When she got back to Waldstraße she found Anna’s successor newly arrived cleaning the neglected front doorstep. Her lean yellow face looked a vacant response to Miriam’s enquiry for Fräulein Pfaff.
“Ist Fräulein zu Hause,” she repeated. The girl shook her head vaguely.
How quiet the house seemed. The girls, after a morning spent in turning out the kitchen for the reception of the new Magd were out for a long ramble, including Schokolade mit Schlagsahne until teatime.
The empty house spread round her and towered above her as she took off her things in the basement and the schoolroom yawned bright and empty as she reached the upper hall. She hesitated by the door. There was no sound anywhere. … She would play … on the Saal piano.
“I’m not a Lehrerin—I’m not—I’m—not,” she hummed as she collected her music … she would bring her songs too. … “I’m going to Pom-pom-pom-Pom‑erain‑eeya.”
“Pom‑erain‑eeya,” she hummed, swinging herself round the great door into the Saal. Pastor Lahmann was standing near one of the windows. The rush of her entry carried her to the middle of the room and he met her there smiling quietly. She stared easily and comfortably up into his great mild eyes, went into them as they remained quietly and gently there, receiving her. Presently he said in a soft low tone, “You are vairy happy, mademoiselle.”
Miriam moved her eyes from his face and gazed out of the window into the little sunlit summerhouse. The sense of the outline of his shoulders and his comforting black mannishness so near to her brought her almost to tears. Fiercely she fixed the sunlit summerhouse, “Oh, I’m not,” she said.
“Not? Is it possible?”
“I think life is perfectly appalling.”
She moved awkwardly to a little chiffonier and put down her music on its marble top.
He came safely following her and stood near again.
“You do not like the life of the school?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“You are from the country, mademoiselle.”
Miriam fumbled with her music. … Was she?
“One sees that at once. You come from the land.”
Miriam glanced at his solid white profile as he stood with hands clasped, near her music, on the chiffonier. She noticed again that strange flatness of the lower part of the face.
“I, too, am from the land. I grew up on a farm. I love the land and think to return to it—to have my little strip when I am free—when my boys have done their schooling. I shall go back.”
He turned towards her and Miriam smiled into the soft brown eyes and tried to think of something to say.
“My grandfather was a gentleman farmer.”
“Ah—that does not surprise me—but what a very English expression!”
“Is it?”
“Well, it sounds so to us. We Swiss are very democratic.”
“I think I’m a radical.”
Pastor Lahmann lifted his chin and laughed softly.
“You are a vairy ambitious young lady.”
“Yes.”
Pastor Lahmann laughed again.
“I, too, am ambitious. I have a good Swiss ambition.”
Miriam smiled into the mild face.
“You have a beautiful English provairb which expresses my ambition.”
Miriam looked, eagerly listening, into the brown eyes that came round to meet hers, smiling:
“A little land, well-tilled,
A little wife, well-willed,
Are great riches.”
Miriam seemed to gaze long at a pallid, rounded man with smiling eyes. She saw a garden and fields, a firelit interior, a little woman smiling and busy and agreeable moving quickly about … and Pastor Lahmann—presiding. It filled her with fury to be regarded as one of a world of little tame things to be summoned by little men to be well-willed wives. She must make him see that she did not even recognise such a thing as “a well-willed wife.” She felt her gaze growing fixed and moved to withdraw it and herself.
“Why do you wear glasses, mademoiselle?”
The voice was full of sympathetic wistfulness.
“I have a severe myopic astigmatism,” she announced, gathering up her music and feeling the words as little hammers on the newly seen, pallid, rounded face.
“Dear me … I wonder whether the glasses are really necessary. … May I look at them? … I know something of eye work.”
Miriam detached her tightly fitting pince-nez and having given them up stood with her music in hand anxiously watching. Half her vision gone with her glasses, she saw only a dim black-coated knowledge, near at hand, going perhaps to help her.
“You wear them always—for how long?
“Poor child, poor child, and you must have passed through all your schooling with those lame, lame eyes … let me see the eyes … turn a little to the light … so.”
Standing near and large he scrutinised her vague gaze.
“And sensitive to light, too. You were vairy, vairy blonde, even more blonde than you are now, as a child, mademoiselle?”
“Na guten Tag, Herr Pastor.”
Fräulein Pfaff’s smiling voice sounded from the little door.
Pastor Lahmann stepped back.
Miriam was pleased at the thought of being grouped with him in the eyes of Fräulein Pfaff. As she took her glasses from his outstretched hand she felt that Fräulein would recognise that they had established a kind of friendliness. She halted for a moment at the door, adjusting her glasses, amiably uncertain, feeling for something to say.
Pastor Lahmann was standing in the middle of the room examining his nails. Fräulein, at the window, was twitching a curtain into place. She turned and drove Miriam from the room with speechless waiting eyes.
The sunlight was streaming across the hall. It seemed gay and homelike. Pastor Lahmann had made her forget she was a governess. He had treated her as a girl. Fräulein’s eyes had spoiled it. Fräulein was angry about it for some extraordinary reason.
VII
“Don’t let her do it, Miss Henderson.”
Fräulein Pfaff’s words broke the silence accompanying the servant’s
