Chapter III (2)

No one else was to be seen. Perhaps it was all over. She was too late. Then a second basin held in coarse red hands appeared round the kitchen door and in a moment a woman, large and coarse, with the sleeves of her large-checked blue and white cotton dress rolled back and a great "teapot" of pale nasturtium coloured hair shining above the third of Miriam's "bony" German faces had emerged and plumped her steaming basin down upon the table.

Soap? and horrid pudding basins of steaming water. Miriam's hair had never been washed with anything but cantharides and rose-water on a tiny special sponge.

In full horror, "Oh," she said, in a low vague voice, "it doesn't matter about me."

"Gun' Tak' Fr'n," snapped the woman briskly.

Miriam gave herself up.

"Gooten Mawgen, Frau Krause," said Millie's polite departing voice.

Miriam's outraged head hung over the steaming basin--her hair spread round it like a tent frilling out over the table.

For a moment she thought that the nausea which had seized her as she surrendered would, the next instant, make flight imperative. Then her amazed ears caught the sharp bump--crack--of an eggshell against the rim of the basin, followed by a further brisk crackling just above her. She shuddered from head to foot as the egg descended with a cold slither upon her incredulous skull. Tears came to her eyes as she gave beneath the onslaught of two hugely enveloping, vigorously drubbing hands--"sh--ham--poo" gasped her mind.

The drubbing went relentlessly on. Miriam steadied her head against it and gradually warmth and ease began to return to her shivering, clenched body. Her hair was gathered into the steaming basin--dipped and rinsed and spread, a comforting compress, warm with the water, over her egg-sodden head. There was more drubbing, more dipping and rinsing. The second basin was re-filled from the kitchen, and after a final rinse in its fresh warm water, Miriam found herself standing up--with a twisted tail of wet hair hanging down over her cape of damp towel--glowing and hungry.

"Thank you," she said timidly to Frau Krause's bustling presence.

"Gun' Tak' Fr'n," said Frau Krause, disappearing into the kitchen.

Miriam gave her hair a preliminary drying, gathered her dressing-gown together and went upstairs. From the schoolroom came unmistakable sounds. They were evidently at dinner. She hurried to her attic. What _was_ she to do with her hair? She rubbed it desperately--fancy being landed with hair like that, in the middle of the day! She could not possibly go down.... She must. Fraeulein Pfaff would expect her to--and would be disgusted if she were not quick--she towelled frantically at the short strands round her forehead, despairingly screwed them into Hinde's and towelled at the rest. What had the other girls done? If only she could look into the schoolroom before going down--it was awful--what should she do?... She caught sight of a sodden-looking brush on Mademoiselle's bed. Mademoiselle had put hers up--she had seen her ... of course ... easy enough for her little fluffy clouds--she could do nothing with her straight, wet lumps--she began to brush it out--it separated into thin tails which flipped tiny drops of moisture against her hands as she brushed. Her arms ached; her face flared with her exertions. She was ravenous--she must manage somehow and go down. She braided the long strands and fastened their cold mass with extra hairpins. Then she unfastened the Hinde's--two tendrils flopped limply against her forehead. She combed them out. They fell in a curtain of streaks to her nose. Feverishly she divided them, draped them somehow back into the rest of her hair and fastened them.

"Oh," she breathed, "my _ghastly_ forehead."

It was all she could do--short of gas and curling tongs. Even the candle was taken away in the day-time.

It was cold and bleak upstairs. Her wet hair lay in a heavy mass against her burning head. She was painfully hungry. She went down.

20

The snarling rattle of the coffee mill sounded out into the hall. Several voices were speaking together as she entered. Fraeulein Pfaff was not there. Gertrude Goldring was grinding the coffee. The girls were sitting round the table in easy attitudes and had the effect of holding a council. Emma, her elbows on the table, her little face bunched with scorn, put out a motherly arm and set a chair for Miriam. Jimmie had flung some friendly remark as she came in. Miriam did not hear what she said, but smiled responsively. She wanted to get quietly to her place and look round. There was evidently something in the air. They all seemed preoccupied. Perhaps no one would notice how awful she looked. "You're not the only one, my dear," she said to herself in her mother's voice. "No," she replied in person, "but no one will be looking so perfectly frightful as me."

"I say, do they know you're down?" said Gertrude hospitably, as the boiling water snored on to the coffee.

Emma rushed to the lift and rattled the panel.

"Anna!" she ordered, "Meece Hendshon! Suppe!"

"Oh, thanks," said Miriam, in general. She could not meet anyone's eye. The coffee cups were being slid up to Gertrude's end of the table and rapidly filled by her. Gertrude, of course, she noticed had contrived to look dashing and smart. Her hair, with the exception of some wild ends that hung round her face was screwed loosely on the top of her head and transfixed with a dagger-like tortoise-shell hair ornament--like a Japanese--Indian--no, Maori--that was it, she looked like a New Zealander. Clara and Minna had fastened up theirs with combs and ribbons and looked decent--frauish though, thought Miriam. Judy wore a plait. Without her fuzzy cloud she looked exactly like a country servant, a farmhouse servant. She drank her coffee noisily and furtively--she looked extraordinary, thought Miriam, and took comfort. The Martins' brown bows appeared on their necks instead of cresting their heads--it improved them, Miriam thought. What regular features they had. Bertha looked like a youth--like a musician. Her hair was loosened a little at the sides, shading the corners of her forehead and adding to its height. It shone like marble, high and straight. Emma's hair hung round her like a shawl. 'Lisbeth, Gretchen ... what was that lovely German name ... hild ... Brunhilde....

Talk had begun again. Miriam hoped they had not noticed her. Her "Braten" shot up the lift.

"Lauter Unsinn!" announced Clara.

"We've all got to do our hair in clash ... clashishsher Knoten, Hendy, all of us," said Jimmie judicially, sitting forward with her plump hands clasped on the table. Her pinnacle of hair looked exactly as usual.

"Oh, really." Miriam tried to make a picture of a classic knot in her mind.

"If one have classic head one can have classic knot," scolded Clara.

"Who have classic head?"

"How many classic head in the school of Waldstrasse?"

Elsa gave a little neighing laugh. "Classisch head, classisch Knote."

"That is true what you say, Clarah."

The table paused.

"Dites-moi--qu'est-ce-que ce terrible classique notte? Dites!"

No one seemed prepared to answer Mademoiselle's challenge.

Miriam's mind groped ... classic--Greece and Rome--Greek knot.... Grecian key ... a Grecian key pattern on the dresses for the sixth form tableau--reading Ruskin ... the strip of glass all along the window space on the floor in the large room--edged with mosses and grass--the mirror of Venus....

"Eh bien? Eh bien!"

... Only the eldest pretty girls ... all on their hands and knees looking into the mirror....

"Classische Form--Griechisch," explained Clara.

"Like a statue, Mademoiselle."

"Comment! Une statue! Je dois arranger mes cheveux comme une statue? Oh, ciel!" mocked Mademoiselle, collapsing into tinkles of her sprite laughter.... "Oh-la-la! Et quelle statue par exemple?" she trilled, with ironic eyebrows, "la statue de votre Kaisere Wilhelm der Grosse peut-etre?"

The Martins' guffaws led the laughter.

"Mademoisellekin with her hair done like the Kaiser Wilhelm," pealed Jimmie.

Only Clara remained grave in wrath.

"Einfach," she quoted bitterly, "Simple--says Lily, so simple!"

"Simple--simpler--simplicissimusko!"

"I make no change, not at all," smiled Minna from behind her nose. "For this Ulrica it is quite something other.... She has yes truly so charming a little head."

She spoke quietly and unenviously.

"I too, indeed. Lily may go and play the flute."

"Brave girls," said Gertrude, getting up. "Come on, Kinder, clearing time. You'll excuse us, Miss Henderson? There's your pudding in the lift. Do you mind having your coffee _mit_?"

The girls began to clear up.

"_Leely, Leely_, Leely Pfaff," muttered Clara as she helped, "so einfach und niedlich," she mimicked, "ach _was_! Schwaermerei--das find' ich abscheulich! I find it disgusting!"

So that was it. It was the new girl. Lily, was Fraeulein Pfaff. So the new girl wore her hair in a classic knot. How lovely. Without her hat she had "a charming little head," Minna had said. And that face. Minna had seen how lovely she was and had not minded. Clara was jealous. Her head with a classic knot and no fringe, her worn-looking sallow face.... She would look like a "prisoner at the bar" in some newspaper. How they hated Fraeulein Pfaff. The Germans at least. Fancy calling her Lily--Miriam did not like it, she had known at once. None of the teachers at school had been called by their Christian names--there had been old Quagmire, the Elfkin, and dear Donnikin, Stroodie, and good old Kingie and all of them--but no Christian names. Oh yes--Sally--so there had--Sally--but then Sally _was_--couldn't have been anything else--never could have held a position of any sort. They ought not to call Fraeulein Pfaff that. It was, somehow, nasty. Did the English girls do it? Ought she to have said anything? Mademoiselle did not seem at all shocked. Where was Fraeulein Pfaff all this time? Perhaps somewhere hidden away, in her rooms, being "done" by Frau Krause. Fancy telling them all to alter the way they did their hair.

21

Everyone was writing Saturday letters--Mademoiselle and the Germans with compressed lips and fine careful evenly moving pen-points; the English scrawling and scraping and dashing, their pens at all angles and careless, eager faces. An almost unbroken silence seemed the order of the earlier part of a Saturday afternoon. To-day the room was very still, save for the slight movements of the writers. At intervals nothing was to be heard but the little chorus of pens. Clara, still smouldering, sitting at the window end of the room looked now and again gloomily out into the garden. Miriam did not want to write letters. She sat, pen in hand, and note-paper in front of her, feeling that she loved the atmosphere of these Saturday afternoons. This was her second. She had been in the school a fortnight--the first Saturday she had spent writing to her mother--a long letter for everyone to read, full of first impressions and enclosing a slangy almost affectionate little note for Harriett. In her general letter she had said, "If you want to think of something jolly, think of me, here." She had hesitated over that sentence when she considered meal-times, especially the midday meal, but on the whole she had decided to let it stand--this afternoon she felt it was truer. She was beginning to belong to the house--she did not want to write letters--but just to sit revelling in the sense of this room full of quietly occupied girls--in the first hours of the weekly holiday. She thought of strange Ulrica somewhere upstairs and felt quite one of the old gang. "Ages" she had known all these girls. She was not afraid of them at all. She would not be afraid of them any more. Emma Bergmann across the table raised a careworn face from her two lines of large neat lettering and caught her eye. She put up her hands on either side of her mouth as if for shouting.

"_Hendchen_," she articulated silently, in her curious lipless way, "mein liebes, liebes, Hendchen."

Miriam smiled timidly and sternly began fumbling at her week's letters--one from Eve, full of congratulations and recommendations--"Keep up your music, my dear," said the conclusion, "and don't mind that little German girl being fond of you. It is impossible to be too fond of people if you keep it all on a high level," and a scrawl from Harriett, pure slang from beginning to end. Both these letters and an earlier one from her mother had moved her to tears and longing when they came. She re-read them now unmoved and felt aloof from the things they suggested. It did not seem imperative to respond to them at once. She folded them together. If only she could bring them all for a minute into this room, the wonderful Germany that she had achieved. If they could even come to the door and look in. She did not in the least want to go back. She wanted them to come to her and taste Germany--to see all that went on in this wonderful house, to see pretty, German Emma, adoring her--to hear the music that was everywhere all the week, that went, like a garland, in and out of everything, to hear her play, by accident, and acknowledge the difference in her playing. Oh yes, besides seeing them all she wanted them to hear her play.... She must stay ... she glanced round the room. It was here, somehow, somewhere, in this roomful of girls, centring in the Germans at her end of the table, reflected on to the English group, something of that influence that had made her play. It was in the sheen on Minna's hair, in Emma's long-plaited schoolgirlishness, somehow in Clara's anger. It was here, here, and she was in it.... She must pretend to be writing letters or someone might speak to her. She would hate anyone who challenged her at this moment. Jimmie might. It was just the kind of thing Jimmie would do. Her eyes were always roving round.... There were a lot of people like that.... It was all right when you wanted anything or to--to--"create a diversion" when everybody was quarrelling. But at the wrong times it was awful.... The Radnors and Pooles were like that. She could have killed them often. "Hullo, Mim," they would say, "Wake up!" or "What's the row!" and if you asked why, they would laugh and tell you you looked like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.... It was all right. No one had noticed her--or if either of the Germans had they would not think like that--they would understand--she believed in a way, they would understand. At the worst they would look at you as if they were somehow with you and say something sentimental. "Sie hat Heimweh" or something like that. Minna would. Minna's forget-me-not blue eyes behind her pink nose would be quite real and alive.... Ein Blatt--she dipped her pen and wrote Ein Blatt ... aus ... Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen ... that thing they had begun last Saturday afternoon and gone on and on with until she had hated the sound of the words. How did it go on? "Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen," she breathed in a half whisper. Minna heard--and without looking up from her writing quietly repeated the verse. Her voice rose and trembled slightly on the last line.

"Oh, chuck it, Minna," groaned Bertha Martin.

"Tchookitt," repeated Minna absently, and went on with her writing.

Miriam was scribbling down the words as quickly as she could--

"Ein Blatt aus sommerlichen Tagen
Ich nahm es so im Wandern mit
Auf dass es einst mir moege sagen
Wie laut die Nachtigall geschlagen
Wie gruen der Wald den ich--durchtritt--"

durchtritt--durchschritt--she was not sure. It was perfectly lovely--she read it through translating stumblingly--

"A leaf from summery days
I took it with me on my way,
So that it might remind me
How loud the nightingale had sung,
How green the wood I had passed through."

With a pang she felt it was true that summer ended in dead leaves.

But she had no leaf, nothing to remind her of her summer days. They were all past and she had nothing--not the smallest thing. The two little bunches of flowers she had put away in her desk had all crumbled together, and she could not tell which was which.... There was nothing else--but the things she had told Eve--and perhaps Eve had forgotten ... there was nothing. There were the names in her birthday book! She had forgotten them. She would look at them. She flushed. She would look at them to-morrow, sometime when Mademoiselle was not there.... The room was waking up from its letter-writing. People were moving about. She would not write to-day. It was not worth while beginning. She took a fresh sheet of note-paper and copied her verse, spacing it carefully with a wide margin all round so that it came exactly in the middle of the page. It would soon be tea-time. "Wie gruen der Wald." She remembered one wood--the only one she could remember--there were no woods at Barnes or at the seaside--only that wood, at the very beginning, someone carrying Harriett--and green green, the brightest she had ever seen, and anemones everywhere, she could see them distinctly at this moment--she wanted to put her face down into the green among the anemones. She could not remember how she got there or the going home, but just standing there--the green and the flowers and something in her ear buzzing and frightening her and making her cry, and somebody poking a large finger into the buzzing ear and making it very hot and sore.

The afternoon sitting had broken up. The table was empty.

Emma, in raptures--near the window, was calling to the other Germans. Minna came and chirruped too--there was a sound of dull scratching on the window--then a little burst of admiration from Emma and Minna together. Miriam looked round--in Emma's hand shone a small antique watch encrusted with jewels; at her side was the new girl. Miriam saw a filmy black dress, and above it a pallid face. What was it like? It was like--like--like jasmine--that was it--jasmine--and out of the jasmine face the great gaze she had met in the morning turned half-puzzled, half-disappointed upon the growing group of girls examining the watch.