Pointed Roofs · Chapter 5 (1/3)

V

During those early days Miriam realised that school routine, as she knew it⁠—the planned days⁠—the regular unvarying succession of lessons and preparations, had no place in this new world. Even the masters’ lessons, coming in from outside and making a kind of framework of appointments over the otherwise fortuitously occupied days, were, she soon found, not always securely calculable. Herr Kapellmeister Bossenberger would be heard booming and intoning in the hall unexpectedly at all hours. He could be heard all over the house. Miriam had never seen him, but she noticed that great haste was always made to get a pupil to the Saal and that he taught impatiently. He shouted and corrected and mimicked. Only Millie’s singing, apparently, he left untouched. You could hear her lilting away through her little high songs as serenely as she did at Vorspielen.

Miriam was at once sure that he found his task of teaching these girls an extremely tiresome one.

Probably most teachers found teaching tiresome. But there was something peculiar and new to her in Herr Bossenberger’s attitude. She tried to account for it⁠ ⁠… German men despised women. Why did they teach them anything at all?

The same impression, the sense of a half-impatient, half-exasperated tuition came to her from the lectures of Herr Winter and Herr Schraub.

Herr Winter, a thin tall withered-looking man with shabby hair and bony hands whose veins stood up in knots, drummed on the table as he taught botany and geography. The girls sat round bookless and politely attentive and seemed, the Germans at least, to remember all the facts for which he appealed during the last few minutes of his hour. Miriam could never recall anything but his weary withered face.

Herr Schraub, the teacher of history, was, she felt, almost openly contemptuous of his class. He would begin lecturing, almost before he was inside the door. He taught from a book, sitting with downcast eyes, his round red mass of face⁠—expressionless save for the bristling spikes of his tiny straw-coloured moustache and the rapid movements of his tight rounded little lips⁠—persistently averted from his pupils. For the last few minutes of his time he would, ironically, his eyes fixed ahead of him at a point on the table, snap questions⁠—indicating his aim with a tapping finger, going round the table like a dealer at cards. Surely the girls must detest him.⁠ ⁠… The Germans made no modification of their polite attentiveness. Amongst the English only Gertrude and the Martins found any answers for him. Miriam, proud of sixth-form history essays and the full marks she had generally claimed for them, had no memory for facts and dates; but she made up her mind that were she ever so prepared with a correct reply, nothing should drag from her any response to these military tappings. Fräulein presided over these lectures from the corner of the sofa out of range of the eye of the teacher and horrified Miriam by voicelessly prompting the girls whenever she could. There was no kind of preparation for these lessons.

Miriam mused over the difference between the bearing of these men and that of the masters she remembered and tried to find words. What was it? Had her masters been more⁠—respectful than these Germans were? She felt they had. But it was not only that. She recalled the men she remembered teaching week by week through all the years she had known them⁠ ⁠… the little bolster-like literature master, an albino, a friend of Browning, reading, reading to them as if it were worthwhile, as if they were equals⁠ ⁠… interested friends⁠—that had never struck her at the time.⁠ ⁠… But it was true⁠—she could not remember ever having felt a schoolgirl⁠ ⁠… or being “talked down” to⁠ ⁠… dear Stroodie, the music master, and Monsieur⁠—old white-haired Monsieur, dearest of all, she could hear his gentle voice pleading with them on behalf of his treasures⁠ ⁠… the drilling master with his keen, friendly blue eye⁠ ⁠… the briefless barrister who had taught them arithmetic in a baritone voice, laughing all the time but really wanting them to get on.

What was it she missed? Was it that her old teachers were “gentlemen” and these Germans were not? She pondered over this and came to the conclusion that the whole attitude of the Englishman and of Monsieur, her one Frenchman, towards her sex was different from that of these Germans. It occurred to her once in a flash during these puzzled musings that the lessons she had had at school would not have been given more zestfully, more as if it were worthwhile, had she and her schoolfellows been boys. Here she could not feel that. The teaching was grave enough. The masters felt the importance of what they taught⁠ ⁠… she felt that they were formal, reverently formal, “pompous” she called it, towards the facts that they flung out down the long schoolroom table, but that the relationship of their pupils to these facts seemed a matter of less than indifference to them.

She began to recognise now with a glow of gratitude that her own teachers, those who were enthusiastic about their subjects⁠—the albino, her dear Monsieur with his classic French prose, a young woman who had taught them logic and the beginning of psychology⁠—that strange, new subject⁠—were at least as enthusiastic about getting her and her mates awake and into relationship with something. They cared somehow.

She recalled the albino, his face and voice generally separated from his class by a book held vertically, close to his left eye, while he blocked the right eye with his free hand⁠—his faintly wheezy tones bleating triumphantly out at the end of a passage from The Ring and the Book, as he lowered his volume and bent beaming towards them all, his right eye still blocked, for response. Miss Donne, her skimpy skirt powdered with chalk, explaining a syllogism from the blackboard, turning quietly to them, her face all aglow, her chalky hands gently pressed together, “Do you see? Does anyone see?” Monsieur, spoiling them, sharpening their pencils, letting them cheat over their pages of rules, knowing quite well that each learned only one and directing his questioning accordingly, Monsieur dreaming over the things he read to them, repeating passages, wandering from his subject, making allusions here and there⁠—and all of them, she, at any rate, and Lilla⁠—she knew, often⁠—in paradise. How rich and friendly and helpful they all seemed.

She began to wonder whether hers had been in some way a specially good school. Things had mattered there. Somehow the girls had been made to feel they mattered. She remembered even old Stroodie⁠—the least attached member of the staff⁠—asking her suddenly, once, in the middle of a music lesson what she was going to do with her life and a day when the artistic vice principal⁠—who was a connection by marriage of Holman Hunt’s and had met Ruskin, Miriam knew, several times⁠—had gone from girl to girl round the collected fifth and sixth forms asking them each what they would best like to do in life. Miriam had answered at once with a conviction born that moment that she wanted to “write a book.” It irritated her when she remembered during these reflections that she had not been able to give to Fräulein Pfaff’s public questioning any intelligible account of the school. She might at least have told her of the connection with Ruskin and Browning and Holman Hunt, whereas her muddled replies had led Fräulein to decide that her school had been “a kind of high school.” She knew it had not been this. She felt there was something questionable about a high school. She was beginning to think that her school had been very good. Pater had seen to that⁠—that was one of the things he had steered and seen to. There had been a school they might have gone to higher up the hill where one learned needlework even in the “first class” as they called it instead of the sixth form as at her school, and “Calisthenics” instead of drilling⁠—and something called elocution⁠—where the girls were “finished.” It was an expensive school. Had the teachers there taught the girls⁠ ⁠… as if they had no minds? Perhaps that school was more like the one she found herself in now? She wondered and wondered. What was she going to do with her life after all these years at the good school? She began bit by bit to understand her agony on the day of leaving. It was there she belonged. She ought to go back and go on.

One day she lay twisted and convulsed, face downwards on her bed at the thought that she could never go back and begin. If only she could really begin now, knowing what she wanted.⁠ ⁠… She would talk now with those teachers.⁠ ⁠… Isn’t it all wonderful! Aren’t things wonderful! Tell me some more.⁠ ⁠… She felt sure that if she could go back, things would get clear. She would talk and think and understand.⁠ ⁠… She did not linger over that. It threatened a storm whose results would be visible. She wondered what the other girls were doing⁠—Lilla? She had heard nothing of her since that last term. She would write to her one day, perhaps. Perhaps not.⁠ ⁠… She would have to tell her that she was a governess. Lilla would think that very funny and would not care for her now that she was so old and worried.⁠ ⁠…

Woven through her retrospective appreciations came a doubt. She wondered whether, after all, her school had been right. Whether it ought to have treated them all so seriously. If she had gone to the other school she was sure she would never have heard of the Aesthetic Movement or felt troubled about the state of Ireland and India. Perhaps she would have grown up a Churchwoman⁠ ⁠… and “ladylike.” Never.

She could only think that somehow she must be “different”; that a sprinkling of the girls collected in that school were different, too. The school she decided was new⁠—modern⁠—Ruskin. Most of the girls perhaps had not been affected by it. But some had. She had. The thought stirred her. She had. It was mysterious. Was it the school or herself? Herself to begin with. If she had been brought up differently, it could not, she felt sure, have made her very different⁠—for long⁠—nor taught her to be affable⁠—to smile that smile she hated so. The school had done something to her. It had not gone against the things she found in herself. She wondered once or twice during these early weeks what she would have been like if she had been brought up with these German girls. What they were going to do with their lives was only too plain. All but Emma, she had been astounded to discover, had already a complete outfit of house linen to which they were now adding fine embroideries and laces. All could cook. Minna had startled her one day by exclaiming with lit face, “Ach, ich koche so schrecklich gern!”⁠ ⁠… Oh, I am so frightfully fond of cooking.⁠ ⁠… And they were placid and serene, secure in a kind of security Miriam had never met before. They did not seem to be in the least afraid of the future. She envied that. Their eyes and their hands were serene.⁠ ⁠… They would have houses and things they could do and understand, always.⁠ ⁠… How they must want to begin, she mused.⁠ ⁠… What a prison school must seem.

She thought of their comfortable German homes, of ruling and shopping and directing and being looked up to.⁠ ⁠… German husbands.

That thought she shirked. Emma in particular she could not contemplate in relation to a German husband.

In any case one day these girls would be middle-aged⁠ ⁠… as Clara looked now⁠ ⁠… they would look like the German women on the boulevards and in the shops.

In the end she ceased to wonder that the German masters dealt out their wares to these girls so superciliously.

And yet⁠ ⁠… German music, a line of German poetry, a sudden light on Clara’s face.⁠ ⁠…

There was one other teacher, a Swiss and some sort of minister she supposed as everyone called him the Herr Pastor. She wondered whether he was in any sense the spiritual adviser of the school and regarded him with provisional suspicion. She had seen him once, sitting short and very black and white at the head of the schoolroom table. His black beard and dark eyes as he sat with his back to the window made his face gleam like a mask. He had spoken very rapidly as he told the girls the life story of some poet.

The time that was not taken up by the masters and the regular succession of rich and savoury meals⁠—wastefully plentiful they seemed to Miriam⁠—was filled in by Fräulein Pfaff with occupations devised apparently from hour to hour. On a master’s morning the girls collected in the schoolroom one by one as they finished their bed-making and dusting. On other days the time immediately after breakfast was full of uncertainty and surmise. Judging from the interchange between the four first-floor bedrooms whose doors were always open during this bustling interval, Miriam, listening apprehensively as she did her share of work on the top floor, gathered that the lack of any planned programme was a standing annoyance to the English girls. Millie, still imperfectly acclimatised, carrying out her duties in a large bibbed apron, was plaintive about it in her conscientious German nearly every morning. The Martins, when the sense of Fräulein as providence was strong upon them made their beds vindictively, rapping out sarcasms to be alternately mocked and giggled at by Jimmie who was generally heard, as the gusts subsided, dispensing the comforting assurance that it wouldn’t last forever. Miriam once heard even Judy grumbling to herself in a mumbling undertone as she carried the lower landing’s collective Wäsche upstairs to the back attic to await the quarterly Waschfrau.

The German side of the landing was uncritical. On free mornings the Germans had one preoccupation. It was generally betrayed by Emma in a loud excited whisper, aimed across the landing: “Gehen wir zu Kreipe? Do we go to Kreipe’s?” “Kreipe, Kreipe,” Minna and Clara would chorus devoutly from their respective rooms. Gertrude on these occasions always had an air of knowledge and would sometimes prophesy. To what extent Fräulein did confide in the girl and how much was due to her experience of the elder woman’s habit of mind Miriam could never determine. But her prophecies were always fulfilled.

Fräulein, who generally went to the basement kitchen from the breakfast table, would be heard on the landing towards the end of the busy half hour, rallying and criticising the housemaids in her gentle caustic voice. She never came to the top floor. Miriam and Mademoiselle, who agreed in accomplishing their duties with great despatch and spending any spare time sitting in their jackets on their respective beds reading or talking, would listen for her departure. There was always a moment when they knew that the excitement was over and the landing stricken into certainty. Then Mademoiselle would flit to the top of the stairs and demand, leaning over the balustrade, “Eh bien! Eh bien!” and someone would retail directions.

Sometimes Anna would appear in her short, chequered cotton dress, shawled and with her market basket on her arm, and would summon Gertrude alone or with Solomon Martin to Fräulein’s room opposite the Saal on the ground floor. The appearance of Anna was the signal for bounding anticipations. It nearly always meant a holiday and an expedition.