Read Online The Prussian Girls by P. N. Dedeaux - Free Book Online Page A

All the same, a mistress would and did mete out a few juicy slices with her switch, or crack a slouching back so hard it would twist like a snake for a few seconds or so. Ordinarily a frown sufficed. Else it might be: “Take twenty lines of Recitation”…”Write out a hundred times, Helen, 'I must not yawn in class' ”… “You will have an hour's Detention, Maud”… “See me after school” (and it would not be, the offender knew, in order to play post office exactly), or finally, the most dreaded and serious of all, “Put yourself down in the Book, Clavdia.”
    In order not to interrupt the train and concentration of these morning classes, a system of chits had been perfected. The girl was given a 'Zettel (or Strafzettel) of a certain color to take along to the Duty Mistress for completion, and signing. These chits were succinct and to the point, thus:
     
    Schillerin:
    Erika Treppe
    Unter-Tertia
    2
    Unaufmerksamkeit.
    Klasse:
    Stunde:
    Fehler:
     
    It was signed by the reporting mistress, and dated.
    Pretty Erika Treppe, already frowning with anxiety, watched the mistress writing on the little blue form, and curtseyed as she accepted it. Inattention nearly always merited a “Blue,” as it was called, which was invariably a destiny of seven, with a thin lithe classroom cane across absolutely nothing at all. No matter how tender of flesh the girl in question was, the Duty Mistress took her time, and aim, and cut just as hard as she could. The girl then rejoined her class, presented her now signed chit to the mistress in charge, and tried to look nonchalant.-not as if she was longing to rub all that fiendishly stinging flesh behind.
    Anna Erland got a “Yellow” that morning. In a History Class, devoted to the growth of the new German Sparta, she had really been unable to sit still. The glycerine suppository had been too strong. She still had to… go. She plucked desperately at her little brown Grecian chlamys, changing the position of her bottom this way and that on the hard oak seat. The mistress had checked her once, and then accorded the 'Zettel. In a hoarse muffled whisper Anna had asked to be allowed to visit the Matron first; her colleagues hid their grins as she hurried out, crimson-faced. All concerned knew this would mean yet another punishment since there was one time, and one only, permitted for bowel evacuation at Schloss Rutenberg.
    Anna took the stairs two at a time, grimacing. Matron Steinkopf presided in a series of chambers at the top of the house. She was a tall, grim-faced woman of over fifty, with a thin mustache lining her upper lip, and she wore a long sweeping black gown. Second only to the Head in power, she performed the function of doctor to the establishment, effecting most of her cures, to be sure, with clyster and castor oil, and she was universally dreaded. It was not that her strokes cut harder than those of any other mistress, but she had a way, a manner of crushing and bruising the soul, rather than the body. There was never any flippancy of lightness on Matron Steinkopf's lips. Nor was there now when she surveyed the slender, twisting youngster, her knickers off already and her skirt tucked into her chain-belt; scum were shaved but this round mound, darkly slit, looked polished as a billiard ball, at the top of the entwining legs.
    “Ach, Matrone… please… I can't help… I have to go!”
    The good woman moved slowly, and without speaking. First she ranged two hard kitchen chairs back to back, half a yard apart. She placed a bucket between them. She put some oil to heat on a flame, and next reversed an empty hour-glass. Then from some canisters and pans she produced a copper cylinder-the dreaded clyster.
    “Please, Matrone, please. I can go without that. In fact, in fact… I can go… any moment.”
    The girl followed the deliberate preparations with wide eyes. It was all taking so horribly long. Her skin was goosing all over. Ach Gott, o weh… the nozzle, which was