Pointed Roofs · Chapter 8 (2/3)

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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein’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.

Tea was over. Fräulein decided against a walk and they all trooped into the Saal. No programme was suggested; they all sat about unoccupied. There was no centre; Fräulein Pfaff was one of them. The little group near her in the shady half of the sunlit summerhouse 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 summerhouse 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 Fräulein’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 summerhouse with her great despairing eyes⁠ ⁠… the housekeeper was rather like a Dutch doll⁠ ⁠… but that was not it.

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 bedtime. But it must have been beginning to get like that at teatime. 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 summerhouse. 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 summerhouse 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.”

Fräulein 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 tonight 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 Fräulein’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.

Fräulein 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.”

Miriam could not remember hearing Fräulein 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. Fräulein’s voice called up urgently from below.

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 Fräulein sharply from the sofa corner. “Not there! In full current!” Her voice shook. Miriam drew the chair to the end of the row of figures and sat down next to Solomon Martin. The wind rushed through the garden, the thunder rattled across the sky. “Oh, Clara! Fräulein! 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 Fräulein sharply. “I will not have that! To touch the flesh! You understand, all! That you know. All! Such immodesty!”

Miriam leaned forward and glanced. Fräulein 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 Fräulein 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 Jé-sus! 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 Fräulein 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 topknot 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.