Reveille rang from the cavalry barracks across the wind-whipped plain, and promptly as it did so, at six o'clock each morning save the Sabbath, a bell clanged in the upper corridors of Schloss Rutenberg. A new day had dawned for its pensionaires. Matrone Steinkopf announced Aufstehen with a huge copper bell, walking past one Dormitory after another, and every girl except the Prefects had to be out of bed by the time it was silent.
So there was much rubbing of sleepy eyes and tousled heads as the girls jumped out of bed, threw off their cozy nighties and made naked, all in a jiggling jostle of toasted girl-flesh, for the wash-room adjoining their individual Dormitory. Here each had to take a cold bath in a wooden tub which would be, as winter wore on, crusted with ice at the start. It was a merry moment again, of pushing and giggling maidens in prime condition, and the Prefect in charge, lying a few seconds longer in her raised bed, would wonder how many more of those chubby bottoms would have neat lines ruled on them by evening. Depending on how long ago they'd had it these lines were black, brown, yellow, the Hohenzollern colors with a vengeance. Supposedly each girl was meant to sit in the icy tub for a full count of ten slow seconds, and some Prefects laughingly enforced this. Others usually got up when the slopping and gambolling was threatening to grow too intense, in order to restore a little order and decorum into the activities. For this girlhood was anything but repressed; they were part of a new world, a coming breed, their camaraderie was close, their esprit de corps intense. Dorm “D” was a real team.
Finally a few slapping cracks of the Prefect's strap would resound and with a whistling “Phew!” some girl, still grinning, would jump into the water she had been reluctantly eyeing. Praelictors were permitted occasional strokes with these straps, “hunting” strokes as they were called, given too by the mistresses with their switches (known for the purpose as Jagdgerte), but to punish a girl any further they had to fill out a chit requesting permission. The girl then had to take this for signing to the Duty Mistress of the day. The latter very rarely refused the request, which was then returned by the culprit for effectuating to the Prefect, who in turn never abused the privilege. It would have been unthinkable to do so-let alone the punishment involved, if discovered. There was indeed no motive to do so in an environment in which justice was so universally worshiped. The strap stung considerably, but the pain was far from intolerable, and a dozen strokes was seldom exceeded. However, the effect was beneficial, notably for the scum, and today Prafekt Seckendorff, standing with beads of moisture on her powerful downy thighs, and rich wet muff, decided it was time to give her own “underschool,” or personally assigned new girl, a reminder of her place in life. She was one of the few Praelictors who liked to take a cold bath to set herself up for the coming day, as well as the majority. Little Anna Erland had just scampered by, to dress and do her bed. Toweling herself briskly on parted legs, the big girl smiled at the Junior doing the same there.
“Get those yesterday, Monika?”
“Yes, Seckendorff.”
“Hurt?”
“Oh like anything.”
“I always hated it from Wedell.”
“Urn, and Steinkopf.”
“Heavens, yes.”
They laughed in complicity together and as Monika Vorst ran through to the dorm to dress the Prefect flicked out the wet end of her towel so that it snapped under the bounding right buttock, indenting it there.
“Ow!” Monika looked back with a grinning squirm.
Many of the girls had put their tunics under their mattresses the night, in order to press them neatly for the new day's wear. The dormitory was now a tangle of tightening knickers, pulled-high stockings, and polished shoes. After which the girls tidied their lockers and made their beds. Seckendorff, making her prefectorial stroll past these when they had finished, dropped out laconically, “Erland. Untidy corner. Come and see me after breakfast, would you.”
Breakfast was at seven, but punctually at a quarter of the school formed up for morning inspection by the day's Duty Mistress, in the big hall before the dining-room. They paraded in classes, like soldiers. The Duty Mistress inspected them before and behind, walking along their ranks close followed by the Duty Prefect for the day who carried the dreaded Duty Book. The mistress herself carried her switch, unclipped from her belt. For this was no laughing matter, at all. Though the so-called hunting stripes seldom amounted to more than three or four, these long eel-dark switches cut like fury, being used principally about the backs of the legs.
This morning the presiding Duty Mistress had roamed the front rank of the Juniors without especial event, except for a passing reprimand here and there, when she stopped before one striking brunette.
“I don't think you require soap behind the ear, Ingrid,” she said quietly. When she had passed on, the Prefect behind her snapped, “Stand out, Forster,” and the girl took three smart military paces forward. One more girl did the like, from a rear rank, only in her case she stepped backward. She had not dried herself sufficiently, it seemed, notably between the legs.
Inspection completed, the Prefect ordered:
“Forster. Right turn. Touch your toes.”
Each girl was accorded three hissing kisses with the lash across the top of the legs, across, in fact, that band of ivory white between her knickers and stocking-tops. Ingrid Forster had to blink back tears marching into a breakfast.
After breakfast there was a so-called free period until first class at eight thirty. In fact, each girl had to evacuate her bowels under penalty. Prefects and seniors were exempt from supervision but the rest had to line up in the chilly exterior area of planked latrines, known as “Groves,” perhaps sarcastically, and have their contributions to a bucket approved by a Prefect before proceeding back to the building. These were usually quite copious since the diet had a large admixture of psyllium seeds within it, and the bulk of even a scum's Wurstchen was considerable. Each had to wash out her bucket afterwards. Anyone “missing” was sent to the Matron, where she soon knew about it.
Thus, Anna Erland, possessor by this point of a slip of paper which began “Request for permission to give the bearer six stripes…” was tensely costive, and climbed the stairs fearfully to the Matron. This good woman lost no time in bending her over and administering a rectal evacuator, of glycerine and castor oil, and long suppository slid in high. Then pigeon-toed, and plucking at her tunic in front, the girl had to stand in a line of four, “controlling” her insides for a ten-minute wait. One offender was fairly griped double, and begged to relieve herself, or else. Unfortunately the alternative, if she let fly as her inner person so demanded, would have been a really sound caning from the implacable Steinkopf. Most held out, squatting over a pan in turn and in public. Each knew, as she left, that were she to miss again that week, it would be a long-beaked clyster up her anus, compared to which the suppository would seem a Sunday-school picnic. And after this little Anna Erland draggled to her Prefect's private den, or study, having first passed by the Duty Mistress to have her chit signed.
The Praelictor's room was sparely and simply furnished. It had, so far as the curtseying entrant was concerned, a low leather hassock, on which was a solid strap.
“Did you get it signed, scum?”
“Yes, Seckendorff.”
“Good. Give it me. I'm going to give you six for an untidy bed. Feeling nice and shivery behind?”
“Yes,” came the glum answer. “Pull up your knickers.”
The Prefects were not allowed to beat on “the bare.”
“They're pulled up, Seckendorff.”
“Well, pull them up higher. If I split them I'll let you off the rest.”
The big girl took up the strap which was about four inches wide and some two feet long; she brought it down with all her strength, and the testimonial of a puff of dust, on the leather hassock set out there. Then thoughtfully, if anything harder, she repeated the gesture. Watching, Anna Erland, aged thirteen, felt the back of her throat dry suddenly; she was nearly in tears.
“Looking forward to it?”
“Ner-ner-no, Seckendorff.”
“Disgusting little scum, ask for it like the filth you are.”
“Per-please may I have a, a… I mean six stripes,” the girl was crying steadily now, her dark hair shaking, “across my bottom, for, for leaving my bed untidy.”
“Idiot! I want an adjective before each noun. Invent. Imagine.”
“P-p-please may I have six stinging stripes… across my wretched bottom, for, for leaving my miserable bed untidy.”
“Not bad. Now three adjectives, and different nouns. Come on, make it colorful. I'm waiting.” So was the swinging strap, it was plain.
The girl bent her head-“I beg to receive six whippy licking juicy strokes of the strap across my small unworthy deserving bottom… arse… for leaving…”
“That's enough. Lie across here.”
Tremors shook the liquid little bottom, when the tunic had been drawn off it. It was small, indeed. The Prefect struck it mercilessly, from in front, at the girl's head, bringing the tail-end of her strap cracking into the underbottoms-three each side- and when it was over, little Anna Erland rolled on the floor in pain.
Simultaneously, in the distant Duty Room, another sinner was feeling sorry for herself, hissing and twisting under two thoughtfully placed “hunting” flicks, both of which plucked up her butties, for having made two errors in Recitation, lines from Cicero set her the previous day.
Promptly at eight thirty-which was to say five minutes beforehand, since everything happened “on the stroke” at the Schloss-classes started to another bell. They were naturally conducted in complete silence and total attention on the girls' part; they continued, with a short break for physical exercises, and milk, until noon. Luncheon was at one.
These classes were not normally punctuated by punishment; the Head discouraged wasting valuable intellectual study in the infliction of bodily pain. 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 being greased ready now, was so dreadful, she could never… and the yellow chit in her little breast pocket assured her of five frightful cuts afterwards, more if Matron…
“Come here.”
Anna shuffled forward. The oil had started to smoke. The flame was extinguished and the end of the nozzle inserted into the bowl; with a long straight drawing motion the Matron loaded the cylinder with her charge, and took it out. The girl looked at it wildly. It was such a small thing, why should it cause her such irrational fear?
“Lean forward.”
The Matron greased the anus, in between the trim cheeks ruddied by the strap. Then she slid in the cylinder an inch. Anna Erland gasped. It was hot! Then the entire tube was thrust up her, quickly. She stumbled and looked back, impaled as she was, her eyes imploring, her hands wringing before her. There were ways of administering the clyster, more or less mild. A series of squirts hurt less, but incontinency of this sort had to be stopped and with a single, solid drive Matron Steinkopf injected the heated olive oil until the ring in the handle of the clyster clicked audibly home as the cylinder emptied.
Anna cried out. She jerked erect, staggering forward a step so that the Matron had to follow, ramming the nozzle well up her until it had voided itself completely into the young bowel.
“Um Gotteswillen… liebe, liebe Matrone…”
Striving hands clutched back, in vain. Having extracted the slippery clyster the Matron then secured the anus with a bung. This resembled a double mushroom, black and of a flexible, rubbery substance that swelled under heat. One head of this was inserted inside the sphincter, which was gripped by the other, outside. Since the core joining the two “mushrooms” was thick, no more than a mild oozing was permitted this natural orifice. It was uncomfortable for the wearer for the first minute, but after two she felt she wanted to tear it out-so strongly did the clyster constrain her. It was for this reason that, before comfortably resuming her seat by the fire, the Matron secured Anna Erland's arms behind her, in elbow-cuffs which held each opposing wrist. Then she turned over her hour-glass.
“Ten minutes,” was what she said.
The girl panted in something close to a panic. She could not conceivably wait that long. She was supposed to stand to attention, like a guardsman- but her belly looked swollen above its slit. The ghastly gripings began. They made her pace in place, long to hug her thighs, and duck her knees, and gasp, and writhe from side to side, stirring her budlike breasts. The sand was spilling with such intolerable lenity.
“Please, Matron. I can't… it's coming down…”
Matron Steinkopf said nothing. Only once, when Anna's squirmings became too insistent, did she get up, unclip her switch, and very methodically deliver three lashing slices to the writhing thighs. Then she sat down again. For Anna the new pain was at least something; it was a call to her body in a new place, to endure and combat. Then suddenly she heard her release.
“Da steigst Du drauf und setzi Dich so auf die Lehne…”
She was running to obey as if her life depended on it. The girl stood on either chair-seat and lowered her pronounced “Popo” onto the backs of each, where the sharp edges bit into her and parted her bottom to splitting. With a pronounced plop the Matron extracted the now oily bung and a sturdy, gleaming turd began instantly and gratefully, to exude from the girlish gut. Arms still bound behind her, Anna frowned tin concentration as she pressed. There were tears at the edges of her lashes, but she was thankful, oh how thankful… the sensation was the greatest relief she had known in her life. The bucket beneath her thumped to two healthy, darkish sausages which looked far too big, somehow, to have come from such a girlish belly. The Matron watched them drop from between the reddened cheeks ruminatively; she was already writing out her yellow 'Zettel for the girl-this for Incontinence.
Three minutes later Anna Erland was presenting these to the Duty Mistress in her dreaded chamber. This today was Mademoiselle Bellais, the French mistress, a neat, smiling woman in her early thirties who looked fashion personified in her ultra-short white silk costume and almost crease-less leather boots. A contrast to the Matron in every way. As she surveyed the wretched expression of the pretty little underschool above her flexed cane, it was all she could do not to burst out laughing. With a bit of luck the silly thing would burst out crying in a moment.
“How would you like the first five, Anna?” she chaffed, and, receiving for answer but a finger twisting at a chain-ring, went on briskly, “Let's try them across that fidgety little bottom of yours, shall we. Come here.”
These 'Zettel were meant to be deterrent, but not intolerably severe. Each Duty Mistress could pay them off as desired, and only a lighter, or “classroom,” cane was employed. This was a flicky, whippy instrument, rather than one that bruised deeply. Its sting was considerable, however.
Anna was bent over a stool, her hands on its far edge and her legs straight behind but at an angle- her feet positioned some yard to the rear. Divested once more of its underclothing, her rump quivered in apprehension. Jacqueline Bellais was highly grateful to the Prefect who had strapped those cheeks downwards like that-the well-reddened undersides would react well.
“Who gave you those?”
“Seckendorff, Miss.”
“Good for her.”
“Hhrsss!”
“Ooooo…”
The mistress cut up quickly into the underfat. It was not a very hard stroke but it finished in a stingy flick that made the skin of her victim cringe in. Four more wristy cuts and Anna was in agony. She was given five minutes' pause and took the second 'Zettel in an unusual way. Sitting on the stool, with her bottoms over its edge, she was made to bend right forward, head between her knees. Then the French mistress cut sharply down, in a rigidly vertical stroke that bit in deeply. Anna had never been corrected like this and was squirming like a cut worm on the stool before it was over. And then her chits were signed, as effectuated, and she had to hurry back to her classroom and present them to her teacher, trying not to show her suffering. The latter made her stand for the rest of the period, and had her do so with knickers down and skirt up, exposing her weals-five nice and high, five nice and low- “Lots of room for some more in between,” as she commented to the snickering class.
And thus, it was-as little Anna was already rapidly learning. You were never free of that beastly biting cane. It hung over your head like a Damoclean sword, descending with that awful tingly dread that took your breath away and yet set you on edge and made even the youngest clit stiff, throbbing in anticipation.
At ten thirty each morning there was a break period, of a half-hour, when the girls performed calisthenics in the yard outside, under the eagle eye of Frau Dick, gym mistress elect. They did these in rows, with maximal vigor, not simply because punishment awaited the slovenly, but since for most of the year it was bitterly cold outside, certainly in the tiny tunics, and also since the girls enjoyed the exercises. These only, in any event, lasted some ten minutes or so, after which they ran back in, hugging their friends, laughing and joking, their faces red and ready for the glass of hot milk each had to take in the Hall.
It was here, daily, at approximately a quarter of eleven that the Headmistress addressed the gathered school. The girls lined either side of the Great Hall by classes, the mistresses sat in front on a dais, from which Frau Grumkow gave out the letters (already, of course, perused), made various announcements about coming activities, and in general encouraged that wholesome fidelity to duty for which the Schloss was celebrated. It was usually a moment of camaraderie and affection, for though all looked up to the Frau Direktrice they did so with an admiring glow. This period was also, however, that allotted to “Head's corrections,” namely by the birch.
So far this term there had only been one of these but it had been, as always, a salutory spectacle. It had involved a sturdily built seventeen-year-old, one Joyce Hall, daughter of the British Ambassador to Pomerania (now ceded to Prussia), and with a niece of Charles XII of Sweden one of the most distinguished foreigners attending the academy. In brief, Joyce had been found secreting cakes from the dining-table in her knickers and eating them under her sheets, after Lights Out.
These birchings were notoriously elaborate, involving much ritual, so much so that after Frau Grumkow's long lecture even the most steel-hearted were longing for the cuts to begin, and to get it over with. For the Schloss endeavored to harden and prepare their charges for life in ways both mental as well as physical. Even an experienced Senior could be reduced to a jelly of nervous emotion by one of the Headmistress's addresses. Joyce, a generally liked girl despite her nationality, endured hers phlegmatically, and stark naked in the center of Great Hall, save for high heels and smoky stockings, high-tethered by her garters. Perhaps this was partly due to the fact that German was not her native tongue. She had thin fairish hair which must have been bleached in the sun since her bush was a short crisp curly black, flattened to her belly by her wearing of panties. Her thighs were particularly well-muscled-she was a strong runner-and her arse-cheeks solid; she was a girl, most would have said, destined to grow stout later in life, altogether an appetizing specimen to flog with the birch, and more than one eye of those watching this flesh which seemed to challenge the rod was bright. But her sentence produced no less than a gasp around the hall; it was thirty-five strokes with the birch, plus five of the celebrated “master's stripes,” and three days' solitary confinement. The girl's eyes blinked unbelievingly when she heard it. After further preliminaries she was bent over the block-“All ass,” as Ingeborg Untermacher remarked to her friend Maria Daunitz after-her thick cheeks awaiting the achingly long twigs which Fraulein Katte, allotted the first dozen, drew dripping from a tub.
These branches stung like fury and it was not long before little spasmodic clenchings were visible testimony of their bite. They hissed like asps in the silence. The hands, manacled behind, fisted and scratched. But she endured her first dozen without a sound. A second mistress came forward for the second and, anxious to show her mettle, soon drew up lively wales and grazed blisters of skin. The twigs dug in pitilessly on the right as the punishment began to be worthy of the name. Each cut now drew a violent jerk and a strangled gasp. The buttock masses tightened frantically and the mistress was able to draw out the strokes considerably. A skilful bircher could keep a girl at the summit of pain with no more than four a minute, though the pace was usually faster than this in order to effect that psychological and most absolute victory of correction-when the whipped girl simply could not get her senses to believe she could take another. This final stage of utter absolution was effected for Joyce by the third mistress, who delivered the last eleven after the girl had been thoroughly revived for the ordeal with smelling salts and a bucket of brine emptied over her buttocks.
These were now, on the right at least, a hatched crisscrossing of purplish wales and weals, flecked with ruby pearls where the skin had broken under some particularly toughly pickled bud. These final strokes, of supreme severity, drove all color from the faces of the junior classes watching. They ended in a flurry of passionate tears from the victim, a sudden sobbing that broke out as much at the degradation of being made, at last, to show her pain as anything. The whole birching had probably taken six or seven minutes and after it was over, the Headmistress came down to inflict her five master's cuts with the whalebone. These were quite excruciating on the tenderized flesh and each drew a cry from the Amazonic English girl. Finally, let down and restored with salts, she had to stand on a dunce's stool at the door while the school filed out past her ruined cheeks in silence.
A wry smile fled over the lips of the mistress with the birch as she supervised there that each girl had a good look at the effects of punishment-the chest still heaving with sobs and pulled back by the fettered hands, the purpled bottoms quivering as if terrified, huddled together-before turning to curtsy to the Head and return to work. The mistress noted the gleam in the eyes of the Seniors, as, connoisseurs of the rod, they observed such details as drops of blood on one sturdy calf-such lively glances were followed by the ashen faces of the younger. Finally, the girl herself was hurried off in chains to the cellars for her three days of Solitary Confinement where, if she was lucky, she would have to face no more than bread and water, bondage, and a morning beating.
The noon hour, then, was a free one. It was a happy moment of the day when the girls gathered in groups before luncheon at one to exchange stories, make friendships, renew old ones-discuss the com-the idea of discipline had lodged deep within the mnemonic processes of these impressionable maidens, each of whom felt especially privileged to be accepted at Schloss Rutenberg, and much chitchat entered on what school slang knew as klitschklatsch! Gossip was rife. Was it true that the young Prince Frederick was now his father's prisoner, no less? That his best friend was to be executed? That Austria were being as insolent as ever? Well, was the common assent, to much tossing of puerile shoulders, the Austrians would have to learn their lesson, that was all. Like the English, and the French, and the Russians… heavens, didn't everyone?
There was but one flagellatory feature of this noon recess; any girl who had received Detention, and was due to suffer it that afternoon, might get dispensation from the Duty Mistress to pay it off in stripes. Five for an hour, ten for two-and all ten had to be taken together. The character of this little amnesty was more light-hearted than most whippings in the Schloss, and close to some athletic activity. For it was really incumbent on any Senior (at least) awarded an hour to show her Prussian pluck by taking a simple “fiver” with the light classroom cane. Should she not do so, she would hardly rate. Moreover, Detention was extremely unpleasant in these parts.
Accordingly, when the list for it went up at noon, a group of excited younger girls-many with “crushes” on their older colleagues-could be seen clustered in the hall outside the Duty Room. The door of this was left open and any girl could tap on it and enter. The chattering would shush and cease as some Senior strode in and made her request. Then, with hot-gripped hands, the listeners would strain excitedly in the silence so that each single biting snip of the cuts came clearly to them, each dry rap like the snapping of a twig of wood. Then the Senior would emerge, red-faced perhaps but not seriously the worse for wear, though walking rather fast. If forced by pain to grasp and puff she would grin at her audience, and probably take to her heels. But if she could saunter controlledly out, a burst of applause would greet her. And she would blush, and signal to her special friend among the scum to follow her, for a little gentle relief.
This regimen of the rod was thus naturally effected day after day, week after week, throughout the term. The girls accepted it unquestioningly, as prideful part of their special training. Indeed, with the number of them there were, the canings were not too intolerably common. Their presence existed in the mind continually, however. During the afternoon sports, and the evening pre-Prep recreation, where round games and dances were indulged in, the rod was publicly put away-so a visitor might conclude. There would, however, be those destined to make corrective trips to individual mistresses' rooms, and then three or four unfortunates a day, whose names had appeared on the Duty List, could be seen with anything but happy expectations on their anxious faces. These were those who had been told to put themselves in The Book-as the black-bound Bible of Duty corrections, standing on its lectern outside that dreaded chamber, was known.
The following will attend the Duty Mistress at 9:00 p.m…
Those who had been deemed sufficiently naughty to join this wretched rank were, by late afternoon, when the list was posted, in a perfect tizzy of internal butterflies. For the daily Duty punishment was the most dreaded moment in the lives of these pretty pensionaires; it was both ordeal and duel-one fought against the frightful penal cane, longer than most, whippy yet tough enough to make a flugleman cry out. Since Maria Daunitz had already experienced this heartless weapon, it is with her we shall logically visit its application in the Duty Room.