not there. She wanted the fields to be still--and smaller. Still green fields and orchards... woods....

They pa.s.sed a farmyard and stopped in a cl.u.s.ter at the gate.

There was a moment of relief for her here. She could look easily at the scatter of poultry and the little pigs trotting and grunting about the yard.

She talked to the nearest German girl, of these and of the calves standing in the shelter of a rick, carefully repeating the English names. As her eyes reached the rick she found that she did not know what to say. Was it hay or straw? What was the difference? She dreaded the day more and more.

Fraulein pa.s.sed on leading the way, down the road hand-in-hand with Emma. The girls straggled after her.

14

Making some remark to Minna, Miriam secured her companionship and dropped a little behind the group. Minna gave her one eager beam from behind her nose, which was shining rosily in the clear air, and they walked silently along side by side bringing up the rear.

Voices and the scrabble of feet along the roadway sounded ahead.

Miriam noticed large rounded puffs of white cloud standing up sharp and still upon the horizon. Cottages began to appear at the roadside.

Standing and moving in the soft air was the strong sour smell of baking schwarzbrot. A big bony-browed woman came from a dark cottage and stood motionless in the low doorway, watching them with kindly body. Miriam glanced at her face--her eyes were small and expressionless, like Anna's ... evil-looking.

Presently they were in a narrow street. Miriam's footsteps hurried.

She almost cried aloud. The facades of the dwellings pa.s.sing slowly on either hand were higher, here and there one rose to a high peak, pierced geometrically with tiny windows. The street widening out ahead showed an open cobbled s.p.a.ce and cross-roads. At every angle stood high quiet peaked houses, their faces shining warm cream and milk-white, patterned with windows.

They overtook the others drawn up in the roadway before a long low wooden house. Miriam had time to see little gilded figures standing out in niches in rows all along the facade and rows of scrollwork dimly painted, as she stood still a moment with beating heart behind the group. She heard Fraulein talking in English of councillors and centuries and a.s.sumed for a moment as Fraulein's eye pa.s.sed her a look of intelligence; then they had all moved on together deeper into the town. She clung to Minna, talking at random... did she like Hoddenheim... and Minna responded to the full, helping her, talking earnestly and emphatically about food and the sunshine, isolating the two of them; and they all reached the cobbled open s.p.a.ce and stood still and the peaked houses stood all round them.

15

"You like old-time Germany, Miss Henderson?"

Miriam turned a radiant face to Fraulein Pfaff's table and made some movement with her lips.

"I think you have something of the German in you."

"She has, she has," said Minna from the little arbour where she sat with Millie. "She is not English."

They had eaten their lunch at a little group of arboured tables at the back of an old wooden inn. Fraulein had talked history to those nearest to her and sat back at last with her gauze veil in place, tall and still in her arbour, sighing happily now and again and making her little sounds of affectionate raillery as the girls finished their coffee and jested and giggled together across their worm-eaten, green-painted tables.

"You have beautiful old towns and villages in England," said Fraulein, yawning slightly.

"Yes--but not anything like this."

"Oh, Gertrude, that isn't true. We _have._"

"Then they're hidden from view, my dear Mill, not visible to the naked eye," laughed Gertrude.

"Tell us, my Millie," encouraged Fraulein, "say what you have in mind.

Perhaps Gairtrud does not know the English towns and villages as well as you do."

The German girls attended eagerly.

"I can't tell you the names of the places," said Millie, "but I have seen pictures."

There was a pause. Gertrude smiled, but made no further response.

"Peectures," murmured Minna. "Peectures always are beautiful. All towns are beautiful, perhaps. Not?"

"There may he bits, perhaps," blurted Miriam, "but not whole towns and nothing anywhere a bit like Hoddenheim, I'm perfectly certain."

"Oh, well, not the _same,_" complained Millie, "but just as beautiful--more beautiful."

"Oh-ho, Millississimo."

"Of course there are, Bertha, there must be."

"Well, Millicent," pressed Fraulein, "'more beautiful' and why? Beauty is what you see and is not for everyone the same. It is an _affaire de gozt._ So you must tell us why to you the old towns of England are more beautiful than the old towns of Germany. It is because you prefair them?

They are your towns, it is quite natural you should prefair them."

"It isn't only that, Fraulein."

"Well?"

"Our country is older than Germany, besides--"

"It _isn't,_ my blessed child."