Wanted, an English Girl

by Moore, Dorothea

  “In Germany we understand how study should be done,” she announced, and again her aggressive tone was within an ace of arousing Gillian to outspoken wrath.

  “I daresay you do, but we’re in Insterburg now,” she answered, and then set herself to subdue her rising irritation by strict attention to the business in hand.

  She had brought with her the extensive notes she had taken on a general course in English literature given at the “High” by an Oxford Professor, who “enthused” over his subject and actually managed to rouse enthusiasm among his hearers. Gillian had taken great pains with her notes and hoped that a little of the Professor’s spirit might have gone into them and so be passed on to the Berta girl.

  She had “done” four of Shakespeare’s plays too thoroughly, with a mistress who could teach, and intended to offer her pupil a choice of these. Being as ambitious as a girl of sixteen should be, her own predilection was in favour of Hamlet, but before she could discuss the choice with her pupil the door opened and Baroness von Traume sailed majestically in.

  Gillian got up and held out her hand, but it was ignored. The Baroness merely bowed stiffly from the neck. Feeling snubbed, Gillian went on hastily to business, and remarked that she was wondering which play Berta would like best to study.

  “What do you think of Hamlet? I’ve some rather good notes on it.”

  “Berta is only sixteen years old and four months,” Berta’s mother informed the English girl, with crushing dignity. “In Germany, Miss Courtney, the proprieties are considered as I believe is not done in England. Seventeen is the age when girls in my daughter’s position bring the intellect to bear on such problems as are presented in Hamlet. As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice are for the study of younger girls.”

  “Oh, all right,” Gillian agreed, rather blankly, It had never struck her somehow that a special age could be required for any one of Shakespeare’s plays; but the Baroness’s tone seemed to imply that no nice-minded girl could dream of reading Hamlet a day before she had attained the age of seventeen.

  “Wonder if that is one of the Kaiser’s little regulations,” she thought, but she wisely did not give voice to the sentiment.

  “How would you like The Merchant of Venice?” she asked aloud. “We had Professor Lingard on that, and a ripping English mistress went over it with us between the lectures. It was the play for my Oxford senior, and I believe we could do some good work on it.”

  “Very well—The Merchant of Venice let it be,” the Baroness agreed. “You will find here an appreciation of literature unusual in your country, Miss Courtney. …”

  Gillian did fire a little at that. “Perhaps you have had the ill-luck to run against rather stupid English people,” she suggested. “Of course there are some, I know; but, in general, we are keen on things, really.”

  “Upon the football field—the race-course and the betting-book, there is, I understand, much eagerness displayed by the English people,” the Baroness said suavely, “but for kultur I fear your nation is still somewhat in the rear, Miss Courtney. Pray do not think, however, that I intend any reflection upon your own attainments, from which I anticipate much benefit to my daughter. Pray keep your conversation in English; I am anxious that Berta should acquire an easy conversational use of that tongue. She should speak it as well as you speak ours, before you leave her.”

  “Oh, I expect she will be ever so much better at English than I am at German,” Gill said, glad to find something upon which she could agree with her hostess. “I’m not a bit good really; of course I can speak it a little, but I don’t understand it easily when people are talking fast. It was quite difficult to make out all that was being said at dinner last night, I am afraid.”

  A momentary gleam lit up the Baroness’s pale eyes. “Is that so? You concealed your difficulty in understanding very creditably then, Miss Courtney.”

  Gillian was divided between a desire to stand up for even that very small part of English culture exemplified in herself, and a horror of falling into any imitation of the rather blatant conceit of her hostess and “the Berta girl.” The British loathing of any form of swagger carried the day; she was pretty good at languages for her age, she knew; but after all she was nothing out of the way, and she had found it required a considerable effort to follow her host and his guest last night.

  “I’m glad you think I’m not so bad,” she said; “but I’ve a lot to learn yet before I’m a decent German scholar, I’m afraid.”

  “Ach! So! Well, you are candid,” said the Baroness, more genially. “I have small doubt that your German will be amply sufficient for my purpose, and I trust you will be happy and at ease among us. Your room, were you quite comfortable in it last night, and did you sleep quickly and well after I left you?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  It was not quite an accurate statement, but Gill felt it near enough under the circumstances, and it seemed to satisfy the Baroness. She expressed a languid desire that Berta should make Miss Courtney feel at home, and display to her some among the beauties of Chardille later in the morning, and then left the two girls to their studies.

  “Well, so it is to be The Merchant of Venice,” Gill said cheerfully to her pupil, who was sitting primly on her chair without the slightest dawning of interest in her round phlegmatic face. “What do you say to my reading you what Professor Lingard said about the attitude of Shakespeare’s day towards Jews?—I got it down pretty nearly word for word, and it was awfully interesting and makes one see a lot, I think. …”

  “For me I do not need to see why the Jew should be detested,” Berta said calmly. “I detest all Jews.”

  “A bit sweeping, isn’t it?” suggested Gillian, but half-heartedly, because it was so impossible to guess how Berta would take things. “Even in Shakespeare’s day they, at least he, wasn’t able to help feeling at the back of his mind that Shylock was a person, not just a monster, though it’s a little difficult to realise that when the old brute goes on with that fiendish ‘I claim my bond.’ Berta, I wish you could have heard the Professor read that part—he was splendid. His voice made you feel quite sick somehow, and you could almost hear the old Jew sharpening his knife.”

  “I should not have felt sick,” Berta assured the English girl. “I have many times viewed the killing of pigs.”

  “Have you?” was all Gillian could say, and that very blankly. This from a girl whose mother looked askance at Gillian for reading Hamlet before she was seventeen.

  They got straight to the play, as Berta refused to be interested in any introductory business, and read on stolidly through the first scene, the only interruptions being Gillian’s comments and explanations from her notes. These were given with as much assurance as she could manage, but the assurance would have been easier to have and to hold, if Berta had not been so obviously bored by the proceeding.

  They were starting upon the second scene when Berta made a remark at last. Gillian listened eagerly, hoping that it might prove the beginning of an intelligent interest in the study of Shakespeare. She was doomed to disappointment.

  “In England do they never put the clothes away tidily except when reminded to do so by another?

  ‘ Oh, can’t you leave your idea of English ways alone for a minute?” Gillian groaned. “Yes, of course there are heaps of tidy people in England, same as here, I suppose. You needn’t take me as representing my nation.”

  Berta was evidently offended. “My mother also desired to know of me what use you had made of the cupboard in your room,” she said.

  “And I suppose you told her that I only put my things away at all because you were there watching my unpacking?” Gill inquired, thoroughly roused. The many pin-pricks of the morning were beginning to smart at last, on account of their number. “Thank you so much; I suppose it is the sort of thing you think it playing the game to do. …”

  She was just going to add “in Germany,” but pulled herself up in time. Rude as both the Baroness and her daughter had bee
n about England it would not do to retaliate in their own coin.

  “When I am not there do you hang up your skirt and your coat? No,” Berta answered calmly, and Gillian was obliged to own to herself that Berta had her there. Her anger had evaporated, however, in her little outburst, and besides she was busy wondering why the Baroness should have been so extraordinarily interested in the question of the English guest’s untidiness.

  “I wonder if they all take their tone from their precious Kaiser and find nothing too small to fuss over,” she thought, “or whether …”

  She stopped short at that, thinking again of the words which she had overheard. They began to savour very much indeed of plotting if her hostess was so anxious that no stranger should have overheard them. Poor Gillian’s mind went back to its weary, fruitless searching for some one whom she could consult upon the matter, and that did not make the study of literature any easier. She was quite as much relieved as Berta was when the gilt clock upon the mantelpiece struck eleven, and her pupil remarked that they had now been working for two hours and would go out.

  The Rue St. Denise looked gay and alluring in the bright, hot sunshine, and there were public gardens at one end, towards which Gill looked longingly. But Berta turned in the other direction.

  “I have business at the shops,” she answered. “I have not had any marrons-glacées for two days, and I must at once eat at least one ice and some fresh fruit-cakes. We will come to Wingeld’s and eat ices and fruit-cakes, and you will observe how different are our cakes from your confectionery in England.”

  “I’ve always heard your cakes are Ai,” Gillian agreed politely, but a little absently, for she was trying to count the coins in her coat-pocket without taking them out, and to decide whether a small one in the corner was really sixpence or a farthing. She did not want to seem disagreeable, especially as Berta had become more friendly and companionable as soon as they got outside the house, but she did not mean to be treated to ices and those wonderful fresh-fruit cakes by anyone who talked as Berta von Traume did about England and the English. If she could pay for herself, well and good; but if not …

  “I suppose Wingeld’s is a very swagger place?” she asked, still trying to decide about that little coin—she did not want to take it out under the eyes of Berta. There were certainly three pennies and a halfpenny; if the coin were sixpence it ought to do—unless Wingeld’s was very expensive. It had not struck her that English money might not pass here. Sixpence for an ice, twopence for a cake—that allowed for a good one—and a penny halfpenny for her half of the threepenny tip which she supposed would do for a small meal like cakes and ices for two schoolgirls.

  “‘Swagger’? I know not the word,” Berta explained, probably with truth, though its meaning was certainly being exemplified in two young officers who swung past at that moment, the nearer one brushing Gill’s shoulder roughly and never pausing for a word of apology. “But Wingeld is from Berlin, so that his confectionery is beyond praise goes without …” Berta went on, and then stopped suddenly, pinching Gillian’s arm in much excitement, and staring with all her eyes at one of the young officers.

  “Oh! It is surely the Prince!” she gasped.

  Gillian looked after the two in their splendid uniforms. “Which of them? and which Prince?” she asked.

  “His Imperial Highness Prince Waldemar,” Berta said, with enthusiasm. “He is the only one of the Kaiser’s sons who comes to Insterburg. They say he will marry the Grand-Duchess. Isn’t he beautiful? Did you observe his gallant air and his exquisite little moustache? Have you any prince like that in England?”

  “I didn’t notice him specially,” apologised Gillian, “but I daresay he’s very nice-looking.”

  She would have found it difficult to rouse any wild enthusiasm for the personal charms of Prince Waldemar, even in the interest of seeing a real live prince at such close quarters, in any case; and just now she felt rather unreasonably annoyed by Berta’s remark about Prince Waldemar being the husband intended for the Grand-Duchess, her Grand-Duchess, as Carina had become in her own mind. Gillian rather hugged the recollection of Carina’s tone as she told Mademoiselle Pipignon that she would not have Prince Waldemar’s photograph in her boudoir; that certainly did not sound as though a Grand-Duchess with a decided will of her own had much intention of marrying the Prussian Prince. The recollection was comforting, and Gillian assured herself that Berta was just the sort of girl to pick up all kinds of ridiculous rumours and tell them as gospel truth. She spoke quite cheerfully.

  “Is the man with him another of the Kaiser’s sons? He has just about as little—I mean that they both have more moustache than chin.”

  “The man with the Prince is his aide-de-camp, Captain Fritz von Posen,” Berta explained delightedly. “Yes, is not his moustache adorable? They say that he has two drawers filled with the hair which girls have given him at different times for keepsakes.”

  “How perfectly disgusting!” Gill said, cuttingly. “Do let’s talk of something else. That sort of man makes me feel sick. Is this Estinotti’s that we’re passing now?”

  Berta stared at her companion. “Who spoke to you of Estinotti’s?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Mademoiselle de Monti, maid of honour to the Grand-Duchess, if you want to know,” Gill said, surprised. “Nothing odd in that, is there? She was telling me about the ripping after-theatre suppers that you have there, that’s all.”

  “Yes, I too have heard of those after-theatre suppers. Estinotti’s is, however, an Italian restaurant,” Berta assured her, with an emphasis which would probably have struck Gillian as strange if she had not been absorbed just then in the unpleasant discovery that the coin which she had fondly hoped to be a sixpence was really only a farthing, so that ices and fruit-cakes were out of the question for her this morning.

  They were just opposite the great German confectioner’s, with its dazzling and luscious array of cakes in bewildering variety. It must be owned that Gillian very much regretted the fact that the farthing was not sixpence when she saw the celebrated Wingeld’s shop-windows. The ways of Germans may not be as our ways, but they would never dream of tolerating the monotonous display of stodgy buns with a dead fly or so to vary the burnt currants crowning them; the limp pastry, and the feeble attempt to lend variety with a little pink and white icing, or stale chocolate—that too often represents the confectionery ideals of our glorious island.

  Wingeld had fascinating little cakes with fresh fruit embedded in them, whole strawberries, raspberries, stoned cherries and sliced peaches set in cream; his big cakes were wonderful and exciting, with layers of various delectable-looking colours, meant to secure a delicious blend of flavours.

  The fragrant scent of the inevitable perfect coffee came into the street; Berta sniffed appreciatively.

  “No one in Chardille has such cakes or such coffee as Wingeld,” she said.

  “Not Estinotti?” Gillian asked innocently, and Berta had answered her quite quickly for her: “Oh yes, of course, Estinotti,” because Gill had time to remember that Estinotti was an Italian, and in the eyes of a German girl would certainly be inferior in all he did.

  “Well, I am glad to hear there is some one else in the town who can stand up to your Wingeld,” she observed. “That must just prevent him from being too sidy, though I will own that he has something to be sidy about. I never saw such ripping-looking cakes, but if you won’t think me fearfully unsociable I’ll be satisfied with the look to-day. I’m not a bit hungry, and couldn’t really eat anything now till lunch.”

  Berta stared at her in very evident astonishment. “But to eat Wingeld’s cakes it is not needful to be hungry,” she explained, and really Gillian thought that there might be a good deal of truth in that remark, greedy though it sounded.

  She stood firm, however, to her refusal. “But of course I’ll come in and sit with you while you have your cakes,” she said, and the two girls went together to one of the small tables. Berta did not offer to treat
her companion, for which Gill was devoutly thankful. They sat down together, and Berta ordered an ice, a cup of coffee and a selection of cakes of stupendous names but alluring appearance, and then looked round for acquaintances. “Everyone comes here,” she told the English girl, and then suddenly caught Gill’s arm with a little squeak of excitement. “See! there are Prince Waldemar and Captain von Posen—there—by the window. There is an empty table close to them—let us move at once.”

  “Berta! You’re not going to do that!” Gillian urged. “You can’t, you know. What on earth would your mother say? Why, he’ll see you’ve moved on his account.”

  “Of course he will. Do not hold my wrist. I am going,” Berta said indignantly. “Ach! it is too late—Sophia von Geisach has run for the table—the pig! Oh, but it holds two! I will go and talk to Sophie. You can wait here for me, if you do not care for the neighbourhood of the Prince, Gillian.”

  “I’ll wait at the door, if you don’t mind,” Gillian said, getting up, feeling decidedly annoyed with Berta. “I don’t much care for sitting here without you—they’ll probably want to know what I’ve ordered and that sort of thing, and I shall be reduced to eating penny buns to keep them quiet. You go and talk to Sophie what’s-her-name and gaze at your Prince, if you like, and I’ll stand and look at the people going up and down, and then we shall both be satisfied.”

  And she walked out without giving Berta time for expostulation.

  It was certainly a good deal more enlivening at the door than sitting inside the confectioner’s looking at delicious things which she could not afford to eat. Gillian watched the faces of the passers-by—they were in general worth watching, for Insterburgers are a good-looking race. She was surprised to see so many Germans among them, however; she might almost have been in London by the amount. She wondered whether she would see any one she knew among the passers-by; how very comforting it would be if she were to recognise Mademoiselle de Monti’s clear-cut features among the many strange faces. In the interest of walking down the finest street in the capital Gill had almost forgotten her uncomfortable secret; now that she was alone again it came back with redoubled force.