Francie: Off to London Page 6

  “I’m doing all right. At least,” said Francie, “these days I don’t want to die before we get back to the Hall, as I did at first. I’m beginning to think I’ll live through the whole experience.”

  “That’s the spirit. Chin up.”

  The games mistress, who was leading the herd, now blew her whistle, which was a signal for the girls to wheel about and start back toward the school. Daylight was growing stronger now; the slanting lines of mist thinned out. It was a maddening mist which Francie could never get used to; looked at from indoors it was exactly like a fine rain, yet out of doors one couldn’t feel separate drops of water. There was just a general clamminess everywhere, all the time. Still, she reflected, one shouldn’t complain about England’s climate. What was the use? There it was, and in a way it was a good climate; nowhere else had she seen such rich green grass and beautiful trees. That was the rain’s doing. Jefferson’s countryside seemed parched and brown when she thought of it.

  “Going to be—a good—day,” said Penny, panting now as she jogged along, for the girls’ pace had been quickened by the games mistress who led them, as they approached the big front door.

  “That won’t do me much good. I’m still way behind in maths and today I’ve got to swot.”

  “Pity,” said Penny, who was quick at mathematics. “I do wish I could give you a hand. Still, you have it easy in your turn when it comes to history, and I’m no good at that.… Home at last.” She puffed out her cheeks. “Just in time, too; I’m dying for brekker.”

  The girls filed into the refectory in a general symphony of sniffling, nose-blowing and throat-clearing. Surveying her companions Francie was struck, as usual, by their luxuriant tresses worn in many stages of disarray. There wasn’t what she considered a well-groomed head in the room. Hair at school wasn’t an adornment at all, but a nuisance.

  Francie, looking around her at the table, suddenly realized that she was beginning to feel a part of the group that filled the dining hall. They looked a nice crowd of girls. They weren’t unglamorous strangers as they had seemed at first, but pleasant enough creatures. She felt a surge of affection for them, though no doubt that was due in part to relief at being back in the building, sitting down at table, instead of still trotting about in the slanting lines of dank mist. Everyone looked nice this morning, even Miss Turner. This week she was at Miss Turner’s table; there was a mistress presiding at each, and the girls moved around from one table to the next, every week. Miss Turner had been their chaperone in the train at the beginning of term—what the girls called a “traveling aunt.” She was stiff and humorless and usually difficult. This morning, however, for the first time, Francie did not hate her.

  Nevertheless a familiar thought assailed her. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself. How strange were the ways of Fate! She thought of morning coffee in Aunt Norah’s breakfast nook, with Ruth dropping in early to pick her up for school, drinking a glass of orange juice with her at the little red-lacquered table between the benches. The sun was coming in through the red-checked curtains at the kitchen window. The Frigidaire sang its happy little song, that humming buzz of America that has taken the place of the outdated teakettle singing away on the hob. It was hot, but not as hot as it would be by nine o’clock when it was time to go to school. Ruth and she were giggling about something they had seen at the movies the night before. Francie was wearing black shoes like ballet slippers and—let’s see, what would she be wearing? Her plaid skirt and white blouse, perhaps.… She was just reaching for that American glass of orange juice when she recovered herself with a slight start.

  The Jefferson breakfast nook was far away. She was sitting at a refectory table in damp, dark, dank England, spooning up the last of her porridge, which was eaten without milk. She was dressed like all the other girls there, but there was nothing soldier-like or smart in these depressing gray costumes. If the idea was to make them all look alike, she reflected, it was a theory that failed in practice; the more they stuck to the pattern the more the individual stood out as unusually leggy, or dumpy, or curly-haired, or gray-eyed. Some of the girls wore mousy brown braids and some had bushy manes of reddish gold.

  Perhaps the thing hardest to get used to, she reflected as she had done many times before, was the youth of these girls. It was shocking to Francie that they should be such babies. Not in years: most of the girls in her own form were more or less of an age with her. It was their attitude toward life. The whole thing was so completely different from anything she had known that her pen failed her when she tried to tell Ruth or Glenn about it in a letter.

  “Maybe it’s partly that we oldest ones are only a handful compared to the rest of the school,” she had written to Glenn, “and that the little kids are only twelve. It’s been a long time since I spent much time in a crowd with a lot of twelve-year-olds and so forth. But they know their place; the ages don’t exactly mingle except when we play some of the games. Only I give you my word, I wouldn’t know how old some of these girls in my dorm are if I had to guess. They’re as old as I am, but they prattle like nursery-school inmates. I feel like a nurse sometimes. You ought to hear them in the dorm.”

  She chuckled to herself now as she thought of some of the bedtime conversations they had. The girls chatted freely through the flimsy walls of their cubicle curtains and often the evening air rang with eager discussions of games, history lessons, and rudimentary religious topics. There was never a word of parties or boys or dresses, or any of the topics Francie’s Jefferson crowd would have chosen.

  “They’re subnormal,” said Francie to herself. “I’m spending what should be my formative years with a lot of subnormal kids.”

  Then because she didn’t want to be always whining, even to herself, she pulled up. They were nice girls—healthy, tomboy, nice girls. It was not their fault that they should remind Francie so fatally of her playmates at the summer camp she had attended when she was twelve. If the truth were known, she didn’t really mind feeling superior; she admitted that to herself wryly. “I may be compensating for the people who snub me,” she thought. “Anyway in their fashion some of them are clever. Gwen’s good at music. Heaps of them are better than I’ll ever be at tennis.”

  But it was Penelope, of course, who got on best with the American—Penelope, whose blue eyes were reflective and kind, and who was able to skip with enviable nimbleness from American to British mentality, and back again. The worst girl in the place, the only real trial, thought Francie, as she drained her mug of sweetened tea, was Jennifer Tennison. But prayers were beginning, and she must stand with the others behind her chair, with hanging head. The glow of their morning exercise was fading; she shivered. Somebody near her sniffled. Someone across the room coughed.

  Prayers finished, Miss Maitland up at the head table began to read the day’s notices. Francie’s feet were numb. Her spirits took a dive downward as her body grew colder; she forgot the girls and the new, if fleeting, feeling of comradeship. She felt too low to think about Ruth or Glenn or the hot morning sun of Jefferson. She didn’t listen to Miss Maitland’s voice, except to wait for the word of dismissal.

  She kept saying to herself, “I’m in prison. It’s no use trying to cheer up; this is exactly like a prison. Pop couldn’t have known it would be as bad as this.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The girls came out the way the animals went into the Ark, two by two. In the corridor they broke ranks to disperse at a run for class. It was in the corridor that Francie, still in a mood, encountered the person she most disliked in the whole school, the person who, presumably and logically, should have been her best friend—Jennifer Tennison. She caught her breath in annoyance and apprehension. She saw Jennifer repeatedly, every day, all day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, but she never learned to relax about it.

  Sometimes Penny tried to reason with Francie about this difficulty in her new life. “Why let her get you down?” Penny would say. “It’s only what she’s trying to do, an
d the more you allow it the worse she’ll get, the little drip.”

  “I’m not used to it, that’s all. Nobody’s ever been so mean to me before—anyway not unless I gave them some cause,” added Francie with a sudden memory of Gretta and a few others. “But Jennifer started it and she’s been at it ever since the first night here. Why, do you suppose?” She stared with honest pained bewilderment at her friend.

  “Suppose we try to figure out why,” said Penelope. “There’s a reason for everything … What makes one girl mean to another, usually?”

  “Well, usually,” said Francie in thoughtful tones, “it’s jealousy. At least, it was always jealousy as far as I was concerned … and I’m not bragging.” She broke off and looked carefully over her shoulder. “You know that, don’t you, Penny? It might sound like boasting, but you know what I mean. I told you about all that—Jefferson and the parties and being popular. You’re the only one in the whole school who would understand.”

  She sounded plaintive, but Penny did indeed understand, and said so. “However, that theory doesn’t get us anywhere in this case,” continued the English girl, with the reflective air Francie so much liked and admired. “You haven’t grabbed any of Jennifer’s boy friends—if they exist, which is doubtful—and even if your clothes are nicer than hers she can’t possibly resent it as we only wear uniforms here. What do you think, yourself? Is there anything you may have said, or done, without thinking?”

  “N-no, not that I know of. But I’ll tell you what,” Francie lowered her voice and peered through the curtains of her cubicle to make sure they were not overheard. As Jennifer lived in the same dormitory, they got little chance of talking out of her hearing; they got little privacy altogether, and the two newcomers agreed that was one of the aspects of school life that they found most trying. “I’ll tell you what,” continued Francie. “Maybe her people did just what Pop did to me, and insisted too much on what friends we were bound to be. Pop gave me Jennifer Tennison for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for weeks before I met her. Of course, not having friends here, it worked all right with me and in the beginning I was ready to like her. But it might have had just the opposite effect with her if the Tennisons did the same thing.”

  “That could be how it started,” said Penelope. “As for the rest—oh well, they say there’s a bully in every school, and though Jennifer can’t very well twist your arm, there are other ways.”

  “You’re telling me!” said Francie.

  Now, in the corridor, she bristled instinctively at the sight of Jennifer. Yet Jennifer’s first words were friendly enough. “Hullo, Francie,” she said, pausing.

  “Hullo, Jennifer.”

  They stood there regarding each other, two girls in gray flannel uniforms, much of an age. It might have surprised a casual onlooker to know that one saw the other as a snake coiling for the strike.

  “Finding your maths any easier going?” asked Jennifer. Like Penelope, she was very good at mathematics. Unlike Penelope she was always reminding other people of it.

  “I try, but it’s awfully hard,” said the incautious Francie.

  Jennifer fell back a pace, registering extreme astonishment. “Oh, never. Surely not! Yanks are always frightfully good at sums. They’re wonderful at adding up dollars and all that sort of thing, aren’t they, Hardcastle?”

  Wendy Hardcastle, appealed to in full flight as she swept through the hall, paused a second. She smiled vaguely. “Do stop pulling her leg,” she implored in high sweet tones, and hurried on.

  “You Yanks—” continued Jennifer.

  “I’m not a Yankee, Jennifer, I’ve told you so a dozen times! Yankees come from New England. I’m from the Middle West.” Francie was going through the familiar struggle of trying to keep her temper. She always tried, and usually failed.

  Jennifer hesitated, searching her mind for some other remark that would be offensive but not crude. But her spite was not alert enough; time was pressing and girls were hurrying past them, reminding them of work. Francie escaped, therefore, without more insults being shot at her for the moment. She made her way to the history class with her nose in the air and her cheeks burning. Why should that girl be so nasty? It made everything in this horrid school seem much horrider. There wasn’t any sense to it.

  “Oh, if I could only take a recording of that female, and play it for Pop!” she thought. “If he only knew half the things she says, he’d probably break off business relations with her father.” She might, of course, write a letter to Pop and tell him about it, but she couldn’t consider that. It was the sort of thing one didn’t do. Back in America the girls and boys talked about their differences when they came home in the evening; it had seemed natural somehow. But boarding school was different, Francie realized. Here, she was very much a member of her own group, in her own world. It wasn’t the world of parents; all that was completely foreign to Fairfields. One was polite to adults or to children, but they belonged to different castes and were kept in their places. One didn’t confide in people “outside.”

  “These kids are a tight, exclusive little band,” Francie thought ruefully, “just the kind of exclusiveness I don’t like, and yet here I am, one of them!”

  However, whether she liked it or not she had to obey the moral code, and this was impossible to explain, even to herself. She only knew that she mustn’t tell. Neither Pop nor Mr. Tennison must be told that Jennifer was such a thorn in her side. Partly, of course, the reason for her silence was that she didn’t want to be laughed at. No parent would be able to see how annoying these pinpricks could be. After all, whatever Jennifer did never sounded as bad as it was. How could one explain the unrelenting persecution of it? Taking each one separately the spiteful remarks were trivial.

  The very first morning, for instance, when Francie had innocently said, “I won’t wash yet; I’ll wait until the water gets warm,” Jennifer had pounced on her words, hooted with scornful mirth, and made the whole dormitory laugh at the American for a luxurious fool who expected warm water. At odd moments Jennifer, for want of other material for annoyance, could always crack down on her for saying “ca-an’t” instead of “cahn’t,” or put on a high nasal whine as if in imitation of an American accent. She also seemed to hold Francie personally responsible for the history and foreign policy of the United States.

  “During the war—” Francie might begin in all innocence, and Jennifer was on her in a moment.

  “The war, did you say? Oh, do tell us about it, Francie. We don’t know anything about it over here in England, of course. We’d like to hear all about your experiences in Chicago. It must have been absolutely frightful. You were killed by a bomb, no doubt. Go on, Francie, you needn’t be shy.”

  All Francie could retort to an attack like that was a feeble, “I don’t live in Chicago.” Afterwards, of course, she had the most violent fits of rage, when Jennifer was gone beyond the range of influence. She could think of good cutting remarks when it was too late. But in Jennifer’s presence she couldn’t do anything.

  “Why don’t you stand up to her?” urged Penelope.

  “I don’t know how to,” said Francie miserably. “I don’t see why she should be so anti-American. I get so puzzled I can’t talk. Doesn’t she know her father works with mine in London? Mr. Tennison has an interest in Pop’s company; the Americans and the British work their oil wells together in that firm.”

  Penny said, “That wouldn’t make any difference to Jennifer; she probably thinks her father rather low, you see, because he’s in trade.”

  Francie blinked. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s just a silly English idea,” said Penny, “though it’s sort of dying out nowadays; after all, anybody who can make a go of trade today is jolly lucky as well as clever. But Tennison’s a silly ass; she’s taken that attitude and she holds by it. At least that’s what I’m beginning to think.”

  “Trade,” said Francie thoughtfully. “I thought that meant selling things for other things—swappin
g, you know.”

  “So it does, but the way they use the word here in England, it means shops. Selling groceries or motorcars, or, I suppose, oil, the way your father and Tennison’s do.”

  “Then everybody’s in trade, as well as our fathers,” said Francie. “I still don’t catch.”

  “Everybody is, in America, if you don’t count teachers or football players or actors or interior decorators,” said Penny, laughing. “And it’s the same here except that rather a lot of men are in the Army or Navy.”

  “So are they in the States, but they don’t boast about it especially.”

  “Well, they’re rather proud of it here,” said Penny, jumping to her feet as the class bell rang, “so I suppose that proves you’re more modest in America, with better manners. Anyway, don’t take Tennison too seriously. She’ll get her neck rung one of these days if she doesn’t grow less poisonous.”

  Books under their arms, they hurried down the hall. “I’ll try not to let her get me down,” Francie said. “I haven’t any time to worry about her; I’m too busy hating the rest of the setup to concentrate so much on Jennifer.”

  Penny glanced at her with concern. “Is it really so bad as all that?”

  “It’s not so good,” Francie admitted. “I don’t tell anybody but you of course, but I’m cold. I’m never warm or cozy. And everything’s so awfully different.… Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

  Penny must have given the matter serious thought; she sought out Francie later when the lessons for the day were done and the girls were taking their “P.T.,” as they called physical training.

  “I say, Nelson, I feel responsible for your misery. I am sorry. After all, if it hadn’t been for me you might never have come to Fairfields.”

  “Oh no, Penny, Pop had made up his mind I’d have to go to school before we ever talked to you, so you can stop worrying. I guess any English school would offer problems of some sort—to me, anyway. I didn’t mean to complain.”