Miriam wondered how Fräulein felt towards the English girls.
She wondered whether Fräulein liked the English girls best. … She paid no attention to the little spurts of conversation that came at intervals as the table grew more and more dismantled. She was there, safely there—what a perfectly stupendous thing—“weird and stupendous” she told herself. The sunlight poured over her and her companions from the great windows behind Fräulein Pfaff. …
When breakfast was over and the girls were clearing the table, Fräulein went to one of the great windows and stood for a moment with her hands on the hasp of the innermost of the double frames. “Balde, balde,” Miriam heard her murmur, “werden wir öffnen können.” Soon, soon we may open. Obviously then they had had the windows shut all the winter. Miriam, standing in the corner near the companion window, wondering what she was supposed to do and watching the girls with an air—as nearly as she could manage—of indulgent condescension—saw, without turning, the figure at the window, gracefully tall, with a curious dignified pannierlike effect about the skirt that swept from the small tightly-fitting pointed bodice, reminding her of illustrations of heroines of serials in old numbers of the Girls’ Own Paper. The dress was of dark blue velvet—very much rubbed and faded. Miriam liked the effect, liked something about the clear profile, the sallow, hollow cheeks, the same heavy bonyness that Anna the servant had, but finer and redeemed by the wide eye that was so strange. She glanced fearfully, at its unconsciousness, and tried to find words for the quick youthfulness of those steady eyes.
Fräulein moved away into the little room opening from the schoolroom, and some of the girls joined her there. Miriam turned to the window. She looked down into a little square of high-walled garden. It was gravelled nearly all over. Not a blade of grass was to be seen. A narrow little border of bare brown mould joined the gravel to the high walls. In the centre was a little domed patch of earth and there a chestnut tree stood. Great bulging brown-varnished buds were shining whitely from each twig. The girls seemed to be gathering in the room behind her—settling down round the table—Mademoiselle’s voice sounded from the head of the table where Fräulein had lately been. It must be raccommodage thought Miriam—the weekly mending Mademoiselle had told her of. Mademoiselle was superintending. Miriam listened. This was a sort of French lesson. They all sat round and did their mending together—in French—darning must be quite different done like that, she reflected.
Jimmie’s voice came, rounded and giggling, “Oh, Mademoiselle! j’ai une potato, pardong, pum de terre, je mean.” She poked three fingers through the toe of her stocking. “Veux dire, veux dire—Qu’est-ce-que vous me racontez là?” scolded Mademoiselle. Miriam envied her air of authority.
“Ah‑ho! Là-là-Boum-Bong!” came Gertrude’s great voice from the door.
“Taisez-vous, taisez-vous, Jair-trude,” rebuked Mademoiselle.
“How dare she?” thought Miriam, with a picture before her eyes of the little grey-gowned thing with the wistful, frugal mouth and nose.
“Na—Miss Henderson?”
It was Fräulein’s voice from within the little room. Minna was holding the door open.
At the end of twenty minutes, dismissed by Fräulein with a smiling recommendation to go and practise in the Saal, Miriam had run upstairs for her music.
“It’s all right. I’m all right. I shall be able to do it,” she said to herself as she ran. The ordeal was past. She was, she had learned, to talk English with the German girls, at table, during walks, whenever she found herself with them, excepting on Saturdays and Sundays—and she was to read with the four—for an hour, three times a week. There had been no mention of grammar or study in any sense she understood.
She had had a moment of tremor when Fräulein had said in her slow clear English, “I leave you to your pupils, Miss Henderson,” and with that had gone out and shut the door. The moment she had dreaded had come. This was Germany. There was no escape. Her desperate eyes caught sight of a solid-looking volume on the table, bound in brilliant blue cloth. She got it into her shaking hands. It was Misunderstood. She felt she could have shouted in her relief. A treatise on the Morse code would not have surprised her. She had heard that such things were studied at school abroad and that German children knew the names and, worse than that, the meaning of the names of the streets in the city of London. But this book that she and Harriett had banished and wanted to burn in their early teens together with Sandford and Merton. …
“You are reading Misunderstood?” she faltered, glancing at the four politely waiting girls.
It was Minna who answered her in her husky, eager voice.
“D’ja, d’ja,” she responded, “na, ich meine, yace, yace we read—so sweet and beautiful book—not?”
“Oh,” said Miriam, “yes …” and then eagerly, “you all like it, do you?”
Clara and Elsa agreed unenthusiastically. Emma, at her elbow, made a little despairing gesture, “I can’t English,” she moaned gently, “too deeficult.”
Miriam tested their reading. The class had begun. Nothing had happened. It was all right. They each, dutifully and with extreme carefulness read a short passage. Miriam sat blissfully back. It was incredible. The class was going on. The chestnut tree budded approval from the garden. She gravely corrected their accents. The girls were respectful. They appeared to be interested. They vied with each other to get exact sounds; and they presently delighted Miriam by telling her they could understand her English much better than that of her
