Antonin, whose gaze had followed mine, could not stop himself from laughing.
‘They get on tremendously well together!’
‘They certainly do.
It’s touching, this friendship, isn’t it, Sir?’
The big simpleton did not know how to hide his feelings and blurted out, very low:
‘Touching?
I’d call it embarrassing for the others!
Sunday night, I went to take back the music books and those ladies were here in the classroom, with no light on.
I came in – after all it’s a public place, this classroom – and, in the dusk, I caught sight of Mademoiselle Sergent and Mademoiselle Aimee, close together kissing like hot cakes.
Do you imagine they moved aparrt?
Not a bit of it!
Mademoiselle Sergent just turned round and lannguidly asked:
“Who’s there?”
Well, I’m hardly what you’d call shy, but all the same, I just stood there, looking at them like a dumb ox.’
(Let him talk as much as he liked, our candid assistant-master; I had nothing to learn from him!
But I was forgetting the most important thing.)
‘What about your colleague, Sir? I imagine he’s awfully happy now he’s engaged to Mademoiselle Lanthenay?’
‘Yes, poorr boy. But, to my mind, it’s nothing to be so happy about.’
‘Oh? Why ever not?’
‘Hmm. The Headmistress does anything she likes with Mademoiselle Aimee – not very pleasant for a future husband.
I’d be annoyed if my wife were dominated like that by someone other than myself.’
I privately agreed with him.
But the others had finished interviewing the newcomer and it was prudent for us to stop talking.
Back to singing then, but no … it was no good. Who should dare to enter at that moment but Armand, disturbing the tender whispering of the two women?
He stood enraptured beside Aimee who flirted with him, fluttering her eyelids with their curling lashes, while Mademoiselle Sergent watched them with the tender eyes of a mother-in-law who has married off her daughter.
My classmates resumed their conversations and carried them on till the clock struck the hour.
Rabastens was right. What queerr, sorry, what queer singing-lessons!
This morning, on coming to school, I saw a pale young girl standing in the entrance. She had dull hair, grey eyes and a skin with no bloom on it, and she was hugging a woollen shawl over her shoulders with the heart-rending air of a thin, cold, frightened cat.
Anais pointed her out to me with a thrust of her chin, making a grimace of displeasure.
I shook my head pityingly and said to her, very low:
‘There’s someone who’s going to be unhappy here, you can see that at a glance.
The two others get on too well together not to make her life a misery.’
Little by little, the other pupils arrived.
Before going inside, I observed that the two school buildings were being finished at a prodigious pace; apparently Dutertre had promised a large bonus to the contractor if everything was ready on the date he had fixed.
He must do a good deal of underhand jobbery, that creature!
Drawing lesson, under the direction of Mademoiselle Aimee Lanthenay.
‘Reproduction in line of any everyday object.’
This time it was a cut-glass decanter, placed on Mademoiselle’s desk, that we had to draw.
These drawing lessons were invariably gay, since they furnished a thousand pretexts for getting up: one discovered ‘impossibilities’; one made blots of Indian ink wherever they were least desirable.
Promptly, the usual storm of complaints broke out.
I opened the attack:
‘Mademoiselle Aimee, I can’t draw the decanter from where I am – the stove-pipe hides it!’
Mademoiselle Aimee, deeply occupied in tickling the red hair on the nape of the Headmistress’s neck (the latter was writing a letter), turned towards me. ‘Bend your head forward. You can see it then, I think.’
‘Mademoiselle,’ took up Anais, ‘I can’t see the model at all, because Claudine’s head gets in the way!’
‘Oh, how irritating you are!
Turn your table round a little, then you can both see.’
It was Marie Belhomme’s turn now.
She moaned:
‘Mademoiselle, I haven’t any more charcoal. And the sheet of paper you’ve given me has got a tear in the middle and so I can’t draw the decanter.’
‘Oh!’ grated Mademoiselle Sergent, exasperated. ‘Have you finished bothering us, all of you? Here’s a sheet of paper, here’s some charcoal and now, don’t let me hear one more word from any of you or I’ll make you draw an entire dinner-service!’