The girls began to clear up.
“Leely, Leely, Leely Pfaff,” muttered Clara as she helped, “so einfach und niedlich,” she mimicked, “ach was! Schwärmerei—das find’ ich abscheulich! I find it disgusting!”
So that was it. It was the new girl. Lily, was Fräulein Pfaff. So the new girl wore her hair in a classic knot. How lovely. Without her hat she had “a charming little head,” Minna had said. And that face. Minna had seen how lovely she was and had not minded. Clara was jealous. Her head with a classic knot and no fringe, her worn-looking sallow face.... She would look like a “prisoner at the bar” in some newspaper. How they hated Fräulein Pfaff. The Germans at least. Fancy calling her Lily—Miriam did not like it, she had known at once. None of the teachers at school had been called by their Christian names—there had been old Quagmire, the Elfkin, and dear Donnikin, Stroodie, and good old Kingie and all of them—but no Christian names. Oh yes—Sally—so there had—Sally—but then Sally was—couldn’t have been anything else—never could have held a position of any sort. They ought not to call Fräulein Pfaff that. It was, somehow, nasty. Did the English girls do it? Ought she to have said anything? Mademoiselle did not seem at all shocked. Where was Fräulein Pfaff all this time? Perhaps somewhere hidden away, in her rooms, being “done” by Frau Krause. Fancy telling them all to alter the way they did their hair.
21
Everyone was writing Saturday letters—Mademoiselle and the Germans with compressed lips and fine careful evenly moving pen-points; the English scrawling and scraping and dashing, their pens at all angles and careless, eager faces. An almost unbroken silence seemed the order of the earlier part of a Saturday afternoon. To-day the room was very still, save for the slight movements of the writers. At intervals nothing was to be heard but the little chorus of pens. Clara, still smouldering, sitting at the window end of the room looked now and again gloomily out into the garden. Miriam did not want to write letters. She sat, pen in hand, and note-paper in front of her, feeling that she loved the atmosphere of these Saturday afternoons. This was her second. She had been in the school a fortnight—the first Saturday she had spent writing to her mother—a long letter for everyone to read, full of first impressions and enclosing a slangy almost affectionate little note for Harriett. In her general letter she had said, “If you want to think of something jolly, think of me, here.” She had hesitated over that sentence when she considered meal-times, especially the midday meal, but on the whole she had decided to let it stand—this afternoon she felt it was truer. She was beginning to belong to the house—she did not want to write letters—but just to sit revelling in the sense of this room full of quietly occupied girls—in the first hours of the weekly holiday. She thought of strange Ulrica somewhere upstairs and felt quite one of the old gang. “Ages” she had known all these girls. She was not afraid of them at all. She would not be afraid of them any more. Emma Bergmann across the table raised a careworn face from her two lines of large neat lettering and caught her eye. She put up her hands on either side of her mouth as if for shouting.
“Hendchen,” she articulated silently, in her curious lipless way, “mein liebes, liebes, Hendchen.”
Miriam smiled timidly and sternly began fumbling at her week’s letters—one from Eve, full of congratulations and recommendations—“Keep up your music, my dear,” said the conclusion, “and don’t mind that little German girl being fond of you. It is impossible to be too fond of people if you keep it all on a high level,” and a scrawl from Harriett, pure slang from beginning to end. Both these letters and an earlier one from her mother had moved her to tears and longing when they came. She re-read them now unmoved and felt aloof from the things they suggested. It did not seem imperative to respond to them at once. She folded them together. If only she could bring them all for a minute into this room, the wonderful Germany that she had achieved. If they could even come to the door and look in. She did not in the least want to go back. She wanted them to come to her and taste Germany—to see all that went on in this wonderful house, to see pretty, German Emma, adoring her—to hear the music that was everywhere all the week, that went, like a garland, in and out of everything, to hear her play, by accident, and acknowledge the difference in her playing. Oh yes, besides seeing them all she wanted them to hear her play.... She must stay ... she glanced round the room. It was here, somehow, somewhere, in this roomful of girls, centring in the Germans at her end of the table, reflected on to the English group, something of that influence that had made her play. It was in the sheen on Minna’s hair, in Emma’s long-plaited schoolgirlishness, somehow in Clara’s anger. It was here, here, and she was in it.... She must pretend to be writing letters or someone might speak to her. She would hate anyone who challenged her at this moment. Jimmie might. It was just the kind of thing Jimmie would do. Her eyes were always roving round.... There were a lot of people like that.... It was all right when you wanted anything or to—to—“create a diversion” when everybody was quarrelling. But at the wrong times it was awful.... The Radnors and Pooles were like that. She could have killed them often. “Hullo, Mim,” they would say, “Wake up!” or “What’s the row!” and if you asked why, they would laugh and tell you you looked like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.... It was all right. No one had noticed her—or if either of the Germans had they would not think like that—they would understand—she believed in a way, they would understand. At the worst they would look at you as if they were somehow with you and say something sentimental. “Sie hat Heimweh” or something like that. Minna would. Minna’s forget-me-not blue eyes behind her pink nose would be quite real and alive.... Ein Blatt—she dipped her pen and wrote Ein Blatt ... aus ... Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen ... that thing they had begun last Saturday afternoon and gone on and on with until she had hated the sound of the words. How did it go on? “Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen,” she breathed in a half whisper. Minna heard—and without looking up from her writing quietly repeated the verse. Her voice rose and trembled slightly on the last line.
“Oh, chuck it, Minna,” groaned Bertha Martin.
“Tchookitt,” repeated Minna absently, and went on with her writing.
Miriam was scribbling down the words as quickly as she could—