I shrugged my shoulders at the ‘Hmm-Hms’ I heard from the lanky Anais and from Marie Belhomme and we went on with an exciting game of ‘turn-the-knife’ in which the beginner, Luce, made mistake after mistake.
She’s young, poor thing, she doesn’t know!
The bell rang for class.
It was a sewing-lesson, a test for the examination. That is to say they made us do the samples of sewing, demanded in the exam, in one hour.
We were handed out small squares of linen and Mademoiselle Sergent wrote up on the blackboard, in her clear writing, full of strokes like hammers:
Buttonhole – Ten centimetres of whipping. Initial G in marking-stitch. Ten centimetres of hem in running-stitch.
I groaned at this announcement because I could just manage the buttonhole and the whipping but the running-stitch hem and the initial in marking-stitch were things I didn’t ‘execute to perfection’, as Mademoiselle Aimee noted with regret.
Luckily I had recourse to a simple and ingenious device. I gave little Luce, who sews divinely, some sweets and she worked a marvellous G for me.
‘We must help one another.’ (Very appropriately, we had commented on this charitable aphorism only the day before.)
Marie Belhomme had confected a letter G that looked like a squatting monkey and, in her usual cheerful, crazy way, was roaring with laughter at her own work.
The boarders, with their heads bent and their elbows held in were talking imperceptibly as they sewed. From time to time they exchanged meaning looks with Luce in the direction of the boys’ school.
I suspected that, at night, they spied some amusing spectacles from the vantage-point of their peaceful white dormitory.
Mademoiselle Lanthenay and Mademoiselle Sergent had exchanged desks; it was Aimee who invigilated our sewing-lesson while the Headmistress was making the girls in the Second Class read aloud.
The favourite was occupied in inscribing the title of an Attendance Register in a beautiful round hand when her Redhead called out to her from the distance:
‘Mademoiselle Lanthenay!’
‘What do you want?’ cried Aimee. Thoughtlessly, she used the familiar tu.
There was a stupefied silence.
We all looked at each other: Anais began to clutch her ribs so as to be able to laugh longer; the two Jauberts bent their heads over their sewing; the boarders slyly dug each other with their elbows; Marie Belhomme burst out in a stifled laugh that sounded like a sneeze, and, at the sight of Aimee’s face of consternation, I exclaimed out loud:
‘Ah! She’s so awfully kind!’
Little Luce was hardly laughing at all. It was obvious that she must have heard them address each other in that intimate way before.
But she was staring at her sister with mocking eyes.
Mademoiselle Aimee turned on me furiously:
‘Anyone may happen to make a mistake at times, Mademoiselle Claudine!
And I apologize to Mademoiselle Sergent for my slip of the tongue!’
But the latter, having recovered from the shock, was quite aware that we should not swallow the explanation. She shrugged her shoulders as a sign of giving up in face of the irremediable blunder.
This made a gay finale to the boring sewing-lesson.
I’d badly needed this sprightly distraction.
When school was over at four o’clock, I did not go straight home. Instead, I astutely forgot an exercise-book and came back.
I knew that, during the time for sweeping, the boarders took turns to carry water up to their dormitory.
I did not know that dormitory yet; I wanted to visit it and Luce had told me: ‘Today, I’m doing the water.’
Treading like a cat, I climbed upstairs, carrying a full pail in case of awkward encounters.
The dormitory had white walls and a white ceiling and was furnished with eight white beds.
Luce showed me hers but I hadn’t the faintest interest in her bed!
I went straight to the windows which did, indeed, let one see into the boys’ dormitory.
Two or three big boys of fourteen or fifteen were prowling about it and looking in our direction: as soon as they saw us, they laughed and gesticulated and pointed to their beds.
A lot of scamps!
All the same, how tempting they are!
Luce, shocked or pretending to be, hurriedly shut the window. But I’m pretty sure that, at bedtime, she displays less prudishness.
The ninth bed, at the end of the dormitory, was placed under a kind of canopy that shrouded it in white curtains.
‘That,’ explained Luce, ‘that’s the mistress on duty’s bed. The assistant-mistresses are supposed to take it in turn, week by week, to sleep in our dormitory.’
‘Ah! So it’s sometimes your sister Aimee, sometimes Mademoiselle Griset?’
‘Well, of course … that’s how it ought to be … but up to now, it’s always Mademoiselle Griset … I don’t know why.’
‘Ah, so you don’t know why?
Hypocrite!’
I gave her a bang on the shoulder; she complained, but without conviction.
Poor Mademoiselle Griset!
Luce went on enlightening me:
‘At night, Claudine, you simply can’t imagine what fun we have when we to go bed.
We laugh, we run about in our chemises, we have pillow-fights.
Some of the girls hide behind the curtains to get undressed because they say it embarrasses them.