14
Her growing conviction and the distress of it were confirmed each week by a spectacle she could not escape and was rapidly growing to hate. Just in front of her and considerably behind the flying van, her full wincey skirt billowing out beneath what seemed to Miriam a dreadfully thin little close-fitting stockinette jacket, trotted Mademoiselle—one hand to the plain brim of her large French hat, and obviously conversational with either Minna and Elsa or Clara and Emma on either side of her. Generally it was Minna and Elsa, Minna brisk and trim and decorous as to her neat plaid skirt, however hurried, and Elsa showing her distress by the frequent twisting of one or other of her ankles which looked, to Miriam, like sticks above her high-heeled shoes. Mademoiselle’s broad hat-brim flapped as her head turned from one companion to the other. Sometimes Miriam caught the mocking tinkle of her laughter. That all three were interested, too, Miriam gathered from the fact that they could not always be relied upon to follow Gertrude. The little party had returned one day in two separate groups, fortunately meeting before the Waldstrasse gate was reached, owing to Mademoiselle’s failure to keep Gertrude in sight. There was no doubt, too, that the medium of their intercourse was French, for Mademoiselle’s knowledge of German had not, for all her six months at the school, got beyond a few simple and badly managed words and phrases. Miriam felt that this French girl was perfectly carrying out Fräulein Pfaff’s design. She talked to her pupils, made them talk; the girls were amused and happy and were picking up French. It was admirable and it was wonderful to Miriam because she felt quite sure that Mademoiselle had no clear idea in her own mind that she was carrying out any design at all. That irritated Miriam. Mademoiselle liked talking to her girls. Miriam was beginning to know that she did not want to talk to her girls. Almost from the first she had begun to know it. She felt sure that if Fräulein Pfaff had been invisibly present at any one of her solitary conversational encounters with these German girls she would have been judged and condemned. Elsa Speier had been the worst. Miriam could see as she thought of her, the angle of the high garden wall of a corner house in Waldstrasse and above it a blossoming almond tree. “How lovely that tree is,” she had said. She remembered trying hard to talk and to make her talk and making no impression upon the girl. She remembered monosyllables and the pallid averted face and Elsa’s dreadful ankles. She had walked along intent and indifferent and presently she had felt a sort of irritation rise through her struggling. And then further on in the walk, she could not remember how it had arisen, there was a moment when Elsa had said with unmoved, averted face hurriedly, “My fazzer is offitser”—and it seemed to Miriam as if this were the answer to everything she had tried to say, to her remark about the almond-tree and everything else; and then she felt that there was nothing more to be said between them. They were both quite silent. Everything seemed settled. Miriam’s mind called up a picture of a middle-aged man in a Saxon blue uniform—all voice and no brains—and going to take to gardening in his old age—and longed to tell Elsa of her contempt for all military men. Clearly she felt Elsa’s and Elsa’s mother’s feeling towards herself. Elsa’s mother had thin ankles, too, and was like Elsa intent and cold and dead. She could imagine Elsa in society now—hard and thin and glittery—she would be stylish—military men’s women always were. The girl had avoided being with her during walks since then, and they never voluntarily addressed one another. Minna and the Bergmanns had talked to her. Minna responded to everything she said in her eager husky voice—not because she was interested Miriam felt, but because she was polite, and it had tired her once or twice dreadfully to go on “making conversation” with Minna. She had wanted to like being with these three. She felt she could give them something. It made her full of solicitude to glance at either of them at her side. She had longed to feel at home with them and to teach them things worth teaching; they seemed pitiful in some way, like children in her hands. She did not know how to begin. All her efforts and their efforts left them just as pitiful.
15
Each occasion left her more puzzled and helpless. Now and again she thought there was going to be a change. She would feel a stirring of animation in her companions. Then she would discover that someone was being discussed, generally one of the girls; or perhaps they were beginning to tell her something about Fräulein Pfaff, or talking about food. These topics made her feel ill at ease at once. Things were going wrong. It was not to discuss such things that they were together out in the air in the wonderful streets and boulevards of Hanover. She would grow cold and constrained, and the conversation would drop.
And then, suddenly, within a day or so of each other, dreadful things had happened.
The first had come on the second occasion of her going with Minna to see Dr. Dieckel. Minna, as they were walking quietly along together had suddenly begun in a broken English which soon turned to shy, fluent, animated German, to tell about a friend, an apotheker, a man, Miriam gathered—missing many links in her amazement—in a shop, the chemist’s shop where her parents dealt, in the little country town in Pomerania which was her home. Minna was so altered, looked so radiantly happy whilst she talked about this man that Miriam had wanted to put out a hand and touch her. Afterwards she could recall the sound of her voice as it was at that moment with its yearning and its promise and its absolute confidence, Minna was so certain of her happiness—at the end of each hurried little phrase her voice sounded like a chord—like three strings sounding at once on some strange instrument.
And soon afterwards Emma had told her very gravely, with Clara walking a little aloof, her dog-like eyes shining as she gazed into the distance, of a “most beautiful man” with a brown moustache, with whom Clara was in love. He was there in the town, in Hanover, a hair-specialist, treating Clara’s thin short hair.