Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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She told him anecdotes about the hospital—about the soldier who had been hit over the eye by a bottle of wine that an enthusiastic French woman had thrown to welcome him to Paris and who had been awarded the Purple Heart because he suffered from double vision incurred in the line of duty. And the nurse and the young officer who made love every night in a parked ambulance and who, one night, when the ambulance had been called out, had been driven all the way to Poughkeepsie stark naked.

As she spoke, it became clear to her that she was a unique and interesting person who led an incident-crammed, full life. She described the problems she had when she had played Rosalind in As You Like It in the school play in her senior year. Mr. Pollack, the director, who had seen a dozen Rosalinds, on Broadway and elsewhere, had said that it would be a crime if she wasted her talent. She had also played Portia the year before and wondered briefly if she wouldn’t make a brilliant lawyer. She thought women ought to go in for things like that these days, not settle for marriage and babies.

She was going to tell Teddy (he was Teddy by dessert) something that she hadn’t confided to a soul, that when the war was over she was going to go down to New York to be an actress. She recited a speech from As You Like It, her tongue lively and tripping from the Daiquiris, the wine, the two glasses of Benedictine.

“Come, woo me, woo me,” she said, “for now I am in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?”

Teddy kissed her hand as she finished and she accepted the tribute graciously, delighted with the flirtatious aptness of the quotation.

Warmed by the man’s unflagging attention, she felt electric, sparkling, and irresistible. She opened the top two buttons of her dress. Let her glories be displayed. Besides, it was warm in the restaurant. She could speak of unmentionable things, she could use words that until now she had only seen scrawled on walls by naughty boys. She had achieved candor, that aristocratic privilege.

“I never pay any attention to them.” She was responding to a question from Boylan about the men in the office. “Squirming around like puppies. Small-town Don Juans. Taking you to the movies and an ice-cream soda and then necking in the back seat of a car, grabbing at you as though you’re the brass ring on a merry-go-round. Making a noise like a dying elk and trying to put their tongues in your mouth. Not for me. I’ve got other things on my mind. They try it once and after that they know better. I’m in no hurry!” She stood up suddenly. “Thank you for a delicious lunch,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She had never before said to any of her dates that she had to go to the bathroom. Her bladder had nearly burst from time to time in movie houses and at parties.

Teddy stood up. “The first door in the hall to the left,” he said. He was a knowing man, Teddy, informed on all subjects.

She sauntered through the room, surprised that it was empty. She walked slowly, knowing that Teddy was following her every step with his pale, intelligent eyes. Her back was straight. She knew that. Her neck was long and white under the black hair. She knew that. Her waist was slender, her hips curved, her legs long and rounded and firm. She knew all that and walked slowly to let Teddy know it once and for all.

In the ladies’ room, she looked at herself in the mirror and wiped off the last of the lipstick from her mouth. I have a wide, striking mouth, she told her reflection. What a fool I was to paint it just like any old mouth.

She went out into the hall from the ladies’ room. Teddy was waiting for her at the entrance to the bar. He had paid the bill and he was drawing on his left glove. He stared at her somberly as she approached him.

“I am going to buy you a red dress,” he said. “A blazing red dress to set off that miraculous complexion and that wild, black hair. When you walk into a room, the men will drop to their knees.”

She laughed, red her color. That was the way a man should talk.

She took his arm and they went out to the car.

He put the top up because it was getting cold and they drove slowly south, his bare right hand, thoughtfully ungloved, on hers on the seat between them. It was cosy in the car, with all the windows up. There was the flowery fragrance of the alcohol they had drunk, mixed with the smell of leather.

“Now,” he said, “tell me. What were you really doing at the bus stop at King’s Landing?”

She chuckled.

“That was a dirty chuckle,” he said.

“I was there for a dirty reason,” she said.

He drove without speaking for awhile. The road was deserted, and they drove through stripes of long shadows and pale sunshine down the tree-lined highway.

“I’m waiting,” Teddy said.

Why not? she thought. All things could be said on this blessed afternoon. Nothing was unspeakable between them. They were above the trivia of prudery. She began to speak, first hesitantly, then more easily, as she got into it, of what had happened at the hospital.

She described what the two Negroes were like, lonely and crippled, the only two colored men in the ward, and how Arnold had always been so reserved and gentlemanly and had never called her by her first name, like the other soldiers, and how he read the books she loaned him and seemed so intelligent and sad, with his wound and the girl in Cornwall who had never written to him again. Then she told about the night he found her alone when all the other men were asleep and the conversation they had and how it led up to the proposition, the two men, the eight hundred dollars. “If they’d been white, I’d have reported them to the Colonel,” she said, “but this way …”

Teddy nodded understandingly at the wheel, but said nothing, just drove a little faster down the highway.

“I haven’t been back to the hospital since,” she said. “I just couldn’t. I begged my father to let me go to New York. I couldn’t bear staying in the same town with that man, with his knowing what he said to me. But my father … There’s no arguing with my father. And naturally, I couldn’t tell him why. He’d have gone out to the hospital and killed those two men with his bare hands. And then, this morning—it was such a lovely day—I didn’t go to the bus, I drifted into it. I knew I didn’t want to go to that house, but I guess I wanted to know if they really were there, if there were men who actually acted like that. Even so, even after I got out of the bus, I just waited on the road. I had a Coke, I took a sunbath … I … Maybe I would have gone a bit down the road. Maybe all the way. Just to see. I knew I was safe. I could run away from them easily, even if they saw me. They can hardly move, with their legs …”

The car was slowing down. She had been looking down at her shoes, under the dashboard of the car, as she spoke. Now she glanced up and saw where they were. The gas station. The general store. Nobody in sight.

The car came to a halt at the entrance to the gravel road that led down to the river.

“It was a game,” she said, “a silly, cruel, girl’s game.”

“You’re a liar,” Boylan said.

“What?” She was stunned. It was terribly hot and airless in the car.

“You heard me, pet,” Boylan said. “You’re a liar. It wasn’t any game. You were going to go down there and get laid.”

“Teddy,” she said, gasping, “please … please open the window. I can’t breathe.”

Boylan leaned across her and opened the door on her side. “Go ahead,” he said. “Walk on down, pet. They’re still there. Enjoy yourself. I’m sure it’ll be an experience you’ll cherish all your life.”

“Please, Teddy …” She was beginning to feel very dizzy and his voice faded in her ears and then came up again, harshly.

“Don’t worry about transportation home,” Boylan said. “I’ll wait here for you. I have nothing better to do. It’s Saturday afternoon and all my friends are out of town. Go ahead. You can tell me about it when you come back. I’ll be most interested.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. Her head was expanding and contracting and she felt as though she were choking. She stumbled out of the car and threw up by the side of the road in great racking heaves.

Boylan sat immobile at the wheel, staring straight ahead of him. When she was finished and the throat-tearing convulsions had ceased, he said, curtly, “All right, come back in here.”

Depleted and fragile, she crept back into the car, cold sweat on her forehead, holding her hand up to her mouth against the smell.

“Here, pet,” Boylan said kindly. He gave her the large colored silk handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Use this.”

She dabbed at her mouth, wiped the sweat from her face. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“What do you really want to do, pet?” he asked.

“I want to go home,” she whimpered.

“You can’t go home in that condition,” he said.

He started the car.

“Where’re you taking me?”

“My house,” he said.

She was too exhausted to argue and she lay with her head against the back of the seat, her eyes closed, as they drove swiftly south along the highway.

He made love to her early that evening, after she had rinsed her mouth a long time with a cinnamon-flavored mouthwash in his bathroom and had slept soddenly on his bed for two hours. Afterward, silently, he drove her home.

Monday morning, when she came into the office at nine o’clock, there was a long, white, plain envelope on her desk, with her name printed on it and “Personal” scribbled in one corner. She opened the envelope. There were eight one-hundred-dollar bills there.

He must have gotten up at dawn to drive all the way into town and get into the locked factory before anyone appeared for work.

Chapter 3

The classroom was silent, except for the busy scratching of pens on paper. Miss Lenaut was seated at her desk reading, occasionally raising her head to scan the room. She had set a half-hour composition for her pupils to write, subject, “Franco-American Friendship.” As Rudolph bent to his task at his desk toward the rear of the room, he had to admit to himself that Miss Lenaut might be beautiful, and undoubtedly French, but that her imagination left something to be desired.

Half a point would be taken off for a mistake in spelling or a misplaced accent, and a full point for any errors in grammar. The composition had to be at least three pages long.

Rudolph filled the required three pages quickly. He was the only student in the class who consistently got marks of over 90 on compositions and dictation, and in the last three tests he had scored 100. He was so good in the language that Miss Lenaut had grown suspicious and had asked him if his parents spoke French. “Jordache,” she said. “It is not an American name.” The imputation hurt him. He wanted to be different from the people around him in many respects, but not in his American-ness. His father was German, Rudolph told Miss Lenaut, but aside from an occasional word in that language, all Rudolph ever heard at home was English.

“Are you sure your father wasn’t born in the Alsace?” Miss Lenaut persisted.

“Cologne,” Rudolph said and added that his grandfather had come from Alsace-Lorraine.

“Alors,” Miss Lenaut said. “It is as I suspected.”

It pained Rudolph that Miss Lenaut, that incarnation of feminine beauty and worldly charm and the object of his feverish devotion, might believe, even for a moment, that he would lie to her or take secret advantage of her. He longed to confess his emotion and had fantasies of returning to the high school some years hence, when he was a suave college man, and waiting outside the school for her and addressing her in French, which would by that time be fluent and perfectly accented, and telling her, with an amused chuckle for the shy child he had been, of his schoolboy passion for her in his junior year. Who knew what then might happen? Literature was full of older women and brilliant young boys, of teachers and precocious pupils …

He reread his work for errors, scowling at the banality which the subject had imposed upon him. He changed a word or two, put in an accent he had missed, then looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go.

“Hey!” There was a tortured whisper on his right. “What’s the past participle of venir?”

Rudolph turned his head slightly toward his neighbor, Sammy Kessler, a straight D student. Sammy Kessler was hunched in a position of agony over his paper, his eyes flicking desperately over at Rudolph. Rudolph glanced toward the front of the room. Miss Lenaut was engrossed in her book. He didn’t like to break the rules in her class, but he couldn’t be known by his contemporaries as a coward or a teacher’s pet.

“Venu,” he whispered.

“With two o’s?” Kessler whispered.

“A u, idiot,” Rudolph said.

Sammy Kessler wrote laboriously, sweating, doomed to his D.

Rudolph stared at Miss Lenaut. She was particularly attractive today, he thought. She was wearing long earrings and a brown, shiny dress that wrinkled skin-tight across her girdled hips and showed a generous amount of her stiffly armored bosom. Her mouth was a bright-red gash of lipstick. She put lipstick on before every class. Her family ran a small French restaurant in the theatrical district of New York and there was more of Broadway in Miss Lenaut than the Faubourg St. Honoré, but Rudolph was happily unaware of this distinction.

Idly, Rudolph began to sketch on a piece of paper. Miss Lenaut’s face took shape under his pen, the easily identifiable two curls that she wore high on her cheeks in front of her ears, the waved, thick hair, with the part in the middle. Rudolph continued drawing. The earrings, the rather thick, beefy throat. For a moment, Rudolph hesitated. The territory he was now entering was dangerous. He glanced once more at Miss Lenaut. She was still reading. There were no problems of discipline in Miss Lenaut’s class. She gave out punishments for the slightest infractions with merciless liberality. The full conjugation of the reflexive irregular verb se taire, repeated ten times, was the lightest of her sentences. She could sit and read with only an occasional lifting of her eyes to reassure herself that all was well, that there was no whispering, no passing of papers between desk and desk.

Rudolph gave himself to the delights of erotic art. He continued the line down from Miss Lenaut’s neck to her right breast, naked. Then he put in her left breast. He was satisfied with the proportions. He drew her standing, three-quarter view, one arm extended, with a piece of chalk in her hand, at the blackboard. Rudolph worked with relish. He was getting better with each opus. The hips were easy. The mons veneris he drew from memory of art books in the library, so it was a bit hazy. The legs, he felt, were satisfactory. He would have liked to draw Miss Lenaut barefooted, but he was bad on feet, so he gave her the high-heeled shoes, with straps above the ankle, that she habitually wore. Since he had her writing on the blackboard, he decided to put some words on the blackboard. “Je suis folle d’amour,” he printed in an accurate representation of Miss Lenaut’s blackboard script. He started to shade Miss Lenaut’s breasts artistically. He decided that the entire work would be more striking if he drew it as though there were a strong light coming from the left. He shaded the inside of Miss Lenaut’s thigh. He wished there were someone he knew in school he could show the drawing to who would appreciate it. But he couldn’t trust the boys on the track team, who were his best friends, to treat the picture with appropriate sobriety.

He was shading in the straps on the ankles when he became conscious of someone standing beside his desk. He looked up slowly. Miss Lenaut was glaring down at the drawing on his desk. She must have moved down the aisle like a cat, high heels and all.

Rudolph sat motionless. No gesture seemed worthwhile at the moment. There was fury in Miss Lenaut’s dark, mascaraed eyes and she was biting the lipstick off her lips. She reached out her hand, silently. Rudolph picked up the piece of paper and gave it to her. Miss Lenaut turned on her heel and walked back to her desk, rolling the paper in her hands so that no one could see what was on it.

Just before the bell rang to end the class, she called out, “Jordache.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rudolph said. He was proud of the ordinary tone he managed to use.

“May I see you for a moment after class?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

The bell rang. The usual chatter broke out. The students hurried out of the room to rush for their next classes. Rudolph, with great deliberation, put his books into his briefcase. When all the other students had quit the room, he walked up to Miss Lenaut’s desk.

She was seated like a judge. Her tone was icy. “Monsieur l’artiste,” she said. “You have neglected an important feature of your chef d’oeuvre.” She opened the drawer of her desk and took out the sheet of paper with the drawing on it and smoothed it with a rasping noise on the blotter of the desk top. “It is lacking a signature. Works of art are notoriously more valuable when they are signed authentically by the artist. It would be deplorable if there were any doubts as to the origin of a work of such richness.” She pushed the drawing across the desk toward Rudolph. “I will be much indebted to you, Monsieur,” she said, “if you would have the kindness to affix your name. Legibly.”

Rudolph took out his pen and signed his name on the lower right hand corner of the drawing. He did it slowly and deliberately and he made sure that Miss Lenaut saw that he was studying the drawing at the same time. He was not going to act like a frightened kid in front of her. Love has its own requirements. Man enough to draw her naked, he was man enough to stand up to her wrath. He underlined his signature with a little flourish.

Miss Lenaut reached over and snatched the drawing to her side of the desk. She was breathing hard now. “Monsieur,” she said shrilly, “you will go get one of your parents immediately after school is over today and you will bring it back for a conversation with me speedily.” When she was excited, there were little, queer mistakes in Miss Lenaut’s English. “I have some important things to reveal to them about the son they have reared in their house. I will be waiting here. If you are not here with a representative of your family by four o’clock the consequences will be of the gravest. Is it understood?”

“Yes, ma’am. Good afternoon, Miss Lenaut.” The “good afternoon” took courage. He went out of the room, neither more quickly nor more slowly than he usually did. He remembered his gliding motion. Miss Lenaut sounded as though she had just run up two flights of stairs.

When he reached home after school was over, he avoided going into the store where his mother was serving some customers and went up to the apartment, hoping to find his father. Whatever happened, he didn’t want his mother to see that drawing. His father might whack him, but that was to be preferred to the expression that he was sure would be in his mother’s eyes for the rest of her life if she saw that picture.

His father was not in the house. Gretchen was at work and Tom never came home until five minutes before supper. Rudolph washed his hands and face and combed his hair. He was going to meet his fate like a gentleman.

He went downstairs and into the shop. His mother was putting a dozen rolls into a bag for an old woman who smelled like a wet dog. He waited until the old woman had left, then went and kissed his mother.

“How were things at school today?” she asked, touching his hair.

“Okay,” he said. “The usual. Pa around anywhere?” “He’s probably down at the river. Why?” The “Why?” was suspicious. It was unusual for anyone in the family to seek out her husband unnecessarily.

“No reason,” Rudolph said carelessly.

“Isn’t there track practice today?” she probed.

“No.” Two customers came into the shop, the little bell over the door tingling, and he didn’t have to lie any more. He waved and went out as his mother was greeting the customers.

When he was out of sight of the shop he began to walk quickly down toward the river. His father kept his shell in the corner of a ramshackle warehouse on the waterfront and usually spent one or two afternoons a week working on the boat there. Rudolph prayed that this was one of those afternoons.

When he reached the warehouse he saw his father out in front of it, sandpapering the hull of the one-man shell, which was propped, upside down, on two sawhorses. His father had his sleeves rolled up and was working with great care on the smooth wood. As Rudolph approached, he could see the ropy muscles of his father’s forearms hardening and relaxing with his rhythmic movements. It was a warm day, and even with the wind that came off the river his father was sweating.

“Hi, Pa,” Rudolph said.

His father looked up and grunted, then went back to his work. He had bought the shell in a half-ruined condition for practically nothing from a boys’ school nearby that had gone bankrupt. Some river memory of youth and health from his boyhood on the Rhine was behind the purchase and he had reconstructed the shell and varnished it over and over again. It was spotless and the mechanism of the sliding seat gleamed with its coating of oil. After he had gotten out of the hospital in Germany, with one leg almost useless and his big frame gaunt and weak, Jordache had exercised fanatically to recover his strength. His work on the Lake boats had given him the strength of a giant and the grueling miles he imposed on himself sweeping methodically up and down the river had kept him forbiddingly powerful. With his bad leg he couldn’t catch anybody, but he gave the impression of being able to crush a grown man in those hairy arms.

“Pa …” Rudolph began, trying to conquer his nervousness. His father had never hit him, but Rudolph had seen him knock Thomas unconscious with one blow of his fist just last year.

“What’s the matter?” Jordache tested the smoothness of the wood, with broad, spatulate fingers. The back of his hands and his fingers were bristling with black hairs.

“It’s about school,” Rudolph said.

“You in trouble? You?” Jordache looked over at his son with genuine surprise.

“Trouble might be too strong a word,” Rudolph said. “A situation has come up.”

“What kind of situation?”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “there’s this French woman who teaches French. I’m in her class. She says she wants to see you this afternoon. Now.”

“Me?”

“Well,” Rudolph admitted, “she said one of my parents.”

“What about your mother?” Jordache asked. “You tell her about this?”

“It’s something I think it’s better she doesn’t know about,” Rudolph said.

Jordache looked across the hull of the shell at him speculatively. “French,” he said. “I thought that was one of your good subjects.”

“It is,” Rudolph said. “Pa, there’s no sense in talking about it, you’ve got to see her.”

Jordache flicked a spot off the wood. Then he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and began rolling down his sleeves. He swung his windjacket over his shoulder, like a workingman, and picked up his cloth cap and put it on his head, and started walking. Rudolph followed him, not daring to suggest that perhaps it would be a good idea if his father went home and put on a suit before the conversation with Miss Lenaut.

Miss Lenaut was seated at her desk correcting papers when Rudolph led his father into the room. The school building was empty, but there were shouts from the athletic field below the classroom windows. Miss Lenaut had put lipstick on at least three more times since Rudolph’s class. For the first time, he realized that she had thin lips and plumped them out artificially. She looked up when they came into the room and her mouth set. Jordache had put his windjacket on before entering the school and had taken off his cap, but he still looked like a workman.

Miss Lenaut stood up as they approached the desk.

“This is my father, Miss Lenaut,” Rudolph said.

“How do you do, sir?” she said, without warmth.

Jordache said nothing. He stood there, in front of the desk, chewing at his moustache, his cap in his hands, proletarian and subdued.

“Has your son told you why I asked you to come this afternoon, Mr. Jordache?”

“No,” Jordache said, “I don’t remember that he did.” That peculiar, uncharacteristic mildness was in his voice, too. Rudolph wondered if his father was afraid of the woman.

“It embarrasses me even to talk about it.” Miss Lenaut immediately became shrill again. “In all my years of teaching … The indignity … From a student who has always seemed ambitious and diligent. He did not say what he had done?”

“No,” Jordache said. He stood there patiently, as though he had all day and all night to sort out the matter, whatever it turned out to be.

“Eh, bien,” Miss Lenaut said, “the burden devolves upon my shoulders.” She bent down and opened the desk drawer and took out the drawing. She did not look at it, but held it down and away from her as she spoke. “In the middle of my classroom, when he was supposed to be writing a composition, do you know what he was doing?”

“No,” said Jordache.

“This!” She poked the drawing dramatically in front of Jordache’s nose. He took the paper from her and held it up to the light from the windows to get a better look at it. Rudolph peered anxiously at his father’s face, searching for signs. He half expected his father to turn and hit him on the spot and wondered if he would have the courage to just stand there and take it without flinching or crying out. Jordache’s face told him nothing. He seemed quite interested, but a little puzzled.

Finally, he spoke. “I’m afraid I can’t read French,” he said.

“That is not the point,” Miss Lenaut said excitedly.

“There’s something written here in French.” Jordache pointed with his big index finger to the phrase, “Je suis folle d’amour,” that Rudolph had printed on the drawing of the blackboard in front of which the naked figure was standing.

“I am crazy with love, I am crazy with love.” Miss Lenaut was now striding up and down in short trips behind her desk.

“What’s that?” Jordache wrinkled his forehead, as though he was trying his best to understand but was out in waters too deep for him.

“That’s what’s written there.” Miss Lenaut pointed a mad finger at the sheet of paper. “It’s a translation of what your talented son has written there. ‘I am crazy with love, I am crazy with love.’” She was shrieking now.

“Oh, I see,” Jordache said, as though a great light had dawned on him. “Is that dirty in French?”

Miss Lenaut gained control of herself with a visible effort, although she was biting her lipstick again. “Mr. Jordache,” she said, “have you ever been to school?”

“In another country,” Jordache said.

“In whatever country you went to school, Mr. Jordache, would it be considered proper for a young boy to draw a picture of his teacher nude, in the classroom?”

“Oh!” Jordache sounded surprised. “Is this you?”

“Yes, it is,” Miss Lenaut said. She glared bitterly at Rudolph.

Jordache studied the drawing more closely. “By God,” he said, “I see the resemblance. Do teachers pose nude in high school these days?”

“I will not have you mock of me, Mr. Jordache,” Miss Lenaut said with cold dignity. “I see there is no further point to this conversation. If you will be so good as to return the drawing to me …” She stretched out her hand. “I will say good day to you and take the matter up elsewhere, where the gravity of the situation will be appreciated. The office of the principal. I had wanted to spare your son the embarrassment of putting his obscenity on the principal’s desk, but I see no other course is open to me. Now, if I may have the drawing please, I won’t detain you further …”

Jordache took a step back, holding onto the drawing. “You say my son did this drawing?”

“I most certainly do,” Miss Lenaut said. “His signature is on it.”

Jordache glanced at the drawing to confirm this. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s Rudy’s signature. It’s his drawing, all right. You don’t need a lawyer to prove that.”

“You may expect a communication from the principal,” Miss Lenaut said. “Now, please return the drawing. I’m busy and I’ve wasted enough time on this disgusting affair.”

“I think I’ll keep it. You yourself said it’s Rudy’s,” Jordache said placidly. “And it shows a lot of talent. A very good likeness.” He shook his head in admiration. “I never guessed Rudy had it in him. I think I’ll have it framed and hang it up back home. You’d have to pay a lot of money to get a nude picture as good as this one on the open market.”

Miss Lenaut was biting her lips so hard she couldn’t get a word out for the moment. Rudolph stared at his father, dumbfounded. He hadn’t had any clear idea of how his father was going to react, but this falsely innocent, sly, country-bumpkin performance was beyond any concept that Rudolph might ever have had of how his father would behave.

Miss Lenaut gave tongue. She spoke in a harsh whisper, leaning malevolently over her desk and spitting out the words at Jordache. “Get out of here, you low, dirty, common foreigner, and take your filthy son with you.”

“I wouldn’t talk like that, Miss,” Jordache said, his voice still calm. “This is a taxpayer’s school and I’m a taxpayer and I’ll get out when I’m good and ready. And if you didn’t strut around with your tail wiggling in a tight skirt and half your titties showing like a two dollar whore on a street corner, maybe young boys wouldn’t be tempted to draw pictures of you stark-assed naked. And if you ask me, if a man took you out of all your brassieres and girdles, it’d turn out that Rudy was downright complimentary in his art work.”

Miss Lenaut’s face was congested and her mouth writhed in hatred. “I know about you,” she said. “Sale Boche.”

Jordache reached across the desk and slapped her. The slap resounded like a small firecracker. The voices from the playing field had died down and the room was sickeningly silent. Miss Lenaut remained bent over, leaning on her hands on the desk, for another moment. Then she burst into tears and crumpled onto her chair, holding her hands to her face.