8
“What a perfect morning ... what a perfect morning,” Miriam kept telling herself, trying to see into the garden. There was a bowl of irises on the breakfast-table—it made everything seem strange. There had never been flowers on the table before. There was also a great dish of pumpernickel besides the usual food. Fräulein had enjoined silence. The silence made the impression of the irises stay. She hoped it might be a new rule. She glanced at Fräulein two or three times. She was pallid white. Her face looked thinner than usual and her eyes larger and keener. She did not seem to notice anyone. Miriam wondered whether she were thinking about cancer. Her face looked as it had done when once or twice she had said, “Ich bin so bange vor Krebs.” She hoped not. Perhaps it was the problem of evil. Perhaps she had thought of it when she put the irises on the table.
She gazed at them, half-feeling the flummery petals against the palm of her hand. Fräulein seemed cancelled. There was no need to feel self-conscious. She was not thinking of any of them. Miriam found herself looking at high grey stone basins, with ornamental stems like wine-glasses and large square fluted pedestals, filled with geraniums and calceolarias. They had stood in the sunshine at the corners of the lawn in her grandmother’s garden. She could remember nothing else but the scent of a greenhouse and its steamy panes over her head ... lemon thyme and scented geranium.
How lovely it would be to-day at the end of the day. Fräulein would feel happy then ... or did elderly people fear cancer all the time.... It was a great mistake. You should leave things to Nature.... You were more likely to have things if you thought about them. But Fräulein would think and worry ... alone with herself ... with her great dark eyes and bony forehead and thin pale cheeks ... always alone, and just cancer coming ... I shall be like that one day ... an old teacher and cancer coming. It was silly to forget all about it and see Granny’s calceolarias in the sun ... all that had to come to an end.... To forget was like putting off repentance. Those who did not put it off saw when the great waters came, a shining figure coming to them through the flood.... If they did not they were like the man in a night-cap, his mouth hanging open—no teeth—and skinny hands, playing cards on his death-bed.