She heard German laughter about the room. The sounds excited her and she watched eagerly for laughing faces.... They were different.... The laughter sounded differently and the laughing faces were different. The eyes were expressionless as they laughed—or evil ... they had that same knowing way of laughing as though everything were settled—but they did not pretend to be refined as Englishwomen did ... they had the same horridness ... but they were ... jolly.... They could shout if they liked.
Three cups of thick-looking chocolate, each supporting a little hillock of solid cream arrived at her table. Clara ordered cakes.
At the first sip, taken with lips that slid helplessly on the surprisingly thick rim of her cup Miriam renounced all the beverages she had ever known as unworthy.
She chose a familiar-looking éclair—Clara and Emma ate cakes that seemed to be alternate slices of cream and very spongy coffee-coloured cake and then followed Emma’s lead with an open tartlet on which plump green gooseberries stood in a thick brown syrup.
12
During dinner Fräulein Pfaff went the round of the table with questions as to what had been consumed at Kreipe’s. The whole of the table on her right confessed to one Kuchen with their chocolate. In each case she smiled gravely and required the cake to be described. The meaning of the pilgrimage of enquiry came to Miriam when Fräulein reached Gertrude and beamed affectionately in response to her careless “Schokolade und ein Biskuit.” Miriam and the Bergmanns were alone in their excesses.
13
Even walks were incalculable excepting on Saturdays, when at noon Anna turned out the schoolrooms. Then—unless to Miriam’s great satisfaction it rained and they had a little festival shut in in holiday mood in the saal, the girls playing and singing, Anna loudly obliterating the week-days next door and the secure harbour of Sunday ahead—they went methodically out and promenaded the streets of Hanover for an hour. These Saturday walks were a recurring humiliation. If they had occurred daily, some crisis, she felt sure would have arisen for her.
The little party would file out under the leadership of Gertrude—Fräulein Pfaff smiling parting directions adjuring them to come back safe and happy to the beehive and stabbing at them all the while, Miriam felt, with her keen eye—through the high doorway that pierced the high wall and then—charge down the street. Gertrude alone, having been in Hanover and under Fräulein Pfaff’s care since her ninth year, was instructed as to the detail of their tour and she swung striding on ahead, the ends of her long fur boa flying out in the March wind, making a flourishing scrollwork round her bounding tailor-clad form—the Martins, short-skirted and thick-booted, with hard cloth jackets and hard felt hats, and short thick pelerines almost running on either side, Jimmie, Millie and Judy hard behind. Miriam’s ever-recurring joyous sense of emergence and her longing to go leisurely and alone along these wonderful streets, to go on and on at first and presently to look, had to give way to the necessity of keeping Gertrude and her companions in sight. On they went relentlessly through the Saturday throng along the great Georgstrasse—a foreign paradise, with its great bright cafés and the strange promising detail of its shops—tantalisingly half seen.
She hated, too, the discomfort of walking thus at this pace through streets along pavements in her winter clothes. They hampered her horribly. Her heavy three-quarter length cloth coat made her too warm and bumped against her as she hurried along—the little fur pelerine which redeemed its plainness tickled her neck and she felt the outline of her stiff hat like a board against her uneasy forehead. Her inflexible boots soon tired her.... But these things she could have endured. They were not the main source of her troubles. She could have renounced the delights all round her, made terms with the discomforts and looked for alleviations. But it was during these walks that she began to perceive that she was making, in a way she had not at all anticipated, a complete failure of her rôle of English teacher. The three weeks’ haphazard curriculum had brought only one repetition of her English lesson in the smaller schoolroom; and excepting at meals, when whatever conversation there was was general and polyglot, she was never, in the house, alone with her German pupils. The cessation of the fixed readings arranged with her that first day by Fräulein Pfaff did not, in face of the general absence of method, at all disturb her. Mademoiselle’s classes had, she discovered, except for the weekly mending long since lapsed altogether. These walks, she soon realised, were supposed to be her and her pupils’ opportunity. No doubt Fräulein Pfaff believed that they represented so many hours of English conversation—and they did not. It was cheating, pure and simple. She thought of fee-paying parents, of the probable prospectus. “French and English governesses.”