5
Miriam woke in the moonlight. She saw Mademoiselle’s face as it had looked at tea-time, pale and cruel, silent and very old. Someone had said she had been in Fräulein’s room again all the afternoon.... Fräulein had spoken to her once or twice during tea. She had answered coolly and eagerly ... disgusting ... like a child that had been whipped and forgiven.... How could Fräulein dare to forgive anybody?
She lay motionless. The night was cool. The screens had not been moved. She felt that the door was shut. After a while she began in imagination a conversation with Eve.
“You see the trouble was,” she said and saw Eve’s downcast believing admiring sympathetic face, “Fräulein talked to me about manner, she simply wanted me to grimace, simply. You know—be like other people.”
Eve laughed. “Yes, I know.”
“You see? Simply.”
“Well, if you wanted to stay, why couldn’t you?”
“I simply couldn’t; you know how people are.”
“But you can act so splendidly.”
“But you can’t keep it up.”
“Why not?”
“Eve. There you are, you see, you always go back.”
“I mean I think it would be simply lovely. If I were clever like you I should do it all the time, be simply always gushing and ‘charming.’”
Then she reminded Eve of the day they had walked up the lane to the Heath talking over all the manners they would like to have—and how Sarah suddenly in the middle of supper had caricatured the one they had chosen. “Of course you overdid it,” she concluded, and Eve crimsoned and said, “Oh yes, I know it was my fault. But you could have begun all over again in Germany and been quite different.”
“Yes, I know I thought about that.... But if you knew as much of the world as I do....”
Eve stared, showing a faint resentment.
Miriam thought of Eve’s many suitors, of her six months’ betrothal, of her lifelong peace-making, her experiment in being governess to the two children of an artist—a little green-robed boy threatening her with a knife.
“Yes, but I mean if you had been about.”
“I know,” smiled Eve confidently. “You mean if I were you. Go on. I know. Explain, old thing.”
“Well, I mean of course if you are a governess in a school you can’t be jolly and charming. You can’t be idiotic or anything.... I did think about it. Don’t tell anybody. But I thought for a little while I might go into a family—one of the girls’ families—the German girls, and begin having a German manner. Two of the girls asked me. One of them was ill and went away—that Pomeranian one I told you about. Well, then, I didn’t tell you about that little one and her sister—they asked me to go to them for the holidays. The youngest said—it was so absurd—‘you shall marry my bruzzer—he is mairchant—very welty’—absurd.”
“Not absurd—you probably would have, away from that school.”
“D’you think so?”
“Yes, you would have been a regular German, fat and jolly and laughing.”
“I know. My dear I thought about it. You may imagine. I wondered if I ought.”
“Why didn’t you try?”
Why not? Why was she not going to try? Eve would, she was sure in her place....
Why not grimace and be very “bright” and “animated” until the end of the term and then go and stay with the Bergmanns for two months and be as charming as she could?... Her heart sank.... She imagined a house, everyone kind and blond and smiling. Emma’s big tall brother smiling and joking and liking her. She would laugh and pretend and flirt like the Pooles and make up to him—and it would be lovely for a little while. Then she would offend someone. She would offend everyone but Emma—and get tired and cross and lose her temper. Stare at them all as they said the things everybody said, the things she hated; and she would sit glowering, and suddenly refuse to allow the women to be familiar with her.... She tried to see the brother more clearly. She looked at the screen. The Bergmanns’ house would be full of German furniture.... At the end of a week every bit of it would reproach her.
She tried to imagine him without the house and the family, not talking or joking or pretending ... alone and sad ... despising his family ... needing her. He loved forests and music. He had a great strong solid voice and was strong and sure about everything and she need never worry any more.
“Seit ich ihn gesehen
Glaub’ ich blind zu sein.”
There would be a garden and German springs and summers and sunsets and strong kind arms and a shoulder. She would grow so happy. No one would recognise her as the same person. She would wear a band of turquoise-blue velvet ribbon round her hair and look at the mountains.... No good. She could never get out to that. Never. She could not pretend long enough. Everything would be at an end long before there was any chance of her turning into a happy German woman.
Certainly with a German man she would be angry at once. She thought of the men she had seen—in the streets, in cafés and gardens, the masters in the school, photographs in the girls’ albums. They had all offended her at once. Something in their bearing and manner.... Blind and impudent.... She thought of the interview she had witnessed between Ulrica and her cousin—the cousin coming up from the estate in Erfurth, arriving in a carriage, Fräulein’s manner, her smiles and hints; Ulrica standing in the saal in her sprigged saffron muslin dress curtseying ... with bent head, the cousin’s condescending laughing voice. It would never do for her to go into a German home. She must not say anything about the chance of going to the Bergmanns’—even to Eve.
She imagined Eve sitting listening in the window space in the bow that was carpeted with linoleum to look like parquet flooring. Beyond them lay the length of the Turkey carpet darkening away under the long table. She could see each object on the shining sideboard. The silver biscuit-box and the large épergne made her feel guilty and shifting, guilty from the beginning of things.
“You see, Eve, I thought counting it all up that if I came home it would cost less than going to Norderney and that all the expense of my going to Germany and coming back is less than what it would have cost to keep me at home for the five months I’ve been there—I wish you’d tell everybody that.”