Minna put down her sewing and turned her kind blue eyes to Fräulein Pfaff’s face.
Ulrica sat drooping, her head bent, her great eyes veiled, her hands entwined on her lap. … The little pathway led to a wood. The wide landscape disappeared. Fräulein’s voice ceased.
She handed the book to Ulrica, indicating the place and Ulrica read. Her voice sounded a higher pitch than Fräulein’s. It sounded out rich and full and liquid, and seemed to shake her slight body and echo against the walls of her face. It filled the room with a despairing ululation. Fräulein seemed by contrast to have been whispering piously in a corner. Listening to the beseeching tones, hearing no words, Miriam wished that the eyes could be raised, when the reading ceased, to hers and that she could go and put her hands about the beautiful head, scarcely touching it and say, “It is all right. I will stay with you always.”
She watched the little hand that was not engaged with the book and lay abandoned, outstretched, listless and shining on her knee. Solomon’s needle snapped. She frowned and roused herself heavily to secure another from the basket on the floor at her side. Miriam, flashing hatred at her, caught Fräulein’s fascinated gaze fixed on Ulrica; and saw it hastily turn to an indulgent smile as the eyes became conscious, moving for a moment without reaching her in the direction of her own low chair. A tap came at the door and Anna’s flat tones, like a voluble mechanical doll, announced a postal official waiting in the hall for Ulrica—with a package. “Ein Paket … a‑a‑ach,” wailed Ulrica, rising, her hands trembling, her great eyes radiant. Fräulein sent her off with Solomon to superintend the signing and payments and give help with the unpacking.
“The little heiress,” she said devoutly, with her wide smile as she returned from the door.
“Oh …” said Miriam politely.
“Sie, nun, Miss Henderson,” concluded Fräulein, handing her the book and indicating the passage Ulrica had just read. “Nun Sie,” she repeated brightly, and Minna drew her chair a little nearer making a small group.
“Schiller” she saw at the top of the page and the title of the poem “Der Spaziergang.” Miriam laid the book on the end of her knee, and leaning over it, read nervously. Her tones reassured her. She noticed that she read very slowly, breaking up the rhythm into sentences—and authoritatively as if she were recounting an experience of her own. She knew at first that she was reading like a cultured person and that Fräulein would recognise this at once, she knew that the perfect assurance of her pronunciation would make it seem that she understood every word, but soon these feelings gave way to the sense half grasped of the serpentine path winding and mounting through a wood, of a glimpse of a distant valley, of flocks and villages, and of her unity with Fräulein and Minna seeing and feeling all these things together. She finished the passage—Fräulein quietly commended her reading and Minna said something about her earnestness.
“Miss Henderson is always a little earnest,” said Fräulein affectionately.
“Are you dressed, Hendy?”
Miriam, who had sat up in her bath when the drumming came at the door, answered sleepily, “No, I shan’t be a minute.”
“Don’t you want to see the diving?”
All Jimmie’s fingers seemed to be playing exercises against the panels. Miriam wished she would restrain them and leave her alone. She did not in the least wish to see the diving.
“I shan’t be a minute,” she shouted crossly, and let her shoulders sink once more under the comforting water. It was the first warm water she had encountered since that night when Mademoiselle had carried the jugs upstairs. Her soap, so characterless in the chilly morning basin lathered freely in the warmth and was fragrant in the steamy air. When Jimmie’s knocking came she was dreaming blissfully of baths with Harriett—the dissipated baths of the last six months between tea and dinner with a theatre or a dance ahead. Harriett, her hair strained tightly into a white crocheted net, her snub face shining through the thick steam, tubbing and jesting at the wide end of the huge porcelain bath, herself at the narrow end commanding the taps under the steam-dimmed beams of the red-globed gas jets … sponge fights … and those wonderful summer bathings when they had come in from long tennis-playing in the sun, filled the bath with cold water and sat in the silence of broad daylight immersed to the neck, confronting each other.
Seeing no sign of anything she could recognise as a towel, she pulled at a huge drapery hanging like a counterpane in front of a coil of pipes extending halfway to the ceiling. The pipes were too hot to touch and the heavy drapery was more than warm and obviously meant for drying purposes. Sitting wrapped in its folds, dizzy and oppressed, she longed for the flourish of a rough towel and a window open at the top. She could see no ventilation of any kind in her white cell. By the time her heavy outdoor things were on she was faint with exhaustion, and hurried down the corridor towards the shouts and splashings echoing in the great, open, glass-roofed swimming bath. She was just in time to see a figure in scarlet and white, standing out on the high gallery at the end of a projecting board which broke the little white balustrade, throw up its arms and leap out and flash—its joined hands pointed downwards towards the water, its white feet sweeping up like the tail of a swooping bird—cleave the green water and disappear. The huge bath was empty of bathers and smoothly rippling save where the flying body had cleaved
