The Small Rain

by Madeleine L'engle

  TEN

  Katherine’s music teacher during her last year at school was a Monsieur Devault. She hated him at once, hated his little waxed mustaches, his ogling manner, his lack of artistry or perception. He, in turn, thought her arrogant and gave her bad marks because she refused to change from Justin’s methods, which had been so like Julie’s, to his. She tried to drop the lessons, but had to keep them up, or she would have had to give up the practicing. She knew the poor marks distressed Manya and Tom, but she stuck stubbornly to what she thought was right.

  Only one thing happened at the school that year that broke through her shell of work and study and touched her. She was getting ready for bed one night, when the gym teacher, Miss Elkes, whose place at the chapel organ she had taken, knocked on the door and asked her to come to the infirmary for a moment. A little bewildered, Katherine put on her bathrobe and slippers and followed her. The nurse and her form mistress were talking busily in the office. Miss Halsey was spreading a sheet over the long wooden table, while the nurse stood by, holding a tape measure.

  “Penelope Deerenforth’s been walking in her sleep again,” the form mistress said. “I’ve had to move her chest of drawers in front of the window.”

  “Probably studying too hard,” the nurse said, and turned and saw Katherine. “Hello, Katherine,” she said, and smiled at her pleasantly, and, Katherine felt, a little too eagerly.

  “Katherine,” Miss Halsey said. “We’ve all noticed that you sometimes limp a little.”

  “Hardly at all any more, Miss Halsey,” Katherine said. “Only when I’m terribly tired, and then if I realize it, I can usually cover it.”

  “Miss Elkes has noticed that you often limp toward the end of gym class.”

  “Well, gym has hardly been my strong point, Miss Halsey. Besides, I’ve felt rather tired this year.”

  “Why?” the nurse asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Miss Anderson.”—I’m certainly not going to tell you it’s because I read under the bedcovers with a flashlight every night and get up before six to go up to the fourth-floor practice room in the morning, where I know I won’t be heard—she thought.

  “How old were you when you injured your hip?”

  “Two.”

  “You’ve never been told to cut out gym?”

  “No. A moderate amount of exercise is good for me. I’m not half bad at fencing.”

  “When was your hip last thoroughly examined by a physician?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. When I was around ten, I guess.”

  “Not since?”

  “No. There wasn’t any need. It’s been perfectly all right. It hasn’t given me a bit of bother. I’ll just never be national sports champion, that’s all.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to get rid of that limp?”

  “But I am rid of it.”

  “Miss Elkes says she notices it often.”

  “Well, I don’t intend to be violently athletic when I leave school, Miss Anderson, so I doubt if anyone else will notice it. Besides, even this remnant of a limp will probably disappear eventually, anyhow.”

  “It doesn’t bother you? Make you self-conscious?”

  “No. Why should it? There isn’t anything there to be self-conscious about.”

  “Were you ever examined to see if one of your legs is shorter than the other?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose so. Dr. Bradley did absolutely everything that had to be done. The last time he examined me, he told me just to forget about it.”

  “I think possibly the fact that your good leg might be longer than the other may account for your limp, rather than the injury to your hip itself.”

  “Oh. Well, it really doesn’t make much difference, does it?” She was suddenly afraid of the three eager women. “Please—may I go now?”

  “No, Katherine, you may not,” Miss Halsey said. “Please don’t be so impertinent. We’re only trying to help you.”

  “Thank you very much, but there’s nothing that needs to be done.”

  Miss Halsey turned to Miss Anderson, speaking as though Katherine were not there. “Crippled children are often maladjusted.”

  “I’m not crippled, I’m not a child, and I’m not maladjusted.”

  “But you were a cripple, weren’t you?”

  “Only when I was too young to really remember it or be bothered by it. And it was never called by that word.”

  “You’re not particularly intimate with the girls here at school, are you?” Miss Elkes asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever had many friends of your own age?”

  “No.”

  “Hasn’t that made you unhappy?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Isn’t that perhaps what made you—well, too emotional about Sarah Courtmont that time?”

  “Need we bring that up?”

  “Katherine,” Miss Halsey said sharply. “Please try to be less antagonistic. How can we help you?”

  “But I’ve told you I don’t want to be helped. Please!”

  Miss Elkes went on. “Do you have any friends of your own age out of school?”

  “Of course. Certainly. Lots of them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Well—there’s—there’s Charlot. Charles Bejart. He’s studying medicine. He’s a very good friend of mine.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “He’s my Aunt Manya’s adopted son.”

  “Who else?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lots of people. Besides, I don’t see what my private life has to do with my hip or my limp. It’s my own business, not anybody else’s.”

  Miss Elkes and Miss Halsey nodded to Miss Anderson, who turned to Katherine. “Will you get up on the table, please, Katherine? We’d like to measure your legs. What have you got on under your bathrobe?”

  “My underclothes.”

  “Will you take them off, please?”

  Deliberately Katherine took off her bathrobe and undressed.

  “Put your robe on again,” Miss Anderson said icily.

  Katherine smiled at them, put on her bathrobe, and climbed onto the table.

  “Is it because of your accident that you are so small?” Miss Elkes asked.

  “No. My mother was very small, too. Small and strong. The difference between us is that people know I’m small, and nobody knew she was. It was always a surprise.”

  “Lie down now, please,” Miss Anderson said, and Katherine lay down on the long table draped with the white sheet. Miss Anderson gave one end of the tape measure to Miss Halsey and showed her just where on Katherine’s hip to hold it. Miss Elkes stood with a pad and pencil ready. Miss Anderson measured first the right leg, then the left leg, calling the figures out to Miss Elkes. Then she measured both legs again triumphantly.

  “Ah,” she said, “we were right. The left leg is a little shorter than the right.” Miss Elkes and Miss Banks beamed. Miss Anderson turned back to Katherine. “Stand up now, please.” Katherine slid down from the table and stood facing them.

  “Yes,” said Miss Halsey. “It’s really quite obvious. Her right hip is higher than her left.”

  “I like it that way,” Katherine said. “May I go now?” She was so angry that it was difficult not to cry.

  Miss Anderson nodded, and she left.

  The next morning during English class Miss Elkes came into the classroom and went up to Miss Halsey’s desk. They whispered together for a moment, then Miss Halsey said, “Katherine Forrester, you’re wanted in the infirmary.”

  Katherine followed Miss Elkes upstairs to the infirmary. The school doctor, whom she mistrusted and disliked, was there. He measured her legs as Miss Anderson had done the night before, and dismissed her without a word. Nothing more was said until two weeks later just after lunch, when Miss Anderson went into the common room and called Katherine.

  “I have a present for you, Katherine,” she said, as she led the way upstairs. Katherine looked at Miss Anderson suspiciously,
as the nurse took a box off the table in the infirmary office. “Here you are,” she said, much too cheerfully.

  Katherine untied the string and took off the wrapping paper. Then she opened the box. In it was a pair of shoes. The shoe for the right foot was a perfectly ordinary, ugly, black shoe with laces. The shoe for the left foot was a cripple’s shoe, built up to raise the left foot higher than the right foot from the ground.

  “What’s this?” Katherine asked.

  “It will make your legs equal in length and you won’t limp any more.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I won’t wear this thing.”

  “Katherine, that shoe was very expensive. You don’t want your father to pay several pounds for something you don’t use, do you?”

  “Did you ask Father’s permission before you got this—this thing?”

  “Your father wrote that we were to do anything in regard to your hip that the doctor thought best.”

  “But you didn’t tell him it would be wearing a thing like this?”

  “Don’t argue, Katherine. Put the shoes on.”

  “No. You’re crazy. It’ll make me limp.” She knew she sounded hysterical, but she couldn’t help it.

  “It may at first, but then it will cure you completely of limping. Come along. Put the shoes on.”

  “No.”

  “Do as I say.”

  “No. I’ll never wear it.”

  “Katherine,” Miss Anderson said. “We’ve tried to be pleasant about this, but you’ve refused to cooperate. Ever since your first day here you’ve done your best to make it impossible for people to like you. All the teachers, with rare exceptions, find you exceptionally antagonistic. History is the only course in which you get good marks. Your music, which you seemed to be so proud of and to think so important, has gone down badly, according to Monsieur Devault, who finds you an impossible pupil. You are obviously not very popular with the girls. I am hoping that all this comes from a physical defect. I am trying to correct that defect.”

  “Do you call making someone who is a perfectly normal healthy person into a cripple correcting a defect?”

  “Your left leg is shorter than your right.”

  “But it doesn’t matter! I’m perfectly adjusted to it! I don’t limp. I’m perfectly normal, there’s nothing to make all this vile, obtuse, unnecessary fuss about. My own doctor, Dr. Bradley, undoubtedly knows that my left leg is shorter than my right. If he’d thought something should be done about it, he’d have done it. You ask him!”

  “Where is he?”

  “In New York.”

  “Aren’t you being a little bit ridiculous, Katherine?”

  Katherine found she could make no effort to control herself. “Well, do you think it’s going to make the girls like me any better to see me wearing this thing? I don’t want pity, by God! And I won’t get pity, anyhow. I’ll get laughter and jibes.”

  “Will you please stop swearing this instant,” Miss Anderson said.

  “If you thought my limp would make me self-conscious, what do you think this thing will do? Dr. Bradley’d shoot you for being a fool, if he ever saw it.”

  “Put that shoe on, Katherine.”

  “Never.”

  Miss Anderson was a large woman, and strong. She went over to Katherine and took both her wrists. “Do you want me to force you?”

  Katherine bared her teeth. “Oh, we’re going to fight, are we? All right, I’m game.”

  Miss Anderson dropped Katherine’s wrists. “Wait here,” she said, and went out of the room.

  Katherine walked up and down, stamping angrily, saying over and over under her breath, “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

  In a very short time Miss Anderson returned with Miss Valentine. Katherine bent down, her lips pressed tightly together, her nostrils curled scornfully, and put on the shoes. Then she walked out of the infirmary, limping, as she had known she would. She went into one of the practice rooms and played angrily until the bell rang for the exercise period, which was a walk that afternoon because of a thin cold drizzle that kept them off the playing fields. Miss Halsey was taking the walk. Katherine went out to the stone path, where the girls from the upper school were assembling, and waited for her name to be called. She tried to cover up the limp the shoes gave her, but the more she tried to hide it, the more exaggerated it seemed to become. Around her the girls were choosing partners for the walk. As yet no one had noticed or remarked upon the terrible shoe.

  As Miss Halsey called “Forrester,” she looked at Katherine, standing slightly apart, and Katherine saw her eyes, curious and eager, on the shoe. She walked in angry silence.

  When her practice period came, during preparation hours, Katherine went down to the cloakroom and took off the shoes and put on her black canvas gym shoes. Miss Anderson had confiscated her regular school shoes when Katherine had taken them off that afternoon.

  She put the heavy shoes she had wrenched off her feet under one arm and went to the small side door near the cloakroom. The rain had turned to snow, but underfoot it was wet and slushy, and she knew her feet would be soaked. She went back to the cloakroom, put on her rubber boots, then set out again, and started up the mountain. The path was almost obscured by snow, but she didn’t care whether she followed it or not. She pushed her way up. Once she reached the shelter of the trees, the wet snow lashed against her face less cruelly, and it was easier to climb because the wind no longer pushed her breath back down her throat; she could pull herself up by the trees. Her hip hurt, sending the pain all the way down her leg, but she was sure it was just the result of the power of suggestion and the misery and embarrassment the shoes had caused her. If none of this sound and fury had happened, she would be no more conscious of her bad hip now than she had been for the past years.—Mother would knock that woman down for being such a fool—she thought.—Mother would just lay out and whack her for trying to make me into a cripple. I won’t have it. They can do anything they want to me, but I won’t have it.—

  When she thought she had climbed far enough, she stopped, put the shoes down, and looked around for a sharp flat stone. Then she began to dig, under the layer of snow and the layer of fallen leaves, into the rich ground that was frozen hard. She dug until her fingers were numb and bleeding and she had made a good-sized hole. Into this she put the shoes, covering them up again with the earth, pounding it down hard, then putting back the layer of dead leaves and spreading snow on top, until it looked like a very small grave. She looked at it and laughed, broke off a twig and drew a cross on top of the grave and the date. Then she placed a small, round stone at the head and said,

  “Blessed be he that spares these stones,

  But cursed be he that moves my bones.”

  and started back down the mountain.

  When she got back to school, she heard voices in the cloakroom. She stopped, and stood waiting, her heart pounding. Then,—Oh, hell—she thought—they’ll have to find out sooner or later—and she pushed open the door of the cloakroom.

  Sarah and Penelope Deerenforth were sitting on one of the big boot boxes reading a letter, their heads close together, and they jumped guiltily as Katherine came in.

  “Hello,” Sarah said, and grinned a little sheepishly.

  “Hello,” Katherine said, and sat down and pulled off her boots and put on her gym shoes.

  “Why the gym shoes?” Pen took off her glasses and put them back on.

  “What were those weird-looking things you had on this afternoon that made you limp?” Sarah asked.

  “They were an idea of Miss Anderson’s,” Katherine said, tying a double knot in her gym shoes viciously, “to keep me from being self-conscious about my bad hip and to cure the limp I don’t have.”

  “Oh, I say, what a rotten shame.” Pen pushed her glasses up her nose and looked at Katherine with sympathy.

  “So I’ve just buried them,” Katherine said. “If you want to report me for being out of bou
nds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I suppose I shall be expelled, but I really don’t give a damn.” She turned her back to them as her words began to gallop out, clenching her teeth together to keep the tears back.

  Pen got up and stood behind her, patting her clumsily on the shoulder. “Don’t get so excited, Kat. We wouldn’t dream of reporting you. I’d have done exactly the same thing in your place.”

  “Besides, we haven’t any business being down here ourselves during prep,” Sarah added. “Let’s tell Kat, shall we, Pen?”

  Pen blushed and lowered her head. “All right.”

  “Pen got herself engaged last summer during the hols, and she just got a letter from his mother asking her to stay in London with them for Christmas. She didn’t think his mother liked her, and it’s a wonderful letter, so everything is all right.”

  “I’m awfully glad, Pen,” Katherine said solemnly.

  “He’s so wonderful,” Pen said. “He’s assistant French master at St. Martin’s School in Yorkshire. Don’t you think I’ll make a wonderful assistant master’s wife in a boys’ school? He was brought up in Paris, so of course he really speaks French, and he’s going back to the Sorbonne to study this summer. Mother says I’m much too young to think of marrying yet, but I’m eighteen, and that’s old enough to know my own mind. I didn’t want to come back this year, but she said if I did she’d let me get married next year, if Edmond and I still wanted to. His name’s Edmond Murray-Lyon, by the way. His mother’s the most dignified white-haired old lady you’ve ever seen. She was quite old when Edmond was born, so in a way she’s more like a grandmother than a mother. The only thing she likes about me is my brains.”

  Sarah laughed. “Have you ever heard Pen talk so much, Kat?”

  “Never,” Katherine said, and laughed, too.

  “You must promise never to tell anyone,” Pen said. “I haven’t told anyone except Sarah.”

  “I promise.” Their sharing the secret with her made Katherine very happy, though she knew it was because they had been sorry for her on account of the dreadful shoe.

  Pen took off her glasses and looked at them dreamily. “He doesn’t mind my glasses,” she said. “He says I’m beautiful, and when he wants to kiss me he takes them off and puts them in his pocket.” She looked at them and wiped them on the sleeve of her uniform and put them on again. “The first time I saw him was at one of my grandmother’s strawberry teas, so of course I didn’t have them on, but then he took me to the cinema, and I knew I’d have to wear them or I wouldn’t see a thing, so I took them out and I said, ‘I have to wear these or I can’t see two feet in front of my nose, do you mind awfully?’ and he said he didn’t mind a bit and I was just as beautiful with them on as I was with them off. I know I’m not a bit beautiful, but it’s lovely to have someone say so.”