The German side of the landing was uncritical. On free mornings the Germans had one preoccupation. It was generally betrayed by Emma in a loud excited whisper, aimed across the landing: “Gehen wir zu Kreipe? Do we go to Kreipe’s?” “Kreipe, Kreipe,” Minna and Clara would chorus devoutly from their respective rooms. Gertrude on these occasions always had an air of knowledge and would sometimes prophesy. To what extent Fräulein did confide in the girl and how much was due to her experience of the elder woman’s habit of mind Miriam could never determine. But her prophecies were always fulfilled.
Fräulein, who generally went to the basement kitchen from the breakfast-table, would be heard on the landing towards the end of the busy half-hour, rallying and criticising the housemaids in her gentle caustic voice. She never came to the top floor. Miriam and Mademoiselle, who agreed in accomplishing their duties with great despatch and spending any spare time sitting in their jackets on their respective beds reading or talking, would listen for her departure. There was always a moment when they knew that the excitement was over and the landing stricken into certainty. Then Mademoiselle would flit to the top of the stairs and demand, leaning over the balustrade, “Eh bien! Eh bien!” and someone would retail directions.
Sometimes Anna would appear in her short, chequered cotton dress, shawled and with her market basket on her arm, and would summon Gertrude alone or with Solomon Martin to Fräulein’s room opposite the saal on the ground floor. The appearance of Anna was the signal for bounding anticipations. It nearly always meant a holiday and an expedition.
8
During the cold weeks after Miriam’s arrival there were no expeditions; and very commonly uncertainty was prolonged by a provisional distribution of the ten girls between the kitchen and the five pianos. In this case neither she nor Mademoiselle received any instructions. Mademoiselle would go to the saal with needlework, generally the lighter household mending. The saal piano at practising time was allotted to the pupil to whom the next music lesson was due, and Mademoiselle spent the greater part of her time installed, either awaiting the possible arrival of Herr Bossenberger or presiding over his lessons when he came. Miriam, unprovided for, sitting in the schoolroom with a book, awaiting events, would watch her disappear unconcernedly through the folding doors, every time with fresh wonder. She did not want to take her place, though it would have meant listening to Herr Bossenberger’s teaching and a quiet alcove of freedom from the apprehensive uncertainty that hung over so many of her hours. It seemed to her odd, not quite the thing, to have a third person in the room at a music lesson. She tried to imagine a lesson being given to herself under these conditions. The thought was abhorrent. And Mademoiselle, of all people. Miriam could see her sitting in the saal, wrapped in all the coolness of her complete insensibility to music, her eyes bent on her work, the quick movements of her small, thin hands, the darting gleam of her thimble, the dry way she had of clearing her throat, a gesture that was an accentuation of the slightly metallic quality of her voice, and expressed, for Miriam, in sound, that curious sense of circumspect frugality she was growing to realise as characteristic of Mademoiselle’s face in repose.
The saal doors closed, the little door leading into the hall became the centre of Miriam’s attention. Before long, sometimes at the end of ten minutes, this door would open and the day become eventful. She had already taken Clara, with Emma, to make a third, three times to her masseuse, sitting for half an hour in a room above a chemist’s shop so stuffy beyond anything in her experience that she had carried away nothing but the sense of its closely-interwoven odours, a dim picture of Clara in a saffron-coloured wrapper and the shocked impression of the resounding thwackings undergone by her. Emma was paying a series of visits to the dentist and might appear at the schoolroom door with frightened eyes, holding it open—“Hendchen! Ich muss zum Zahnarzt.” Miriam dreaded these excursions. The first time Miriam had accompanied her Emma had had “gas.” Miriam, assailed by a loud scream followed by the peremptory voices of two white-coated, fiercely moustached operators, one of whom seemed to be holding Emma in the chair, had started from her sofa in the background. “Brutes!” she had declared and reached the chair-side voluble in unintelligible German to find Emma serenely emerging from unconsciousness. Once she had taken Gertrude to the dentist—another dentist, an elderly man, practising in a frock-coat in a heavily-furnished room with high sash windows, the lower sashes filled with stained glass. There had been a driving March wind and Gertrude with a shawl round her face had battled gallantly along shouting through her shawl. Miriam had made out nothing clearly, but the fact that the dentist’s wife had a title in her own right. Gertrude had gone through her trial, prolonged by some slight complication, without an anæsthetic, in alternations of tense silence and great gusts of her hacking laughter. Miriam, sitting strained in the far background near a screen covered with a mass of strange embroideries, wondered how she really felt. That, she realised with a vision of Gertrude going on through life in smart costumes, one would never know.
9
The thing Miriam dreaded most acutely was a visit with Minna to her aurist. She learned with horror that Minna was obliged every few months to submit to a series of small operations at the hands of the tall, scholarly-looking man, with large, clear, impersonal eyes, who carried on his practice high up in a great block of buildings in a small faded room with coarse coffee-coloured curtains at its smudgy windows. The character of his surroundings added a great deal to her abhorrence of his attentions to Minna.
The room was densely saturated with an odour which she guessed to be that of stale cigar-smoke. It seemed so tangible in the room that she looked about at first for visible signs of its presence. It was like an invisible dry fog and seemed to affect her breathing.
Coming and going upon the dense staleness of the room and pervading the immediate premises was a strange savoury pungency. Miriam could not at first identify it. But as the visits multiplied and she noticed the same odour standing in faint patches here and there about the stairways and corridors of the block, it dawned upon her that it must be onions—onions freshly frying but with a quality of accumulated richness that she could not explain. But the fact of the dominating kitchen side by side with the consulting-room made her speculate. She imagined the doctor’s wife, probably in that kitchen, a hard-browed bony North German woman. She saw the clear-eyed man at his meals; and imagined his slippers. There were dingy books in the room where Minna started and moaned.