On my way home, I was already ruminating on various alluring tricks to excite that hulking ultra-inflammable Antonin still more. It would be something to pass the time during recreation when it rained.
And I who believed he was in process of plotting the seduction of Mademoiselle Lanthenay!
I was delighted that he wasn’t trying to make up to her, for what little Aimee struck me as being so amorous that even a Rabastens might have succeeded – who knows?
It’s true that Richelieu was even more smitten with her than I had supposed.
At seven o’clock in the morning, I arrived at school. It was my turn to light the fire, worse luck!
That meant breaking up firewood in the shed and ruining one’s hands; carrying logs, blowing on the flames and getting stinging smoke in one’s eyes … Good gracious, the first new building was already rising high and the boys’ school, identical with it, had got most of its roof on! Our poor old half-demolished school looked like a tiny hovel by these two buildings that had so quickly sprouted out of the ground.
The lanky Anais joined me and we went off to break up firewood together.
‘D’you know, Claudine, there’s a second assistant-mistress arriving today, and we’re all going to be forced out of house and home.
They’re going to give us classes in the Infants’ School.’
‘What a brilliant idea!
We shall catch fleas and lice. It’s simply filthy over there.’
‘Yes, but we’ll be nearer the boys’ classroom, old thing.’ (Anais really is shameless!
However, she’s perfectly right.)
‘That’s true.
Now, you twopenny-halfpenny fire, are you going to catch or not?
I’ve been bursting my lungs for the last ten minutes.
Ah, I bet Monsieur Rabastens blazes up a lot quicker than you do!’
Little by little, the fire made up its mind to burn.
The pupils arrived; Mademoiselle Sergent was late. (Why?
It was the first time.) She came down at last, answered our ‘Good morning’ with a preoccupied air, then sat down at her desk saying:
‘To your places’ without looking at us and obviously without giving us a thought.
I copied down my problems while I asked myself what thoughts were troubling her and I noticed, with uneasy surprise, that from time to time she darted quick looks at me – looks that were at once furious and vaguely gratified.
Whatever could be up?
I was not comfortable in my mind.
Not at all.
I began to search my conscience … I couldn’t think of anything except that she’d watched us going off for our English lesson, Mademoiselle Lanthenay and me, with a barely-concealed, almost rueful anger.
Aha! so we were not to be left in peace, my little Aimee and I?
Yet we were doing nothing wrong!
Our last English lesson had been so delightful!
We hadn’t even opened the dictionary, or the Selection of Phrases in Common Use, or the exercise-book …
I meditated, inwardly raging as I copied down my problems in wildly untidy writing. Anais was surreptitiously eyeing me, obviously guessing something was up.
I looked again at that terrible Redhead with the jealous eyes as I picked up my pen which I’d dropped on the floor by a lucky piece of clumsiness.
But … but she’d been crying … I couldn’t possibly be mistaken!
Then why those angry, yet almost pleased glances?
This was becoming unbearable; it was absolutely essential to question Aimee as soon as possible.
I didn’t give another thought to the problem to be transcribed:
… A workman is planting stakes to make a fence.
He plants them at such a distance from each other that the bucket of tar, in which he dips their lower ends to a depth of 30 centimetres, is empty at the end of 3 hours.
Given that the quantity of tar which remains on the stake equals 10 cubic centimetres, that the bucket is a cylinder whose radius at the base is 0.15 metres and whose height is 0.75 metres and is three-quarters full, that the workman dips 40 stakes an hour and takes 8 minutes’ rest during that time, what is the number of stakes and what is the area of the property which is in the form of a perfect square?
State also what would be the number of stakes necessary if they were planted 10 centimetres further apart.
State also the cost of this operation in both cases, if the stakes cost 3 francs a hundred and if the workman is paid 50 centimes an hour …
Must one also say if the workman is happily married?
Oh, what unwholesome imagination, what depraved brain incubates those revolting problems with which they torture us?
I detest them!
And the workmen who band together to complicate the amount of work of which they are capable, who divide themselves into two squads, one of which uses one-third more strength than the other, while the other, by way of compensation, works two hours longer!
And the number of needles a seamstress uses in twenty-five years when she uses needles at 50 centimes a packet for eleven years, and needles at 75 centimes for the rest of the time but if the ones at 75 centimes are … etc., etc.… And the locomotives that diabolically complicate their speeds, their times of departure, and the state of health of their drivers!
Odious suppositions, improbable hypotheses that have made me refractory to arithmetic for the rest of my life!
‘Anais, come up to the blackboard.’
The lanky bean-pole stood and made a secret grimace, like a cat about to be sick, in my direction.
Nobody likes ‘coming up to the blackboard’ under the black, watchful eye of Mademoiselle Sergent.