Every article about the Doctor in the reference books, however, emphasized that it was as a teacher that she was most influential. She had studied with Nadia Boulanger; the musical historians said that she came nearest to imparting the spirit of her great mentor. Nobody said she was as good as Nadia Boulanger, or different; it is a firm critical principle that nobody living is quite as good as somebody dead.
A teacher, then? A teacher whom Schnak could truly respect? She had not quite known that that was what she wanted more than anything else in the world, and she came to such self-knowledge with mulish resistance. Now, at the end of her sixth session, she offered to cut the Doctor’s grass. Schnak had met her master.
The grass badly wanted cutting. The Doctor had never, in her life, been a householder, but the School of Music had established her in a pleasant little house, on a street very near the university, which belonged to a professor who had gone on a year’s sabbatical, taking his wife and children with him. It was a domestic little house, and the furniture, without being in ruins, spoke of a family life that included small children. It had bookshelves in every room, in which books, chiefly of a philosophical nature, were ranged tightly, with other books laid sidewise on whatever space there was above them. Small hands had marked the walls; philosophical bottoms had made deep nests in every chair. There was no complete set of any sort of china, and the cutlery was odds and ends of stainless steel which had managed, somehow, to acquire stains. The pictures were of philosophers—not a notably decorative class of men—and photographs of conferences where the professor and his wife had been snapped with colleagues from many lands. Whatever branch of philosophy the professor taught, it was clearly not aesthetics. When the Doctor had been introduced to the house she had sighed, removed most of the pictures, and set upon the mantelpiece her great treasure, without which she never left her Paris flat for long; it was a small, exquisite bronze by Barbara Hepworth. Beyond that, she felt, there was nothing to be done.
But the grass! When she arrived, the lawn had the battlefield look of a children’s playground, and in no time at all the grass had grown long and rank. What was to be done? The Doctor did not know, and did not really care, but she could not ignore the fact that the little lawns on either side were neatly trimmed. The Doctor had never before lived in a place where grass obtruded itself, or if it did, men came from somewhere and trimmed it. As the grass grew, she began to feel like La Belle au Bois Dormant, overgrown and shut in by uncontrollable herbage. As well as the problem of the grass there was a wasps’ nest over the front door, and the windows were muddy from the rains and dusty winds of the Canadian autumn. The Doctor had no gift for domesticity.
And here, in Hulda Schnakenburg, was somebody who seemed to know what to do about grass!
Schnak went to the back premises where there was, of course, a lawn-mower in a shed. It was not a good lawnmower, for the professor was not far above the Doctor in his understanding of bourgeois domesticity, but it worked after a fashion, tearing up whatever grass its ancient jaws could not chew, and with this antique Schnak set to work to chop the lawn, if not positively to trim it. She worked with the devotion of the willing slave, and after the lawn had been harried into submission she raked up the cuttings, and cut it again. She gathered the harvest and put it in a plastic bag, which went into the garbage can, which the Doctor regarded with disgust and used as little as she could; it was her custom to pack the leavings from her scant meals into paper bags, which she later, by stealth and in darkness, threw over a nearby fence into the back lawn of a professor of theology.
When at last Schnak was finished, the Doctor was standing at the front door.
“Thank you, my dear,” she said. “And now, your bath is ready.”
Bath? Schnak did not take baths. Now and then, under pressure from some outraged companion, she took a shower at the Women’s Union, careful not to get her hair wet. She had a horror of colds.
“You are hot and tired,” said the Doctor. “Look—you sweat. You will take cold. Come with me.”
The bath was such as Schnak had never seen before. The professor’s bathroom was not Neronian in its luxury, but it had everything that was needed, and the Doctor had banished all the smelly sponges, the balding brushes, and the celluloid ducks and rubber animals of the previous regime. The tub was contemporaneous with the house itself and was a large, old-fashioned affair with brass taps, and claw feet; it was full of hot water, bubbling fragrantly with the bath-oils the Doctor used upon herself, for she was a voluptuous bather.
What puzzled Schnak was that the Doctor seemed determined to remain in the bathroom with her, and gestured to her to take off her clothes. This was strange indeed, for in the Schnakenburg household baths were secret ceremonies, hinting of medical indecency, like enemas, and the bather always bolted the door against intruders. Schnak had stripped in front of somebody else before, because the three boys with whom she had undergone some sort of crude sexual experience were all great on what they called “skin”, but since childhood she had never stripped in front of a woman, and she felt shame. The Doctor knew it, and laughing a little, but with fastidious fingers, she pulled off Schnaks filthy sweater, and nodded to her to kick off her degraded loafers and her stained jeans. So, very shortly, Schnak stood naked on the bathmat, and the Doctor looked at her consideringly.
“My God, you are a dirty child,” she said. “No wonder you smell so bad. Get into the water.”
Would marvels never cease? Schnak discovered that she was not to bathe, but to be bathed. The Doctor had somewhere found a large apron which she wore over her clothes, and kneeling beside the tub she gave Schnak such a bath as she had never had in twelve years, at which time she had been instructed by her mother to bathe herself. What soaping, what rubbing, what scouring of the feet in a this-little-piggy-went-to-market detail they had not known since childhood! It took a long time and the beautiful water was slick and grimy when at last the Doctor pulled out the plug and let it all drain away.
“Out with you,” said the Doctor, standing with a large towel in her hands. She rubbed and scuffled Schnak’s unaccustomedly clean body in a businesslike fashion that admitted of no assistance, and included intimacies that astonished Schnak, for they were not the rough maulings of her three engineering students. And while this was going on the Doctor was drawing another tubful of water.