"Oh," she breathed, "my ghastly forehead."

It was all she could do—short of gas and curling tongs. Even the candle was taken away in the daytime.

It was cold and bleak upstairs. Her wet hair lay in a heavy mass against her burning head. She was painfully hungry. She went down.



20

The snarling rattle of the coffee mill sounded out into the hall. Several voices were speaking together as she entered. Fraulein Pfaff was not there. Gertrude Goldring was grinding the coffee. The girls were sitting round the table in easy attitudes and had the effect of holding a council. Emma, her elbows on the table, her little face bunched with scorn, put out a motherly arm and set a chair for Miriam. Jimmie had flung some friendly remark as she came in. Miriam did not hear what she said, but smiled responsively. She wanted to get quietly to her place and look round. There was evidently something in the air. They all seemed preoccupied. Perhaps no one would notice how awful she looked. "You're not the only one, my dear," she said to herself in her mother's voice. "No," she replied in person, "but no one will be looking so perfectly frightful as me."

"I say, do they know you're down?" said Gertrude hospitably, as the boiling water snored on to the coffee.

Emma rushed to the lift and rattled the panel.

"Anna!" she ordered, "Meece Hendshon! Suppe!"

"Oh, thanks," said Miriam, in general. She could not meet anyone's eye. The coffee cups were being slid up to Gertrude's end of the table and rapidly filled by her. Gertrude, of course, she noticed had contrived to look dashing and smart. Her hair, with the exception of some wild ends that hung round her face was screwed loosely on the top of her head and transfixed with a dagger-like tortoise-shell hair ornament—like a Japanese—Indian—no, Maori—that was it, she looked like a New Zealander. Clara and Minna had fastened up theirs with combs and ribbons and looked decent—frauish though, thought Miriam. Judy wore a plait. Without her fuzzy cloud she looked exactly like a country servant, a farmhouse servant. She drank her coffee noisily and furtively—she looked extraordinary, thought Miriam, and took comfort. The Martins' brown bows appeared on their necks instead of cresting their heads-it improved them, Miriam thought. What regular features they had. Bertha looked like a youth—like a musician. Her hair was loosened a little at the sides, shading the corners of her forehead and adding to its height. It shone like marble, high and straight. Emma's hair hung round her like a shawl. 'Lisbeth, Gretchen... what was that lovely German name... hild... Brunhilde...

Talk had begun again. Miriam hoped they had not noticed her. Her "Braten" shot up the lift.

"Lauter Unsinn!" announced Clara.

"We've all got to do our hair in clash... clashishsher Knoten, Hendy, all of us," said Jimmie judicially, sitting forward with her plump hands clasped on the table. Her pinnacle of hair looked exactly as usual.

"Oh, really." Miriam tried to make a picture of a classic knot in her mind.

"If one have classic head one can have classic knot," scolded Clara.

"Who have classic head?"

"How many classic head in the school of Waldstrasse?"

Elsa gave a little neighing laugh. "Classisch head, classisch Knote."

"That is true what you say, Clarah."

The table paused.

"Dites-moi—qu'est-ce-que ce terrible classique notte? Dites!"

No one seemed prepared to answer Mademoiselle's challenge.

Miriam's mind groped... classic—Greece and Rome—Greek knot.... Grecian key... a Grecian key pattern on the dresses for the sixth form tableau—reading Ruskin... the strip of glass all along the window space on the floor in the large room—edged with mosses and grass—the mirror of Venus....

"Eh bien? Eh bien!"

... Only the eldest pretty girls... all on their hands and knees looking into the mirror....

"Classische Form—Griechisch," explained Clara.

"Like a statue, Mademoiselle."

"Comment! Une statue! Je dois arranger mes cheveux comme une statue? Oh, ciel!" mocked Mademoiselle, collapsing into tinkles of her sprite laughter.... "Oh-la-la! Et quelle statue par exemple?" she trilled, with ironic eyebrows, "la statue de votre Kaisere Wilhelm der Grosse peut-etre?"

The Martins' guffaws led the laughter.

"Mademoisellekin with her hair done like the Kaiser Wilhelm," pealed Jimmie.

Only Clara remained grave in wrath.

"Einfach," she quoted bitterly, "Simple—says Lily, so simple!"

"Simple—simpler—simplicissimusko!"

"I make no change, not at all," smiled Minna from behind her nose. "For this Ulrica it is quite something other.... She has yes truly so charming a little head."

She spoke quietly and unenviously.

"I too, indeed. Lily may go and play the flute."

"Brave girls," said Gertrude, getting up. "Come on, Kinder, clearing time. You'll excuse us, Miss Henderson? There's your pudding in the lift. Do you mind having your coffee mit?"

The girls began to clear up.

"Leelly, Leely, Leely Pfaff," muttered Clara as she helped, "so einfach und niedlich," she mimicked, "ach was! Schwarmerei—das find' ich abscheulich! I find it disgusting!"

So that was it. It was the new girl. Lily, was Fraulein Pfaff. So the new girl wore her hair in a classic knot. How lovely. Without her hat she had "a charming little head," Minna had said. And that face. Minna had seen how lovely she was and had not minded. Clara was jealous. Her head with a classic knot and no fringe, her worn-looking sallow face.... She would look like a "prisoner at the bar" in some newspaper. How they hated Fraulein Pfaff. The Germans at least. Fancy calling her Lily—Miriam did not like it, she had known at once. None of the teachers at school had been called by their Christian names—there had been old Quagmire, the Elfkin, and dear Donnikin, Stroodie, and good old Kingie and all of them—but no Christian names. Oh yes—Sally—so there had—Sally—but then Sally was—couldn't have been anything else—never could have held a position of any sort. They ought not to call Fraulein Pfaff that. It was, somehow, nasty. Did the English girls do it? Ought she to have said anything? Mademoiselle did not seem at all shocked. Where was Fraulein Pfaff all this time? Perhaps somewhere hidden away, in her rooms, being "done" by Frau Krause. Fancy telling them all to alter the way they did their hair.



21

Everyone was writing Saturday letters—Mademoiselle and the Germans with compressed lips and fine careful evenly moving pen-points; the English scrawling and scraping and dashing, their pens at all angles and careless, eager faces. An almost unbroken silence seemed the order of the earlier part of a Saturday afternoon. To-day the room was very still, save for the slight movements of the writers. At intervals nothing was to be heard but the little chorus of pens. Clara, still smouldering, sitting at the window end of the room looked now and again gloomily out into the garden. Miriam did not want to write letters. She sat, pen in hand, and note-paper in front of her, feeling that she loved the atmosphere of these Saturday afternoons. This was her second. She had been in the school a fortnight—the first Saturday she had spent writing to her mother—a long letter for everyone to read, full of first impressions and enclosing a slangy almost affectionate little note for Harriett. In her general letter she had said, "If you want to think of something jolly, think of me, here." She had hesitated over that sentence when she considered meal-times, especially the midday meal, but on the whole she had decided to let it stand—this afternoon she felt it was truer. She was beginning to belong to the house—she did not want to write letters—but just to sit revelling in the sense of this room full of quietly occupied girls—in the first hours of the weekly holiday. She thought of strange Ulrica somewhere upstairs and felt quite one of the old gang. "Ages" she had known all these girls. She was not afraid of them at all. She would not be afraid of them any more. Emma Bergmann across the table raised a careworn face from her two lines of large neat lettering and caught her eye. She put up her hands on either side of her mouth as if for shouting.

"Hendchen," she articulated silently, in her curious lipless way, "mein liebes, liebes, Hendchen."

Miriam smiled timidly and sternly began fumbling at her week's letters—one from Eve, full of congratulations and recommendations—"Keep up your music, my dear," said the conclusion, "and don't mind that little German girl being fond of you. It is impossible to be too fond of people if you keep it all on a high level," and a scrawl from Harriett, pure slang from beginning to end. Both these letters and an earlier one from her mother had moved her to tears and longing when they came. She re-read them now unmoved and felt aloof from the things they suggested. It did not seem imperative to respond to them at once. She folded them together. If only she could bring them all for a minute into this room, the wonderful Germany that she had achieved. If they could even come to the door and look in. She did not in the least want to go back. She wanted them to come to her and taste Germany—to see all that went on in this wonderful house, to see pretty, German Emma, adoring her—to hear the music that was everywhere all the week, that went, like a garland, in and out of everything, to hear her play, by accident, and acknowledge the difference in her playing. Oh yes, besides seeing them all she wanted them to hear her play.... She must stay... she glanced round the room. It was here, somehow, somewhere, in this roomful of girls, centring in the Germans at her end of the table, reflected on to the English group, something of that influence that had made her play. It was in the sheen on Minna's hair, in Emma's long-plaited schoolgirlishness, somehow in Clara's anger. It was here, here, and she was in it.... She must pretend to be writing letters or someone might speak to her. She would hate anyone who challenged her at this moment. Jimmie might. It was just the kind of thing Jimmie would do. Her eyes were always roving round.... There were a lot of people like that.... It was all right when you wanted anything or to—to—"create a diversion"—when everybody was quarrelling. But at the wrong times it was awful.... The Radnors and Pooles were like that. She could have killed them often. "Hullo, Mim," they would say. "Wake up!" or "What's the row!" and if you asked why, they would laugh and tell you you looked like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.... It was all right. No one had noticed her—or if either of the Germans had they would not think like that—they would understand—she believed in a way, they would understand. At the worst they would look at you as if they were somehow with you and say something sentimental. "Sie hat Heimweh" or something like that. Minna would. Minna's forget-me-not blue eyes behind her pink nose would be quite real and alive.... Ein Blatt—she dipped her pen and wrote Ein Blatt... aus... Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen that thing they had begun last Saturday afternoon and gone on and on with until she had hated the sound of the words. How did it go on? "Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen," she breathed in a half whisper. Minna heard—and without looking up from her writing quietly repeated the verse. Her voice rose and trembled slightly on the last line.

"Oh, chuck it, Minna," groaned Bertha Martin.

"Tchookitt," repeated Minna absently, and went on with her writing.

Miriam was scribbling down the words as quickly as she could—

"Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen Ich nahm es so im Wandern mit Auf dass es einst mir moge sagen Wie laut die Nachtigall geschlagen Wie grun der Wald den ich—durchtritt—" durchtritt—durchschritt—she was not sure. It was perfectly lovely—she read it through translating stumblingly—

"A leaf from summery days I took it with me on my way, So that it might remind me How loud the nightingale had sung, How green the wood I had passed through."

With a pang she felt it was true that summer ended in dead leaves.

But she had no leaf, nothing to remind her of her summer days. They were all past and she had nothing—not the smallest thing. The two little bunches of flowers she had put away in her desk had all crumbled together, and she could not tell which was which.... There was nothing else but the things she had told Eve—and perhaps Eve had forgotten... there was nothing. There were the names in her birthday book! She had forgotten them. She would look at them. She flushed. She would look at them to-morrow, sometime when Mademoiselle was not there.... The room was waking up from its letter-writing. People were moving about. She would not write to-day. It was not worth while beginning. She took a fresh sheet of note-paper and copied her verse, spacing it carefully with a wide margin all round so that it came exactly in the middle of the page. It would soon be tea-time. "Wie grun der Wald." She remembered one wood—the only one she could remember—there were no woods at Barnes or at the seaside—only that wood, at the very beginning, someone carrying Harriett—and green green, the brightest she had ever seen, and anemones everywhere, she could see them distinctly at this moment—she wanted to put her face down into the green among the anemones. She could not remember how she got there or the going home, but just standing there—the green and the flowers and something in her ear buzzing and frightening her and making her cry, and somebody poking a large finger into the buzzing ear and making it very hot and sore.

The afternoon sitting had broken up. The table was empty.

Emma, in raptures—near the window, was calling to the other Germans. Minna came and chirruped too—there was a sound of dull scratching on the window—then a little burst of admiration from Emma and Minna together. Miriam looked round—in Emma's hand shone a small antique watch encrusted with jewels; at her side was the new girl. Miriam saw a filmy black dress, and above it a pallid face. What was it like? It was like—like—like jasmine—that was it—jasmine—and out of the jasmine face the great gaze she had met in the morning turned half-puzzled, half-disappointed upon the growing group of girls examining the watch.



CHAPTER IV



1

Miriam paid her first visit to a German church the next day, her third Sunday. Of the first Sunday, now so far off, she could remember nothing but sitting in a low-backed chair in the saal trying to read "Les Travailleurs de la Mer"... seas... and a sunburnt youth striding down a desolate lane in a storm... and the beginning of tea-time. They had been kept indoors all day by the rain.

The second Sunday they had all gone in the evening to the English church with Fraulein Pfaff... rush-seated chairs with a ledge for books, placed very close together and scrooping on the stone floor with the movements of the congregation... a little gathering of English people. They seemed very dear for a moment... what was it about them that was so attractive... that gave them their air of "refinement"?...

Then as she watched their faces as they sang she felt that she knew all these women, the way, with little personal differences, they would talk, the way they would smile and take things for granted.

And the men, standing there in their overcoats.... Why were they there? What were they doing? What were their thoughts?

She pressed as against a barrier. Nothing came to her from these unconscious forms.

They seemed so untroubled.... Probably they were all Conservatives.... That was part of their "refinement." They would all disapprove of Mr. Gladstone.... Get up into the pulpit and say "Gladstone" very loud... and watch the result. Gladstone was a Radical... "pull everything up by the roots."... Pater was always angry and sneery about him.... Where were the Radicals? Somewhere very far away... tub-thumping... the Conservatives made them thump tubs... no wonder.

She decided she must be a Radical. Certainly she did not belong to these "refined" English—women or men. She was quite sure of that, seeing them gathered together, English Church-people in this foreign town.

But then Radicals were probably chapel?

It would be best to stay with the Germans. Yes.... she would stay. There was a woman sitting in the endmost chair just across the aisle in line with them. She had a pale face and looked worn and middle-aged. The effect of "refinement" made on Miriam by the congregation seemed to radiate from her. There was a large ostrich feather fastened by a gleaming buckle against the side of her silky beaver hat. It swept, Miriam found the word during the Psalms, back over her hair. Miriam glancing at her again and again felt that she would like to be near her, watch her and touch her and find out the secret of her effect. But not talk to her, never talk to her.

She, too, sad and alone though Miriam knew her to be, would have her way of smiling and taking things for granted. The sermon came. Miriam sat, chafing, through it. One angry glance towards the pulpit had shown her a pale, black-moustached face. She checked her thoughts. She felt they would be too savage; would rend her unendurably. She tried not to listen. She felt the preacher was dealing out "pastoral platitudes." She tried to give her mind elsewhere; but the sound of the voice, unconvinced and unconvincing threatened her again and again with a tide of furious resentment. She fidgeted and felt for thoughts and tried to compose her face to a semblance of serenity. It would not do to sit scowling here amongst her pupils with Fraulein Pfaff's eye commanding her profile from the end of the pew just behind.... The air was gassy and close, her feet were cold. The gentle figure across the aisle was sitting very still, with folded hands and grave eyes fixed in the direction of the pulpit. Of course. Miriam had known it. She would "think over" the sermon afterwards.... The voice in the pulpit had dropped. Miriam glanced up. The figure faced about and intoned rapidly, the congregation rose for a moment rustling, and rustling subsided again. A hymn was given out. They rose again and sang. It was "Lead, Kindly Light." Chilly and feverish and weary Miriam listened ... "the encircling glooo—om"... Cardinal Newman coming back from Italy in a ship... in the end he had gone over to Rome... high altars... candles... incense... safety and warmth.

From far away a radiance seemed to approach and to send out a breath that touched and stirred the stuffy air... the imploring voices sang on... poor cold English things... Miriam suddenly became aware of Emma Bergmann standing at her side with open hymn-book shaking with laughter. She glanced sternly at her, mastering a sympathetic convulsion.



2

Emma looked so sweet standing there shaking and suffused. Her blue eyes were full of tears. Miriam wanted to giggle too. She longed to know what had amused her... just the fact of their all standing suddenly there together. She dared not join her... no more giggling as she and Harriett had giggled. She would not even be able afterwards to ask her what it was.



3

Sitting on this third Sunday morning in the dim Schloss Kirche—the Waldstrasse pew was in one of its darkest spaces and immediately under the shadow of a deeply overhanging gallery—Miriam understood poor Emma's confessed hysteria over the abruptly alternating kneelings and standings, risings and sittings of an Anglican congregation. Here, there was no need to be on the watch for the next move. The service droned quietly and slowly on. Miriam paid no heed to it. She sat in the comforting darkness. The unobserving Germans were all round her, the English girls tailed away invisibly into the distant obscurity. Fraulein Pfaff was not there, nor Mademoiselle. She was alone with the school. She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come—running—she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church—working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong—all wrong. It couldn't be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good—even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile—and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on from unsound premises until your brain was sick... droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic... and nothing behind it. As often as not you could pick out the logical fallacy if you took the trouble.... Preachers knew no more than anyone else... you could see by their faces... sheeps' faces.... What a terrible life... and wives and children in the homes taking them for granted....



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 brass 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. Nobody 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 God", before the singing had reached the third syllable. She hung over the book. "Nun—dank—et—Al—le—Gott." Now—thank—all—God. 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-glass 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 masses and a high dim roof, and strange spaces 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, God!"... 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 attitude. 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 class. He would begin lecturing, almost before he was inside the door. He taught from a book, sitting with downcast eyes, his round red mass 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 attitude of the Englishman and of Monsieur, her one Frenchman, towards her sex 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 gratitude that her own teachers, those who were enthusiastic about their subjects—the albino, her dear Monsieur with his classic 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 class 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 passage 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 passages, 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-principal—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 class" 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.

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 apron, 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 assurance 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 basement 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 balustrade, "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 anticipations. 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 circumspect 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 masseuse, 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, assailed 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 glass. 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 title 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 mass 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 coarse 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 accumulated 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 assured 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 classes 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 glasses 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 Georgstrasse 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 attitudes. 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.



13

Even walks were incalculable excepting on Saturdays, 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 Saturday 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 Saturday throng along the great Georgstrasse—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 bumped 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 anticipated, a complete failure of her role of English teacher. The three weeks' haphazard curriculum had brought only one repetition 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 classes 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."



14

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 Waldstrasse 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 Waldstrasse 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.



15

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.



16

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.



17

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



1

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," tittered 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.



2

Fraulein Pfaff rose at last from the table.

"Na, Kinder," she smiled, holding her arms out to them all.

She turned to the nearest window.

"Die Fenster auf!" she cried, in quivering tones, "Die Herzen auf!" "Up with windows! Up with hearts!"

Her hands struggled with the hasp of the long-closed outer frame. The girls crowded round as the lattices swung wide. The air poured in.

Miriam stood in a vague crowd seeing nothing. She felt the movement of her own breathing and the cool streaming of the air through her nostrils. She felt comely and strong.

"That's a thrush," she heard Bertha Martin say as a chattering flew across a distant garden—and Fraulein's half-singing reply, "Know you, children, what the thrush says? Know you?" and Minna's eager voice sounding out into the open, "D'ja, d'ja, ich, weiss—Ritzifizier, sagt sie, Ritzifizier, das vierundzwanzigste Jahr!" and voices imitating.

"Spring! Spring! Spring!" breathed Clara, in a low sing-song.

Miriam found herself with her hands on the doors leading into the saal, pushing them gently. Why not? Everything had changed. Everything was good. The great doors gave, the sunlight streamed from behind her into the quiet saal. She went along the pathway it made and stood in the middle of the room. The voices from the schoolroom came softly, far away. She went to the centre window and pushing aside its heavy curtains saw for the first time that it had no second pane like the others, but led directly into a sort of summer-house, open in front and leading by a wooden stairway down to the garden plot. Up the railing of the stairway and over the entrance of the summer-house a creeping plant was putting out tiny leaves. It was in shadow, but the sun caught the sharply peaked gable of the summer-house and on the left, the tops of the high shrubs lining the pathway leading to the wooden door and the great balls finishing the high stone gateway shone yellow with sunlit lichen. She heard the schoolroom windows close and the girls clearing away the breakfast things and escaped upstairs singing.

Before she had finished her duties a summons came. Jimmie brought the message, panting as she reached the top of the stairs.

"Hurry up, Hendy!" she gasped. "You're one of the distinguished ones, my dear!"

"What do you mean?" Miriam began apprehensively as she turned to go. "Oh, Jimmie——" she tried to laugh ingratiatingly. "Do tell me what you mean?" Jimmie turned and raised a plump hand with a sharply-quirked little finger and a dangle of lace-edged handkerchief.

"You're a swell, my dear. You're in with the specials and the classic knot."

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to read—Gerty, or something—no idiots admitted. You're going it, Hendy. Ta-ta. Fly! Don't stick in the mud, old slowcoach."

"I'll come in a second," said Miriam, adjusting hairpins.

She was to read Goethe... with Fraulein Pfaff.... Fraulein knew she would be one of the few who would do for a Goethe reading. She reached the little room smiling with happiness.

"Here she is," was Fraulein's greeting. The little group—Ulrica, Minna and Solomon Martin were sitting about informally in the sunlit window space, Minna and Solomon had needlework—Ulrica was gazing out into the garden. Miriam sank into the remaining low-seated wicker chair and gave herself up. Fraulein began to read, as she did at prayers, slowly, almost below her breath, but so clearly that Miriam could distinguish each word and her face shone as she bent over her book. It was a poem in blank verse with long undulating lines. Miriam paid no heed to the sense. She heard nothing but the even swing, the slight rising and falling of the clear low tones. She felt once more the opening of the schoolroom window—she saw the little brown summer-house and the sun shining on the woodwork of its porch. Summer coming. Summer coming in Germany. She drew a long breath. The poem was telling of someone getting away out of a room, out of "narrow conversation" to a meadow-covered plain—of a white pathway winding through the green.

Minna put down her sewing and turned her kind blue eyes to Fraulein Pfaff's face.

Ulrica sat drooping, her head bent, her great eyes veiled, her hands entwined on her lap.... The little pathway led to a wood. The wide landscape disappeared. Fraulein's voice ceased.



3

She handed the book to Ulrica, indicating the place and Ulrica read. Her voice sounded a higher pitch than Fraulein's. It sounded out rich and full and liquid, and seemed to shake her slight body and echo against the walls of her face. It filled the room with a despairing ululation. Fraulein seemed by contrast to have been whispering piously in a corner.

Listening to the beseeching tones, hearing no words, Miriam wished that the eyes could be raised, when the reading ceased, to hers and that she could go and put her hands about the beautiful head, scarcely touching it and say, "It is all right. I will stay with you always."

She watched the little hand that was not engaged with the book and lay abandoned, outstretched, listless and shining on her knee. Solomon's needle snapped. She frowned and roused herself heavily to secure another from the basket on the floor at her side. Miriam, flashing hatred at her, caught Fraulein's fascinating gaze fixed on Ulrica; and saw it hastily turn to an indulgent smile as the eyes became conscious, moving for a moment without reaching her in the direction of her own low chair. A tap came at the door and Anna's flat tones, like a voluble mechanical doll, announced a postal official waiting in the hall for Ulrica—with a package. "Ein Packet... a-a-ach," wailed Ulrica, rising, her hands trembling, her great eyes radiant. Fraulein sent her off with Solomon to superintend the signing and payments and give help with the unpacking.

"The little heiress," she said devoutly, with her wide smile as she returned from the door.

"Oh..." said Miriam politely.

"Sie, nun, Miss Henderson," concluded Fraulein, handing her the book and indicating the passage Ulrica had just read. "Nun, Sie," she repeated brightly, and Minna drew her chair a little nearer making a small group.



4

"Schiller" she saw at the top of the page and the title of the poem "Der Spaziergang." Miriam laid the book on the end of her knee, and leaning over it, read nervously. Her tones reassured her. She noticed that she read very slowly, breaking up the rhythm into sentences—and authoritatively as if she were recounting an experience of her own. She knew at first that she was reading like a cultured person and that Fraulein would recognise this at once, she knew that the perfect assurance of her pronunciation would make it seem that she understood every word, but soon these feelings gave way to the sense half grasped of the serpentine path winding and mounting through a wood, of a glimpse of a distant valley, of flocks and villages, and of her unity with Fraulein and Minna seeing and feeling all these things together. She finished the passage—Fraulein quietly commended her reading and Minna said something about her earnestness.

"Miss Henderson is always a little earnest," said Fraulein affectionately.



5

"Are you dressed, Hendy?"

Miriam, who had sat up in her bath when the drumming came at the door, answered sleepily, "No, I shan't be a minute."

"Don't you want to see the diving?"

All Jimmie's fingers seemed to be playing exercises against the panels. Miriam wished she would restrain them and leave her alone. She did not in the least wish to see the diving.

"I shan't be a minute," she shouted crossly, and let her shoulders sink once more under the comforting water. It was the first warm water she had encountered since that night when Mademoiselle had carried the jugs upstairs. Her soap, so characterless in the chilly morning basin lathered freely in the warmth and was fragrant in the steamy air. When Jimmie's knocking came she was dreaming blissfully of baths with Harriett—the dissipated baths of the last six months between tea and dinner with a theatre or a dance ahead. Harriett, her hair strained tightly into a white crocheted net, her snub face shining through the thick steam, tubbing and jesting at the wide end of the huge porcelain bath, herself at the narrow end commanding the taps under the steam-dimmed beams of the red-globed gasjets... sponge-fights... and those wonderful summer bathings when they had come in from long tennis-playing in the sun, filled the bath with cold water and sat in the silence of broad daylight immersed to the neck, confronting each other.

Seeing no sign of anything she could recognise as a towel, she pulled at a huge drapery hanging like a counterpane in front of a coil of pipes extending half-way to the ceiling. The pipes were too hot to touch and the heavy drapery was more than warm and obviously meant for drying purposes. Sitting wrapped in its folds, dizzy and oppressed, she longed for the flourish of a rough towel and a window open at the top. She could see no ventilation of any kind in her white cell. By the time her heavy outdoor things were on she was faint with exhaustion, and hurried down the corridor towards the shouts and splashings echoing in the great, open, glass-roofed swimming-bath. She was just in time to see a figure in scarlet and white, standing out on the high gallery at the end of a projecting board which broke the little white balustrade, throw up its arms and leap out and flash—its joined hands pointed downwards towards the water, its white feet sweeping up like the tail of a swooping bird—cleave the green water and disappear. The huge bath was empty of bathers and smoothly rippling save where the flying body had cleaved it and left wavelets and bubbles. The girls—most of them in their outdoor things—were gathered in a little group near the marble steps leading down into the water farthest from where the diver had dropped, stirring and exclaiming. As Miriam was approaching them a red-capped head came cleanly up out of the water near the steps and she recognised the strong jaw and gleaming teeth of Gertrude. She neither spluttered nor shook her head. Her eyes were wide and smiling, and her raucous laugh rang out above the applause of the group of girls.

Miriam paused under the overhanging gallery. Her eyes went, incredulously, up to the spring-board. It seemed impossible... and all that distance above the water.... Her gaze was drawn to the flicking of the curtain of one of the little compartments lining the gallery.



6

"Hullo, Hendy, let me get into my cubicle." Gertrude stood before her dripping and smiling.

"However on earth did you do it?" said Miriam, gazing incredulously at the ruddy wet face.

Gertrude's smile broadened. "Go on," she said, shaking the drops from her chin, "it's all in the day's work."

In the hard clear light Miriam saw that the teeth that looked so gleaming and strong in the distance were slightly ribbed and fluted and had serrated edges. Large stoppings showed like shadows behind the thin shells of the upper front ones. Even Gertrude might be ill one day; but she would never be ill and sad and helpless. That was clear from the neat way she plunged in through her curtains....

Miriam's eyes went back to the row of little curtained recesses in the gallery. The drapery that had flapped was now half withdrawn, the light from the glass roof fell upon the top of a head flung back and shaking its mane of hair. The profile was invisible, but the sheeny hair rippled in thick gilded waves almost to the floor.... How hateful of her, thought Miriam.... How beautiful. I should be just the same if I had hair like that... that's Germany.... Lohengrin.... She stood adoring. "Stay and talk while I get on my togs," came Gertrude's voice from behind her curtains.

Miriam glanced towards the marble steps. The little group had disappeared. She turned helplessly towards Gertrude's curtains. She could not think of anything to say to her. She was filled with apprehension. "I wonder what we shall do to-morrow," she presently murmured.

"I don't," gasped Gertrude, towelling.

Miriam waited for the prophecy.

"Old Lahmann's back from Geneva," came the harsh panting voice.

"Pastor Lahmann?" repeated Miriam.

"None other, Madame."

"Have you seen him?" went on Miriam dimly, wishing that she might be released.

"Scots wha hae, no! But I saw Lily's frills."

The billows of gold hair in the gallery were being piled up by two little hands—white and plump like Eve's, but with quick clever irritating movements, and a thin sweet self-conscious voice began singing "Du, meine Seele." Miriam lost interest in the vision.... They were all the same. Men liked creatures like that. She could imagine that girl married.

"Lily and his wife were great friends," Gertrude was saying. "She's dead, you know."

"Is she," said Miriam emphatically.

"She used to be always coming when I first came over, Scots wha—blow—got a pin, Hendy? We shan't have his... thanks, you're a saint... his boys in the schoolroom any more now."

"Are those Pastor Lahmann's boys?" said Miriam, noticing Gertrude's hair was coarse, each hair a separate thread. "She's the wiry plucky kind. How she must despise me," said her mind.

"Well," said Gertrude, switching back her curtain to lace her boots. "Long may Lily beam. I like summer weather myself."

Miriam turned away. Gertrude half-dressed behind the curtains was too clever for her. She could not face her unveiled with vacant eyes.

"The summer is jolly, isn't it?" she said uneasily.

"You're right, my friend. Hullo! There's Emmchen looking for you. I expect the Germans have just finished their annual. They never come into the Schwimmbad, they're always too late. I should think you'd better toddle them home, Hendy—the darlings might catch cold."

"Don't we all go together?"

"We go as we are ready, from this establishment, just anyhow as long as we're not in ones or twos—Lily won't have twos, as I dare say you've observed. Be good, my che-hild," she said heartily, drawing on her second boot, "and you'll be happy—sehr sehr happy, I hope, Hendy."



7

"Thank you," laughed Miriam. Emma's hands were on her muff, stroking it eagerly. "Hendchen, Hendchen," she cooed in her consoling tones, "to house to house, I am so angry—hangry."

"Hungry."

"Hungry, yes, and Minna and Clara is ready. Kom!"

The child linked arms with her and pulled Miriam towards the corridor. Once out of sight under the gallery she slipped her arm round Miriam's waist. "Oh, Hendchen, my darling beautiful, you have so lovely teint after your badth—oh, I am zo hangry, oh Hendchen, I luff you zo, I am zo haypie, kiss me one small, small kiss."

"What a baby you are," said Miriam, half turning as the girl's warm lips brushed the angle of her jaw. "Yes, we'll go home, come along."

The corridor was almost airless. She longed to get out into the open. They found Minna at a table in the entrance hall her head propped on her hand, snoring gently. Clara sat near her with closed eyes.

As the little party of four making its way home, cleansed and hungry, united and happy, stood for a moment on a tree-planted island half-way across a wide open space, Minna with her eager smile said, gazing, "Oh, I would like a glass Bier." Miriam saw very distinctly the clear sunlight on the boles of the trees showing every ridge and shade of colour as it had done on the peaked summer-house porch in the morning. The girls closed in on her during the moment of disgust which postponed her response.

"Dear Hendchen! We are alone! Just we nice four! Just only one most little small glass! Just one! Kind best, Hendchen!" she heard. She pushed her way through the little group pretending to ignore their pleadings and to look for obstacles to their passage to the opposite curb. She felt her disgust was absurd and was asking herself why the girls should not have their beer. She would like to watch them, she knew; these little German Fraus-to-be serenely happy at their bier table on this bright afternoon. They closed in on her again. Emma in the gutter in front of her. She felt arms and hands, and the pleading voices besieged her again. Emma's upturned tragic face, her usually motionless lips a beseeching tunnel, her chin and throat moving to her ardent words made Miriam laugh. It was disgusting. "No, no," she said hastily, backing away from them to the end of the island. "Of course not. Come along. Don't be silly." The elder girls gave in. Emma kept up a little solo of reproach hanging on Miriam's arm. "Very strict. Cold English. No bier. I want to home. I have bier to home" until they were in sight of the high walls of Waldstrasse.