United States or Niue ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


She drew deep breaths as they went slowly along under the Waldstrasse lime-trees and looked up again and again at the leaves brilliant opaque green against white plaster with sharp black shadows behind them, or brilliant transparent green on the hard blue sky. She felt that the scent of them must be visible. Every breath she drew was like a long yawning sigh.

She saw Minna's departing face leaning from the carriage window, its new gay boldness: "I shall no more when we are at home call you Miss Henderson." When she got back to Waldstrasse she found Anna's successor newly arrived cleaning the neglected front doorstep. Her lean yellow face looked a vacant response to Miriam's enquiry for Fraulein Pfaff. "Ist Fraulein zu Hause," she repeated.

Come along. Don't be silly." The elder girls gave in. Emma kept up a little solo of reproach hanging on Miriam's arm. "Very strict. Cold English. No bier. I want to home. I have bier to home" until they were in sight of the high walls of Waldstrasse. Pastor Lahmann gave a French lesson the next afternoon. "Sur l'eau, si beau!"

Sometimes Miriam caught the mocking tinkle of her laughter. That all three were interested, too, Miriam gathered from the fact that they could not always be relied upon to follow Gertrude. The little party had returned one day in two separate groups, fortunately meeting before the Waldstrasse gate was reached, owing to Mademoiselle's failure to keep Gertrude in sight.

Into all the gatherings at Waldstrasse the outside world came like a presence. It removed the sense of pressure, of being confronted and challenged. Everything that was said seemed to be incidental to it, like remarks dropped in a low tone between individuals at a great conference. Miriam wondered again and again whether her companions shared this sense with her.

People always liked her if she let herself go. She would let herself go more in future at Waldstrasse. It was so jolly being at Waldstrasse. "Qu'est-ce que vous avez?" appealed Mademoiselle, laughing at the door with open face. Miriam continued her trot.

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."

Miriam could see as she thought of her, the angle of the high garden wall of a corner house in Waldstrasse and above it a blossoming almond tree. "How lovely that tree is," she had said. She remembered trying hard to talk and to make her talk and making no impression upon the girl. She remembered monosyllables and the pallid averted face and Elsa's dreadful ankles.

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.

Sitting on this third Sunday morning in the dim Schloss Kirche the Waldstrasse pew was in one of its darkest spaces and immediately under the shadow of a deeply overhanging gallery Miriam understood poor Emma's confessed hysteria over the abruptly alternating kneelings and standings, risings and sittings of an Anglican congregation. Here, there was no need to be on the watch for the next move.