“Likewise ‘Boo!’ Come on, Mill, we’re all waiting.”
“Well, you know I don’t like it, Jimmie.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me forget I’m in Germany and only remember I’ve got to go back.”
“My hat, Mill, you’re a queer mixture!”
“But, Millie, best child, it’s just the very thing that makes you know you’re here.”
“It doesn’t me, Gertrude.”
“What is English towns looking like,” said Elsa Speier.
No one seemed ready to take up this challenge.
“Like other towns I suppose,” laughed Jimmie.
“Our Millie is glad to be in Germany,” ruled Fräulein, rising. “She and I agree—I go most gladly to England. Gairtrud is neither English nor German. Perhaps she looks down upon us all.”
“Of course I do,” roared Gertrude, crossing her knees and tilting her chair. “What do you think. Was denkt ihr? I am a barbarian.”
“A stranger.”
“Still we of the wild are the better men.”
“Ah. We end then with a quotation from our dear Schiller. Come, children.”
“What’s that from?” Miriam asked of Gertrude as they wandered up the garden.
“The Räuber. Magnificent thing. Play. We saw it last winter.”
“I don’t believe she really cares for it a bit,” was Miriam’s mental comment. Her heart was warm towards Millie, looking so outlandish with her English vicarage air in this little German beer garden, with her strange love of Germany. Of course there wasn’t anything a bit like Germany in England. … So silly to make comparisons. “Comparisons are odious.” Perfectly true.
They made their way back to the street through a long low roomful of men drinking at little tables. Heavy clouds of smoke hung and moved in the air and mingled with the steady odour of German food, Braten, onion and butter-sodden, beer and rich sour bread. A tinkling melody supported by rhythmic time-marking bass notes that seemed to thump the wooden floor came from a large glass-framed musical box. The dark rafters ran low, just above them. Faces glanced towards them as they all filed avertedly through the room. There were two or three guttural greetings—“N’ Morgen, meine Damen. …” A large limber woman met them in the front room with their bill and stood talking to Fräulein as the girls straggled out into the sunshine. She was wearing a neat short-skirted crimson-and-brown check dress and a large blue apron and her haggard face was lit with radiantly kind strong dark eyes. Miriam envied her. She would like to pour out beer for those simple men and dispense their food … quietly and busily. … No need to speak to them, or be clever. They would like her care and would understand. “Meine Damen” hurt her. She was not Dame—Was Fräulein? Elsa? Millie was. Millie would condescend to these men without feeling uncomfortable. She could see Millie at village teas. … The girls looked very small as they stood in groups about the roadway. … Their clothes … their funny confidence … being so sure of themselves … what was it … what were they so sure of? There was nothing … and she was afraid of them all, even of Minna and Emma sometimes.
They trailed, Minna once more safely at her side, slowly on through the streets of the close-built peaked and gabled, carved and cobbled town. It came nearer to her than Barnes, nearer even than the old first house she had kissed the morning they came away—the flower-filled garden, the river, the woods.
They turned aside and up a little mounting street and filed into a churchyard. Fräulein tried and opened the great carved doorway of the church … incense. … They were going into a Roman Catholic church. How easy it was; just to walk in. Why had one never done it before? There was one at Roehampton. But it would be different in England.
“Pas convenable,” she heard Mademoiselle say just behind her, “non, je connais ces gens-là, je vous promets … vraiment j’en ai peur. …” Elsa responded with excited enquiries. They all trooped quietly in and the great doors closed behind them.
“Vraiment j’ai peur,” whispered Mademoiselle.
Miriam saw a point of red light shining like a ruby far ahead in the gloom. She went round the church with Fräulein Pfaff and Minna, and was shown stations and chapels, altars hung with offerings, a dusty tinsel-decked, gaily-painted Madonna, an alcove railed off and fitted with an iron chandelier furnished with spikes—filled halfway up its height by a solid mass of waxen drippings, banners and paintings and artificial flowers, rich dark carvings. She looked at everything and spoke once or twice.
“This is the first time I have seen a Roman Catholic church,” she said, and “how superstitious” when they came upon crutches and staves hanging behind a reredos—and all the time she breathed the incense and felt the dimness around her and going up and up and brooding, high up.
Presently they were joined by a priest. He took them into a little room, unlocking a heavy door which clanged to after them, opening out behind one of the chapels. One side of the room was lined with an oaken cupboard.
“Je frissonne.”
Miriam escaped Mademoiselle’s neighbourhood and got into an angle between the frosted window and the plaster wall. The air was still and musty—the floor was of stone, the ceiling low and white. There was nothing in the room but the oaken cupboard. The priest was showing a cross so crusted with jewels that the mounting was invisible. Miriam saw it as he lifted it from its wrappings in the cupboard. It seemed familiar to her. She did not wish to see it more closely, to touch it. She stood as thing after thing was taken from the cupboard, waiting in her corner for the moment when they must leave. Now and again she stepped forward and appeared to look, smiled and murmured.
