9
Breakfast the next morning was a gay feast. The mood which had seized the girls at the lavishly decked tea-table awaiting them on their return from their momentous walk the day before, still held them. They all had come in feeling a little apprehensive, and Fräulein behind her tea-urn had met them with the fullest expansion of smiling indulgence Miriam had yet seen. After tea she had suggested an evening’s entertainment and had permitted the English girls to act charades.
For Miriam it was an evening of pure delight. At the end of the first charade, when the girls were standing at a loss in the dimly-lit hall, she made a timid suggestion. It was enthusiastically welcomed and for the rest of the evening she was allowed to take the lead. She found herself making up scene after scene surrounded by eager faces. She wondered whether her raised voice, as she disposed of proffered suggestions—“no, that wouldn’t be clear, this is the thing we’ve got to bring out”—could be heard by Fräulein sitting waiting with the Germans under the lowered lights in the saal, and she felt Fräulein’s eye on her as she plunged from the hall into the dim schoolroom rapidly arranging effects in the open space in front of the long table which had been turned round and pushed alongside the windows.
Towards the end of the evening, dreaming alone in the schoolroom near the closed door of the little room whence the scenes were lit, she felt herself in a vast space. The ceilings and walls seemed to disappear. She wanted a big scene, something quiet and serious—quite different from the fussy little absurdities they had been rushing through all the evening. A statue ... one of the Germans. “You think of something this time,” she said, pushing the group of girls out into the hall.
Ulrica. She must manage to bring in Ulrica without giving her anything to do. Just to have her to look at. The height of darkened room above her rose to a sky. An animated discussion, led by Bertha Martin, was going on in the hall.
They had chosen “beehive.” It would be a catch. Fräulein was always calling them her Bienenkorb and the girls would guess Bienenkorb and not discover that they were meant to say the English word.
“The old things can’t possibly get it. It’ll be a lark, just for the end,” said Jimmie.
“No.” Miriam announced radiantly. “They’d hate a sell. We’ll have Romeo.”
“That’ll be awfully long. Four bits altogether, if they don’t guess from the syllables,” objected Solomon wearily.
Rapidly planning farcical scenes for the syllables she carried her tired troupe to a vague appreciation of the final tableau for Ulrica. Shrouding the last syllable beyond recognition, she sent a messenger to the audience through the hall door of the saal to beg for Ulrica.
Ulrica came, serenely wondering, her great eyes alight with her evening’s enjoyment and was induced by Miriam.
“You’ve only to stand and look down—nothing else.” To mount the schoolroom table in the dimness and standing with her hands on the back of a draped chair to gaze down at Romeo’s upturned face.
Bertha Martin’s pale profile, with her fair hair drawn back and tied at the nape of her neck and a loose cloak round her shoulders would, it was agreed, make the best presentation of a youth they could contrive, and Miriam arranged her, turning her upturned face so that the audience would catch its clear outline. But at the last minute, urged by Solomon’s disapproval of the scene, Bertha withdrew. Miriam put on the cloak, lifted its collar to hide her hair and standing with her back to the audience flung up her hands towards Ulrica as the gas behind the little schoolroom door was turned slowly up. Standing motionless, gazing at the pale oval face bending gravely towards her from the gloom, she felt for a moment the radiance of stars above her and heard the rustle of leaves. Then the guessing voices broke from the saal. “Ach! ach! Wie schön! Romeo! That is beautifoll. Romeo! Who is our Romeo?” and Fräulein’s smiling, singing, affectionate voice, “Who is Romeo! The rascal!”