Francie (7 page)

That was probably why she made the remark she did about her bed. The Sixth Form girls didn't all sleep in one room, exactly; each girl had a little cubicle marked off from the others by an arrangement of curtains. Francie had just been introduced to her special cell, and to show her good will had bounced cheerfully on the bed. To her surprise, there was no responding give of good old American innersprings; just a resisting plop that jarred her to the teeth.

“My gosh!” cried Francie. “Do you actually sleep on these prison pallets?”

A hush fell upon the dormitory and Francie, quickly sensitive, knew that it was the hostile silence of those offended. It was then she noticed a girl who had just come into the dormitory and was standing in the aisle a short distance away. She was a stocky, youngish-looking girl with pale blue eyes and sandy hair. But the surprising thing was the scornful way in which she was staring directly at Francie.

“I'd always heard how soft you Yanks are,” the girl said.

Francie, not believing her ears, stared back. “Yanks?
Who's
a Yank?”

The other girl tossed her limp hair free of one shoulder. “I shouldn't wonder if you are, Nelson.”

“Oh hush, Jennifer!” said Penelope crossly. “Francie's not a Yankee—she's from the Middle West. And these beds
are
hard.”

Jennifer, Francie thought unhappily. This unappealing-looking girl with the sharp tongue and the resentment against Americans was the “buddy” she was to have taken to her heart. Instead of being wildly angry as she would have been at home, Francie experienced only a weary, letdown feeling. So this was the English reserve she had heard so much about—this frozen silence all around her. Well, let them be that way! She could be reserved too.

Without glancing in Jennifer's direction again, even ignoring Penny, who was trying her best to ease the awkwardness, Francie got ready for bed. Not till “lights out” did she relax her stony, vigilant guard. Then she lay stiffly on the hard, unfamiliar bed, hating England and Fairfields and especially Jennifer, aching with longing for home and her own kind.

Back home in Jefferson a letter had arrived from Francie Nelson, and Ruth could hardly wait to get on the telephone.

“Gretta?” she cried excitedly into the receiver. “I've just got a letter from Francie and it's going to kill you. The poor thing.”

“I suppose she's coming back soon,” said Gretta gloomily, “before Prom.”

“Oh no, not at all. No such luck for Francie; on the contrary she's all set at school over there. It's a boarding school at that.”

“Boarding school?” Gretta sounded more cheerful now. “Read it to me, why don't you, if it's not too long.”

“Well, I won't go through all the guff on the first two pages because it's sort of hysterical. It's about her uniform.”

“Uniform?”

“It's what they've got to wear at these schools, evidently,” explained Ruth. “She says she tried to get by without wearing one of these terrible outfits, pleading that textile shortage they're always talking about in the English papers. But Miss Maitland, who's the headmistress—that's a sort of principal—said she thought it advisable to look like the others, which means she thought it necessary, so poor Francie's running around looking like a female convict, and playing hockey.”

“Well, go on,” Gretta said. “What else?”

“Here's what she writes,” Ruth said. “‘This Miss Maitland is what I might call a sourpuss, but we haven't got a lot to do with her, luckily, as she scares me to death. She takes some of the girls for Latin, but I'm so far behind in Latin they've given me up in despair. I'm not trying for any of their University examinations so they don't really care. People don't graduate here. There's something about certificates instead, and because everybody knows I'm only here for a while they don't worry. But they're way ahead of me in most things; I was surprised to find out how far I've had to go back to the younger girls' forms—that means classes—for maths and French and goodness knows what, and if I can catch up, entrance exams into State won't bother me a bit. In the meantime, though, it makes me awfully ashamed to seem so dumb.

“As for social life outside the school, there isn't any. They think men are but poison, when they admit their existence at all. Even when I write to Glenn—” Ruth paused until Gretta's exaggerated groans had died out on the telephone, and continued without comment—“when I write to Glenn I feel terribly guilty and hide the address. I don't think they'd go so far as to censor our letters but I don't trust Miss Maitland. Sometimes I figure I might as well be in a nunnery. The funny thing is, I'm getting used to it.”

Ruth paused again as a sound of disbelief came over the phone from Gretta.

“I don't think she'll last the time out,” said Gretta, plunged in stubborn gloom. “I'm sure I couldn't. I'm not sure I'd wish this fate even on Francie Nelson. What else does she say?”

“Not very much more, except that the way she's feeling right now, the fur coat her father promised her when she gets back has got to be something really snazzy. No mouton or rabbit. Oh yes, and that this girl she met on the boat—Penny her name is—is a great comfort, being half human because she was over here so long. But there's another girl—”

A decidedly angry voice broke in. It belonged to Ruth's mother on the telephone extension. “Now girls, you'll simply have to hang up. I've waited as long as I'm going to; I've got to get through to the grocery store.”

“Call you later, Gretta,” said Ruth resignedly. There were times, she knew, when even a mother must be allowed to assert herself.

It was the third week of term, and the Fairfields girls were taking their morning run, scattering out on the driveway as they emerged from the school door. It was not yet eight o'clock, and still dark. Under the clouded sky the trees of Fairfields' famous oak park very slowly took on shape and solidity. The air was cold but not crisp; there was a hint of rain in it.

Francie lowered her head and ran glumly, sniffling as she went. She wore no makeup and her hair was arranged for simplicity, not chic. She looked several years younger and several degrees less contented. She seemed always to have a cold these days; not a very bad one but nothing very comfortable either. The sniffle waxed and waned and never quite went away. Nobody paid any attention to colds at Fairfields unless a girl ran a temperature and complained of sore throat. Just now, for example, everybody in Francie's House had a cold, severe or mild. Even Penelope had one, though she was usually adaptable to climates.

“Hi there.” It was Penny herself trotting along next to Francie. She ran lightly, without noticeable puffing. “How you doing?” she continued, and Francie noted that she was already losing her American accent in spite of an occasional noble effort to keep it.

“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.