Pointed Roofs: Pilgrimage Part 5

Fraulein's smile was at its widest, waiting the issue.

"Nein," triumphed the Australian, causing a lull.

"Leise, Kinder, leise, doucement, gentlay," chided Fraulein, still smiling.

"Hermann, _yes,_" proceeded the Australian, "aber Hugo--_ne!_"

Miriam heard it agreed in the end that someone named Hugo did not wear a moustache, though someone named Hermann did. She was vaguely shocked and interested.

4

After tea the great doors were thrown open and the girls filed into the saal. It was a large high room furnished like a drawing-room--enough settees and easy chairs to accommodate more than all the girls. The polished floor was uncarpeted save for an archipelago of mats and rugs in the wide circle of light thrown by the four-armed chandelier. A grand piano was pushed against the wall in the far corner of the room, between the farthest of the three high French windows and the s.h.i.+ning pillar of porcelain stove.

5

The high room, the bright light, the plentiful mirrors, the long sweep of lace curtains, the many faces--the girls seemed so much more numerous scattered here than they had when collected in the schoolroom--brought Miriam the sense of the misery of social occasions. She wondered whether the girls were nervous. She was glad that music lessons were no part of her remuneration. She thought of dreadful experiences of playing before people. The very first time, at home, when she had played a duet with Eve--Eve playing a little running melody in the treble--her own part a page of minims. The minims had swollen until she could not see whether they were lines or s.p.a.ces, and her fingers had been so weak after the first unexpectedly loud note that she could hardly make any sound. Eve had said "louder" and her fingers had suddenly stiffened and she had worked them from her elbows like sticks at the end of her trembling wrists and hands. Eve had noticed her dreadful movements and resented being elbowed. She had heard nothing then but her hard loud minims till the end, and then as she stood dizzily up someone had said she had a nice firm touch, and she had pushed her angry way from the piano across the hearthrug. She should always remember the clear red-hot ma.s.s of the fire and the bottle of green Chartreuse warming on the blue and cream tiles. There were probably only two or three guests, but the room had seemed full of people, stupid people who had made her play. How angry she had been with Eve for noticing her discomfiture and with the forgotten guest for her silly remark. She knew she had simply poked the piano. Then there had been the annual school concert, all the girls almost unrecognisable with fear. She had learnt her pieces by heart for those occasions and played them through with trembling limbs and burning eyes--alternately thumping with stiff fingers and feeling her whole hand faint from the wrist on to the notes which fumbled and slurred into each other almost soundlessly until the thumping began again. At the musical evenings, organised by Eve as a winter set-off to the tennis-club, she had both played and sung, hoping each time afresh to be able to reproduce the effects which came so easily when she was alone or only with Eve. But she could not discover the secret of getting rid of her nervousness. Only twice had she succeeded--at the last school concert when she had been too miserable to be nervous and Mr. Strood had told her she did him credit and, once she had sung "Chanson de Florian" in a way that had astonished her own listening ear--the notes had laughed and thrilled out into the air and come back to her from the wall behind the piano.... The day before the tennis tournament.

6

The girls were all settling down to fancy work, the white-cuffed hands of the Martins were already jerking crochet needles, faces were bending over fine embroideries and Minna Blum had trundled a mounted lace-pillow into the brighter light.

Miriam went to the schoolroom and fetched from her work-basket the piece of canvas partly covered with red and black wool in diamond pattern that was her utmost experience of fancy work.

As she returned she half saw Fraulein Pfaff, sitting as if enthroned on a high-backed chair in front of the centremost of the mirrors filling the wall s.p.a.ces between the long French windows, signal to her, to come to that side of the room.

Timorously ignoring the signal she got herself into a little low chair in the shadow of the half-closed swing door and was spreading out her wool-work on her knee when the Vorspielen began.

Emma Bergmann was playing. The single notes of the opening _motif_ of Chopin's Fifteenth Nocturne fell pensively into the waiting room.

Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom. It seemed to her that the light with which the room was filled grew brighter and clearer. She felt that she was looking at nothing and yet was aware of the whole room like a picture in a dream. Fear left her. The human forms all round her lost their power. They grew suffused and dim.... The pensive swing of the music changed to urgency and emphasis.... It came nearer and nearer. It did not come from the candlelit corner where the piano was.... It came from everywhere. It carried her out of the house, out of the world.

It hastened with her, on and on towards great brightness.... Everything was growing brighter and brighter....

Gertrude Goldring, the Australian, was making noises with her hands like inflated paper bags being popped. Miriam clutched her wool-needle and threaded it. She drew the wool through her canvas, one, three, five, three, one and longed for the piano to begin again.

7

Clara Bergmann followed. Miriam watched her as she took her place at the piano--how square and stout she looked and old, careworn, like a woman of forty. She had high square shoulders and high square hips---her brow was low and her face thin and broad and flat. Her eyes were like the eyes of a dog and her thin-lipped mouth long and straight until it went steadily down at the corners. She wore a large fringe like Harriett's--and a thin coil of hair filled the nape of her neck. She played, without music, her face lifted boldly. The notes rang out in a prelude of unfinished phrases--the kind, Miriam noted, that had so annoyed her father in what he called new-fangled music--she felt it was going to be a brilliant piece--fireworks--execution--style--and sat up self-consciously and fixed her eyes on Clara's hands. "Can you see the hands?" she remembered having heard someone say at a concert. How easily they moved. Clara still sat back, her face raised to the light. The notes rang out like trumpet-calls as her hands dropped with an easy fling and sprang back and dropped again. What loose wrists she must have, thought Miriam. The clarion notes ceased. There was a pause. Clara threw back her head, a faint smile flickered over her face, her hands fell gently and the music came again, pianissimo, swinging in an even rhythm. It flowed from those clever hands, a half-indicated theme with a gentle, steady, throbbing undertow. Miriam dropped her eyes--she seemed to have been listening long--that wonderful light was coming again--she had forgotten her sewing--when presently she saw, slowly circling, fading and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the whole thing, dripping, dripping as it circled, a weed-grown mill-wheel....

She recognised it instantly. She had seen it somewhere as a child--in Devons.h.i.+re--and never thought of it since--and there it was. She heard the soft swish and drip of the water and the low humming of the wheel.

How beautiful... it was fading.... She held it--it returned--clearer this time and she could feel the cool breeze it made, and sniff the fresh earthy scent of it, the scent of the moss and the weeds s.h.i.+ning and dripping on its huge rim. Her heart filled. She felt a little tremor in her throat. All at once she knew that if she went on listening to that humming wheel and feeling the freshness of the air, she would cry.

She pulled herself together, and for a while saw only a vague radiance in the room and the dim forms grouped about. She could not remember which was which. All seemed good and dear to her. The trumpet notes had come back, and in a few moments the music ceased.... Someone was closing the great doors from inside the schoolroom. As the side behind which she was sitting swung slowly to, she caught a glimpse, through the crack, of four boys with close-cropped heads, sitting at the long table. The gas was out and the room was dim, but a reading-lamp in the centre of the table cast its light on their bowed heads.

8

The playing of the two Martins brought back the familiar feeling of English self-consciousness. Solomon, the elder one, sat at her Beethoven sonata, an adagio movement, with a patch of dull crimson on the pallor of the cheek she presented to the room, but she played with a heavy fervour, preserving throughout the characteristic marching staccato of the ba.s.s, and gave unstinted value to the shading of each phrase. She made Miriam feel nervous at first and then--as she went triumphantly forward and let herself go so tremendously--traction-engine, thought Miriam--in the heavy fortissimos,--a little ashamed of such expression coming from English hands. The feeling of shame lingered as the younger sister followed with a spirited vivace. Her hollow-cheeked pallor remained unstained, but her thin lips were set and her hard eyes were harder. She played with determined nonchalance and an extraordinarily facile rapidity, and Miriam's uneasiness changed insensibly to the conviction that these girls were learning in Germany not to be ashamed of "playing with expression." All the things she had heard Mr.

Strood--who had, as the school prospectus declared, been "educated in Leipzig"--preach and implore, "style," "expression," "phrasing," "light and shade," these girls were learning, picking up from these wonderful Germans. They did not do it quite like them though. They did not think only about the music, they thought about themselves too. Miriam believed she could do it as the Germans did. She wanted to get her own music and play it as she had always dimly known it ought to be played and hardly ever dared. Perhaps that was how it was with the English. They knew, but they did not dare. No. The two she had just heard playing were, she felt sure, imitating something--but hers would be no imitation. She would play as she wanted to one day in this German atmosphere. She wished now she were going to have lessons. She had in fact had a lesson. But she wanted to be alone and to play--or perhaps with someone in the next room listening. Perhaps she would not have even the chance of practising.

9

Minna rippled through a Chopin valse that made Miriam think of an apple orchard in bloom against a blue sky, and was followed by Jimmie who played the Spring Song with slightly swaying body and little hands that rose and fell one against the other, and reminded Miriam of the finger game of her childhood--"Fly away Jack, fly away Jill." She played very sweetly and surely except that now and again it was as if the music caught its breath.

Jimmie's Lied brought the piano solos to an end, and Fraulein Pfaff after a little speech of criticism and general encouragement asked, to Miriam's intense delight, for the singing. "Millie" was called for.

Millie came out of a corner. She was out of Miriam's range at meal-times and appeared to her now for the first time as a tall child-girl in a high-waisted, blue serge frock, plainly made with long plain sleeves, at the end of which appeared two large hands s.h.i.+ning red and shapeless with chilblains. She attracted Miriam at once with the sh.e.l.l-white and sh.e.l.l-pink of her complexion, her firm chubby baby-mouth and her wide gaze. Her face shone in the room, even her hair--done just like the Martins', but fluffy where theirs was flat and s.h.i.+ny--seemed to give out light, shadowy-dark though it was. Her figure was straight and flat, and she moved, thought Miriam, as though she had no feet.

She sang, with careful precision as to the accents of her German, in a high breathy effortless soprano, a little song about a child and a bouquet of garden flowers.

The younger Martin in a strong hard jolting voice sang of a love-sick Linden tree, her pale thin cheeks pink-flushed.

"Herr Kapellmeister chooses well," smiled Fraulein at the end of this performance.

The Vorspielen was brought to an end by Gertrude Goldring's song. Clara Bergmann sat down to accompany her, and Miriam roused herself for a double listening. There would be Clara's' opening and Clara's accompaniment and some wonderful song. The Australian stood well away from the piano, her shoulders thrown back and her eyes upon the wall opposite her. There was no prelude. Piano and voice rang out together--single notes which the voice took and sustained with an expressive power which was beyond anything in Miriam's experience. Not a note was quite true.... The unerring falseness of pitch was as startling as the quality of the voice. The great wavering shouts slurring now above, now below the mark amazed Miriam out of all shyness. She sat up, frankly gazing--"How dare she? She hasn't an atom of ear--how ghastly"--her thoughts exclaimed as the shouts went on. The longer sustained notes presently reminded her of something. It was like something she had heard--in the interval between the verses--while the sounds echoed in the mind she remembered the cry, hand to mouth, of a London dustman.

Then she lost everything in the story of the Sultan's daughter and the young Asra, and when the fullest applause of the evening was going to Gertrude's song, she did not withhold her share.

10

Anna, the only servant Miriam had seen so far--an enormous woman whose face, apart from the small eyes, seemed all "bony structure," Miriam noted in a phrase borrowed from some unremembered reading--brought in a tray filled with cups of milk, a basket of white rolls and a pile of little plates. Gertrude took the tray and handed it about the room. As Miriam took her cup, chose a roll, deposited it on a plate and succeeded in abstracting the plate from the pile neatly, without fumbling, she felt that for the moment Gertrude was prepared to tolerate her. She did not desire this in the least, but when the deep harsh voice fell against her from the bending Australian, she responded to the "Wie gefallt's Ihnen?" with an upturned smile and a warm "sehr gut!" It gratified her to discover that she could, at the end of this one day, understand or at the worst gather the drift of, all she heard, both of German and French her English was all right--at least, if she chose.... Pater had always been worrying about slang and careless p.r.o.nunciation. None of them ever said "cut in half" or "very unique" or "ho'sale" or "phodygraff." She was awfully slangy herself--she and Harriett were, in their thoughts as well as their words--but she had no provincialisms, no Londonisms--she could be the purest Oxford English. There was something at any rate to give her German girls.... She could say, "There are no rules for English p.r.o.nunciation, but what is usual at the University of Oxford is decisive for cultured people"--"decisive for cultured people." She must remember that for the cla.s.s.

"Na, was sticken Sie da Miss Henderson?"

It was Fraulein Pfaff.

Miriam who had as yet hardly spoken to her, did not know whether to stand or to remain seated. She half rose and then Fraulein Pfaff took the chair near her and Miriam sat down, stiff with fear. She could not remember the name of the thing she was making. She flushed and fumbled--thought of dressing-tables and the little objects of which she had made so many hanging to the mirror by ribbons; "toilet-tidies"

haunted her--but that was not it--she smoothed out her work as if to show it to Fraulein--"Na, na," came the delicate caustic voice. "Was wird das wohl sein?" Then she remembered. "It's for a pin-cus.h.i.+on," she said. Surely she need, not venture on German with Fraulein yet.

"Ein Nadelkissen," corrected Fraulein, "das wird niedlich aussehen," she remarked quietly, and then in English, "You like music, Miss Henderson?"

"Oh, yes," said Miriam, with a pounce in her voice.