“Did you see, Pater; did you see?”
They were walking rapidly along the quay.
“Did you see? Sunlight Zeep!”
She listened to his slightly scuffling stride at her side.
Glancing up she saw his face excited and important. He was not listening. He was being an English gentleman, “emerging” from the Dutch railway station.
“Sunlight Zeep,” she shouted. “Zeep, Pater!”
He glanced down at her and smiled condescendingly.
“Ah, yes,” he admitted with a laugh.
There were Dutch faces for Miriam—men, women and children coming towards her with sturdy gait.
“They’re talking Dutch! They’re all talking Dutch!”
The foreign voices, the echoes in the little narrow street, the flat waterside effect of the sounds, the bright clearness she had read of, brought tears to her eyes.
“The others must come here,” she told herself, pitying them all.
They had an English breakfast at the Victoria Hotel and went out and hurried about the little streets. They bought cigars and rode through the town on a little tramway. Presently they were in a train watching the Dutch landscape go by. One level stretch succeeded another. Miriam wanted to go out alone under the grey sky and walk over the flat fields shut in by poplars.
She looked at the dykes and the windmills with indifferent eyes, but her desire for the flat meadows grew.
Late at night, seated wide-awake opposite her sleeping companion, rushing towards the German city, she began to think.
It was a fool’s errand. … To undertake to go to the German school and teach … to be going there … with nothing to give. The moment would come when there would be a class sitting round a table waiting for her to speak. She imagined one of the rooms at the old school, full of scornful girls. … How was English taught? How did you begin? English grammar … in German? Her heart beat in her throat. She had never thought of that … the rules of English grammar? Parsing and analysis. … Anglo-Saxon prefixes and suffixes … gerundial infinitive. … It was too late to look anything up. Perhaps there would be a class tomorrow. … The German lessons at school had been dreadfully good. … Fräulein’s grave face … her perfect knowledge of every rule … her clear explanations in English … her examples. … All these things were there, in English grammar. … And she had undertaken to teach them and could not even speak German.
Monsieur … had talked French all the time … dictées … lectures … Le Conscrit … Waterloo … “La Maison déserte” … his careful voice reading on and on … until the room disappeared. … She must do that for her German girls. Read English to them and make them happy. … But first there must be verbs … there had been cahiers of them … first, second, third conjugation. … It was impudence, an impudent invasion … the dreadful clever, foreign school. … They would laugh at her. … She began to repeat the English alphabet. … She doubted whether, faced with a class, she could reach the end without a mistake. … She reached z and went on to the parts of speech.
There would be a moment when she must have an explanation with the Fräulein. Perhaps she could tell her that she found the teaching was beyond her scope and then find a place somewhere as a servant. She remembered things she had heard about German servants—that whenever they even dusted a room they cleaned the windows and on Sundays they waited at lunch in muslin dresses and afterwards went to balls. She feared even the German servants would despise her. They had never been allowed into the kitchen at home except when there was jam-making … she had never made a bed in her life. … A shop? But that would mean knowing German and being quick at giving change. Impossible. Perhaps she could find some English people in Hanover who would help her. There was an English colony she knew, and an English church. But that would be like going back. That must not happen. She would rather stay abroad on any terms—away from England—English people. She had scented something, a sort of confidence, everywhere, in her hours in Holland, the brisk manner of the German railway officials and the serene assurance of the travelling Germans she had seen, confirmed her impression. Away out here, the sense of imminent catastrophe that had shadowed all her life so far, had disappeared. Even here in this dim carriage, with disgrace ahead she felt that there was freedom somewhere at hand. Whatever happened she would hold to that.
She glanced up at her small leather handbag lying in the rack and thought of the solid money in her purse. Twenty-five shillings. It was a large sum and she was to have more as she needed.
She glanced across at the pale face with its point of reddish beard, the long white hands laid one upon the other on the crossed knees. He had given her twenty-five shillings and there was her fare and his, and his return fare and her new trunk and all the things she had needed. It must be the end of taking money from him. She was grown up. She was the strong-minded one. She must manage. With a false position ahead and after a short space, disaster, she must get along.
The peaceful Dutch fields came to her mind. They looked so secure. They had passed by too soon. We have always been in a false position, she pondered. Always lying and pretending and keeping up a show—never daring to tell anybody. … Did she want to tell anybody? To come out into the open and be helped and have things arranged for her and do things like other people? No. … No. … “Miriam always likes to be different”—“Society is no boon to those not sociable.” Dreadful things … and the girls laughing together about them. What did they really mean?
“Society is no boon to those not sociable”—on her birthday page in Ellen Sharpe’s birthday book.
