These dreaded expeditions brought a compensation.
Her liking for Minna grew with each visit. She wondered at her. Here she was with her nose and her ear—she was subject to rheumatism too—it would always, Miriam reflected, be doctor’s treatment for her. She wondered at her perpetual cheerfulness. She saw her with a pang of pity, going through life with her illnesses, capped in defiance of all the care she bestowed on her person, with her disconcerting nose, a nose she reflected, that would do splendidly for charades.
On several occasions a little contingent selected from the pianos and kitchen had appeared in the schoolroom and settled down to read German with Fräulein. Miriam had been despatched to a piano. After these readings the mid-morning lunching plates of sweet custardlike soup or chocolate soup or perhaps glasses of sweet syrup and biscuits—were, if Fräulein were safely out of earshot, voluble indignation meetings. If she were known to be in the room beyond the little schoolroom, lunch was taken in silence except for Gertrude’s sallies, cheerful generalisations from Minna or Jimmie, and grudging murmurs of response.
On the mornings of Fräulein’s German readings the school never went to Kreipe’s. Going to Kreipe’s Miriam perceived was a sign of fair weather.
They had been twice since her coming. Sitting at a little marble-topped table with the Bergmanns near the window and overlooking the full flood of the Georgstraße Miriam felt a keen renewal of the sense of being abroad. Here she sat, in the little enclosure of this upper room above a shopful of strange Delikatessen, securely adrift. Behind her she felt, not home but the German school where she belonged. Here they all sat, free. Germany was all around them. They were in the midst of it. Fräulein Pfaff seemed far away. … How strange of her to send them there. … She glanced towards the two tables of English girls in the centre of the room wondering whether they felt as she did. … They had come to Germany. They were sharing it with her. It must be changing them. They must be different for having come. They would all go back she supposed. But they would not be the same as those who had never come. She was sure they felt something of this. They were sitting about in easy attitudes. How English they all looked … for a moment she wanted to go and sit with them—just sit with them, rejoice in being abroad; in having got away. She imagined all their people looking in and seeing them so thoroughly at home in this little German restaurant free from home influences, in a little world of their own. She felt a pang of response as she heard their confidently raised voices. She could see they were all, even Judy, a little excited. They chaffed each other.
Gertrude had taken everyone’s choice between coffee and chocolate and given an order.
Orders for Schokolade were heard from all over the room. There were only women there—wonderful German women in twos and threes—ladies out shopping, Miriam supposed. She managed intermittently to watch three or four of them and wondered what kind of conversation made them so emphatic—whether it was because they held themselves so well and “spoke out” that everything they said seemed so important. She had never seen women with so much decision in their bearing. She found herself drawing herself up.
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.
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.
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 weekdays 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
