She could only think that somehow she must be “different”; that a sprinkling of the girls collected in that school were different, too. The school she decided was new—modern—Ruskin. Most of the girls perhaps had not been affected by it. But some had. She had. The thought stirred her. She had. It was mysterious. Was it the school or herself? Herself to begin with. If she had been brought up differently, it could not, she felt sure, have made her very different—for long—nor taught her to be affable—to smile that smile she hated so. The school had done something to her. It had not gone against the things she found in herself. She wondered once or twice during these early weeks what she would have been like if she had been brought up with these German girls. What they were going to do with their lives was only too plain. All but Emma, she had been astounded to discover, had already a complete outfit of house linen to which they were now adding fine embroideries and laces. All could cook. Minna had startled her one day by exclaiming with lit face, “Ach, ich koche so schrecklich gern!” … Oh, I am so frightfully fond of cooking. … And they were placid and serene, secure in a kind of security Miriam had never met before. They did not seem to be in the least afraid of the future. She envied that. Their eyes and their hands were serene. … They would have houses and things they could do and understand, always. … How they must want to begin, she mused. … What a prison school must seem.
She thought of their comfortable German homes, of ruling and shopping and directing and being looked up to. … German husbands.
That thought she shirked. Emma in particular she could not contemplate in relation to a German husband.
In any case one day these girls would be middle-aged … as Clara looked now … they would look like the German women on the boulevards and in the shops.
In the end she ceased to wonder that the German masters dealt out their wares to these girls so superciliously.
And yet … German music, a line of German poetry, a sudden light on Clara’s face. …
There was one other teacher, a Swiss and some sort of minister she supposed as everyone called him the Herr Pastor. She wondered whether he was in any sense the spiritual adviser of the school and regarded him with provisional suspicion. She had seen him once, sitting short and very black and white at the head of the schoolroom table. His black beard and dark eyes as he sat with his back to the window made his face gleam like a mask. He had spoken very rapidly as he told the girls the life story of some poet.
The time that was not taken up by the masters and the regular succession of rich and savoury meals—wastefully plentiful they seemed to Miriam—was filled in by Fräulein Pfaff with occupations devised apparently from hour to hour. On a master’s morning the girls collected in the schoolroom one by one as they finished their bed-making and dusting. On other days the time immediately after breakfast was full of uncertainty and surmise. Judging from the interchange between the four first-floor bedrooms whose doors were always open during this bustling interval, Miriam, listening apprehensively as she did her share of work on the top floor, gathered that the lack of any planned programme was a standing annoyance to the English girls. Millie, still imperfectly acclimatised, carrying out her duties in a large bibbed apron, was plaintive about it in her conscientious German nearly every morning. The Martins, when the sense of Fräulein as providence was strong upon them made their beds vindictively, rapping out sarcasms to be alternately mocked and giggled at by Jimmie who was generally heard, as the gusts subsided, dispensing the comforting assurance that it wouldn’t last forever. Miriam once heard even Judy grumbling to herself in a mumbling undertone as she carried the lower landing’s collective Wäsche upstairs to the back attic to await the quarterly Waschfrau.
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
