Pointed Roofs · Chapter 6 (3/5)

“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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein, who stood laughing in her doorway. After one glance Miriam recoiled. They had not seen her.

“Ja,” screamed Fräulein⁠—“Sie können Ihre paar Groschen haben!⁠—Ihre paar Groschen! Ihre paar Groschen!” and then the two voices shrieked incoherently together until Fräulein’s door slammed to and Anna’s voice, shouting and swearing, died away towards the basement.

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.

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 Fräulein to see all her incapability. Fräulein 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.

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

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 façades 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 crossroads. 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 façade and rows of scrollwork dimly painted, as she stood still a moment with beating heart behind the group. She heard Fräulein talking in English of councillors and centuries and assumed for a moment as Fräulein’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.

“You like old-time Germany, Miss Henderson?”

Miriam turned a radiant face to Fräulein 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. Fräulein 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 Fräulein, 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 Fräulein, “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 be 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 Fräulein, “ ‘more beautiful’ and why? Beauty is what you see and is not for everyone the same. It is an affaire de goût. 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, Fräulein.”

“Well?”

“Our country is older than Germany, besides⁠—”

“It isn’t, my blessed child.”

“It is, Gertrude⁠—our civilisation.”

“Oh, civilisation.”

“Engländerin, Engländerin,” mocked Bertha.

“Englishwooman, very Englishwooman,” echoed Elsa Speier.

“Well, I am Engländerin,” said Millie, blushing crimson.

“Would you rather the street boys called Engländerin 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 Fräulein Pfaff.

“Oh well, of course, Fräulein.” 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 Engländerin. 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 Fräulein, 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 Räuber. 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.

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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein? 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. Fräulein 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-là, 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 Fräulein 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 halfway 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.