Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 6

"You play the piano?"

"A little."

"You must keep up your practice then, while you are with us--you must have time for practice."

11

Fraulein Pfaff rose and moved away. The girls were arranging the chairs in two rows--plates and cups were collected and carried away. It dawned on Miriam that they were going to have prayers. What a wet-blanket on her evening. Everything had been so bright and exciting so far. Obviously they had prayers every night. She felt exceedingly uncomfortable. She had never seen prayers in a sitting-room. It had been nothing at school--all the girls standing in the drill-room, rows of voices saying "adsum," then a Collect and the Lord's Prayer.

A huge Bible appeared on a table in front of Fraulein's high-backed chair. Miriam found herself ranged with the girls, sitting in an attentive hush. There was a quiet, slow turning of pages, and then a long indrawn sigh and Fraulein's clear, low, even voice, very gentle, not caustic now but with something child-like about it, "Und da kamen die Apostel zu Ihm...." Miriam had a moment of revolt. She would not sit there and let a woman read the Bible at her... and in that "smarmy"

way.... in spirit she rose and marched out of the room. As the English pupil-teacher bound to suffer all things or go home, she sat on.

Presently her ear was charmed by Fraulein's slow clear enunciation, her pure unaspirated North German. It seemed to suit the narrative--and the narrative was new, vivid and real in this new tongue. She saw presently the little group of figures talking by the lake and was sorry when Fraulein's voice ceased.

Solomon Martin was at the piano. Someone handed Miriam a shabby little paper-backed hymnbook. She fluttered the leaves. All the hymns appeared to have a little short-lined verse, under each ordinary verse, in small print. It was in English--she read. She fumbled for the t.i.tle-page and then her cheeks flamed with shame, "Moody and Sankey." She was incredulous, but there it was, clearly enough. What was such a thing doing here?... Finishing school for the daughters of gentlemen.... She had never had such a thing in her hands before.... Fraulein could not know.... She glanced at her, but Fraulein's cavernous mouth was serenely open and the voices of the girls sang heartily, "Whenhy--cometh.

Whenhy--_com_eth, to _make up_ his _jew_els----" These girls, Germany, that piano.... What did the English girls think? Had anyone said anything? Were they chapel? Fearfully, she told them over. No. Judy might be, and the Martins perhaps, but not Gertrude, nor Jimmie, nor Millie. How did it happen? What was the German Church? Luther--Lutheran.

She longed for the end.

She glanced through the book--frightful, frightful words and choruses.

The girls were getting on to their knees.

Oh dear, every night. Her elbows sank into soft red plush.

She was to have time for practising--and that English lesson--the first--Oxford, decisive for--educated people....

Fraulein's calm voice came almost in a whisper, "Vater unser... der Du bist im Himmel," and the murmuring voices of the girls followed her.

12

Miriam went to bed content, wrapped in music. The theme of Carlo's solo recurred again and again; and every time it brought something of the wonderful light--the sense of going forward and forward through s.p.a.ce.

She fell asleep somewhere outside the world. No sooner was she asleep than a voice was saying, "Bonjour, Meece," and her eyes opened on daylight and Mademoiselle's little night-gowned form minuetting towards her down the single strip of matting. Her hair, hanging in short ringlets when released, fell forward round her neck as she bowed--the slightest dainty inclination, from side to side against the swaying of her dance. She was smiling her down-glancing, little sprite smile.

Miriam loved her....

A great plaque of sunlight lay across the breakfast-table. Miriam was too happy to trouble about her imminent trial. She reflected that it was quite possible to-day and to-morrow would be free. None of the visiting masters came, except, sometimes, Herr Bossenberger for music-lessons--that much she had learned from Mademoiselle. And, after all, the cla.s.s she had so dreaded had dwindled to just these four girls, little Emma and the three grown-up girls. They probably knew all the rules and beginnings. It would be just reading and so on. It would not be so terrible--four sensible girls; and besides they had accepted her.

It did not seem anything extraordinary to them that she should teach them; and they did not dislike her. Of that she felt sure. She could not say this for even one of the English girls. But the German girls did not dislike her. She felt at ease sitting amongst them and was glad she was there and not at the English end of the table. Down here, hemmed in by the Bergmanns with Emma's little form, her sounds, movements and warmth, her little quiet friendliness planted between herself and the English, with the apparently un.o.bservant Minna and Elsa across the way she felt safe. She felt fairly sure those German eyes did not criticise her.

Perhaps, she suggested to herself, they thought a good deal of English people in general; and then they were in the minority, only four of them; it was evidently a school for English girls as much as anything...

strange--what an adventure for all those English girls--to be just boarders--Miriam wondered how she would feel sitting there as an English boarder among the Martins and Gertrude, Millie, Jimmie and Judy? It would mean being friendly with them. Finally she ensconced herself amongst her Germans, feeling additionally secure.... Fraulein had spent many years in England. Perhaps that explained the breakfast of oatmeal porridge--piled plates of thick stirabout thickly sprinkled with pale, very sweet powdery brown sugar--and the eggs to follow with rolls and b.u.t.ter.

Miriam wondered how Fraulein felt towards the English girls.

She wondered whether Fraulein liked the English girls best.... She paid no attention to the little spurts of conversation that came at intervals as the table grew more and more dismantled. She was there, safely there--what a perfectly stupendous thing--"weird and stupendous" she told herself. The sunlight poured over her and her companions from the great windows behind Fraulein Pfaff....

14

When breakfast was over and the girls were clearing the table, Fraulein went to one of the great windows and stood for a moment with her hands on the hasp of the innermost of the double frames. "Balde, balde,"

Miriam heard her murmur, "werden wir offnen konnen." Soon, soon we may open. Obviously then they had had the windows shut all the winter.

Miriam, standing in the corner near the companion window, wondering what she was supposed to do and watching the girls with an air--as nearly as she could manage--of indulgent condescension--saw, without turning, the figure at the window, gracefully tall, with a curious dignified pannier-like effect about the skirt that swept from the small tightly-fitting pointed bodice, reminding her of ill.u.s.trations of heroines of serials in old numbers of the "Girls' Own Paper." The dress was of dark blue velvet--very much rubbed and faded. Miriam liked the effect, liked something about the clear profile, the sallow, hollow cheeks, the same heavy bonyness that Anna the servant had, but finer and redeemed by the wide eye that was so strange. She glanced fearfully, at its unconsciousness, and tried to find words for the quick youthfulness of those steady eyes.

Fraulein moved away into the little room opening from the schoolroom, and some of the girls joined her there. Miriam turned to the window. She looked down into a little square of high-walled garden. It was gravelled nearly all over. Not a blade of gra.s.s was to be seen. A narrow little border of bare brown mould joined the gravel to the high walls. In the centre was a little domed patch of earth and there a chestnut tree stood. Great bulging brown-varnished buds were shining whitely from each twig. The girls seemed to be gathering in the room behind her--settling down round the table--Mademoiselle's voice sounded from the head of the table where Fraulein had lately been. It must be _raccommodage_ thought Miriam--the weekly mending Mademoiselle had told her of. Mademoiselle was superintending. Miriam listened. This was a sort of French lesson.

They all sat round and did their mending together in French--darning must be quite different done like that, she reflected.

Jimmie's voice came, rounded and giggling, "Oh, Mademoiselle! j'ai une _potato_, pardong, pum de terre, je mean." She poked three fingers through the toe of her stocking. "Veux dire, veux dire--Qu'est-ce-que vous me racontez la?" scolded Mademoiselle. Miriam envied her air of authority.

"Ah-ho! La-la--Boum--Bong!" came Gertrude's great voice from the door.

"Taisez-vous, taisez-vous, Jair-trude," rebuked Mademoiselle.

"How dare she?" thought Miriam, with a picture before her eyes of the little grey-gowned thing with the wistful, frugal mouth and nose.

"Na--Miss Henderson?"

It was Fraulein's voice from within the little room. Minna was holding the door open.

15

At the end of twenty minutes, dismissed by Fraulein with a smiling recommendation to go and practise in the saal, Miriam had run upstairs for her music.

"It's all right. I'm all right. I shall be able to do it," she said to herself as she ran. The ordeal was past. She was, she had learned, to talk English with the German girls, at table, during walks, whenever she found herself with them, excepting on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays--and she was to read with the four--for an hour, three times a week. There had been no mention of grammar or study in any sense she understood.

She had had a moment of tremor when Fraulein had said in her slow clear English, "I leave you to your pupils, Miss Henderson," and with that had gone out and shut the door. The moment she had dreaded had come. This was Germany. There was no escape. Her desperate eyes caught sight of a solid-looking volume on the table, bound in brilliant blue cloth. She got it into her shaking hands. It was "Misunderstood." She felt she could have shouted in her relief. A treatise on the Morse code would not have surprised her. She had heard that such things were studied at school abroad and that German children knew the names and, worse than that, the meaning of the names of the streets in the city of London. But this book that she and Harriett had banished and wanted to burn in their early teens together with "Sandford and Merton."...

"You are reading 'Misunderstood'?" she faltered, glancing at the four politely waiting girls.

It was Minna who answered her in her husky, eager voice.

"D'ja, d'ja," she responded, "na, ich meine, _yace, yace_ we read--so sweet and beautiful book--not?"

"Oh," said Miriam, "yes..." and then eagerly, "you all like it, do you?"

Clara and Elsa agreed unenthusiastically. Emma, at her elbow, made a little despairing gesture, "I can't English," she moaned gently, "too deeficult."

Miriam tested their reading. The cla.s.s had begun. Nothing had happened.

It was all right. They each, dutifully and with extreme carefulness read a short pa.s.sage. Miriam sat blissfully back. It was incredible. The cla.s.s was going on. The chestnut tree budded approval from the garden.

She gravely corrected their accents. The girls were respectful. They appeared to be interested. They vied with each other to get exact sounds; and they presently delighted Miriam by telling her they could understand her English much better than that of her predecessor. "So cleare, so cleare," they chimed, "Voonderfoll." And then they all five seemed to be talking at once. The little room was full of broken English, of Miriam's interpolated corrections. It was going--succeeding.

This was her cla.s.s. She hoped Fraulein was listening outside. She probably was. Heads of foreign schools did. She remembered Madame Beck in "Villette." But if she was not, she hoped they would tell her about being able to understand the new English teacher so well. "Oh, I am haypie," Emma was saying, with adoring eyes on Miriam and her two arms outflung on the table. Miriam recoiled. This would not do--they must not all talk at once and go on like this. Minna's whole face was aflame.