Pastor Lahmann gave a French lesson the next afternoon.
“Sur l’eau, si beau!”
This refrain threatening for the third time, three or four of the girls led by Bertha Martin, supplied it in a subdued singsong without waiting for Pastor Lahmann’s slow voice. Miriam had scarcely attended to his discourse. He had begun in flat easy tones, describing his visit to Geneva, the snow-clad mountains, the quiet lake, the spring flowers. His words brought her no vision and her mind wandered, half tethered. But when he began reading the poem she sank into the rhythm and turned towards him and fixed expectant eyes upon his face. His expression disturbed her. Why did he read with that half-smile? She felt sure that he felt they were “young ladies,” “demoiselles,” “jeunes filles.” She wanted to tell him she was nothing of the kind and take the book from him and show him how to read. His eyes, soft and brown, were the eyes of a child. She noticed that the lower portion of his flat white cheeks looked broader than the upper without giving an effect of squareness of jaw. Then the rhythm took her again and with the second “sur l’eau, si beau,” she saw a very blue lake and a little boat with lateen sails, and during the third verse began to forget the lifeless voice. As the murmured refrain came from the girls there was a slight movement in Fräulein’s sofa corner. Miriam did not turn her eyes from Pastor Lahmann’s face to look at her, but half expected that at the end of the next verse her low clear devout tones would be heard joining in. Part way through the verse with a startling sweep of draperies against the leather covering of the sofa, Fräulein stood up and towered extraordinarily tall at Pastor Lahmann’s right hand. Her eyes were wide. Miriam thought she had never seen anyone look so pale. She was speaking very quickly in German. Pastor Lahmann rose and faced her. Miriam had just grasped the fact that she was taking the French master to task for reading poetry to his pupils and heard Pastor Lahmann slowly and politely enquire of her whether she or he were conducting the lesson when the two voices broke out together. Fräulein’s fiercely voluble and the Pfaff Pastor’s voluble and mocking and polite. The two voices continued as he made his way, bowing gravely, down the far side of the table to the Saal doors. Here he turned for a moment and his face shone black and white against the dark panelling. “Na, Kinder,” crooned Fräulein gently, when he had disappeared, “a walk—a walk in the beautiful sunshine. Make ready quickly.”
“My sainted uncle,” laughed Bertha as they trooped down the basement stairs. “Oh—my stars!”
“Did you see her eyes?”
“Ja! Wütend!”
“I wonder the poor little man wasn’t burnt up.”
“Hurry up, mädshuns, we’ll have a ripping walk. We’ll see if we can go Tiergartenstraße.”
“Does this sort of thing often happen?” asked Miriam, finding herself bending over a boot box at Gertrude’s side.
Gertrude turned and winked at her. “Only sometimes.”
“What an awful temper she must have,” pursued Miriam.
Gertrude laughed.
Breakfast the next morning was a gay feast. The mood which had seized the girls at the lavishly decked tea table awaiting them on their return from their momentous walk the day before, still held them. They all had come in feeling a little apprehensive, and Fräulein behind her tea urn had met them with the fullest expansion of smiling indulgence Miriam had yet seen. After tea she had suggested an evening’s entertainment and had permitted the English girls to act charades.
For Miriam it was an evening of pure delight. At the end of the first charade, when the girls were standing at a loss in the dimly-lit hall, she made a timid suggestion. It was enthusiastically welcomed and for the rest of the evening she was allowed to take the lead. She found herself making up scene after scene surrounded by eager faces. She wondered whether her raised voice, as she disposed of proffered suggestions—“no, that wouldn’t be clear, this is the thing we’ve got to bring out”—could be heard by Fräulein sitting waiting with the Germans under the lowered lights in the Saal, and she felt Fräulein’s eye on her as she plunged from the hall into the dim schoolroom rapidly arranging effects in the open space in front of the long table which had been turned round and pushed alongside the windows.
Towards the end of the evening, dreaming alone in the schoolroom near the closed door of
