8

Pastor Lahmann gave a French lesson the next afternoon.

"Sur l'eau, si beau!"

This refrain threatening for the third time, three or four of the girls led by Bertha Martin, supplied it in a subdued singsong without waiting for Pastor Lahmann's slow voice. Miriam had scarcely attended to his discourse. He had begun in flat easy tones, describing his visit to Geneva, the snowclad mountains, the quiet lake, the spring flowers. His words brought her no vision and her mind wandered, half tethered. But when he began reading the poem she sank into the rhythm and turned towards him and fixed expectant eyes upon his face. His expression disturbed her. Why did he read with that half-smile? She felt sure that he felt they were "young ladies," "demoiselles," "jeunes filles." She wanted to tell him she was nothing of the kind and take the book from him and show him how to read. His eyes, soft and brown, were the eyes of a child. She noticed that the lower portion of his flat white cheeks looked broader than the upper without giving an effect of squareness of jaw. Then the rhythm took her again and with the second "sur l'eau, si beau," she saw a very blue lake and a little boat with lateen sails, and during the third verse began to forget the lifeless voice. As the murmured refrain came from the girls there was a slight movement in Fraulein's sofa-corner. Miriam did not turn her eyes from Pastor Lahmann's face to look at her, but half expected that at the end of the next verse her low clear devout tones would be heard joining in. Part way through the verse with a startling sweep of draperies against the leather covering of the sofa, Fraulein stood up and towered extraordinarily tall at Pastor Lahmann's right hand. Her eyes were wide. Miriam thought she had never seen anyone look so pale. She was speaking very quickly in German. Pastor Lahmann rose and faced her. Miriam had just grasped the fact that she was taking the French master to task for reading poetry to his pupils and heard Pastor Lahmann slowly and politely enquire of her whether she or he were conducting the lesson when the two voices broke out together. Fraulein's fiercely voluble and the Herr Pastor's voluble and mocking and polite. The two voices continued as he made his way, bowing gravely, down the far side of the table to the saal doors. Here he turned for a moment and his face shone black and white against the dark panelling. "Na, Kinder," crooned Fraulein gently, when he had disappeared, "a walk—a walk in the beautiful sunshine. Make ready quickly."

"My sainted uncle," laughed Bertha as they trooped down the basement stairs. "Oh—my stars!"

"Did you see her eyes?"

"Ja! Wuthend!"

"I wonder the poor little man wasn't burnt up."

"Hurry up, madshuns, we'll have a ripping walk. We'll see if we can go Tiergartenstrasse."

"Does this sort of thing often happen?" asked Miriam, finding herself bending over a boot-box at Gertrude's side.

Gertrude turned and winked at her. "Only sometimes."

"What an awful temper she must have," pursued Miriam.

Gertrude laughed.



9

Breakfast the next morning was a gay feast. The mood which had seized the girls at the lavishly decked tea-table awaiting them on their return from their momentous walk the day before, still held them. They all had come in feeling a little apprehensive, and Fraulein behind her tea-urn had met them with the fullest expansion of smiling indulgence Miriam had yet seen. After tea she had suggested an evening's entertainment and had permitted the English girls to act charades.

For Miriam it was an evening of pure delight. At the end of the first charade, when the girls were standing at a loss in the dimly-lit hall, she made a timid suggestion. It was enthusiastically welcomed and for the rest of the evening she was allowed to take the lead. She found herself making up scene after scene surrounded by eager faces. She wondered whether her raised voice, as she disposed of proffered suggestions—"no, that wouldn't be clear, this is the thing we've got to bring out"—could be heard by Fraulein sitting waiting with the Germans under the lowered lights in the saal, and she felt Fraulein's eye on her as she plunged from the hall into the dim schoolroom rapidly arranging effects in the open space in front of the long table which had been turned round and pushed alongside the windows.

Towards the end of the evening, dreaming alone in the schoolroom near the closed door of the little room whence the scenes were lit, she felt herself in a vast space. The ceilings and walls seemed to disappear. She wanted a big scene, something quiet and serious—quite different from the fussy little absurdities they had been rushing through all the evening. A statue... one of the Germans. "You think of something this time," she said, pushing the group of girls out into the hall.

Ulrica. She must manage to bring in Ulrica without giving her anything to do. Just to have her to look at. The height of darkened room above her rose to a sky. An animated discussion, led by Bertha Martin, was going on in the hall.

They had chosen "beehive." It would be a catch. Fraulein was always calling them her Bienenkorb and the girls would guess Bienenkorb and not discover that they were meant to say the English word.

"The old things can't possibly get it. It'll be a lark, just for the end," said Jimmie.

"No." Miriam announced radiantly. "They'd hate a sell. We'll have Romeo."

"That'll be awfully long. Four bits altogether, if they don't guess from the syllables," objected Solomon wearily.

Rapidly planning farcical scenes for the syllables she carried her tired troupe to a vague appreciation of the final tableau for Ulrica. Shrouding the last syllable beyond recognition, she sent a messenger to the audience through the hall door of the saal to beg for Ulrica.

Ulrica came, serenely wondering, her great eyes alight with her evening's enjoyment and was induced by Miriam.

"You've only to stand and look down-nothing else." To mount the schoolroom table in the dimness and standing with her hands on the back of a draped chair to gaze down at Romeo's upturned face.

Bertha Martin's pale profile, with her fair hair drawn back and tied at the nape of her neck and a loose cloak round her shoulders would, it was agreed, make the best presentation of a youth they could contrive, and Miriam arranged her, turning her upturned face so that the audience would catch its clear outline. But at the last minute, urged by Solomon's disapproval of the scene, Bertha withdrew. Miriam put on the cloak, lifted its collar to hide her hair and standing with her back to the audience flung up her hands towards Ulrica as the gas behind the little schoolroom door was turned slowly up. Standing motionless, gazing at the pale oval face bending gravely towards her from the gloom, she felt for a moment the radiance of stars above her and heard the rustle of leaves. Then the guessing voices broke from the saal. "Ach! ach! Wie schon! Romeo! That is beautifoll. Romeo! Who is our Romeo?" and Fraulein's smiling, singing, affectionate voice, "Who is Romeo! The rascal!"



10

Taking the top flight three stairs at a time Miriam reached the garret first and began running about the room at a quick trot with her fists closed, arms doubled and elbows back. The high garret looked wonderfully friendly and warm in the light of her single candle. It seemed full of approving voices. Perhaps one day she would go on the stage. Eve always said so.

People always liked her if she let herself go. She would let herself go more in future at Waldstrasse.

It was so jolly being at Waldstrasse.

"Qu'est-ce que vous avez?" appealed Mademoiselle, laughing at the door with open face. Miriam continued her trot. Mademoiselle put the candle down on the dressing-table and began to run, too, in little quick dancing steps, her wincey skirt bellowing out all round her. Their shadows bobbed and darted, swelling and shrinking on the plaster walls. Soon breathless, Mademoiselle sank down on the side of her bed, panting and volleying raillery and broken tinkles of laughter at Miriam standing goosestepping on the strip of matting with an open umbrella held high over her head. Recovering breath, she began to lament.... Miriam had not during the whole evening of dressing up seen the Martins' summer hats.... They were wonderful. Shutting her umbrella Miriam went to her dressing-table drawer.... It would be impossible, absolutely impossible... to imagine hats more beautiful.... Miriam sat on her own bed punctuating through a paper-covered comb.... Mademoiselle persisted... non, ecoutez—figurez-vous—the hats were of a pale straw... the colour of pepper... "Bee..." responded the comb on a short low wheeze. "And the trimmings—ah, of a charm that no one could describe."... "Beem!" squeaked the comb... "stalks of barley"... "beem-beem"... "of a perfect naturalness"... "and the flowers, poppies, of a beauty"—"bee-eeem—beeem"... "oh, oh, vraiment"—Mademoiselle buried her face in her pillow and put her fingers to her ears.

Miriam began playing very softly "The March of the Men of Harlech," and got to her feet and went marching gently round the room near the walls. Sitting up, Mademoiselle listened. Presently she rounded her eyes and pointed with one finger to the dim roof of the attic.

"Les toiles, d'araignees auront peur!" she whispered.

Miriam ceased playing and her eyes went up to the little window frames high in the wall, farthest away from the island made by their two little beds and the matting and toilet chests and scarcely visible in the flickering candle-light, and came back to Mademoiselle's face.

"Les toiles d'araignees," she breathed, straining her eyes to their utmost size. They gazed at each other. "Les toiles..."

Mademoiselle's laughter came first. They sat holding each other's eyes, shaken with laughter, until Mademoiselle said, sighing brokenly, "Et c'est la cloche qui va sonner immediatement." As they undressed, she went on talking—"the night comes the black night... we must sleep... we must sleep in peace... we are safe... we are protected... nous craignons Dieu, n'est ce pas?" Miriam was shocked to find her at her elbow, in her nightgown, speaking very gravely. She looked for a moment into the serious eyes challenging her own. The mouth was frugally compressed. "Oh yes," said Miriam stiffly.

They blew out the candle when the bell sounded and got into bed. Miriam imagined the Martins' regular features under their barley and poppy trimmed hats. She knew exactly the kind of English hat it would be. They were certainly not pretty hats—she wondered at Mademoiselle's French eyes being so impressed. She knew they must be hats with very narrow brims, the trimming coming nearly to the edge and Solomon's she felt sure inclined to be boat-shaped. Mademoiselle was talking about translated English books she had read. Miriam was glad of her thin voice piercing the darkness—she did not want to sleep. She loved the day that had gone; and the one that was coming. She saw the room again as it had been when Mademoiselle had looked up towards the toiles d'araignees. She had never thought of there being cobwebs up there. Now she saw them dangling in corners, high up near those mysterious windows unnoticed, looking down on her and Mademoiselle... Fraulein Pfaff's cobwebs. They were hers now, had been hers through cold dark nights.... Mademoiselle was asking her if she knew a most charming English book... "La Premiere Priere de Jessica"?

"Oh yes."

"Oh, the most beautiful book it would be possible to read." An indrawn breath, "Le Secret de Lady Audley."

"Yes," responded Miriam sleepily.



11

After the gay breakfast Miriam found herself alone in the schoolroom. listening inadvertently to a conversation going on apparently in Fraulein Pfaff's room beyond the little schoolroom. The voices were low, but she knew neither of them, nor could she distinguish words. The sound of the voices, boxed in, filling a little space shut off from the great empty hall made the house seem very still. The saal was empty, the girls were upstairs at their housework. Miriam restlessly rising early had done her share before breakfast. She took Harriett's last letter from her pocket and fumbled the disarranged leaves for the conclusion.

"We are sending you out two blouses. Don't you think you're lucky?" Miriam glanced out at the young chestnut leaves drooping in tight pleats from black twigs... "real grand proper blouses the first you've ever had, and a skirt to wear them with... won't you be within an inch of your life! Mother got them at Grigg's—one is squashed strawberry with a sort of little catherine-wheely design in black going over it but not too much, awfully smart; and the other is a sort of buffy; one zephyr, the other cotton, and the skirt is a sort of mixey pepper and salt with lumps in the weaving—you know how I mean, something like our prawn dresses only lighter and much more refined. The duffer is going to join the tennis-club—he was at the Pooles' dance. I was simply flabbergasted. He's a duffer."

The little German garden was disappearing from Miriam's eyes.... It was cruel, cruel that she was not going to wear her blouses at home, at the tennis-club... with Harriett.... It was all beginning again, after all—the spring and tennis and presently boating—things were going on... the smash had not come... why had she not stayed... just one more spring?... how silly and hurried she had been, and there at home in the garden lilac was quietly coming out and syringa and guelder roses and May and laburnum and... everything... and she had run away, proud of herself, despising them all, and had turned herself into Miss Henderson,... and no one would ever know who she was.... Perhaps the blouses would make a difference—it must be extraordinary to have blouses.... Slommucky... untidy and slommucky Lilla's mother had called them... and perhaps they would not fit her....

One of the voices rose to a sawing like the shrill whir of wood being cut by machinery.... A derisive laugh broke into the strange sound. It was Fraulein Pfaff's laughter and was followed by her voice thinner and shriller and higher than the other. Miriam listened. What could be going on?... both voices were almost screaming... together... one against the other... it was like mad women.... A door broke open on a shriek. Miriam bounded to the schoolroom door and opened it in time to see Anna lurch, shouting and screaming, part way down the basement stairs. She turned, leaning with her back against the wall, her eyes half-closed, sawing with fists in the direction of Fraulein, who stood laughing in her doorway. After one glance Miriam recoiled. They had not seen her.

"Ja," screamed Fraulein—"Sie konnen ihre paar Groschen haben!—Ihre paar Groschen! Ihre paar Groschen!" and then the two voices shrieked incoherently together until Fraulein's door slammed to and Anna's voice, shouting and swearing, died away towards the basement.



12

Miriam had crept back to the schoolroom window. She stood shivering, trying to forget the taunting words, and the cruel laughter. "You can have your ha'pence!" Poor Anna. Her poor wages. Her bony face...

Gertrude looked in.

"I say, Henderson, come on down and help me pack up lunch. We're all going to Hoddenheim for the day, the whole family, come on."

"For the day?"

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

Miriam stood looking at her laughing face and listening to her hoarse, whispering voice. Gertrude turned and went downstairs.

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

Upstairs the other girls were getting ready for the outing.



13

Starting out along the dusty field-girt roadway leading from the railway station to the little town of Hoddenheim through the hot sunshine, Miriam was already weary and fearful of the hours that lay ahead. They would bring tests; and opportunities for Fraulein to see all her incapability. Fraulein had thrown her thick gauze veil back over her large hat and was walking with short footsteps, quickly along the centre of the roadway throwing out exclamations of delight, calling to the girls in a singing voice to cast away the winter, to fill their lungs, fill their hearts with spring.

She rallied them to observation.

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

They passed a farmyard and stopped in a cluster at the gate.

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

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

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



14

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

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

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

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

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

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



15

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes—but not anything like this."

"Oh, Gertrude, that isn't true. We have."

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

"Tell us, my Millie," encouraged Fraulein, "say what you have in mind. Perhaps Gairtrud does not know the English towns and villages as well as you do."

The German girls attended eagerly.

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

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

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

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

"Oh, well, not the same," complained Millie, "but just as beautiful—more beautiful."

"Oh-ho, Millississimo."

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

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

"It isn't only that, Fraulein."

"Well?"

"Our country is older than Germany, besides—"

"It isn't, my blessed child."

"It is, Gertrude—our civilisation."

"Oh, civilisation."

"Englanderin, Englanderin," mocked Bertha.

"Englishwooman, very Englishwooman," echoed Elsa Speier.

"Well, I am Englanderin," said Millie, blushing crimson.

"Would you rather the street-boys called Englanderin after you or they didn't?"

"Oh, Jimmie," said Solomon impatiently.

"I wasn't asking you, Solomon."

"What means Solomon, with her 'Oh, Djimmee,' 'oh, Djimmee'?"

Solomon stirred heavily and looked up, flushing, her eyes avoiding the German arbours.

"Na, Solemn," laughed Fraulein Pfaff.

"Oh well, of course, Fraulein." Solomon sat in a crimson tide, bridling.

"Solomon likes not Germans."

"Go on, Elsa," rattled Bertha. "Germans are all right, me dear. I think it's rather a lark when they sing out Englanderin. I always want to yell 'Ya!'"

"Likewise 'Boo!' Come on, Mill, we're all waiting."

"Well, you know I don't like it, Jimmie."

"Why?"

"Because it makes me forget I'm in Germany and only remember I've got to go back."

"My hat, Mill, you're a queer mixture!"

"But, Millie, best child, it's just the very thing that makes you know you're here."

"It doesn't me, Gertrude."

"What is English towns looking like," said Elsa Speier.

No one seemed ready to take up this challenge.

"Like other towns I suppose," laughed Jimmie.

"Our Millie is glad to be in Germany," ruled Fraulein, rising. "She and I agree—I go most gladly to England. Gairtrud is neither English nor German. Perhaps she looks down upon us all."

"Of course I do," roared Gertrude, crossing her knees and tilting her chair. "What do you think? Was denkt ihr? I am a barbarian."

"A stranger."

"Still we of the wild are the better men."

"Ah. We end then with a quotation from our dear Schiller. Come, children."

"What's that from?" Miriam asked of Gertrude as they wandered up the garden.

"'The Rauber.' Magnificent thing. Play. We saw it last winter."

"I don't believe she really cares for it a bit," was Miriam's mental comment. Her heart was warm towards Millie, looking so outlandish with her English vicarage air in this little German beer-garden, with her strange love of Germany. Of course there wasn't anything a bit like Germany in England.... So silly to make comparisons. "Comparisons are odious." Perfectly true.



16

They made their way back to the street through a long low roomful of men drinking at little tables. Heavy clouds of smoke hung and moved in the air and mingled with the steady odour of German food, braten, onion and butter-sodden, beer and rich sour bread. A tinkling melody supported by rhythmic time-marking bass notes that seemed to thump the wooden floor came from a large glass-framed musical box. The dark rafters ran low, just above them. Faces glanced towards them as they all filed avertedly through the room. There were two or three guttural greetings—"N' Morgen, Meine Damen...." A large limber woman met them in the front room with their bill and stood talking to Fraulein as the girls straggled out into the sunshine. She was wearing a neat short-skirted crimson-and-brown check dress and a large blue apron and her haggard face was lit with radiantly kind strong dark eyes. Miriam envied her. She would like to pour out beer for those simple men and dispense their food... quietly and busily.... No need to speak to them, or be clever. They would like her care and would understand. "Meine Damen" hurt her. She was not Dame—Was Fraulein? Elsa? Millie was. Millie would condescend to these men without feeling uncomfortable. She could see Millie at village teas.... The girls looked very small as they stood in groups about the roadway.... Their clothes... their funny confidence... being so sure of themselves... what was it... what were they so sure of? There was nothing... and she was afraid of them all, even of Minna and Emma sometimes.

They trailed, Minna once more safely at her side, slowly on through the streets of the close-built peaked and gabled, carved and cobbled town. It came nearer to her than Barnes, nearer even than the old first house she had kissed the morning they came away—the flower-filled garden, the river, the woods.

They turned aside and up a little mounting street and filed into a churchyard. Fraulein tried and opened the great carved doorway of the church... incense.... They were going into a Roman Catholic church. How easy it was; just to walk in. Why had one never done it before? There was one at Roehampton. But it would be different in England.

"Pas convenable," she heard Mademoiselle say just behind her, "non, je connais ces gens-la, je vous promets... vraiment j'en ai peur...." Elsa responded with excited enquiries. They all trooped quietly in and the great doors closed behind them.

"Vraiment j'ai peur," whispered Mademoiselle.

Miriam saw a point of red light shining like a ruby far ahead in the gloom. She went round the church with Fraulein Pfaff and Minna, and was shown stations and chapels, altars hung with offerings, a dusty tinsel-decked, gaily-painted Madonna, an alcove railed off and fitted with an iron chandelier furnished with spikes—filled half-way up its height by a solid mass of waxen drippings—banners and paintings and artificial flowers, rich dark carvings. She looked at everything and spoke once or twice.

"This is the first time I have seen a Roman Catholic church," she said, "and 'how superstitious' when they came upon crutches and staves hanging behind a reredos"—and all the time she breathed the incense and felt the dimness around her and going up and up and brooding, high up.

Presently they were joined by a priest. He took them into a little room, unlocking a heavy door which clanged to after them, opening out behind one of the chapels. One side of the room was lined with an oaken cupboard.

"Je frissonne."

Miriam escaped Mademoiselle's neighbourhood and got into an angle between the frosted window and the plaster wall. The air was still and musty—the floor was of stone, the ceiling low and white. There was nothing in the room but the oaken cupboard. The priest was showing a cross so crusted with jewels that the mounting was invisible. Miriam saw it as he lifted it from its wrappings in the cupboard. It seemed familiar to her. She did not wish to see it more closely, to touch it. She stood as thing after thing was taken from the cupboard, waiting in her corner for the moment when they must leave. Now and again she stepped forward and appeared to look, smiled and murmured. Faint sounds from the town came up now and again.

The minutes were passing; soon they must go. She wanted to stay... more than she had ever wanted anything in her life she wanted to stay in this little musty room behind the quiet dim church in this little town.



17

At sunset they stood on a hill outside the town and looked across at it lying up its own hillside, its buildings peaking against the sky. They counted the rich green copper cupolas and sighed and exulted over the whole picture, the coloured sky, the coloured town, the shimmering of the trees.

Making their way along the outskirts of the town towards the station in the fading light they met a little troop of men and women coming quietly along the roadway. They were all dressed in black. They looked at the girls with strange mild eyes and filled Miriam with fear.

Presently the girls crossed a little high bridge over a stream, and from the crest of the bridge beyond a high-walled garden a terraced building came into sight. It was dotted with women dressed in black. One of the figures rose and waved a handkerchief. "Wave, children," said Fraulein's trembling voice, "wave"—and the girls collected in a little group on the crest of the bridge and waved with raised arms.

"Ghastly, isn't it?" said Gertrude, glancing at Miriam as they moved on. Miriam was cold with apprehension. "Are they mad?" she whispered.



18

For a week the whole of the housework and cooking was done by the girls under the superintendence of Gertrude, who seemed to be all over the house acting as forewoman to little gangs of workers. Miriam took but a small part in the work—Minna was paying long visits to the aurist every day—but she shared the depleted table and knew that the whole school was taking part in weathering the storm of Fraulein's ill-humour that had broken first upon Anna. She once caught a glimpse of Gertrude flushed and downcast, confronting Fraulein's reproachful voice upon the stairs; and one day in the basement she heard Ulrica tearfully refuse to clean her own boots and saw Fraulein stand before her bowing and smiling, and with the girls gathered round, herself brush and polish the slender boots.

She was glad to get away with Minna.

Her blouses came at the beginning of the week. She carried them upstairs. Her hands took them incredulously from their wrappages. The "squashed strawberry" lay at the top, soft warm clear madder-rose, covered with a black arabesque of tiny leaves and tendrils. It was compactly folded, showing only its turned-down collar, shoulders and breast. She laid it on her bed side by side with its buff companion and shook out the underlying skirt.... How sweet of them to send her the things... she felt tears in her eyes as she stood at her small looking-glass with the skirt against her body and the blouses held in turn above it... they both went perfectly with the light skirt.... She unfolded them and shook them out and held them up at arms' length by the shoulder seams. Her heart sank. They were not in the least like anything she had ever worn. They had no shape. They were square and the sleeves were like bags. She turned them about and remembered the shapeliness of the stockinette jerseys smocked and small and clinging that she had worn at school. If these were blouses then she would never be able to wear blouses.... "They're so flountery!" she said, frowning at them. She tried on the rose-coloured one. It startled her with its brightness.... "It's no good, it's no good," she said, as her hands fumbled for the fastenings. There was a hook at the neck; that was all. Frightful... she fastened it, and the collar set in a soft roll but came down in front to the base of her neck. The rest of the blouse stuck out all round her... "it's got no cut... they couldn't have looked at it."... She turned helplessly about, using her hand-glass, frowning and despairing. Presently she saw Harriett's quizzical eyes and laughed woefully, tweaking at the outstanding margin of the material. "It's all very well," she murmured angrily, "but it's all I've got."... She wished Sarah were there. Sarah would do something, alter it or something. She heard her encouraging voice saying, "You haven't half got it on yet. It'll be all right." She unfastened her black skirt, crammed the flapping margin within its band and put on the beaded black stuff belt.

The blouse bulged back and front shapelessly and seemed to be one with the shapeless sleeves which ended in hard loose bands riding untrimmed about her wrists with the movements of her hands.... "It's like a nightdress," she said wrathfully and dragged the fulnesses down all round under her skirt. It looked better so in front; but as she turned with raised hand-glass it came riding up at the side and back with the movement of her arm.



19

Minna was calling to her from the stairs. She went on to the landing to answer her and found her on the top flight dressed to go out.

"Ach!" she whispered as Miriam drew back. "Jetzt mag' ich sie leiden. Now I like you."

She ran back to her room. There was no time to change. She fixed a brooch in the collar to make it come a little higher at the join.

Going downstairs she saw Pastor Lahmann hanging up his hat in the hall. His childish eyes came up as her step sounded on the lower flight.

Miriam was amazed to see him standing there as though nothing had happened. She did not know that she was smiling at him until his face lit up with an answering smile.

"Bonjour, mademoiselle."

Miriam did not answer and he disappeared into the saal.

She went on downstairs listening to his voice, repeating his words over and over in her mind.

Jimmie was sweeping the basement floor with a duster tied round her hair.

"Hullo, Mother Bunch," she laughed.

"It is weird, isn't it? Not a bit the kind I meant to have."

"The blouse is all right, my dear, but it's all round your ears and you've got all the fulness in the wrong place. There.... Bless the woman, you've got no drawstring! And you must pin it at the back! And haven't you got a proper leather belt?"



20

Minna and Miriam ambled gently along together. Miriam had discarded her little fur pelerine and her double-breasted jacket bulged loosely over the thin fabric of her blouse. She breathed in the leaf-scented air and felt it playing over her breast and neck. She drew deep breaths as they went slowly along under the Waldstrasse lime-trees and looked up again and again at the leaves brilliant opaque green against white plaster with sharp black shadows behind them, or brilliant transparent green on the hard blue sky. She felt that the scent of them must be visible. Every breath she drew was like a long yawning sigh. She felt the easy expansion of her body under her heavy jacket.... "Perhaps I won't have any more fitted bodices," she mused and was back for a moment in the stale little sitting-room of the Barnes dressmaker. She remembered deeply breathing in the odour of fabrics and dust and dankness and cracking her newly fitted lining at the pinholes and saying, "It is too tight there"—crack-crack. "I can't go like that"...

"But you never want to go like that, my dear child," old Miss Ottridge had laughed, readjusting the pins; "just breathe in your ordinary way—there, see? That's right."

Perhaps Lilla's mother was right about blouses... perhaps they were "slommucky." She remembered phrases she had heard about people's figures... "falling abroad"... "the middle-aged sprawl"... that would come early to her as she was so old and worried... perhaps that was why one had to wear boned bodices... and never breathe in gulps of air like this?... It was as if all the worry were being taken out of her temples. She felt her eyes grow strong and clear; a coolness flowed through her—obstructed only where she felt the heavy pad of hair pinned to the back of her head, the line of her hat, the hot line of compression round her waist and the confinement of her inflexible boots.

They were approaching the Georgstrasse with its long-vistaed width and its shops and cafes and pedestrians. An officer in pale blue Prussian uniform passed by flashing a single hard preoccupied glance at each of them in turn. His eyes seemed to Miriam like opaque blue glass. She could not remember such eyes in England. They began to walk more quickly. Miriam listened abstractedly to Minna's anticipations of three days at a friend's house when she would visit her parents at the end of the week. Minna's parents, her far-away home on the outskirts of a little town, its garden, their little carriage, the spring, the beautiful country seemed unreal and her efforts to respond and be interested felt like a sort of treachery to her present bliss.... Everybody, even docile Minna, always seemed to want to talk about something else....

Suddenly she was aware that Minna was asking her whether, if it was decided that she should leave school at the end of the term, she, Miriam, would come and live with her.

Miriam beamed incredulously. Minna, crimson-faced, with her eyes on the pavement and hurrying along explained that she was alone at home, that she had never made friends—her mother always wanted her to make friends—but she could not—that her parents would be so delighted—that she, she wanted Miriam, "You, you are so different, so—reasonable—I could live with you."

Minna's garden, her secure country house, her rich parents, no worries, nothing particular to do, seemed for a moment to Miriam the solution and continuation of all the gay day. There would be the rest of the term—increasing spring and summer—Fraulein divested of all mystery and fear and then freedom—with Minna.

She glanced at Minna—the cheerful pink face and the pink bulb of nose came round to her and in an excited undertone she murmured something about the apotheker.

"I should love to come—simply love it," said Miriam enthusiastically, feeling that she would not entirely give up the idea yet. She would not shut off the offered refuge. It would be a plan to have in reserve. She had been daunted as Minna murmured by a picture of Minna and herself in that remote garden—she receiving confidences about the apotheker—no one else there—the Waldstrasse household blotted out—herself and Minna finding pretexts day after day to visit the chemist's in the little town.



21

Miriam almost ran home from seeing Minna into the three o'clock train. .. dear beautiful, beautiful Hanover... the sunlight blazed from the rain-sprinkled streets. Everything shone. Bright confident shops, happy German cafes moved quickly by as she fled along. Sympathetic eyes answered hers. She almost laughed once or twice when she met an eye and thought how funny she must look "tearing along" with her long, thick, black jacket bumping against her.... She would leave it off to-morrow and go out in a blouse and her long black lace scarf. She imagined Harriett at her side—Harriett's long scarf and longed to do the "crab walk" for a moment or the halfpenny dip, hippety-hop. She did them in her mind.

She heard the sound of her boot soles tapping the shining pavement as she hurried along... she would write a short note to her mother "a girl about my own age with very wealthy parents who wants a companion" and enclose a note for Eve or Harriett... Eve, "Imagine me in Pomerania, my dear"... and tell her about the coffee parties and the skating and the sleighing and Minna's German Christmasses....

She saw Minna's departing face leaning from the carriage window, its new gay boldness: "I shall no more when we are at home call you Miss Henderson."

When she got back to Waldstrasse she found Anna's successor newly arrived cleaning the neglected front doorstep. Her lean yellow face looked a vacant response to Miriam's enquiry for Fraulein Pfaff.

"Ist Fraulein zu Hause," she repeated. The girl shook her head vaguely.

How quiet the house seemed. The girls, after a morning spent in turning out the kitchen for the reception of the new magd were out for a long ramble, including Schocolade mit Schlagsahne until tea-time.

The empty house spread round her and towered above her as she took off her things in the basement and the schoolroom yawned bright and empty as she reached the upper hall. She hesitated by the door. There was no sound anywhere.... She would play... on the saal piano.

"I'm not a Lehrerin—I'm not—I'm—not," she hummed as she collected her music... she would bring her songs too.... "I'm going to Pom—pom—pom—Pom-erain—eeya."



22

"Pom—erain—eeya," she hummed, swinging herself round the great door into the saal. Pastor Lahmann was standing near one of the windows. The rush of her entry carried her to the middle of the room and he met her there smiling quietly. She stared easily and comfortably up into his great mild eyes, went into them as they remained quietly and gently there, receiving her. Presently he said in a soft low tone, "You are vairy happy, mademoiselle."

Miriam moved her eyes from his face and gazed out of the window into the little sunlit summer-house. The sense of the outline of his shoulders and his comforting black mannishness so near to her brought her almost to tears. Fiercely she fixed the sunlit summer-house, "Oh, I'm not," she said.

"Not? Is it possible?"

"I think life is perfectly appalling."

She moved awkwardly to a little chiffonier and put down her music on its marble top.

He came safely following her and stood near again.

"You do not like the life of the school?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"You are from the country, mademoiselle."

Miriam fumbled with her music.... Was she?

"One sees that at once. You come from the land."

Miriam glanced at his solid white profile as he stood with hands clasped, near her music, on the chiffonier. She noticed again that strange flatness of the lower part of the face.

"I, too, am from the land. I grew up on a farm. I love the land and think to return to it—to have my little strip when I am free—when my boys have done their schooling. I shall go back."

He turned towards her and Miriam smiled into the soft brown eyes and tried to think of something to say.

"My grandfather was a gentleman-fanner."

"Ah—that does not surprise me—but what a very English expression!"

"Is it?"

"Well, it sounds so to us. We Swiss are very democratic."

"I think I'm a radical."

Pastor Lahmann lifted his chin and laughed softly.

"You are a vairy ambitious young lady."

"Yes."

Pastor Lahmann laughed again.

"I, too, am ambitious. I have a good Swiss ambition."

Miriam smiled into the mild face.

"You have a beautiful English provairb which expresses my ambition."

Miriam looked, eagerly listening, into the brown eyes that came round to meet hers, smiling:

"A little land, well-tilled, A little wife, well-willed, Are great riches."

Miriam seemed to gaze long at a pallid, rounded man with smiling eyes. She saw a garden and fields, a firelit interior, a little woman smiling and busy and agreeable moving quickly about.... and Pastor Lahmann—presiding. It filled her with fury to be regarded as one of a world of little tame things to be summoned by little men to be well-willed wives. She must make him see that she did not even recognise such a thing as "a well-willed wife." She felt her gaze growing fixed and moved to withdraw it and herself.

"Why do you wear glasses, mademoiselle?"

The voice was full of sympathetic wistfulness.

"I have a severe myopic astigmatism," she announced, gathering up her music and feeling the words as little hammers on the newly seen, pallid, rounded face.

"Dear me... I wonder whether the glasses are really necessary.... May I look at them?... I know something of eye-work."

Miriam detached her tightly fitting pince-nez and having given them up stood with her music in hand anxiously watching. Half her vision gone with her glasses, she saw only a dim black-coated knowledge, near at hand, going perhaps to help her.

"You wear them always—for how long?"

"Poor child, poor child, and you must have passed through all your schooling with those lame, lame eyes... let me see the eyes... turn a little to the light... so."

Standing near and large he scrutinised her vague gaze.

"And sensitive to light, too. You were vairy, vairy blonde, even more blonde than you are now, as a child, mademoiselle?"

"Na guten Tag, Herr Pastor."

Fraulein Pfaff's smiling voice sounded from the little door.

Pastor Lahmann stepped back.

Miriam was pleased at the thought of being grouped with him in the eyes of Fraulein Pfaff. As she took her glasses from his outstretched hand she felt that Fraulein would recognise that they had established a kind of friendliness. She halted for a moment at the door, adjusting her glasses, amiably uncertain, feeling for something to say.

Pastor Lahmann was standing in the middle of the room examining his nails. Fraulein, at the window, was twitching a curtain into place. She turned and drove Miriam from the room with speechless waiting eyes.

The sunlight was streaming across the hall. It seemed gay and home-like. Pastor Lahmann had made her forget she was a governess. He had treated her as a girl. Fraulein's eyes had spoiled it. Fraulein was angry about it for some extraordinary reason.



CHAPTER VII



"Don't let her do it, Miss Henderson."

Fraulein Pfaff's words broke the silence accompanying the servant's progress from Gertrude whose soup-plate she had first seized, to Miriam more than half-way down the table.

Startled into observation Miriam saw the soup-spoon of her neighbour whisked, dripping, from its plate to the uppermost of Marie's pile and Emma shrinking back with a horrified face against Jimmie who was leaning forward entranced with watching.... The whole table was watching. Marie, having secured Emma's plate to the base of her pile clutched Miriam's spoon. Miriam moved sideways as the spoon swept up, saw the desperate hard, lean face bend towards her for a moment as her plate was seized, heard an exclamation of annoyance from Fraulein and little sounds from all round the table. Marie had passed on to Clara. Clara received her with plate and spoon held firmly together and motioned her before she would relinquish them, to place her load upon the shelf of the lift.

Miriam felt she was in disgrace with the whole table.... She sat, flaring, rapidly framing phrase after phrase for the lips of her judges ... "slow and awkward"... "never has her wits about her"....

"Don't let her do it, Miss Henderson...." Why should Fraulein fix upon her to teach her common servants? Struggling through her resentment was pride in the fact that she did not know how to handle soup-plates. Presently she sat refusing absolutely to accept the judgment silently assailing her on all hands.

"You are not very domesticated, Miss Henderson."

"No," responded Miriam quietly, in joy and fear.

Fraulein gave a short laugh.

Goaded, Miriam plunged forward.

"We were never even allowed in the kitchen at home."

"I see. You and your sisters were brought up like Countesses, wie Grafinnen," observed Fraulein Pfaff drily.

Miriam's whole body was on fire... "and your sisters and your sisters," echoed through and through her. Holding back her tears she looked full at Fraulein and met the brown eyes. She met them until they turned away and Fraulein broke into smiling generalities. Conversation was released all round the table. Emphatic undertones reached her from the English side. "Fool"... "simply idiotic."

"I've done it now," mused Miriam calmly, on the declining tide of her wrath.

Pretending to be occupied with those about her she sat examining the look Fraulein had given her... she hates me.... Perhaps she did from the first.... She did from the first.... I shall have to go... and suddenly, lately, she has grown worse....



CHAPTER VIII



1

Walking along a narrow muddy causeway by a little river overhung with willows, girls ahead of her in single file and girls in single file behind, Miriam drearily recognised that it was June. The month of roses, she thought, and looked out across the flat green fields. It was not easy to walk along the slippery pathway. On one side was the little grey river, on the other long wet grass repelling and depressing. Not far ahead was the roadway which led, she supposed to the farm where they were to drink new milk. She would have to walk with someone when they came to the road, and talk. She wondered whether this early morning walk would come, now, every day. Her heart sank at the thought. It had been too hot during the last few days for any going out at midday, and she had hoped that the strolling in the garden, sitting about under the chestnut tree and in the little wooden garden room off the saal had taken the place of walks for the summer.

She had got up reluctantly, at the surprise of the very early gonging. Mademoiselle had guessed it would be a "milk-walk." Pausing in the bright light of the top landing as Mademoiselle ran downstairs she had seen through the landing window the deep peak of a distant gable casting an unfamiliar shadow—a shadow sloping the wrong way, a morning shadow. She remembered the first time, the only time, she had noticed such a shadow—getting up very early one morning while Harriett and all the household were still asleep—and how she had stopped dressing and gazed at it as it stood there cool and quiet and alone across the mellow face of a neighbouring stone porch—had suddenly been glad that she was alone and had wondered why that shadowed porch-peak was more beautiful than all the summer things she knew and felt at that moment that nothing could touch or trouble her again.

She could not find anything of that feeling in the early day outside Hanover. She was hemmed in, and the fields were so sad she could not bear to look at them. The sun had disappeared since they came out. The sky was grey and low and it seemed warmer already than it had been in the midday sun during the last few days. One of the girls on ahead hummed the refrain of a student-song:—

"In der Ecke steht er Seinen Schnurbart dreht er Siehst du wohl, da steht er schon Der versoff'ne Schwiegersohn."

Miriam felt very near the end of endurance.

Elsa Speier who was just behind her, became her inevitable companion when they reached the roadway. A farmhouse appeared about a quarter of a mile away.

Miriam's sense of her duties closed in on her. Trying not to see Elsa's elaborate clothes and the profile in which she could find no meaning, no hope, no rest, she spoke to her.

"Do you like milk, Elsa?" she said cheerfully.

Elsa began swinging her lace-covered parasol.

"If I like milk?" she repeated presently, and flashed mocking eyes in Miriam's direction.

Despair touched Miriam's heart.

"Some people don't," she said.

Elsa hummed and swung her parasol.

"Why should I like milk?" she stated.

The muddy farmyard, lying back from the roadway and below it, was steamy and choking with odours. Miriam who had imagined a cool dairy and cold milk frothing in pans, felt a loathing as warmth came to her fingers from the glass she held. Most of the girls were busily sipping. She raised her glass once towards her lips, snuffed a warm reek, and turned away towards the edge of the group, to pour out the contents of her glass, unseen, upon the filth-sodden earth.



2

Passing languidly up through the house after breakfast, unable to decide to spend her Saturday morning as usual at a piano in one of the bedrooms, Miriam went, wondering in response to a quiet call from Fraulein Pfaff into the large room shared by the Bergmanns and Ulrica Hesse. Explaining that Clara was now to take possession of the half of Elsa Speier's room that had been left empty by Minna—"poor Minna now with her good parents seeking health in the Swiss mountains, schooldays at an end, at an end, at an end," she repeated mournfully, Fraulein explained that Clara's third of the large room would now be Miriam's.

Miriam stood incredulous at her side as she indicated a large empty chest of drawers, a white covered bed in a deep corner away from the window, a small drawer in the dressing-table and five pegs in a large French wardrobe. Emma was going very gravely about the room collecting her work-basket and things for raccommodage. She flung one ecstatic glance at Miriam as she went away with these.

"I shall hold you responsible here amongst these dear children, Miss Henderson," fluted Fraulein, quietly gathering up a few last things of Minna's collected on the bed, "our dear Ulrica and our little Emma," she smiled, passing out, leaving Miriam standing in the wonderful room.

"My goodney," she breathed, gathering gently clenched fists close to her person. She stood for a few moments; she felt like a visitor... embroidered toilet covers, polished furniture, gold and cream crockery, lace curtains, white beds, the large screen cutting off her third of the room... then she rushed headlong upstairs, a member of the downstairs landing, to collect her belongings.

On the landing just outside the door of the garret bedroom stood a huge wicker travelling basket; a clumsy umbrella with a large knobby handle, like a man's umbrella, lay on the top of it partly covering a large pair of goloshes.

She was tired and very warm by the time everything was arranged in her new quarters.

Taking a last look round she caught the eye of Eve's photograph gazing steadily at her from the chest of drawers.... It would be quite easy now that this had happened to write and tell them that the Pomerania plan had come to nothing.

Evidently Fraulein approved of her, after all.



3

In the schoolroom she found the raccommodage party gathered round the table. At its head sat Mademoiselle, her arms flung out upon the table and her face buried against them.

"Cheer up, Mademoiselle," said Jimmie as Miriam took an empty chair between Gertrude and the Martins.

Timidly meeting Gertrude's eye Miriam received her half-smile, watched her eyebrows flicker faintly up and the little despairing shrug she gave as she went on with her mending.

"Ah, mammazellchen c'est pas mal, ne soyez triste, mein Gott mammazellchen es ist aber nichts!" chided Emma consolingly from her place near the window.

"Oh! je ne veux pas, je ne veux pas," sobbed Mademoiselle.

No one spoke; Mademoiselle lay snuffling and shuddering. Solomon's scissors fell on to the floor. "Mais pourquoi pas, Mademoiselle?" she interrogated as she recovered them.

"Pourquoi, pourquoi!" choked Mademoiselle. Her suffused little face came up for a moment towards Solomon. She met Miriam's gaze as if she did not see her. "Vous me demandez pourquoi je ne veux pas partager ma chambre avec une femine mariee?" Her head sank again and her little grey form jerked sharply as she sobbed.

"Probably a widder, Mademoiselle," ventured Bertha Martin, "oon voove."

"Verve, Bertha," came Millie's correcting voice and Miriam's interest changed to excited thoughts of Fraulein—not hating her, and choosing Mademoiselle to sleep with the servant, a new servant—the things on the landing—Mademoiselle refusing to share a room with a married woman... she felt about round this idea as Millie's prim, clear voice went on... her eyes clutched at Mademoiselle, begging to understand... she gazed at the little down-flung head, fine little tendrils frilling along the edge of her hair, her little hard grey shape, all miserable and ashamed. It was dreadful. Miriam felt she could not bear it. She turned away. It was a strange new thought that anyone should object to being with a married woman... would she object? or Harriett? Not unless it were suggested to them.

Was there some special refinement in this French girl that none of them understood? Why should it be refined to object to share a room with a married woman? A cold shadow closed in on Miriam's mind.

"I don't care," said Millie almost quickly, with a crimson face. "It's a special occasion. I think Mademoiselle ought to complain. If I were in her place I should write home. It's not right. Fraulein has no right to make her sleep with a servant."

"Why can't the servant sleep in one of the back attics?" asked Solomon.

"Not furnished, my sweetheart," said Gertrude, "and you know Kinder you're all running on very fast about servants—the good Frau is our housekeeper."

"Will she have meals with us?"

"Gewiss Jimmie, meals."

"Mon Dieu, vous etes terribles, toutes!" came Mademoiselle's voice. It seemed to bite into the table. "Oh, eest grossiere!" She gathered herself up and escaped into the little schoolroom.

"Armes, armes, Momzell," wailed Ulrica gently gazing out of the window.

"Som one should go, go you, Henchen," urged Emma.

"Don't, for goodness' sake, Hendy," begged Jimmie, "not you, she's wild about you going downstairs," she whispered.

Miriam struggled with her gratification. "Oh go, som one; go you, Clara!"

"Better leave her alone," ruled Gertrude.

"We miss old Minna, don't we?" concluded Bertha.



4

The heat grew intense.

The air was more and more oppressive as the day went on.

Clara fainted suddenly just after dinner, and Fraulein, holding a little discourse on clothing and an enquiry into wardrobes, gave a general permission for the reduction of garments to the minimum and sent everyone to rest uncorseted until tea-time, promising a walk to the woods in the cool of the evening. There was a sense of adventure in the house. It was as if it were being besieged. It gave Miriam confidence to approach Fraulein for permission to rearrange her trunk in the basement. She let Fraulein understand that her removal was not complete, that there were things to do before she could be properly settled in her new room.

"Certainly, Miss Henderson, you are quite free," said Fraulein instantly as the girls trooped upstairs.

Miriam knew she wanted to avoid an afternoon shut up with Emma and Ulrica and she did not in the least want to lie down. It seemed to her a very extraordinary thing to do. It surprised and disturbed her. It suggested illness and weakness. She could not remember having lain down in the daytime. There had been that fortnight in the old room at home with Harriett... chicken-pox and new books coming and games, and Sarah reading the Song of Hiawatha and their being allowed to choose their pudding. She could not remember feeling ill. Had she ever felt ill?... Colds and bilious attacks....

She remembered with triumph a group of days of pain two years ago. She had forgotten.... Bewilderment and pain... her mother's constant presence... everything, the light everywhere, the leaves standing out along the tops of hedgerows as she drove with her mother, telling her of pain and she alone in the midst of it... for always... pride, long moments of deep pride.... Eve and Sarah congratulating her, Eve stupid and laughing... the new bearing of the servants... Lily Belton's horrible talks fading away to nothing.

Fraulein had left her and gone to her room. Every door and window on the ground floor stood wide excepting that leading to Fraulein's little double rooms. She wondered what the rooms were like and felt sorry for Fraulein, tall and gaunt, moving about in them alone, alone with her own dark eyes, curtains hanging motionless at the windows... was it really bad to tight-lace? The English girls, except Millie and Solomon all had small waists. She wished she knew. She placed her large hands round her waist. Drawing in her breath she could almost make them meet. It was e feel them pulling her arms from their sockets, dragging her shoulders down, throwing out her chest, to spray canful after canful through a great wide rose, sprinkling her ankles sometimes, and to grow so warm that she would not feel the heat. Bella Lyndon had never worn stays; playing rounders so splendidly, lying on the grass between the games with her arms under her head... simply disgusting, someone had said... who... a disgusted face... nearly all the girls detested Bella.

Going through the hall on her way down to the basement she heard the English voices sounding quietly out into the afternoon from the rooms above. Flat and tranquil they sounded, Bertha and Jimmie she heard, Gertrude's undertones, quiet words from Millie. She felt she would like a corner in the English room for the afternoon, a book and an occasional remark—"Mr. Barnes of New York"—she would not be able to read her three yellow books in the German bedroom. She felt at the moment glad to be robbed of them. It would be much better, of course. There was no sound from the German rooms. She pictured sleeping faces. It was cooler in the basement—but even there the air seemed stiff and dusty with the heat.

Why did the hanging garments remind her of All Saints' Church and Mr. Brough?... she must tell Harriett that in her letter... that day they suddenly decided to help in the church decorations... she remembered the smell of the soot on the holly as they had cut and hacked at it in the cold garden, and Harriett overturning the heavy wheelbarrow on the way to church, and how they had not laughed because they both felt solemn, and then there had just been the three Anwyl girls and Mrs. Anwyl and Mrs. Scarr and Mr. Brough in the church-room all being silly about Birdy Anwyl roasting chestnuts, and how silly and affected they were when a piece of holly stuck in her skirt.



5

Coming up the basement stairs in response to the tea-gong, Miriam thought there were visitors in the hall and hesitated; then there was Pastor Lahmann's profile disappearing towards the door and Fraulein patting and dismissing two of his boys. His face looked white and clear and firm and undisturbed, Miriam wanted to arrest him and ask him something—what he thought of the weather—he looked so different from her memory of him in the saal two Saturdays ago—two weeks—four classes she must have missed. Why? Why was she missing Pastor Lahmann's classes? How had it happened? Perhaps she would see him in class again. Perhaps next week....

The other visitors proved to be the Bergmanns in new dresses. Miriam gazed at Clara as she went down the schoolroom to her corner of the table. She looked like... a hostess. It seemed absurd to see her sit down to tea as a school-girl. The dress was a fine black muslin stamped all over with tiny fish-shaped patches of mauve. It was cut to the base of the neck and came to a point in front where the soft white ruching was fastened with a large cameo brooch. Clara's pallid worried face had grown more placid during the hot inactive days, and to-day her hard mouth looked patient and determined and responsible. She seemed quite independent of her surroundings. Miriam found herself again and again consulting her calm face. Her presence haunted Miriam throughout tea-time. Emma was sweet, pink and bright after her rest in a bright light brown muslin dress dotted with white spots....

Funny German dresses, thought Miriam, funny... and old. Her mind hovered and wondered over these German dresses—did she like them or not—something about them—she glanced at Elsa, sitting opposite in the dull faint electric blue with black lace sleeves she had worn since the warm weather set in. Even Ulrica, thin and straight now... like a pole... in a tight flat dress of saffron muslin sprigged with brown leaves, seemed to be included in something that made all these German dresses utterly different from anything the English girls could have worn. What was it? It was crowned by the Bergmanns' dresses. It had begun in a summer dress of Minna's, black with a tiny sky-blue spot and a heavy ruche round the hem. She thought she liked it. It seemed to set the full tide of summer round the table more than the things of the English girls—and yet the dresses were ugly—and the English girls' dresses were not that... they were nothing... plain cottons and zephyrs with lace tuckers—no ruches. It was something somehow in the ruches—the ruches and the little peaks of neck.

A faint scent of camphor came from the Martins across the way, sitting in their cool creased black-and-white check cotton dresses. They still kept to their hard white collars and cuffs. As tea went on Miriam found her eyes drawn back and back again to these newly unpacked camphor-scented dresses... and when conversation broke after moments of stillness... shadowy foliage... the still hot garden... the sunbaked wooden room beyond the sunny saal, the light pouring through three rooms and bright along the table... it was to the Martins' check dresses that she glanced.

It was intensely hot, but the strain had gone out of the day; the feeling of just bearing up against the heat and getting through the day had gone; they all sat round... which was which?... Miriam met eye after eye—how beautiful they all were looking out from faces and meeting hers—and her eyes came back unembarrassed to her cup, her solid butterbrot and the sunlit angle of the garden wall and the bit of tree just over Fraulein Pfaff's shoulder. She tried to meet Mademoiselle's eyes, she felt sure their eyes could meet. She wondered intensely what was in Elsa's mind behind her faint hard blue dress. She wanted to hear Mademoiselle's voice; Mademoiselle was almost invisible in her corner near the door, the new housekeeper was sitting at her side very upright and close to the table. Once or twice she felt Fraulein's look; she sustained it, and glowed happily under it without meeting it; she referred back contentedly to it after hearing herself laugh out once just as she would do at home; once or twice she forgot for a moment where she was. The way the light shone on the housekeeper's hair, bright brown and plastered flatly down on either side of her bright white-and-crimson face, and the curves of her chocolate and white striped cotton bodice, reminded her sharply of something she had seen once, something that had charmed her... it was in the hair against the hard white of the forehead and the flat broad cheeks with the hard, clear crimson colouring nearly covering them... something in the way she sat, standing out against the others.... Judy on her left hand with almost the same colouring looked small and gentle and refined.



6

Tea was over. Fraulein decided against a walk and they all trooped into the saal. No programme was suggested; they all sat about unoccupied. There was no centre; Fraulein Pfaff was one of them. The little group near her in the shady half of the sunlit summer-house was as quietly easy as those who sat far back in the saal. Miriam had got into a low chair near the saal doors whence she could see across the room through the summer-house window through the gap between the houses across the way to the far-off afternoon country. Its colours gleamed, a soft confusion of tones, under the heat-haze. For a while she sat with her eyes on Fraulein's thin profile, clean and cool and dry in the intense heat... "she must be looking out towards the lime-trees."... Ulrica sat drooped on a low chair near her knees... "sweet beautiful head"... the weight of her soft curved mouth seemed too much for the delicate angles of her face and it drooped faintly, breaking their sharp lines. Miriam wished all the world could see her.... Presently Ulrica raised her head, as Elsa and Clara broke into words and laughter near her, and her drooping lips flattened gently back into their place in the curve of her face. She gazed out through the doorway of the summer-house with her great despairing eyes... the housekeeper was rather like a Dutch doll... but that was not it.



7

The sun had set. Miriam had found a little thin volume of German poetry in her pocket. She sat fumbling the leaves. She felt the touch of her limp straightening hair upon her forehead. It did not matter. Twilight would soon come, and bed-time. But it must have been beginning to get like that at tea-time. Perhaps the weather would get even hotter. She must do something about her hair... if only she could wear it turned straight back.

There was a stirring in the room; beautiful forms rose and stood and spoke and moved about. Someone went to the door. It opened gently with a peaceful sound on to the quiet hall and footsteps ran upstairs. Two figures going out from the saal passed in front of the two still sitting quietly grouped in the light of the summer-house. They were challenged as they passed and turned soft profiles and stood talking. Behind the voices,—flutings, single notes, broken phrases, long undisturbed warblings came from the garden.

Clara was at the piano. Tall behind her stood Millie's gracious shapeless baby-form.

As Millie's voice climbing carefully up and down the even stages of Solveig's song reached the second verse, Miriam tried to separate the music from the words. The words were wrong. She half saw a fair woman with a great crown of plaited hair and very broad shoulders singing the song in the Hanover concert-room in Norwegian. She remembered the moment of taking her eyes away from the singer and the platform, and feeling the crowded room and the airlessness, and then the song going steadily on from note to note as she listened... no trills and no tune... saying something. It stood in the air. All the audience were saying it. And then the fair-haired woman had sung the second verse as though it was something about herself—tragically... tragic muse.... It was not her song, standing there in the velvet dress.... She stopped it from going on. There was nothing but the movement of the lace round her shoulders and chest, her expanded neck, quivering, and the pressure in her voice.... And then there had been Herr Bossenberger, hammering and shouting it out in the saal with Millie, and everything in the schoolroom, even the dust on the paper-rack, standing out clearer and clearer as he bellowed slowly along. And then she had got to know that everybody knew about it; it was a famous song. There were people singing it everywhere in German and French and English—a girl singing about her lover.... It was not that; even if people sang it like that, if a real girl had ever sung something like that, that was not what she meant... "the winter may pass"... yes, that was all right—and mountains with green slopes and narrow torrents—and a voice going strongly out and ceasing, and all the sky filled with the sound—and the song going on, walking along, thinking to itself.... She looked about as Millie's voice ceased trembling on the last high note. She hoped no one would hum the refrain. There was no one there who knew anything about it.... Judy? Judy knew, perhaps. Judy would never hum or sing anything. If she did, it would be terrible. She knew so much. Perhaps Judy knew everything. She was sitting on the low sill of the window behind the piano sewing steel beads on to a shot silk waistband held very close to her eyes. Minna could. Minna might be sitting in her plaid dress on the window-seat with her embroidery, her smooth hair polished with bay-rum humming Solveig's song.

The housekeeper brought in the milk and rolls and went away downstairs again. The cold milk was very refreshing but the room grew stifling as they all sat round near the little centre table with the French window nearly closed, shutting off the summer-house and garden. Everybody in turn seemed to be saying "Ik kenne meine Tasse sie ist svatz." Bertha had begun it, holding up her white glass of milk as she took it from the tray and exactly imitating the housekeeper's voice.

"Platt Deutsch spricht-sie, ja?" Clara had said. It seemed as if there were no more to be said about the housekeeper. At prayers when they were all saying "Vater unser," she heard Jimmie murmur, "Ik kenne meine Tasse."



8

Fraulein Pfaff came upstairs behind the girls and ordered silence as they went to their rooms. "Hear, all, children," she said in German in the quiet clear even tone with which she had just read prayers, "no one to speak to her neighbour, no one to whisper or bustle, nor to-night to brush her hair, but each to compose her mind and go quietly to her rest. Thus acting the so great heat shall injure none of us and peaceful sleep will come. Do you hear, children?"

Answering voices came from the bedrooms. She entered each room, shifting screens, opening each window for a few moments, leaving each door wide.

"Each her little corner," she said in Miriam's room, "fresh water set for the morning. The heavens are all round us, my little ones; have no fear."

Gently sighing and moaning Ulrica moved about in her corner. Emma dropped a slipper and muttered consolingly. Thankfully Miriam listened to Fraulein's short, deprecating footsteps pacing up and down the landing. She was safe from the dreadful challenge of conversation with her pupils. She felt hemmed in in the stifling room with the landing full of girls all round her. She wanted to push away her screen, push up the hot white ceiling. She wished she could be safely upstairs with Mademoiselle and the height of the candle-lit garret above her head. It could not possibly be hotter up there than in this stifling room with its draperies and furniture and gas.

Fraulein came in very soon and turned out the light with a formal good-night greeting. For a while after all the lights were out, she continued pacing up and down.

Across the landing someone began to sneeze rapidly sneeze after sneeze. "Ach, die Millie!" muttered Emma sleepily. For several minutes the sneezing went on. Sighs and impatient movements sounded here and there. "Ruhig, Kinder, ruhig. Millie shall soon sleep peacefully as all."



9

Miriam could not remember hearing Fraulein Pfaff go away when she woke in the darkness feeling unendurably oppressed. She flung her sheet aside and turned her pillow over and pushed her frilled sleeves to her elbows. How energetic I am, she thought and lay tranquil. There was not a sound. "I shall never be able to sleep down here, it's too awful," she murmured, and puffed and shifted her head on the pillow.

The Win-ter may—pass.... The win-ter... may pass. The winter may ... pass. The Academy... a picture in very bright colours... a woman sitting by the roadside with a shawl round her shoulders and a red skirt and red cheeks and bright green country behind her... people moving about on the shiny floor, someone just behind saying, "that is plein-air, these are the plein-airistes"—the woman in the picture was like the housekeeper....

A brilliant light flashed into the room... lightning—how strange the room looked—the screens had been moved—the walls and corners and little beds had looked like daylight. Someone was talking across the landing. Emma was awake. Another flash came and movements and cries. Emma screamed aloud, sitting up in bed. "Ach Gott! Clara! Clara!" she screamed. Cries came from the next room. A match was struck across the landing and voices sounded. Gertrude was in the room lighting the gas and Clara tugging down the blind. Emma was sitting with her hands pressed to her eyes, quickly gasping, "Ach Clara! Mein Gott! Ach Gott!" On Ulrica's bed nothing was visible but a mound of bedclothes. The whole landing was astir. Fraulein's voice called up urgently from below.



10

Miriam was the last to reach the schoolroom. The girls were drawn up on either side of the gaslit room—leaving the shuttered windows clear. She moved to take a chair at the end of the table in front of the saal doors. "Na!" said Fraulein sharply from the sofa-corner. "Not there! In full current!" Her voice shook. Miriam drew the chair to the end of the room of figures and sat down next to Solomon Martin. The wind rushed through the garden, the thunder rattled across the sky. "Oh, Clara! Fraulein! Nein!" gasped Emma. She was sitting opposite, between Clara and Jimmie with flushed face and eyes strained wide, twisting her linked hands against her knees. Jimmie patted her wrist, "It's all right, Emmchen," she muttered cheerfully. "Nein, Christina!" jerked Fraulein sharply. "I will not have that! To touch the flesh! You understand, all! That you know. All! Such immodesty!"

Miriam leaned forward and glanced. Fraulein was sitting very upright on the sofa in a shapeless black cloak with her hands clasped on her breast. Near her was Ulrica in her trailing white dressing-gown, her face pressed against the back of the sofa. In the far corner, the other side of Fraulein sat Gertrude in her grey ulster, her knees comfortably crossed, a quilted scarlet silk bedroom-slipper sticking out under the hem of her ulster.

The thunder crashed and pounded just above them. Everyone started and exclaimed. Emma flung her arms up across her face and sat back in her chair with a hooting cry. From the sofa came a hidden sobbing and gasping. "Ach Himmel! Ach Herr Jesus! Ach du lie-ber, lie-ber Gott!"

Miriam wished they could see the lightning and be prepared for the crashes. If she were alone she would watch for the flashes and put her fingers in her ears after each flash. The shock of the sound was intolerable to her. Once it had broken, she drank in the tumult joyfully. She sat tense and miserable longing to get to bed. She wondered whether it would be of any use to explain to Fraulein that they would be safer in their iron bedsteads than anywhere in the house. She tried to distract her thoughts.... Fancy Jimmie's name being Christina.... It suited her exactly sitting there in her little striped dressing-gown with its "toby" frill. How Harriett would scream if she could see them all sitting round. But she and Harriett had once lain very quiet and frightened in a storm by the sea—the thunder and lightning had come together and someone had looked in and said, "There won't be another like that, children." "My boots, I should hope not," Harriett had said.

For a while it seemed as though cannon balls were being thumped down and rumbled about on the floor above; then came another deafening crash. Jimmie laughed and put up her hand to her loosely-pinned top-knot as if to see whether it was still there. Outcries came from all over the room. After the first shock which had made her sit up sharply and draw herself convulsively together, Miriam found herself turning towards Solomon Martin who had also stirred and sat forward. Their eyes met full and consulted. Solomon's lips were compressed, her perspiring face was alight and determined. Miriam felt that she looked for long into those steady, oily half-smiling brown eyes. When they both relaxed she sat back, catching a sympathetic challenging flash from Gertrude. She drew a deep breath and felt proud and easy. Let it bang, she said to herself. I must think of doors suddenly banging—that never makes me jumpy—and she sat easily breathing.

Fraulein had said something in German in a panting voice, and Bertha had stood up and said, "I'll get the Bible, Fraulein."

"Ei! Bewahre! Bertha!" shouted Clara. "Stay only here! Stay only here!"

"Nein, Bertha, nein, mein Kind," moaned Fraulein sadly.

"It's really perfectly all right, Fraulein," said Bertha, getting quietly to the door.

As Fraulein opened the great book on her knees the rain hissed down into the garden.

"Gott sei Dank," she said, in a clear childlike voice. "It dot besser wenn da regnet?" enquired the housekeeper, looking round the room. She began vigorously wiping her face and neck with the skirt of the short cotton jacket she wore over her red petticoat.

Ulrica broke into steady weeping.

Fraulein read Psalms, ejaculating the short phrases as if they were petitions, with a pause between each. When the thunder came she raised her voice against it and read more rapidly.

As the storm began to abate a little party of English went to the kitchen and brought back milk and biscuits and jam.



11

"You will be asleep, Miss Hendershon." Miriam started at the sound of Ulrica's wailing whisper. Fraulein had only just gone. She had been sitting on the end of Emma's bed talking quietly of self-control and now Emma was asleep. Ulrica's corner had been perfectly quiet. Miriam had been lying listening to the steady swishing of the rain against the chestnut leaves.

"No; what is it?"

"Oh, most wonderful. Ich bin so empfindlich. I am so sensible."

"Sensitive?"

"Oh, it was most wonderful. Only hear and I shall tell you. This evening when the storm leave himself down it was exactly as my Konfirmation."

"Yes."

"It was as my Konfirmation. I think of that wonderful day, my white dress, the flower-bouquet and how I weeped always. Oh, it was all of most beautifullest. I am so sensible."

"Oh, yes," whispered Miriam.

"I weeped so! All day I have weeped! The all whole day! And my mozzer she console me I shall not weep. And I weep. Ach! It was of most beautifullest."

Miriam felt as if she were being robbed.... This was Ulrica. "You remember the Konfirmation, miss?"

"Oh, I remember."

"Have you weeped?"

"We say cry, not weep, except in poetry—weinen, to cry."

"Have you cry?"

"No, I didn't cry. But we mustn't talk. We must go to sleep. Good night."

"Gute Nacht. Ach, wie empfindlich bin ich, wie empfindlich...."

Miriam lay thinking of how she and Harriett on their confirmation morning had met the vicar in the Upper Richmond Road, having gone out, contrary to the desire expressed by him at his last preparation class, and how he had stopped and greeted them. She had tried to look vague and sad and to murmur something in spite of the bull's-eye in her cheek and had suddenly noticed as they stood grouped that Harriett's little sugar-loaf hat was askew and her brown eye underneath it was glaring fixedly at the vicar above the little knob in her cheek—and how they somehow got away and went, gently reeling and colliding, moaning and gasping down the road out of hearing.



12

Early next morning Judy came in to tell Emma and Ulrica to get up at once and come and help the housekeeper make the rooms tidy and prepare breakfast. Miriam lay motionless while Emma unfolded and arranged the screens. Then she gazed at the ceiling. It was pleasant to lie tranquil, open-eyed and unchallenged while others moved busily about. Two separate, sudden and resounding garglings almost startled her to thought, but she resisted, and presently she was alone in the strange room. She supposed it must be cooler after the storm. She felt strong and languid. She could feel the shape and weight of each limb; sounds came to her with perfect distinctness; the sounds downstairs and a low-voiced conversation across the landing, little faint marks that human beings were making on the great wide stillness, the stillness that brooded along her white ceiling and all round her and right out through the world; the faint scent of her soap-tablet reached her from the distant wash-stand. She felt that her short sleep must have been perfect, that it had carried her down and down into the heart of tranquillity where she still lay awake, and drinking as if at a source. Cool streams seemed to be flowing in her brain, through her heart, through every vein, her breath was like a live cool stream flowing through her.

She remembered that she had dreamed her favourite dream—floating through clouds and above treetops and villages. She had almost brushed the treetops, that had been the happiest moment, and had caught sight of a circular seat round the trunk of a large old tree and a group of white cottages.

She stirred; her hands seemed warm on her cool chest and the warmth of her body sent up a faint pleasant sense of personality. "It's me," she said, and smiled.

"Look here, you'd better get up, my dear," she murmured.

She wanted to have the whole world in and be reconciled. But she knew that if anyone came, she would contract and the expression of her face would change and they would hate her or be indifferent. She knew that if she even moved she would be changed.

"Get up."

She listened for a while to two voices across the landing. Millie's thick and plaintive with her hay-fever and Bertha's thin and cold and level and reassuring.... Bertha's voice was like the morning, clean and cool.... Then she got up and shut the door.

The sky was a vivid grey—against its dark background the tops of heavy masses of cloud were standing up just above the roof-line of the houses beyond the neighbouring gardens. The trees and the grey roofs and the faces of the houses were staringly bright. They were absolutely stiff, nothing was moving, there were no shadows.

A soft distant rumble of thunder came as she was dressing.... The storm was still going on... what an extraordinary time of day for thunder... the excitement was not over... they were still a besieged party... all staying at the Bienenkorb together.... How beautiful it sounded rumbling away over the country in the morning. When she had finished struggling with her long thick hair and put the hairpins into the solid coil on the top of her head and tied the stout doubled door-knocker plait at her neck, she put on the rose-madder blouse. The mirror was lower and twice as large as the one in the garret, larger than the one she had shared with Harriett. "How jolly I look," she thought, "jolly and big somehow. Mother would like me this morning. I am German-looking to-day, pinky red and yellow hair. But I haven't got a German expression and I don't smile like a German.... She smiled.... Silly, baby-face! Doll! Never mind! I look jolly. She looked gravely into her eyes.... There's something about my expression." Her face grew wistful. "It isn't vain to like it. It's something. It isn't me. It's something I am, somehow. Oh, do stay," she said, "do be like that always." She sighed and turned away saying in Harriett's voice, "Oo—crumbs! This is no place for me."



13

The sky seen from the summer-house was darker still. There were no massed clouds, nothing but a hard even dark copper-grey, and away through the gap the distant country was bright like a little painted scene. On the horizon the hard dark sky shut down. At intervals thunder rumbled evenly, far away. Miriam stood still in the middle of the summer-house floor. It was half-dark; the morning saal lay in a hot sultry twilight. The air in the summer-house was heavy and damp. She stood with her half-closed hands gathered against her. "How perfectly magnificent," she murmured, gazing out through the hard half-darkness to where the brightly coloured world lay in a strip and ended on the hard sky.

"Yes... yes," came a sad low voice at her side.

For a second Miriam did not turn. She drank in the quiet "yes, yes," the hard fixed scene seemed to move. Who loved it too, the dark sky and the storm? Then she focussed her companion who was standing a little behind her, and gazed at Fraulein; she hardly saw her, she seemed still to see the outdoor picture. Fraulein made a movement towards her; and then she saw for a moment the strange grave young look in her eyes. Fraulein had looked at her in that moment as an equal. It was as if they had embraced each other.

Then Fraulein said sadly, "You like the storm-weather, Miss Henderson."

"Yes."

Fraulein sighed, looking out across the country. "We are in the hollow of His Hand," she murmured. "Come to your breakfast, my child," she chided, smiling.



14

There was no church. Late in the afternoon when the sky lifted they all went to the woods in their summer dresses and hats. They had permission to carry their gloves and Elsa Speier's parasol and lace scarf hung from her wrist. The sky was growing higher and lighter, but there was no sun. They entered the dark woods by a little well-swept pathway and for a while there was a strip of sky above their heads; but presently the trees grew tall and dense, the sky was shut out and their footsteps and voices began to echo about them as they straggled along, grouping and regrouping as the pathway widened and narrowed, gathering their skirts clear of the wet undergrowth. They crossed a roadway and two carriage loads of men and women talking and laughing and shouting with shining red faces passed swiftly by, one close behind the other. Beyond the roadway the great trees towered up in a sort of twilight. There were no flowers here, but bright fungi shone here and there about the roots of the trees and they all stood for a moment to listen to the tinkling of a little stream.

Pathways led away in all directions. It was growing lighter. There were faint chequers of light and shade about them as they walked. The forest was growing golden all round them, lifting and opening, gold and green, clearer and clearer. There were bright jewelled patches in amongst the trees; the boles of the trees shone out sharp grey and silver and flaked with sharp green leaves away and away until they melted into a mist of leafage. Singing sounded suddenly away in the wood; a sudden strong shouting of men's voices singing together like one voice in four parts, four shouts in one sound.

"O Sonnenschein! O Sonnenschein!"

Between the two exclamatory shouts, the echo rang through the woods and the listening girls heard the sharp drip, drip and murmur of the little stream near by, then the voices swung on into the song, strongly interwoven, swelling and lifting; dropping to a soft even staccato and swelling strongly out again.

"Wie scheinst du mir in's Herz hinein Weck'st drinnen lauter Liebeslust, Dass mir so enge wird die Brust O Sonnenschein! O Sonn—-enschein!"

When the voices ceased there was a faint distant sound of crackling twigs and the echo of talking and laughter.

"Ach Studenten!"

"Irgend ein Mannergesangverein."

"I think we ought to get back, Gertrude. Fraulein said only an hour altogether and it's church tonight."

"We'll get back, Millenium mine—never fear."

As they began to retrace their steps Clara softly sang the last line of the song, the highest note ringing, faint and clear, away into the wood.

"Ho-lah!" A mighty answering shout rang through the wood. It was like a word of command.

"Oh, come along home; Clara, what are you dreaming of?"

"Taisez-vous, taisez-vous, Clarah! C'est honteux mon Dieu!"



CHAPTER IX



1

The next afternoon they all drove in a high wide brake with an awning, five miles out into the country to have tea at a forest-inn. The inn appeared at last standing back from the wide roadway along which they had come, creamy-white and grey-roofed, long and low and with overhanging eaves, close against the forest. They pulled up and Pastor Lahmann dropped the steps and got out. Miriam who was sitting next to the door felt that the long sitting in two rows confronted in the hard afternoon light, bumped and shaken and teased with the crunchings and slitherings of the wheels the grinding and squeaking of the brake, had made them all enemies. She had sat tense and averted, seeing the general greenery, feeling that the cool flowing air might be great happiness, conscious of each form and each voice, of the insincerity of the exclamations and the babble of conversation that struggled above the noise of their going, half seeing Pastor Lahmann opposite to her, a little insincerely smiling man in an alpaca suit and a soft felt hat. She got down the steps without his assistance. With whom should she take refuge?... no Minna. There were long tables and little round tables standing about under the trees in front of the inn. Some students in Polytechnik uniform were leaning out of an upper window.

The landlord came out. Everyone was out of the brake and standing about. Tall Fraulein was taking short padding steps towards the inn-door. A strong grip came on Miriam's arm and she was propelled rapidly along towards the farther greenery. Gertrude was talking to her in loud rallying tones, asking questions in German and answering them herself. Miriam glanced round at her face. It was crimson and quivering with laughter. The strong laughter and her strong features seemed to hide the peculiar roughness of her skin and coarseness of her hair. They made the round of one of the long tables. When they were on the far side Gertrude said, "I think you'll see a friend of mine to-day, Henderson."

"D'you mean Erica's brother?"

"There's his chum anyhow at yondah window."

"Oh, I say."

"Hah! Spree, eh? Happy thought of Lily's to bring us here."

Miriam pondered, distressed. "You must tell me which it is if we see him."

Their party was taking possession of a long table near by. Returning to her voluble talk, Gertrude steered Miriam towards them.

As they settled round the table under the quiet trees the first part of the waltz movement of Weber's "Invitation" sounded out through the upper window. The brilliant tuneless passages bounding singly up the piano, flowing down entwined, were shaped by an iron rhythm.

Everyone stirred. Smiles broke. Fraulein lifted her head until her chin was high, smiled slowly until the fullest width was reached and made a little chiding sound in her throat.

Pastor Lahmann laughed with raised eyebrows. "Ah! la valse... les etudiants."

The window was empty. The assault settled into a gently-leaping, heavily-thudding waltz.

As the waiter finished clattering down a circle of cups and saucers in front of Fraulein, the unseen iron hands dropped tenderly into the central melody of the waltz. The notes no longer bounded and leaped but went dreaming along in an even slow swinging movement.

It seemed to Miriam that the sound of a far-off sea was in them, and the wind and the movement of distant trees and the shedding and pouring of faraway moonlight. One by one, delicately and quietly the young men's voices dropped in, and the sea and the wind and the trees and the pouring moonlight came near.

When the music ceased Miriam hoped she had not been gazing at the window. It frightened and disgusted her to see that all the girls seemed to be sitting up and... being bright... affected. She could hardly believe it. She flushed with shame.... Fast, horrid... perfect strangers... it was terrible... it spoilt everything. Sitting up like that and grimacing.... It was different for Gertrude. How happy Gertrude must be. She was sitting with her elbows on the table laughing out across the table about something.... Millie was not being horrid. She looked just as usual, pudgy and babyish and surprised and half resentful... it was her eyebrows. Miriam began looking at eyebrows.