Clara was at the piano. Tall behind her stood Millie’s gracious shapeless baby form.
As Millie’s voice climbing carefully up and down the even stages of Solveig’s song reached the second verse, Miriam tried to separate the music from the words. The words were wrong. She half saw a fair woman with a great crown of plaited hair and very broad shoulders singing the song in the Hanover concert room in Norwegian. She remembered the moment of taking her eyes away from the singer and the platform, and feeling the crowded room and the airlessness, and then the song going steadily on from note to note as she listened … no trills and no tune … saying something. It stood in the air. All the audience were saying it. And then the fair-haired woman had sung the second verse as though it was something about herself—tragically … tragic muse. … It was not her song, standing there in the velvet dress. … She stopped it from going on. There was nothing but the movement of the lace round her shoulders and chest, her expanded neck, quivering, and the pressure in her voice. … And then there had been Herr Bossenberger, hammering and shouting it out in the Saal with Millie, and everything in the schoolroom, even the dust on the paper rack, standing out clearer and clearer as he bellowed slowly along. And then she had got to know that everybody knew about it; it was a famous song. There were people singing it everywhere in German and French and English—a girl singing about her lover. … It was not that; even if people sang it like that, if a real girl had ever sung something like that, that was not what she meant … “the winter may pass” … yes, that was all right—and mountains with green slopes and narrow torrents—and a voice going strongly out and ceasing, and all the sky filled with the sound—and the song going on, walking along, thinking to itself. … She looked about as Millie’s voice ceased trembling on the last high note. She hoped no one would hum the refrain. There was no one there who knew anything about it. … Judy? Judy knew, perhaps. Judy would never hum or sing anything. If she did, it would be terrible. She knew so much. Perhaps Judy knew everything. She was sitting on the low sill of the window behind the piano sewing steel beads on to a shot silk waistband held very close to her eyes. Minna could. Minna might be sitting in her plaid dress on the window seat with her embroidery, her smooth hair polished with bay rum humming Solveig’s song.
The housekeeper brought in the milk and rolls and went away downstairs again. The cold milk was very refreshing but the room grew stifling as they all sat round near the little centre table with the French window nearly closed, shutting off the summerhouse and garden. Everybody in turn seemed to be saying “Ik kenne meine Tasse sie ist svatz.” Bertha had begun it, holding up her white glass of milk as she took it from the tray and exactly imitating the housekeeper’s voice.
“Platt Deutsch spricht sie, ja?” Clara had said. It seemed as if there were no more to be said about the housekeeper. At prayers when they were all saying “Vater unser,” she heard Jimmie murmur, “Ik kenne meine Tasse.”
Fräulein Pfaff came upstairs behind the girls and ordered silence as they went to their rooms. “Hear, all, children,” she said in German in the quiet clear even tone with which she had just read prayers, “no one to speak to her neighbour, no one to whisper or bustle, nor tonight to brush her hair, but each to compose her mind and go quietly to her rest. Thus acting the so great heat shall injure none of us and peaceful sleep will come. Do you hear, children?”
Answering voices came from the bedrooms. She entered each room, shifting screens, opening each window for a few moments, leaving each door wide.
“Each her little corner,” she said in Miriam’s room, “fresh water set for the morning. The heavens are all round us, my little ones; have no fear.”
Gently sighing and moaning Ulrica moved about in her corner. Emma dropped a slipper and muttered consolingly. Thankfully Miriam listened to Fräulein’s short, deprecating footsteps pacing up and down the landing. She was safe from the dreadful challenge of conversation with her pupils. She felt hemmed in in the stifling room with the landing full of girls all round her. She wanted to push away her screen, push up the hot white ceiling. She wished she could be safely upstairs with Mademoiselle and the height of the candle-lit garret above her head. It could not possibly be hotter up there than in this stifling room with its draperies and furniture and gas.
Fräulein came in very soon and turned out the light with a formal good night greeting. For a while after all the lights were out, she continued pacing up and down.
Across the landing someone began to sneeze rapidly sneeze after sneeze. “Ach, die Millie!” muttered Emma sleepily. For several minutes the sneezing went on. Sighs and impatient movements sounded here and there. “Ruhig, Kinder, ruhig. Millie shall soon sleep peacefully as all.”
Miriam could not remember hearing Fräulein Pfaff go away when she woke in the darkness feeling unendurably oppressed. She flung her
