Julia was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Would you teach me?”
She was dead serious. Kate tried to make light of it. “Perhaps we should organize a boxing class for the Unit.”
“Not boxing,” Julia said passionately. “No Queensberry rules. They don’t abide by them. Why should we?”
Tentatively, feeling on very uncertain ground, Kate asked, “Did you tell anyone—about Dr. Stapleton?”
“Are you mad? They would have said I invited it. Bad enough to have women in medical school. Worse to have them distracting the real doctors. I would have been out on my ear.” Julia flexed her gloved hands. “I started carrying a knife in my pocket. I told him if he did it again, I’d gut him and stand in the dock with pleasure.”
Her voice resonated with emotion, so much emotion, more emotion than Kate would have thought Julia was capable of feeling.
Kate said the only thing she could think to say. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll be hit by a shell.”
Julia gave a guttural laugh. “I’m not sure I want to rely on the intervention of Providence.”
“We can just tell Maud he’s a German spy and let her at him,” Kate offered.
“That might be punishment enough.” Julia cast Kate a long, sideways look. “You won’t say anything to Emmie?”
Kate had never expected to feel sorry for Julia. Or to feel kinship with Julia. “No.”
Julia stared straight ahead, at the raindrops glinting in the light of the lamps. “I was such a little fool. I thought we were colleagues. Equals. When he said he wanted to exchange notes, I actually thought he wanted to exchange notes.”
Kate winced as the White slid a little too far to the right, fighting to keep the truck on the road. “He ought to have. You were always at the top of our class at Smith.”
“That was only because I worked extra hard to stay ahead of you.” Julia turned away before Kate could see her face, pointing at the signpost. “There’s the turnoff for Grécourt. Do you think that reporter’s still infesting the place?”
Chapter Fourteen
In addition to running our own classes, we are making an effort to supply the schools with everything the state gave them before the war, so the education of the children won’t suffer any more than it already has. You can imagine our joy when the Inspector of Education in Amiens told us there were some old school benches in the attic of the National School—there are scarcely any benches or desks and no wood to make any, which has been a great trial in trying to restore school hours to what they were. He said he had been trying for four months to send them to a certain sector, but there was no way to get them to the station （！！）。 We asked him if we could have them if we could move them. He said yes, only it couldn’t be done, and anyway, it would require the permission of some other official, and what about the other people to whom he’d promised the benches. We told him we would wait while he got the proper papers. He shook his head and said something about Americans. The poor man stayed over his lunch hour before he knew it, and I don’t think he will ever quite recover.
But we have our benches! I know how deeply you concern yourself with education and particularly the education of young women, so thought you might like to hear of this small victory in the grand battle for universal education. . . .
—Miss Emmaline Van Alden, ’11, to her mother, Mrs. Livingston Van Alden
November 1917
Grécourt, France
“‘In the midst of a vast desolation close to the front, seventeen American college girls are carrying the kindly spirit of the new world to martyred peasantry. . . .’”
“Martyred peasantry?” Nell Baldwin choked on her war bread. “That sounds a little too Golgotha for me.”
“Joan of Arc would be more appropriate, I should think,” offered Kate, sounding more relaxed than Emmie had heard her in ages.
A holiday air prevailed at the breakfast table, where the Smith Unit was partaking of an unusually late repast, not because it was a Sunday, but because the engineers were coming for luncheon. It had been decided that there would be hardly enough time to do their morning rounds and prepare for guests. So here they were in their dining/sitting room, with Nell toasting her feet on the fender and Alice reading aloud from a crumpled piece of newspaper that had just been forwarded to them via the Paris Committee. Even Dr. Stringfellow had closed the dispensary for the morning and was eating bread and jam quite like a normal person.