Off we go!
Let us contrast the shining key, with its rounded contours which the hand polishes and turns in the lock twenty times a day, with the key eaten away with reddish rust.
The good workman who labours joyously, having risen at dawn, whose brawny muscles, etc., etc … Let us set him against the idler, who lying languidly on oriental divans watches rare dishes, etc., etc.… succeed each other on his sumptuous table, etc., etc … dishes which vainly attempt to reawaken his appetite, etc., etc … Oh, that won’t take long to hash out!
Nonsense, of course, that it isn’t good to laze in an armchair!
Nonsense, of course, that workers who labour all their life don’t die young and exhausted!
But naturally one mustn’t say so.
In the ‘Examination Syllabus’ things don’t happen as they do in life.
Little Luce was lacking in ideas and whining in a low voice for me to provide her with some.
I generously let her read what I had written; she wouldn’t get much from me.
At last it was four o’clock.
We went off home.
The boarders went upstairs to eat the refreshments Mademoiselle Sergent’s mother had prepared for them.
I left with Anais and Marie Belhomme after having looked at my reflection in the window-panes to make sure that my hat wasn’t crooked.
On the way, we shared a sugar-loaf and castigated Blanchot as if we were breaking it over his back.
He bores me stiff, that old man, who wants us always to be dressed in sackcloth and wear our hair scraped back.
‘All the same, I don’t think he’s awfully pleased with the Second Class,’ remarked Marie Belhomme. ‘If you hadn’t wheedled him round with the music!’
‘What d’you expect?’ said Anais. ‘Mademoiselle Lanthenay doesn’t exactly over-exert herself with anxiety over the welfare of her class.’
‘The things you say!
Come, come, she can’t do everything!
Mademoiselle Sergent has attached her to her person – she’s the one who dresses her in the morning.’
‘Oh, that’s bunkum!’ Anais and Marie exclaimed both at once.
‘It isn’t bunkum in the least!
If ever you go into the dormitory and into the mistresses’ rooms (it’s awfully easy, you’ve only to take some water up with the boarders), run your hand over the bottom of Mademoiselle Aimee’s basin.
You needn’t be afraid of getting wet, there’s nothing but dust in it.’
‘No, that’s going a bit far, all the same!’ declared Marie Belhomme.
The lanky Anais made no further comment and went away meditating; no doubt she would pass on all these charming details to the big boy with whom she was flirting that week.
I knew very little about her escapades; she remained secretive and sly when I sounded her about them.
I was bored at school; a tiresome symptom and quite a new one.
Yet I wasn’t in love with anyone. (Indeed, perhaps that was the reason.) I was so apathetic that I did my schoolwork almost accurately, and I was quite unmoved as I watched our two mistresses caressing each other, billing and cooing and quarrelling for the pleasure of being more affectionate than ever when they made it up.
Their words and gestures to each other were so uninhibited nowadays that Rabastens, in spite of his self-possession, was taken aback by them and spluttered excitably.
Then Aimee’s eyes would gleam with delight like those of a mischievous cat and Mademoiselle Sergent would laugh at seeing her laughing.
Upon my word, they really were amazing!
It’s fantastic, how exacting the little thing has become! The other changes countenance at the faintest sigh from her, at a pucker of her velvety eyebrows.
Little Luce is acutely conscious of this tender intimacy: she watches every move, hot on the trail, and learns things for herself.
Indeed she is learning a great deal for she seizes every opportunity of being alone with me, and brushes up against me coaxingly, her green eyes almost closed and her fresh little mouth half-open.
But no, she doesn’t tempt me.
Why doesn’t she transfer her attentions to the lanky Anais, who is also highly interested in the goings-on of the two love-birds who serve us as teachers in their spare moments and who is extremely surprised at them, for she is oddly ingenuous in some ways?
This morning I beat little Luce to a jelly because she wanted to kiss me in the shed where they keep the watering-cans.
She didn’t yell but began to cry until I comforted her by stroking her hair. I told her:
‘Silly, you’ll have plenty of time to work off your superfluous feelings later on, as you’re going on to the Training College!’
‘Yes, but you’re not going on there!’
‘No, thank goodness!
But you won’t have been there two days before two “Third Years” will have quarrelled over you, you disgusting little beast!’
She let herself be insulted with voluptuous pleasure and threw me grateful glances.
Is it because they’ve changed my old school that I’m so bored in this one?
I no longer have the dusty ‘nooks’ where one could hide in the passages of that rambling old building where one never knew whether one was in the staff’s quarters or in our own and where it was so natural to find oneself in a master’s room that one hardly needed to apologize on returning to the classroom.
Is it because I’m getting older?
Can I be feeling the weight of the sixteen years I’ve nearly attained?
That really would be too idiotic for words.
Perhaps it’s the spring?