1
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.
2
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 worth while, 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 worth while, 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.