The girl’s thin fingers had come out of her furs and fastened convulsively—like cold, throbbing claws on to the breadth of Miriam’s hand.
“Unsere englische Lehrerin—our teacher from England,” smiled Fräulein.
“Lehrerin!” breathed the girl. Something flinched behind her great eyes. The fingers relaxed, and Miriam feeling within her a beginning of response, had gone upstairs.
As she reached the upper landing she began to distinguish against the clangour of chromatic passages assailing the house from the echoing Saal, the gentle tones of the nearer piano, the one in the larger German bedroom opposite the front room for which she was bound. She paused for a moment at the top of the stairs and listened. A little swaying melody came out to her, muted by the closed door. Her grasp on the roll of music slackened. A radiance came for a moment behind the gravity of her face. Then the careful unstumbling repetition of a difficult passage drew her attention to the performer, her arms dropped to her sides and she passed on. It was little Bergmann, the youngest girl in the school. Her playing, on the bad old piano in the dark dressing room in the basement, had prepared Miriam for the difference between the performance of these German girls and nearly all the piano-playing she had heard. It was the morning after her arrival. She had been unpacking and had taken, on the advice of Mademoiselle, her heavy boots and outdoor things down to the basement room. She had opened the door on Emma sitting at the piano in her blue and buff check ribbon-knotted stuff dress. Miriam had expected her to turn her head and stop playing. But as, arms full, she closed the door with her shoulders, the child’s profile remained unconcerned. She noticed the firmly-poised head, the thick creamy neck that seemed bare with its absence of collar-band and the soft frill of tucker stitched right on to the dress, the thick cable of string-coloured hair reaching just beyond the rim of the leather-covered music stool, the steel-beaded points of the little slippers gleaming as they worked the pedals, the serene eyes steadily following the music. She played on and Miriam recognised a quality she had only heard occasionally at concerts, and in the playing of one of the music teachers at school.
She had stood amazed, pretending to be fumbling for empty pegs as this round-faced child of fourteen went her way to the end of her page. Then Miriam had ventured to interrupt and to ask her about the hanging arrangements, and the child had risen and speaking soft South German had suggested and poked tiptoeing about amongst the thickly-hung garments and shown a motherly solicitude over the disposal of Miriam’s things. Miriam noted the easy range of the child’s voice, how smoothly it slid from birdlike queries and chirpings to the consoling tones of the lower register. It seemed to leave undisturbed the softly-rounded, faintly-mottled chin and cheeks and the full unpouting lips that lay quietly one upon the other before she spoke, and opened flexibly but somehow hardly moved to her speech and afterwards closed again gradually until they lay softly blossoming as before.
Emma had gathered up her music when the clothes were arranged, sighing and lamenting gently, “Wäre ich nur zu Hause”—how happy one was at home—her little voice filled with tears and her cheeks flushed, “haypie, haypie to home,” she complained as she slid her music into its case, “where all so good, so nice, so beautiful,” and they had gone, side by side, up the dark uncarpeted stone stairs leading from the basement to the hall. Halfway up, Emma had given Miriam a shy firm hug and then gone decorously up the remainder of the flight.
The sense of that sudden little embrace recurred often to Miriam during the course of the first day.
It was unlike any contact she had known—more motherly than her mother’s. Neither of her sisters could have embraced her like that. She did not know that a human form could bring such a sense of warm nearness, that human contours could be eloquent—or anyone so sweetly daring.
That first evening at Waldstraße there had been a performance that had completed the transformation of Miriam’s English ideas of “music.” She had caught the word Vorspielen being bandied about the long tea table, and had gathered that there was to be an informal playing of “pieces” before Fräulein Pfaff. She welcomed the event. It relieved her from the burden of being in high focus—the relief had come as soon as she took her place at the gaslit table. No eye seemed to notice her. The English girls having sat out two mealtimes with her, had ceased the hard-eyed observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts only less embarrassing than Fräulein’s questions about England. The four Germans who had neither stared nor even appeared aware of her existence, talked cheerfully across the table in a general exchange that included tall Fräulein Pfaff smiling her horse smile—Miriam provisionally called it—behind the tea urn, as chairman. The six English-speaking girls, grouped as it were towards their chief, a dark-skinned, athletic looking Australian with hot, brown, slightly bloodshot eyes sitting as vice president opposite Fräulein, joined occasionally, in solo and chorus, and Miriam noted with relief a unanimous atrocity of accent in their enviable fluency. Rapid sotto voce commentary and half-suppressed wordless byplay located still more clearly the English quarter. Animation flowed and flowed. Miriam safely ignored, scarcely heeding, but warmed and almost happy, basked. She munched her black bread and butter, liberally smeared with the rich savoury paste of liver sausage, and drank her sweet weak tea
