Dumpling went close to the rail and looked down into the darkness. The guide and the rest of the party were already going away toward some other sight.
“Darling, we have to go now, we really do,” Mother said, taking Dumpling’s hand. “We can’t stay on down here without the guide.”
“Oh Mommy,” Dumpling said, “she’ll be lonesome.”
“Well, tell her good-bye,” Mother said, “and tell her we hope it won’t be long.”
Dumpling leaned over the railing. “Good-bye, Irene,” she said. “It’s dark, but don’t be afraid, dearie. I’ll be thinking about you, and we hope it won’t be long. Good-bye. Good-bye.”
Nothing else that they saw in the castle impressed them. They were very tired and sad.
Father bought a number of picture postcards of the castle so that Dumpling would have pictures of the place where Irene was languishing in prison.
Dumpling said, “Thank you, Daddy,” and put the postcards in her pocket beside the candy in the silver paper. They seemed to comfort her a little. Everyone tried to be very kind to her and give her the biggest piece and the first chance to do things. But her red mouth drooped at the corners and behind her glasses one often caught a glitter of tears. She was just as good as ever, but somehow she had lost her bounce.
On the way up to Paris, George and Susan didn’t once ask her, “Dumpling, isn’t this nice?” Because they knew it was no use.
The School of the Earnest Camel
In Paris the Ridgeways soon found a place to live. They were to stay in a pension—which is the French name for a boarding house—in a narrow street called the Rue Rollin in the oldest part of the city. The Rue Rollin was certainly not like the wide, tree-lined streets of Midwest City, but it pleased Professor Ridgeway very much because it was full of history.
“Just think,” he cried, “Pascal lived on this street, and the story Paul and Virginia was written in the house across the way!”
“And there is a tiny little garden in the back,” said Mother.
“And it’s very near the university,” said Father.
“And there are big public gardens just a few blocks away on both sides of us,” Mother said. Mother was always thinking about gardens, because when children are traveling it is hard to find good places for them to play.
“And there’s a nice little private school in a house at the end of the street,” added Father. “There’ll be time for the children to get started there before the Christmas holiday.”
“Oh, Daddy,” said Susan and George, groaning, “wouldn’t it be lots better to wait until after Christmas?”
But Father thought no. “We mustn’t waste our precious time,” he said.
You never saw such a funny school as the one at the end of the Rue Rollin. It was really just the house of Mademoiselle Ernestine DuChamel, and classes were held upstairs and downstairs and even in the bedrooms and the parlor. Mademoiselle Ernestine DuChamel was a large, stern lady with a look about her nose and lower lip that reminded Susan of some kind of animal. She couldn’t think what kind of animal it was, but she was sure that George would know.
After their first interview with this rather frightening lady, Susan said to George, “George, does she remind you of some animal?”
“Yes,” said George promptly. “A camel.” So, instead of struggling with the difficult name of Mademoiselle Ernestine DuChamel, George and Susan began to call her the Earnest Camel. Of course this was strictly between themselves and not for outside use. But it gave them a grain of pleasure to speak of her by a humorous name, as if she had been an author with a beard. It helped make a game out of an experience that was not always funny.
At home in Midwest City, Susan and George had been among the best pupils in their classes. But here in Paris, because they had not learned very much French, they found to their surprise that they were at the bottom of the class.
The Earnest Camel began by putting Susan with the twelve-year-olds and George with the ten-year-olds. Dumpling, of course, was in the first-grade room downstairs, where there were very small desks and chairs.
“Here is a nice desk for you by the window,” said Miss Camel to Dumpling (in French, of course). “The little girl who had it went home sick this morning.” In fact, it seemed as if the little girl must have been quite violently sick, because one of Miss Camel’s assistants was still cleaning up the desk with a damp cloth when Dumpling sat down.
“Susie, please don’t go and leave me,” Dumpling said.
But Susan said, “Honey, I have to. The girls my age are upstairs. But I’ll see you at noon. Be of good cheer.”
“Then, George, please stay,” begged Dumpling.
“I’d like to, Dumpling,” said George, “but I’ve got to go upstairs, too. This is the little kids’ room, Dumpling.”
“Okay, then,” said Dumpling sadly. Since she had lost Irene, she was often sad. She did what people told her to do, but she did not seem to enjoy herself.
Susan went upstairs and took her seat among the girls of her own age. They all looked at her very curiously, and one of them gave her a book and began to whisper to her. That was the first jolt Susan had. She found that she could not understand a word the girl was saying.
Susan opened the book and looked at it, and there was nothing at all about cats and balls or dogs and baskets. The print was small, and there were no pictures. She looked and looked, and the only words she could read were the French words for “the” and “and.” The umpty-umpty-umpty-um, and the umpty-umpty-um, translated Susan to herself. It did not seem as if she could learn very much this way.
Susan heard the other girls reciting and reading and answering questions all around her, and still she hadn’t an idea what they were saying. Suddenly there was a long and rather awful pause during which nobody said anything. Susan glanced up from the book and saw that everybody was looking at her. They were all expecting her to do something.
“Suzanne,” said the teacher quite sternly, and Susan realized that she was being called upon to recite and that the teacher had probably been calling her name for some time.
Susan got to her feet and said, “Oui, oui, oui, Mademoiselle. Je ne understand pas. Je suis sorry, but je can’t help it.”
The girls all began to giggle, and the teacher rapped on her desk for silence. The Earnest Camel was called and there was a hasty conference, after which Susan was moved into the next room, with the ten-year-olds.
Well, at least I’ll have George for company, Susan thought to herself. But, when she entered the ten-year-olds’ room and looked all around, she couldn’t see George anywhere. She felt a little puzzled and disturbed.
What has happened to George? she wondered. She began to recall stories she had read of mysterious disappearances, and they made her a trifle uneasy. Dear George! she thought. Sometimes I get quite tired of him, but I should certainly hate to lose him. I love him a lot, and it would be a great comfort to be near him right now. What in the world could have happened to him? But she couldn’t summon up enough French to ask anyone.
Unfortunately Susan couldn’t read the ten-year-olds’ reader either. Perhaps she might have been able to figure out a few of the words if only she had not been so worried about George. But the words seemed to blur and run together on the page.
“Suzanne,” said the teacher.
Susan heard her name at once this time. She got to her feet and said, “Excusez-moi. Je suis quite stupid, et je don’t know a thing you’re talking about.” At the same time another little girl whose name was Suzanne got to her feet and began to recite her lesson, and it appeared that she was really the one the teacher was calling for. It was all quite confusing, and the next thing Susan knew she had been transferred into the class for eight-year-olds.
Dear me, said Susan to herself, I feel just like Alice in Wonderland with the Drink Me bottle. I seem to be getting rapidly smaller and smaller.
When she came into the room for eight-year-olds, she looked all around for Ge
orge, but he was not there either. This is dreadful! Susan said to herself.
There were pictures in the books for the eight-year-olds, and Susan tried hard to imagine what the story must be about. In one picture there was a cat, and so, when she was called upon, Susan said, “Le chat joue avec le ballon.” But it turned out that the story was really not about a cat at all, but about a young girl who had lost her mother and had to go out into the world to earn her living. The cat had just been put in by the artist to make the picture more interesting.
“Well then,” said Susan impatiently, “l’ascenseur ne marche pas.”
The French children went into fits of laughter at this; Miss Earnest Camel was called; and Susan was conducted downstairs to the first grade.
Susan felt somewhat disappointed and ashamed, but at least she knew that Dumpling would be glad to see her. So she held her head high as she went down the stairs behind Miss Camel. In the doorway of the first-grade room she paused and looked all around and drew a long, deep breath. There sat Dumpling in the seat by the window, smiling a welcome to her—and, yes, there sat George, grinning a sheepish grin. George had got there before she did!
“Hi, Susie!” said Dumpling, and George said, “Hi!”
“Well, it’s nice to be together again,” Susan said, “even if we’re all back in the first grade.”
“This is as far back as we can go, Susan,” said George cheerfully. “They don’t have a kindergarten.”
“Silence! Silence!” commanded the teacher.
The hardest thing for Susan and George was scrounching their knees up under the tiny little desks. And all the little children, except Dumpling, looked at them with such round eyes of surprise!
However, the reading was very much easier than it had been in the upper grades, and gradually Susan and George began to get the hang of it. When it came to weaving mats and painting pictures, Susan was the envy of them all. George never had been very good at handcrafts, but arithmetic is pretty much the same in any language, and he certainly could add and subtract and multiply circles around the first graders.
On the way home at noon Susan said, “I suppose it really is a disgrace for us to be back in the first grade. I wonder if they understand about our father’s being a professor, and all that sort of thing.”
“Well, let’s not tell them,” George said hastily. “I guess the first grade is where we belong.”
“And it’s nice to be together,” Dumpling said.
When they weren’t in school, the Ridgeways found it very delightful to go to the public gardens. By walking a few blocks in one direction, they came to the Luxembourg Gardens, where many children played every day. Here there were trees and lawns and statues. Also, there were sand piles and swings and a pond for sailing toy boats on. There were donkeys to ride and a wonderful puppet theater right out-of-doors under the trees. There was a booth where one could buy hoops and balls and sand pails and nice little cakes for an afternoon lunch.
By walking a few blocks in the opposite direction from the Ridgeways’ pension, one came to the Jardin des Plantes—the Botanical Garden. This garden had great trees, too, and many strange and wonderful plants from other lands. But what pleased George most of all was that it also had a zoo. There were animal houses with lions and tigers and seals and monkeys, and outdoors was a kind of farm with ordinary country animals, such as sheep and goats. The city children could come here and get acquainted with the farm animals just as farm children do.
The Ridgeways started school on a Monday, and the first days seemed very long. Actually the school hours were longer than they were at home in Midwest City. After school the children barely had time to walk to the big public gardens and begin to play before the early winter dusk began to close in. Then a soldier would go all around the garden, beating a drum, and the children would have to troop out before the gates were closed and locked for the night.
By Thursday, George and Susan were quite fed up with the small cramped seats in the small first-grade room in the small stuffy house of the Earnest Camel. Dumpling didn’t seem to care, but then, she didn’t care much about anything these days.
Then something pleasant happened, for a change. They found out that every Thursday afternoon was a school holiday for all the children in France.
It was a bright crisp day, cold but sunny, and right after lunch Father walked with them to the Luxembourg gardens for an afternoon of fun. They saw a puppet show and watched the boats on the pond. They tried out the swings, and rode the donkeys, and ate little cakes. Best of all, perhaps, Susan and George were able to stretch their cramped legs by running races and playing hopscotch on the garden paths.
“Let’s come again on Saturday,” Susan said.
But George said, “How about the zoo on Saturday?”
There was another surprise in store for the Ridgeway children, but one not quite as pleasant. It turned out that French children went to school all day long on Saturday! Thursday afternoon and Sunday were the only free days.
After George and Susan found this out, if you had suddenly asked them, “George and Susan, isn’t this nice?” they would certainly have chimed in with Dumpling and said, “Home is better.” So, all through a shining Saturday, the Ridgeways were obliged to sit doubled up under the small desks, making shocking mistakes in French grammar, to the amusement of the first-graders.
Of course it rained on Sunday—“cats and dogs,” as George said.
“I don’t see any cats or dogs, Georgie,” said Dumpling sadly, pressing her nose to the windowpane. “Nothing but raindrops running down the glass.”
“He just means it’s too wet and cold to go out, honey,” Susan said.
“So what do we do?” asked George.
“There’s always the game of Authors,” Susan said.
“Oh, phooey!” said George. “I’m sick and tired of Speak-a-piece Whackery and Alfred O-Lord Tennisball.”
“Well, then you say what to do, George.”
“We could make our Christmas lists, and write down all the things we’d like to get,” George said.
“It would be something to do to pass the time,” Susan said. “But you know very well we aren’t going to get presents this year, because of the expense of travel and all that.”
“I know,” George said gloomily.
“Still,” said Susan, “it might be fun anyway. Let’s write down everything we would like in the world—not just presents that we might reasonably expect to get.”
“Okay,” said George.
They borrowed a few sheets of Mother’s yellow paper and began to write.
Susan’s list began: “A red velvet coat trimmed with white ermine with little black tails and a white ermine muff,” and, after filling both sides of the paper, it ended with: “a new pen and a lipstick like Mother’s.”
George’s list was equally long, but it began and ended with the same item: “Not to have to go to school.” In between were the names of all kinds of animals.
“You wouldn’t really like a jaguar, would you, George?” asked Susan sensibly.
But George said he would.
Dumpling’s sheet of paper had only one word on it, and the word was
Irene
Later on, when Dumpling was sitting under the table, looking over her postcards of the castle where Irene was imprisoned, Susan said softly to George, “We ought to do something for her, George. What could it be?”
George’s mind was still on Christmas. “If we could make something,” he said, “something for Christmas.”
“But I mean now,” said Susan, “now, while it’s raining and Dumpling and all of us are feeling gloomy.”
“Well, I mean now, too,” said George. “If we could make something that was getting ready for Christmas.”
“Tree trimmings!” cried Susan. “We left all ours at home. We’ve got the Nativity scene, but we haven’t any trimmings for a tree!”
“Boy, oh boy!” said George. “How would you like to make trimm
ings for a Christmas tree, Dumpling?”
“Okay,” Dumpling said. She put her postcards carefully away. “I’ve still got the silver paper that came around the piece of candy. You can have that.”
“Silver paper!” Susan said. At once the day seemed less dark and the rain less noisy. “Why, I’ve saved all the silver and colored papers on all the candies I’ve eaten in France! I didn’t know why I was saving them, but of course it was for this. Scissors, crayons, paste, yellow paper. What else do we have? Turn out your pockets, George.”
“Well,” said George, “I’ve got the champagne cork. If we covered that with silver paper—”
“And Daddy can show us how to fold and cut a star,” said Susan.
“I can make paper chains,” Dumpling said. She began to look quite excited, and happier than she had looked since she lost Irene. There was a bright pink flush on each of her round cheeks and a sparkle behind her glasses.
“Well,” said Susan, “let’s get busy. What are we waiting for?”
Adventure at the Zoo
The pension on the Rue Rollin was not as magnificent as the Grand Hotel and So Forth and So Forth, but it was cozy and it had steam heat that sizzled and bubbled and went bang, bang! in the radiators. This was good in cold weather.
The Ridgeways had two rooms and a little hall with shelves along the walls. The room that overlooked the Rue Rollin and all the history was the children’s bedroom. The room that overlooked the tiny little garden at the back of the house was used in the daytime as a living room. At night Mother and Father opened up the couch into a bed, and it became a second bedroom.
Meals were served downstairs at a long table in a dark, small dining room. Since the other boarders were foreign students who came from all sorts of strange places, the conversation at mealtime was rather bewildering. Sometimes it was in Romanian, sometimes in Swedish, sometimes in Chinese—or it was in French, with a variety of accents.
There were no other children. But Madame Duprés, the landlady, said to the Ridgeways, “Wait but a little, until my daughter comes. Then you shall have one to play with. Now she visits her grandmother. But soon she will come.”
Family Sabbatical (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries) Page 13
