Pointed Roofs · Chapter 5 (2/3)

During the cold weeks after Miriam’s arrival there were no expeditions; and very commonly uncertainty was prolonged by a provisional distribution of the ten girls between the kitchen and the five pianos. In this case neither she nor Mademoiselle received any instructions. Mademoiselle would go to the Saal with needlework, generally the lighter household mending. The Saal piano at practising time was allotted to the pupil to whom the next music lesson was due, and Mademoiselle spent the greater part of her time installed, either awaiting the possible arrival of Herr Bossenberger or presiding over his lessons when he came. Miriam, unprovided for, sitting in the schoolroom with a book, awaiting events, would watch her disappear unconcernedly through the folding doors, every time with fresh wonder. She did not want to take her place, though it would have meant listening to Herr Bossenberger’s teaching and a quiet alcove of freedom from the apprehensive uncertainty that hung over so many of her hours. It seemed to her odd, not quite the thing, to have a third person in the room at a music lesson. She tried to imagine a lesson being given to herself under these conditions. The thought was abhorrent. And Mademoiselle, of all people. Miriam could see her sitting in the Saal, wrapped in all the coolness of her complete insensibility to music, her eyes bent on her work, the quick movements of her small, thin hands, the darting gleam of her thimble, the dry way she had of clearing her throat, a gesture that was an accentuation of the slightly metallic quality of her voice, and expressed, for Miriam, in sound, that curious sense of circumspect frugality she was growing to realise as characteristic of Mademoiselle’s face in repose.

The Saal doors closed, the little door leading into the hall became the centre of Miriam’s attention. Before long, sometimes at the end of ten minutes, this door would open and the day become eventful. She had already taken Clara, with Emma, to make a third, three times to her masseuse, sitting for half an hour in a room above a chemist’s shop so stuffy beyond anything in her experience that she had carried away nothing but the sense of its closely-interwoven odours, a dim picture of Clara in a saffron-coloured wrapper and the shocked impression of the resounding thwackings undergone by her. Emma was paying a series of visits to the dentist and might appear at the schoolroom door with frightened eyes, holding it open⁠—“Hendchen! Ich muss zum Zahnarzt.” Miriam dreaded these excursions. The first time Miriam had accompanied her Emma had had “gas.” Miriam, assailed by a loud scream followed by the peremptory voices of two white-coated, fiercely moustached operators, one of whom seemed to be holding Emma in the chair, had started from her sofa in the background. “Brutes!” she had declared and reached the chair side voluble in unintelligible German to find Emma serenely emerging from unconsciousness. Once she had taken Gertrude to the dentist⁠—another dentist, an elderly man, practising in a frock coat in a heavily-furnished room with high sash windows, the lower sashes filled with stained glass. There had been a driving March wind and Gertrude with a shawl round her face had battled gallantly along shouting through her shawl. Miriam had made out nothing clearly, but the fact that the dentist’s wife had a title in her own right. Gertrude had gone through her trial, prolonged by some slight complication, without an anaesthetic, in alternations of tense silence and great gusts of her hacking laughter. Miriam, sitting strained in the far background near a screen covered with a mass of strange embroideries, wondered how she really felt. That, she realised with a vision of Gertrude going on through life in smart costumes, one would never know.

The thing Miriam dreaded most acutely was a visit with Minna to her aurist. She learned with horror that Minna was obliged every few months to submit to a series of small operations at the hands of the tall, scholarly-looking man, with large, clear, impersonal eyes, who carried on his practice high up in a great block of buildings in a small faded room with coarse coffee-coloured curtains at its smudgy windows. The character of his surroundings added a great deal to her abhorrence of his attentions to Minna.

The room was densely saturated with an odour which she guessed to be that of stale cigar smoke. It seemed so tangible in the room that she looked about at first for visible signs of its presence. It was like an invisible dry fog and seemed to affect her breathing.

Coming and going upon the dense staleness of the room and pervading the immediate premises was a strange savoury pungency. Miriam could not at first identify it. But as the visits multiplied and she noticed the same odour standing in faint patches here and there about the stairways and corridors of the block, it dawned upon her that it must be onions⁠—onions freshly frying but with a quality of accumulated richness that she could not explain. But the fact of the dominating kitchen side by side with the consulting room made her speculate. She imagined the doctor’s wife, probably in that kitchen, a hard-browed bony North German woman. She saw the clear-eyed man at his meals; and imagined his slippers. There were dingy books in the room where Minna started and moaned.

She compared this entourage with her recollection of her one visit to an oculist in Harley Street. His stately house, the exquisite freshness of his appointments and his person stood out now. The English she assured herself were more refined than the Germans. Even the local doctor at Barnes whose effect upon her mother’s perpetual ill health, upon Eve’s nerves and Sarah’s mysterious indigestion was so impermanent that the very sound of his name exasperated her, had something about him that she failed entirely to find in this German⁠—something she could respect. She wondered whether the professional classes in Germany were all like this specialist and living in this way. Minna’s parents she knew were paying large fees.

These dreaded expeditions brought a compensation.

Her liking for Minna grew with each visit. She wondered at her. Here she was with her nose and her ear⁠—she was subject to rheumatism too⁠—it would always, Miriam reflected, be doctor’s treatment for her. She wondered at her perpetual cheerfulness. She saw her with a pang of pity, going through life with her illnesses, capped in defiance of all the care she bestowed on her person, with her disconcerting nose, a nose she reflected, that would do splendidly for charades.

On several occasions a little contingent selected from the pianos and kitchen had appeared in the schoolroom and settled down to read German with Fräulein. Miriam had been despatched to a piano. After these readings the midmorning lunching plates of sweet custardlike soup or chocolate soup or perhaps glasses of sweet syrup and biscuits⁠—were, if Fräulein were safely out of earshot, voluble indignation meetings. If she were known to be in the room beyond the little schoolroom, lunch was taken in silence except for Gertrude’s sallies, cheerful generalisations from Minna or Jimmie, and grudging murmurs of response.

On the mornings of Fräulein’s German readings the school never went to Kreipe’s. Going to Kreipe’s Miriam perceived was a sign of fair weather.

They had been twice since her coming. Sitting at a little marble-topped table with the Bergmanns near the window and overlooking the full flood of the Georgstraße Miriam felt a keen renewal of the sense of being abroad. Here she sat, in the little enclosure of this upper room above a shopful of strange Delikatessen, securely adrift. Behind her she felt, not home but the German school where she belonged. Here they all sat, free. Germany was all around them. They were in the midst of it. Fräulein Pfaff seemed far away.⁠ ⁠… How strange of her to send them there.⁠ ⁠… She glanced towards the two tables of English girls in the centre of the room wondering whether they felt as she did.⁠ ⁠… They had come to Germany. They were sharing it with her. It must be changing them. They must be different for having come. They would all go back she supposed. But they would not be the same as those who had never come. She was sure they felt something of this. They were sitting about in easy attitudes. How English they all looked⁠ ⁠… for a moment she wanted to go and sit with them⁠—just sit with them, rejoice in being abroad; in having got away. She imagined all their people looking in and seeing them so thoroughly at home in this little German restaurant free from home influences, in a little world of their own. She felt a pang of response as she heard their confidently raised voices. She could see they were all, even Judy, a little excited. They chaffed each other.

Gertrude had taken everyone’s choice between coffee and chocolate and given an order.

Orders for Schokolade were heard from all over the room. There were only women there⁠—wonderful German women in twos and threes⁠—ladies out shopping, Miriam supposed. She managed intermittently to watch three or four of them and wondered what kind of conversation made them so emphatic⁠—whether it was because they held themselves so well and “spoke out” that everything they said seemed so important. She had never seen women with so much decision in their bearing. She found herself drawing herself up.

She heard German laughter about the room. The sounds excited her and she watched eagerly for laughing faces.⁠ ⁠… They were different.⁠ ⁠… The laughter sounded differently and the laughing faces were different. The eyes were expressionless as they laughed⁠—or evil⁠ ⁠… they had that same knowing way of laughing as though everything were settled⁠—but they did not pretend to be refined as Englishwomen did⁠ ⁠… they had the same horridness⁠ ⁠… but they were⁠ ⁠… jolly.⁠ ⁠… They could shout if they liked.

Three cups of thick-looking chocolate, each supporting a little hillock of solid cream arrived at her table. Clara ordered cakes.

At the first sip, taken with lips that slid helplessly on the surprisingly thick rim of her cup Miriam renounced all the beverages she had ever known as unworthy.

She chose a familiar-looking éclair⁠—Clara and Emma ate cakes that seemed to be alternate slices of cream and very spongy coffee-coloured cake and then followed Emma’s lead with an open tartlet on which plump green gooseberries stood in a thick brown syrup.

During dinner Fräulein Pfaff went the round of the table with questions as to what had been consumed at Kreipe’s. The whole of the table on her right confessed to one Kuchen with their chocolate. In each case she smiled gravely and required the cake to be described. The meaning of the pilgrimage of enquiry came to Miriam when Fräulein reached Gertrude and beamed affectionately in response to her careless “Schokolade und ein Biskuit.” Miriam and the Bergmanns were alone in their excesses.

Even walks were incalculable excepting on Saturdays, when at noon Anna turned out the schoolrooms. Then⁠—unless to Miriam’s great satisfaction it rained and they had a little festival shut in in holiday mood in the Saal, the girls playing and singing, Anna loudly obliterating the weekdays next door and the secure harbour of Sunday ahead⁠—they went methodically out and promenaded the streets of Hanover for an hour. These Saturday walks were a recurring humiliation. If they had occurred daily, some crisis, she felt sure would have arisen for her.

The little party would file out under the leadership of Gertrude⁠—Fräulein Pfaff smiling parting directions adjuring them to come back safe and happy to the beehive and stabbing at them all the while, Miriam felt, with her keen eye⁠—through the high doorway that pierced the high wall and then⁠—charge down the street. Gertrude alone, having been in Hanover and under Fräulein Pfaff’s care since her ninth year, was instructed as to the detail of their tour and she swung striding on ahead, the ends of her long fur boa flying out in the March wind, making a flourishing scrollwork round her bounding tailor-clad form⁠—the Martins, short-skirted and thick-booted, with hard cloth jackets and hard felt hats, and short thick pelerines almost running on either side, Jimmie, Millie and Judy hard behind. Miriam’s ever-recurring joyous sense of emergence and her longing to go leisurely and alone along these wonderful streets, to go on and on at first and presently to look, had to give way to the necessity of keeping Gertrude and her companions in sight. On they went relentlessly through the Saturday throng along the great Georgstraße⁠—a foreign paradise, with its great bright cafés and the strange promising detail of its shops⁠—tantalisingly half seen.

She hated, too, the discomfort of walking thus at this pace through streets along pavements in her winter clothes. They hampered her horribly. Her heavy three-quarter length cloth coat made her too warm and bumped against her as she hurried along⁠—the little fur pelerine which redeemed its plainness tickled her neck and she felt the outline of her stiff hat like a board against her uneasy forehead. Her inflexible boots soon tired her.⁠ ⁠… But these things she could have endured. They were not the main source of her troubles. She could have renounced the delights all round her, made terms with the discomforts and looked for alleviations. But it was during these walks that she began to perceive that she was making, in a way she had not at all anticipated, a complete failure of her role of English teacher. The three weeks’ haphazard curriculum had brought only one repetition of her English lesson in the smaller schoolroom; and excepting at meals, when whatever conversation there was was general and polyglot, she was never, in the house, alone with her German pupils. The cessation of the fixed readings arranged with her that first day by Fräulein Pfaff did not, in face of the general absence of method, at all disturb her. Mademoiselle’s classes had, she discovered, except for the weekly mending long since lapsed altogether. These walks, she soon realised, were supposed to be her and her pupils’ opportunity. No doubt Fräulein Pfaff believed that they represented so many hours of English conversation⁠—and they did not. It was cheating, pure and simple. She thought of fee-paying parents, of the probable prospectus. “French and English governesses.”