“Ask Judy!” they all chorused, laughing.
Judy cast an appealing flash of her eyes sideways at nothing, flushed furiously and mumbled, “Ik weiss nik—I don’t know.”
In the outcries and laughter which followed, Miriam noticed only the hoarse hacking laugh of the Australian. Her eyes flew up the table and fixed her as she sat laughing, her chair drawn back, her knees crossed—tea was drawing to an end. The detail of her terrifyingly stylish ruddy-brown frieze dress with its Norfolk jacket bodice and its shiny black leather belt was hardly distinguishable from the dark background made by the folding doors. But the dreadful outline of her shoulders was visible, the squarish oval of her face shone out—the wide forehead from which the wiry black hair was combed to a high puff, the red eyes, black now, the long straight nose, the wide laughing mouth with the enormous teeth.
Her voice conquered easily.
“Nein,” she tromboned, through the din.
Mademoiselle’s little finger stuck up sharply like a steeple, her mouth said, “Oh—Oh—”
Fräulein’s smile was at its widest, waiting the issue.
“Nein,” triumphed the Australian, causing a lull.
“Leise, Kinder, leise, doucement, gentlay,” chided Fräulein, still smiling.
“Hermann, yes,” proceeded the Australian, “aber Hugo—né!”
Miriam heard it agreed in the end that someone named Hugo did not wear a moustache, though someone named Hermann did. She was vaguely shocked and interested.
After tea the great doors were thrown open and the girls filed into the Saal. It was a large high room furnished like a drawing-room—enough settees and easy chairs to accommodate more than all the girls. The polished floor was uncarpeted save for an archipelago of mats and rugs in the wide circle of light thrown by the four-armed chandelier. A grand piano was pushed against the wall in the far corner of the room, between the farthest of the three high French windows and the shining pillar of porcelain stove.
The high room, the bright light, the plentiful mirrors, the long sweep of lace curtains, the many faces—the girls seemed so much more numerous scattered here than they had when collected in the schoolroom—brought Miriam the sense of the misery of social occasions. She wondered whether the girls were nervous. She was glad that music lessons were no part of her remuneration. She thought of dreadful experiences of playing before people. The very first time, at home, when she had played a duet with Eve—Eve playing a little running melody in the treble—her own part a page of minims. The minims had swollen until she could not see whether they were lines or spaces, and her fingers had been so weak after the first unexpectedly loud note that she could hardly make any sound. Eve had said “louder” and her fingers had suddenly stiffened and she had worked them from her elbows like sticks at the end of her trembling wrists and hands. Eve had noticed her dreadful movements and resented being elbowed. She had heard nothing then but her hard loud minims till the end, and then as she stood dizzily up someone had said she had a nice firm touch, and she had pushed her angry way from the piano across the hearthrug. She should always remember the clear red-hot mass of the fire and the bottle of green Chartreuse warming on the blue and cream tiles. There were probably only two or three guests, but the room had seemed full of people, stupid people who had made her play. How angry she had been with Eve for noticing her discomfiture and with the forgotten guest for her silly remark. She knew she had simply poked the piano. Then there had been the annual school concert, all the girls almost unrecognisable with fear. She had learnt her pieces by heart for those occasions and played them through with trembling limbs and burning eyes—alternately thumping with stiff fingers and feeling her whole hand faint from the wrist on to the notes which fumbled and slurred into each other almost soundlessly until the thumping began again. At the musical evenings, organised by Eve as a winter set-off to the tennis club, she had both played and sung, hoping each time afresh to be able to reproduce the effects which came so easily when she was alone or only with Eve. But she could not discover the secret of getting rid of her nervousness. Only twice had she succeeded—at the last school concert when she had been too miserable to be nervous and Mr. Strood had told her she did him credit and, once she had sung “Chanson de Florian” in a way that had astonished her own listening ear—the notes had laughed and thrilled out into the air and come back to her from the wall behind the piano. … The day before the tennis tournament.
The girls were all settling down to fancy work, the white-cuffed hands of the Martins were already jerking crochet needles, faces were bending over fine embroideries and Minna Blum had trundled a mounted lace pillow into the brighter light.
Miriam went to the schoolroom and fetched from her workbasket the piece of canvas partly covered with red and black wool in diamond pattern that was her utmost experience of fancy work.
As she returned she half saw Fräulein Pfaff, sitting as if enthroned on a high-backed chair in front of the centremost of the mirrors filling the wall spaces between the long French windows, signal to her, to come to that side of the room.
Timorously ignoring the signal she got herself into a little low chair in the shadow of the half-closed swing door and was spreading out her woolwork on her knee when the Vorspielen began.
Emma Bergmann was playing. The single notes of the opening motif of Chopin’s Fifteenth Nocturne fell pensively into the waiting room. Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom.
