Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 13

Fraulein Pfaff rose at last from the table.

"Na, Kinder," she smiled, holding her arms out to them all.

She turned to the nearest window.

"Die Fenster auf!" she cried, in quivering tones, "Die Herzen auf!" "Up with windows! Up with hearts!"

Her hands struggled with the hasp of the long-closed outer frame. The girls crowded round as the lattices swung wide. The air poured in.

Miriam stood in a vague crowd seeing nothing. She felt the movement of her own breathing and the cool streaming of the air through her nostrils. She felt comely and strong.

"That's a thrush," she heard Bertha Martin say as a chattering flew across a distant garden--and Fraulein's half-singing reply, "Know you, children, what the thrush says? Know you?" and Minna's eager voice sounding out into the open, "D'ja, d'ja, ich, weiss--Ritzifizier, sagt sie, Ritzifizier, das vierundzwanzigste Jahr!" and voices imitating.

"Spring! Spring! Spring!" breathed Clara, in a low sing-song.

Miriam found herself with her hands on the doors leading into the saal, pus.h.i.+ng them gently. Why not? Everything had changed. Everything was good. The great doors gave, the sunlight streamed from behind her into the quiet saal. She went along the pathway it made and stood in the middle of the room. The voices from the schoolroom came softly, far away. She went to the centre window and pus.h.i.+ng aside its heavy curtains saw for the first time that it had no second pane like the others, but led directly into a sort of summer-house, open in front and leading by a wooden stairway down to the garden plot. Up the railing of the stairway and over the entrance of the summer-house a creeping plant was putting out tiny leaves. It was in shadow, but the sun caught the sharply peaked gable of the summer-house and on the left, the tops of the high shrubs lining the pathway leading to the wooden door and the great b.a.l.l.s finis.h.i.+ng the high stone gateway shone yellow with sunlit lichen. She heard the schoolroom windows close and the girls clearing away the breakfast things and escaped upstairs singing.

Before she had finished her duties a summons came. Jimmie brought the message, panting as she reached the top of the stairs.

"Hurry up, Hendy!" she gasped. "You're one of the distinguished ones, my dear!"

"What do you mean?" Miriam began apprehensively as she turned to go.

"Oh, Jimmie----" she tried to laugh ingratiatingly. "_Do_ tell me what you mean?" Jimmie turned and raised a plump hand with a sharply-quirked little finger and a dangle of lace-edged handkerchief.

"You're a _swell,_ my dear. You're in with the specials and the cla.s.sic knot."

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to read--Gerty, or something--no idiots admitted. You're going it, Hendy. Ta-ta. Fly! Don't stick in the mud, old slowcoach."

"I'll come in a second," said Miriam, adjusting hairpins.

She was to read Goethe... with Fraulein Pfaff.... Fraulein knew she would be one of the few who would do for a Goethe reading. She reached the little room smiling with happiness.

"Here she is," was Fraulein's greeting. The little group--Ulrica, Minna and Solomon Martin were sitting about informally in the sunlit window s.p.a.ce, Minna and Solomon had needlework--Ulrica was gazing out into the garden. Miriam sank into the remaining low-seated wicker chair and gave herself up. Fraulein began to read, as she did at prayers, slowly, almost below her breath, but so clearly that Miriam could distinguish each word and her face shone as she bent over her book. It was a poem in blank verse with long undulating lines. Miriam paid no heed to the sense. She heard nothing but the even swing, the slight rising and falling of the clear low tones. She felt once more the opening of the schoolroom window--she saw the little brown summer-house and the sun s.h.i.+ning on the woodwork of its porch. Summer coming. Summer coming in Germany. She drew a long breath. The poem was telling of someone getting away out of a room, out of "narrow conversation" to a meadow-covered plain--of a white pathway winding through the green.

Minna put down her sewing and turned her kind blue eyes to Fraulein Pfaff's face.

Ulrica sat drooping, her head bent, her great eyes veiled, her hands entwined on her lap.... The little pathway led to a wood. The wide landscape disappeared. Fraulein's voice ceased.

3

She handed the book to Ulrica, indicating the place and Ulrica read. Her voice sounded a higher pitch than Fraulein's. It sounded out rich and full and liquid, and seemed to shake her slight body and echo against the walls of her face. It filled the room with a despairing ululation.

Fraulein seemed by contrast to have been whispering piously in a corner.

Listening to the beseeching tones, hearing no words, Miriam wished that the eyes could be raised, when the reading ceased, to hers and that she could go and put her hands about the beautiful head, scarcely touching it and say, "It is all right. I will stay with you always."

She watched the little hand that was not engaged with the book and lay abandoned, outstretched, listless and s.h.i.+ning on her knee. Solomon's needle snapped. She frowned and roused herself heavily to secure another from the basket on the floor at her side. Miriam, flas.h.i.+ng hatred at her, caught Fraulein's fascinating gaze fixed on Ulrica; and saw it hastily turn to an indulgent smile as the eyes became conscious, moving for a moment without reaching her in the direction of her own low chair.

A tap came at the door and Anna's flat tones, like a voluble mechanical doll, announced a postal official waiting in the hall for Ulrica--with a package. "Ein Packet... a-a-ach," wailed Ulrica, rising, her hands trembling, her great eyes radiant. Fraulein sent her off with Solomon to superintend the signing and payments and give help with the unpacking.

"The little heiress," she said devoutly, with her wide smile as she returned from the door.

"Oh..." said Miriam politely.

"Sie, nun, Miss Henderson," concluded Fraulein, handing her the book and indicating the pa.s.sage Ulrica had just read. "Nun, Sie," she repeated brightly, and Minna drew her chair a little nearer making a small group.

4

"Schiller" she saw at the top of the page and the t.i.tle of the poem "Der Spaziergang." Miriam laid the book on the end of her knee, and leaning over it, read nervously. Her tones rea.s.sured her. She noticed that she read very slowly, breaking up the rhythm into sentences--and authoritatively as if she were recounting an experience of her own.

She knew at first that she was reading like a cultured person and that Fraulein would recognise this at once, she knew that the perfect a.s.surance of her p.r.o.nunciation would make it seem that she understood every word, but soon these feelings gave way to the sense half grasped of the serpentine path winding and mounting through a wood, of a glimpse of a distant valley, of flocks and villages, and of her unity with Fraulein and Minna seeing and feeling all these things together. She finished the pa.s.sage--Fraulein quietly commended her reading and Minna said something about her earnestness.

"Miss Henderson is always a little earnest," said Fraulein affectionately.

5

"Are you dressed, Hendy?"

Miriam, who had sat up in her bath when the drumming came at the door, answered sleepily, "No, I shan't be a minute."

"Don't you want to see the diving?"

All Jimmie's fingers seemed to be playing exercises against the panels.

Miriam wished she would restrain them and leave her alone. She did not in the least wish to see the diving.

"I shan't be a minute," she shouted crossly, and let her shoulders sink once more under the comforting water. It was the first warm water she had encountered since that night when Mademoiselle had carried the jugs upstairs. Her soap, so characterless in the chilly morning basin lathered freely in the warmth and was fragrant in the steamy air.

When Jimmie's knocking came she was dreaming blissfully of baths with Harriett--the dissipated baths of the last six months between tea and dinner with a theatre or a dance ahead. Harriett, her hair strained tightly into a white crocheted net, her snub face s.h.i.+ning through the thick steam, tubbing and jesting at the wide end of the huge porcelain bath, herself at the narrow end commanding the taps under the steam-dimmed beams of the red-globed gasjets... sponge-fights...

and those wonderful summer bathings when they had come in from long tennis-playing in the sun, filled the bath with cold water and sat in the silence of broad daylight immersed to the neck, confronting each other.

Seeing no sign of anything she could recognise as a towel, she pulled at a huge drapery hanging like a counterpane in front of a coil of pipes extending half-way to the ceiling. The pipes were too hot to touch and the heavy drapery was more than warm and obviously meant for drying purposes. Sitting wrapped in its folds, dizzy and oppressed, she longed for the flourish of a rough towel and a window open at the top. She could see no ventilation of any kind in her white cell. By the time her heavy outdoor things were on she was faint with exhaustion, and hurried down the corridor towards the shouts and splas.h.i.+ngs echoing in the great, open, gla.s.s-roofed swimming-bath. She was just in time to see a figure in scarlet and white, standing out on the high gallery at the end of a projecting board which broke the little white bal.u.s.trade, throw up its arms and leap out and flash--its joined hands pointed downwards towards the water, its white feet sweeping up like the tail of a swooping bird--cleave the green water and disappear. The huge bath was empty of bathers and smoothly rippling save where the flying body had cleaved it and left wavelets and bubbles. The girls--most of them in their outdoor things--were gathered in a little group near the marble steps leading down into the water farthest from where the diver had dropped, stirring and exclaiming. As Miriam was approaching them a red-capped head came cleanly up out of the water near the steps and she recognised the strong jaw and gleaming teeth of Gertrude. She neither spluttered nor shook her head. Her eyes were wide and smiling, and her raucous laugh rang out above the applause of the group of girls.

Miriam paused under the overhanging gallery. Her eyes went, incredulously, up to the spring-board. It seemed impossible... and all that distance above the water.... Her gaze was drawn to the flicking of the curtain of one of the little compartments lining the gallery.

6

"Hullo, Hendy, let me get into my cubicle." Gertrude stood before her dripping and smiling.

"However on earth did you do it?" said Miriam, gazing incredulously at the ruddy wet face.