eyes were moist and gleaming.
Yes, it was still hurting a very great deal-as each single breast, beating beneath those thin green tunics knew. Monika herself bore no resentment. Such a notion never even got near to her mind. She was happy she had again “come through,” without disgrace, and that was simply that. It had been a routine beating, and thus another ordeal and challenge to rise to. Like an athletic activity, in many ways. She had broken a rule, and reaped the consequences. She admired Wedell for making it so painful, so “tight,” and knew she had got everything out of her eight strokes she could. Once or twice she had been a trifle wild, she had “overhit” perhaps at the end, but by and large it had been a methodical, calculated caning of the type that made you feel corrected through and through. Monika's burning bottom now felt thrice its size, heavy as lead, but she knew corporal punishment achieved its goal. If she made that same mistake again, she'd be more likely to get a dozen. And anyway the worst of the smart was now subsiding nicely, melding into a pervasive heat, and sense of satisfaction at her center. Relaxed and torpid, she stared at Caesar's rank prosaic prose and knew she would have to borrow Barbara's bone thing from her again tonight.
Chapter Two
“What I am at a total loss to understand, Fraulein Daunitz,” said the figure standing behind her desk, almost exactly one hour after this scene, “is why you allowed this to happen both so early in the term, and in front of a Prefect. You know our rules by now.”
“Yes, Frau Direktrice.”
She did. As a new mistress, Maria Daunitz had arrived at Schloss Rutenberg three weeks before first classes. She had been thoroughly drilled in the regulations by the permanently resident Matron, a grim woman called Steinkopf, and for five days prior to school opening assigned to one of the younger mistresses, Ingeborg Untermacher. She knew the regimen by heart, had been familiarized with all the tricks of the trade, such as soaping the skin or sitting on stone, on the part of the girls, to try to lessen corporeal sting, as well as devices on the part of their superiors, like leaving off one's key ring in order to move more quietly and catch out offenders.
For such, it seemed, was their relentless and unremitting task at Schloss Rutenberg. No girl was ever to feel free of the suddenly descending Damoclean sword of “tight” chastisement. The mere passage of a mistress, with her thinly dangling switch, ought to, and did, inspire a frisson to ripple the skin of even the Seniors. Nothing was “let off,” nothing allowed to get lax. Finally, each evening for five days Inge had taken her charge to the gymnasium where, under the expert eye of Frau Dick, gym mistress and champion high-diver, Maria had practiced her aim with cane, switch, strap and martinet on a leather-simulated buttock for the purpose. Those had been among the merrier moments of her preparation, while Frau Dick would call an encouraging “Good shot!” or advise more follow-through, and transfer of weight, and grinning Inge would “ouch” and rub her bum. For if in the new Army the officers were more feared than the enemy, at Schloss Rutenberg the motto was that the mistresses should be feared more than fear itself. And the Headmistress, Elizabetha Grumkow, had her name spelt in the souls of several past sinners t-e- r-r-o-r. She had never been known to forgive a single offense. That was why Maria had shivered in her steeple heels when the maid had knocked at her door-“Frau Direktrice would like to see you, Miss.” It was an invitation that boded no good. Nor, she found out soon enough, did it do so in fact.
Elizabetha Grumkow was not tall. She inclined, especially in comparison with her usually towering mistresses, to look rather short and stocky. One did not inquire the age of the Frau Direktrice but it might have been forty, a very fit forty indeed. She had actually a friendly, open face, blue-eyed and square-jawed, with a laughing slant to her lids under a close crop of sandy hair. This one seldom saw since she affected, certainly in duty hours as now, the uniform of an Army officer, involving a white pigtailed perruque. She wore high boots, gallooned at the thighs, and extremely tight-fitting fawn trousers. These fitted her, in fact, without a crease behind and since she wore the flaps of her three-quarter coat pinned back, as was fashionable, the prominent, stubborn jut of her chubby cheeks was aggressively visible, as it bounced about. She stood now behind her desk, on which were decorously littered a glove the world (Hohenzollern territories turned towards her), books, compass, divider and the like. Between her fingers she toyed with a long switch of black whalebone.
Maria Daunitz knew she was for it on entering. She had dropped to her knees (a girl would have prostrated herself), been bidden to rise, and stood now like a sentry, staring straight ahead, as the Frau Direktrice paced about, “lecturing” her. Some spying eye had seen, and reported, her encounter with Monika in the corridor; by rights she should have sent the girl back to Duty Room for more. Part of her punishment was to control herself in front of her colleagues while the worst of pain still raged beneath. It must have been some maid who had seen, or even the Matron, though it was said that the Frau Direktrice's eyes were everywhere. You were seldom unobserved in Schloss Rutenberg. All the same, as it was her first “offense,” Maria hoped she would be let off with a warning. She badly needed this employment, her parents having perished two years before in an accident at sea. But her hopes of a pardon began rapidly to wane, and fall with her heart to the well-carpeted floor. The Frau Direktrice was shaking her head almost sadly.
“You know that to have any favorites is one of the worst of crimes in a mistress?”
“Yes, Madam.”
“Excessive Leniency is punished extremely strictly.”
“Yes.”
The Headmistress thought. “Even though it is your first time before me, I don't see how I can possibly let you off. You are aware that it is a principle of our whole regime to demand especially high codes of conduct from those in privileged positions. All our mistresses are whipped when in error, and of course more severely than their pupils.”
“Of course, Frau Direktrice.”
“Were you whipped at home?”
“A little.”
“How? What with?”
“My father's belt, as a rule, Ma'am.”
“Across the buttocks?”
“Yes.”
“Hm.” The Headmistress mused. She took an elegant time-piece out of a fob-pocket, consulted it, and sighed. “Well, I shall have to have you flogged. You understand that, don't you, Daunitz? Obviously I can't let this go by unpunished. I'm only sorry it's happened so early in term, but perhaps that is all for the best, and will clear the air between us a little. The girl will have to be thrashed again, too, and the Praelictor concerned.”
“Er, with your pardon, Madam,” Maria ventured a little dully, “it was scarcely the latter's fault. The girl's perhaps, but I do not think Gundling's. She was indeed trying to hasten the youngster on.”
There was an ominous silence. It was broken by a cold tone-“Fraulein Daunitz, I am not certain you quite understand Schloss Rutenberg. All in all, it will probably do you a lot of good to meet with a whipping yourself this early. Nothing goes unpunished! Do you understand?” The little Empress of a woman stamped out the words, imperiously, and Maria Daunitz paled.
“Yes, Madam.”
“Our girls are being molded into mothers of a superior race, a new breed of man, able to withstand all shocks and stresses to the system. You must not relax your attention a minute-not if you are to stay here, Fraulein, rather than be sent to the vaults of Spandau for a spell. No, we are hardening this womanhood in its own interest. All our girls are grateful to us later. Why, I had one writhing in here this morning just for looking impertinent. A fingernail too long, an unpolished shoe-heel, anything, anything, I tell you. Your job is to keep after them all the time. No, you will be flogged, but first you will cane the girl in front of me here- without mercy, do you understand-eight more cuts and work across her previous weals, and then we shall decide what to do with the Prefect. Apart from yourselves, they always,” finished the Frau Direktrice rather gloomily, “get it the worst of all.”
“Yes, Ma'am.”
The Headmistress rang a bell, and took a seat behind her table desk. Maria remained standing. After a while there came a timid tap on the door and Monika Vorst appeared. She prostrated herself full length, burying her nose in the carpet, and was duly told to rise.
