Emma had found her place and handed her a big hymnbook with the score.
There was time for Miriam to read the first line and recognise the original of “Now Thank We All Our God” before the singing had reached the third syllable. She hung over the book. “Nun—dank—et—Al—le—Gott.” Now—thank—all—God. She read that first line again and felt how much better the thing was without the “we” and the “our.” What a perfect phrase. … The hymn rolled on and she recognised that it was the tune she knew—the hard square tune she and Eve had called it—and Harriett used to mark time to it in jerks, a jerk to each syllable, with a twisted glove-finger tip just under the book ledge with her left hand, towards Miriam. But sung as these Germans sang it, it did not jerk at all. It did not sound like a “proclamation” or an order. It was … somehow … everyday. The notes seemed to hold her up. This was—Luther—Germany—the Reformation—solid and quiet. She glanced up and then hung more closely over her book. It was the stained-glass windows that made the Schlosskirche so dark. One movement of her head showed her that all the windows within sight were dark with rich colour, and there was oak everywhere—great shelves and galleries and juttings of dark wood, great carved masses and a high dim roof and strange spaces of light; twilight, and light like moonlight and people, not many people, a troop, a little army under the high roof, with the great shadows all about them. “Nun danket alle Gott.” There was nothing to object to in that. Everybody could say that. Everybody—Fräulein, Gertrude, all these little figures in the church, the whole world. “Now thank, all, God!” … Emma and Marie were chanting on either side of her. Immediately behind her sounded the quavering voice of an old woman. They all felt it. She must remember that. … Think of it every day.
V
During those early days Miriam realised that school routine, as she knew it—the planned days—the regular unvarying succession of lessons and preparations, had no place in this new world. Even the masters’ lessons, coming in from outside and making a kind of framework of appointments over the otherwise fortuitously occupied days, were, she soon found, not always securely calculable. Herr Kapellmeister Bossenberger would be heard booming and intoning in the hall unexpectedly at all hours. He could be heard all over the house. Miriam had never seen him, but she noticed that great haste was always made to get a pupil to the Saal and that he taught impatiently. He shouted and corrected and mimicked. Only Millie’s singing, apparently, he left untouched. You could hear her lilting away through her little high songs as serenely as she did at Vorspielen.
Miriam was at once sure that he found his task of teaching these girls an extremely tiresome one.
Probably most teachers found teaching tiresome. But there was something peculiar and new to her in Herr Bossenberger’s attitude. She tried to account for it … German men despised women. Why did they teach them anything at all?
The same impression, the sense of a half-impatient, half-exasperated tuition came to her from the lectures of Herr Winter and Herr Schraub.
Herr Winter, a thin tall withered-looking man with shabby hair and bony hands whose veins stood up in knots, drummed on the table as he taught botany and geography. The girls sat round bookless and politely attentive and seemed, the Germans at least, to remember all the facts for which he appealed during the last few minutes of his hour. Miriam could never recall anything but his weary withered face.
Herr Schraub, the teacher of history, was, she felt, almost openly contemptuous of his class. He would begin lecturing, almost before he was inside the door. He taught from a book, sitting with downcast eyes, his round red mass of face—expressionless save for the bristling spikes of his tiny straw-coloured moustache and the rapid movements of his tight rounded little lips—persistently averted from his pupils. For the last few minutes of his time he would, ironically, his eyes fixed ahead of him at a point on the table, snap questions—indicating his aim with a tapping finger, going round the table like a dealer at cards. Surely the girls must detest him. … The Germans made no modification of their polite attentiveness. Amongst the English only Gertrude and the Martins found any answers for him. Miriam, proud of sixth-form history essays and the full marks she had generally claimed for them, had no memory for facts and dates; but she made up her mind that were she ever so prepared with a correct reply, nothing should drag from her any response to these military tappings. Fräulein presided over these lectures from the corner of the sofa out of range of the eye of the teacher and horrified Miriam by voicelessly prompting the girls whenever she could. There was no kind of preparation for these lessons.
Miriam mused over the difference between the bearing of these men and that of the masters she remembered and tried to find words. What was it? Had her masters been more—respectful than these Germans were? She felt they had. But it was not only that. She recalled the men she remembered teaching week by week through all the years she had known them … the little bolster-like literature master, an albino, a friend of Browning, reading, reading to them as if it were worthwhile, as if they were equals … interested friends—that had never struck her at the time. … But it was true—she could not remember ever having felt
