Pointed Roofs · Chapter 3 (3/5)

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

A huge Bible appeared on a table in front of Fräulein’s high-backed chair. Miriam found herself ranged with the girls, sitting in an attentive hush. There was a quiet, slow turning of pages, and then a long indrawn sigh and Fräulein’s clear, low, even voice, very gentle, not caustic now but with something childlike about it, “Und da kamen die Apostel zu Ihm.⁠ ⁠…” Miriam had a moment of revolt. She would not sit there and let a woman read the Bible at her⁠ ⁠… and in that “smarmy” way.⁠ ⁠… In spirit she rose and marched out of the room. As the English pupil-teacher bound to suffer all things or go home, she sat on. Presently her ear was charmed by Fräulein’s slow clear enunciation, her pure unaspirated North German. It seemed to suit the narrative⁠—and the narrative was new, vivid and real in this new tongue. She saw presently the little group of figures talking by the lake and was sorry when Fräulein’s voice ceased.

Solomon Martin was at the piano. Someone handed Miriam a shabby little paperbacked hymnbook. She fluttered the leaves. All the hymns appeared to have a little short-lined verse, under each ordinary verse, in small print. It was in English⁠—she read. She fumbled for the title page and then her cheeks flamed with shame, “Moody and Sankey.” She was incredulous, but there it was, clearly enough. What was such a thing doing here?⁠ ⁠… Finishing school for the daughters of gentlemen.⁠ ⁠… She had never had such a thing in her hands before.⁠ ⁠… Fräulein could not know.⁠ ⁠… She glanced at her, but Fräulein’s cavernous mouth was serenely open and the voices of the girls sang heartily, “Whenhy‑cometh. Whenhy‑cometh, to make-up his jewels⁠—” These girls, Germany, that piano.⁠ ⁠… What did the English girls think? Had anyone said anything? Were they chapel? Fearfully, she told them over. No. Judy might be, and the Martins perhaps, but not Gertrude, nor Jimmie, nor Millie. How did it happen? What was the German Church? Luther⁠—Lutheran.

She longed for the end.

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

The girls were getting on to their knees.

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

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

Fräulein’s calm voice came almost in a whisper, “Vater unser⁠ ⁠… der Du bist im Himmel,” and the murmuring voices of the girls followed her.

Miriam went to bed content, wrapped in music. The theme of Clara’s solo recurred again and again; and every time it brought something of the wonderful light⁠—the sense of going forward and forward through space. She fell asleep somewhere outside the world. No sooner was she asleep than a voice was saying, “Bonjour, Meece,” and her eyes opened on daylight and Mademoiselle’s little night-gowned form minuetting towards her down the single strip of matting. Her hair, hanging in short ringlets when released, fell forward round her neck as she bowed⁠—the slightest dainty inclination, from side to side against the swaying of her dance. She was smiling her down-glancing, little sprite smile. Miriam loved her.⁠ ⁠…

A great plaque of sunlight lay across the breakfast table. Miriam was too happy to trouble about her imminent trial. She reflected that it was quite possible today and tomorrow would be free. None of the visiting masters came, except, sometimes, Herr Bossenberger for music lessons⁠—that much she had learned from Mademoiselle. And, after all, the class she had so dreaded had dwindled to just these four girls, little Emma and the three grown-up girls. They probably knew all the rules and beginnings. It would be just reading and so on. It would not be so terrible⁠—four sensible girls; and besides they had accepted her. It did not seem anything extraordinary to them that she should teach them; and they did not dislike her. Of that she felt sure. She could not say this for even one of the English girls. But the German girls did not dislike her. She felt at ease sitting amongst them and was glad she was there and not at the English end of the table. Down here, hemmed in by the Bergmanns with Emma’s little form, her sounds, movements and warmth, her little quiet friendliness planted between herself and the English, with the apparently unobservant Minna and Elsa across the way she felt safe. She felt fairly sure those German eyes did not criticise her. Perhaps, she suggested to herself, they thought a good deal of English people in general; and then they were in the minority, only four of them; it was evidently a school for English girls as much as anything⁠ ⁠… strange⁠—what an adventure for all those English girls⁠—to be just boarders⁠—Miriam wondered how she would feel sitting there as an English boarder among the Martins and Gertrude, Millie, Jimmie and Judy? It would mean being friendly with them. Finally she ensconced herself amongst her Germans, feeling additionally secure.⁠ ⁠… Fräulein had spent many years in England. Perhaps that explained the breakfast of oatmeal porridge⁠—piled plates of thick stirabout thickly sprinkled with pale, very sweet powdery brown sugar⁠—and the eggs to follow with rolls and butter.

Miriam wondered how Fräulein felt towards the English girls.

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

When breakfast was over and the girls were clearing the table, Fräulein went to one of the great windows and stood for a moment with her hands on the hasp of the innermost of the double frames. “Balde, balde,” Miriam heard her murmur, “werden wir öffnen können.” Soon, soon we may open. Obviously then they had had the windows shut all the winter. Miriam, standing in the corner near the companion window, wondering what she was supposed to do and watching the girls with an air⁠—as nearly as she could manage⁠—of indulgent condescension⁠—saw, without turning, the figure at the window, gracefully tall, with a curious dignified pannierlike effect about the skirt that swept from the small tightly-fitting pointed bodice, reminding her of illustrations of heroines of serials in old numbers of the Girls’ Own Paper. The dress was of dark blue velvet⁠—very much rubbed and faded. Miriam liked the effect, liked something about the clear profile, the sallow, hollow cheeks, the same heavy bonyness that Anna the servant had, but finer and redeemed by the wide eye that was so strange. She glanced fearfully, at its unconsciousness, and tried to find words for the quick youthfulness of those steady eyes.

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

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

“Ah‑ho! Là-là-Boum-Bong!” came Gertrude’s great voice from the door.

“Taisez-vous, taisez-vous, Jair-trude,” rebuked Mademoiselle.

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

“Na⁠—Miss Henderson?”

It was Fräulein’s voice from within the little room. Minna was holding the door open.

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

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

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

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

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

“D’ja, d’ja,” she responded, “na, ich meine, yace, yace we read⁠—so sweet and beautiful book⁠—not?”

“Oh,” said Miriam, “yes⁠ ⁠…” and then eagerly, “you all like it, do you?”

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

Miriam tested their reading. The class had begun. Nothing had happened. It was all right. They each, dutifully and with extreme carefulness read a short passage. Miriam sat blissfully back. It was incredible. The class was going on. The chestnut tree budded approval from the garden. She gravely corrected their accents. The girls were respectful. They appeared to be interested. They vied with each other to get exact sounds; and they presently delighted Miriam by telling her they could understand her English much better than that of her predecessor. “So cleare, so cleare,” they chimed, “Voonderfoll.” And then they all five seemed to be talking at once. The little room was full of broken English, of Miriam’s interpolated corrections. It was going⁠—succeeding. This was her class. She hoped Fräulein was listening outside. She probably was. Heads of foreign schools did. She remembered Madame Beck in Villette. But if she was not, she hoped they would tell her about being able to understand the new English teacher so well. “Oh, I am haypie,” Emma was saying, with adoring eyes on Miriam and her two arms outflung on the table. Miriam recoiled. This would not do⁠—they must not all talk at once and go on like this. Minna’s whole face was aflame. She sat up stiffly⁠—adjusted her pince-nez⁠—and desperately ordered the reading to begin again⁠—at Minna. They all subsided and Minna’s careful husky voice came from her still blissfully-smiling face. The others sat back and attended. Miriam watched Minna judicially, and hoped she looked like a teacher. She knew her pince-nez disguised her and none of these girls knew she was only seventeen and a half. “Sorrowg,” Minna was saying, hesitating. Miriam had not heard the preceding word. “Once more the whole sentence,” she said, with quiet gravity, and then as Minna reached the word “thorough” she corrected and spent five minutes showing her how to get over the redoubtable th. They all experimented and exclaimed. They had never been shown that it was just a matter of getting the tongue between the teeth. Miriam herself had only just discovered it. She speculated as to how long it would take for her to deliver them up to Fräulein Pfaff with this notorious stumbling block removed. She was astonished herself at the mechanical simplicity of the cure. How stupid people must be not to discover these things. Minna’s voice went on. She would let her read a page. She began to wonder rather blankly what she was to do to fill up the hour after they had all read a page. She had just reached the conclusion that they must do some sort of writing when Fräulein Pfaff came, and still affable and smiling had ushered the girls to their mending and sent Miriam off to the Saal.

As she flew upstairs for her music, saying, “I’m all right. I can do it all right,” she was half-conscious that her provisional success with her class had very little to do with her bounding joy. That success had not so much given her anything to be glad about⁠—it had rather removed an obstacle of gladness which was waiting to break forth. She was going to stay on. That was the point. She would stay in this wonderful place.⁠ ⁠… She came singing down through the quiet house⁠—the sunlight poured from bedroom windows through open doors. She reached the quiet Saal. Here stood the great piano, its keyboard open under the light of the French window opposite the door through which she came. Behind the great closed swing doors the girls were talking over their raccommodage. Miriam paid no attention to them. She would ignore them all. She did not even need to try to ignore them. She felt strong and independent. She would play, to herself. She would play something she knew perfectly, a Grieg lyric or a movement from a Beethoven sonata⁠ ⁠… on this gorgeous piano⁠ ⁠… and let herself go, and listen. That was music⁠ ⁠… not playing things, but listening to Beethoven.⁠ ⁠… It must be Beethoven⁠ ⁠… Grieg was different⁠ ⁠… acquired⁠ ⁠… like those strange green figs Pater had brought from Tarring⁠ ⁠… Beethoven had always been real.

It was all growing clearer and clearer.⁠ ⁠… She chose the first part of the first movement of the Sonata Pathétique. That she knew she could play faultlessly. It was the last thing she had learned, and she had never grown weary of practising slowly through its long bars of chords. She had played it at her last music lesson⁠ ⁠… dear old Stroodie walking up and down the long drilling room.⁠ ⁠… “Steady the bass”; “grip the chords,” then standing at her side and saying in the thin light sneery part of his voice, “You can⁠ ⁠… you’ve got hands like umbrellas”⁠ ⁠… and showing her how easily she could stretch two notes beyond his own span. And then marching away as she played and crying out to her standing under the high windows at the far end of the room, “Let it go! Let it go!”

And she had almost forgotten her wretched self, almost heard the music.⁠ ⁠…