04 The Head Girl of the Chalet School

TWO GIRLS were walking down Palmerston Road, Portsmouth, with a graceful swing which drew the eyes of the passers-by to them. The elder of the two, slender and pretty, with an unusual amount of brown curling hair tied loosely back from a vivid face, was holding forth to the other, a much smaller girl, with black eyes shining out of a pale pointed face, which looked the paler for the straight black hair cut round it, page’s fashion. They were a noticeable pair in any place, but the more so because of their swift, graceful movements, and their trick – an unusual one in English girls, as they obviously were – of using their hands when they talked.

“It’s going to be difficult, you see, Joey,” said the older girl as they paused before a cafe, where they evidently expected to meet someone. “If only Madame hadn’t gone and got married this year!” she added with a sigh.

Joey pulled her brown cap more firmly on to her head before she replied. “I think you are a bit selfish about that, Grizel,” she said mildly. “After all, she did wait a whole year before she did it, and it’s worse for Robin and me than for you. Now, where is Maynie? She said she’d be here by one, and it’s past that now!

Do you think she’s missed the train or anything?”

Grizel shook her head. “Not likely; Maynie is always all there when it comes to trains and boats. But to go back to what we were saying, I do wish Bette had stayed on till the end of the year! After all, she’s only just eighteen, and heaps of girls go to school long after that. Why, the Head of the High when we were there had her hair up and was nearly nineteen!”

“Yes; and now she’s shingled, and at Oxford,” said Joey. “Bette is only going to be at home. I’m sorry if you feel like that about it, old thing, but it can’t be helped! And there’s Maynie and the Robin
at last
!”

The two girls turned to look down the road to where a tall, graceful girl of twenty-two or three was coming along, holding the hand of a small girl of eight, whose lovely little face was lifted to her companion’s as she talked rapidly and eagerly, with the same gesticulations as the other two had used. Only, in Robin Humphries, they were not so surprising, for she was half Polish.

As they saw the two girls awaiting them, the pair hurried their steps, and presently they were all seated round a table, chattering away, while Miss Maynard, who was maths. mistress at the Chalet School to which they belonged, gave her orders to the smiling waitress.

“Didn’t know you were coming, Robin,” said Joey, as she helped the small girl to unfasten her coat and hang up her hat. “Thought you were going to stay with Mrs. Maynard this morning.”

“It was such a fine day,” said the mistress as the waitress withdrew, “that I thought she might as well come.

She loves Portsmouth – don’t you,
mein
Voglein
? And we go back tomorrow.”

“Isn’t it joyous?” said Joey eagerly. “I love England, of course; but the Tyrol is home now, and I’m dying to see my sister again! How she
could
be so stupid as to get mumps at Christmas is more than I can think!

It’s messed up her holidays, anyway!”

“Poor Tante Marguerite!” said the Robin pensively. “Will she he quite well now, Joey? Shall we go to see her when we get home?”

“Sure of it,” said Joey. “Shouldn’t wonder if she wasn’t at Innsbruck waiting to welcome us. Salt, please, Grizel, unless you want it all to yourself!”

“I wish Madame was back at the Chalet!” sighed Grizel, her mind reverting to her own particular problems once more. “It won’t be easy this term – Easter term never is!”

“But you’ve been games prefect long enough to be able to carry responsibility,” said Miss Maynard bracingly. “Why are you so upset about being head-girl?”

“Games give you a certain hold,” explained Grizel. “Gertrud will do well as games pre., but it seems to me she’d have done just as well as head-girl. I wish I hadn’t been chosen.”

The Robin looked up from her roast chicken. “Me, I will be
very
good, Grizelle,” she promised.

Grizel looked at her, with a smile. “I know you will. It isn’t that, either! You can’t understand, little pet! Of course, I shall do my best, Miss Maynard; but it won’t he easy-”

“Nothing worth while ever is,” replied the mistress. Then she changed the conversation. It was true that the Robin never repeated things; still, it was better that she should not hear Grizel’s woes voiced quite as plainly as this. Therefore Miss Maynard turned to Joey and asked her some questions about the books she had come to buy.

“Got three of them,” replied the girl. “The Francis Thompson was five bob, but worth it – I’ve wanted him for ages! The Green’s history was five too. The other thing was sixpence.”

“I can’t understand
how
you can read those awful goody-good books,” interposed Grizel. “It isn’t you a bit, really!”

“I think they’re so priceless,” said Joey, with a grin. “And, anyway, they do teach you a lot of history.”

“But they’re so biased,” objected Grizel. “The one you lent me seemed to be fairly reeking with hate for the English and George III. and his ministers. It’s so silly, too, when it all happened more than a hundred years ago.”

“Well, they had a lot to put up with,” said Joey broad-mindedly. “After all, Grenville and his idiotic Stamp Act was enough to drive anyone mad, specially when they hadn’t a chance of saying anything one way or another. And Miss Annersley says that it was a very good thing for us that the American colonies
did
break away. So it was all for the best.”

Grizel shrugged her shoulders. She was not historically inclined, and, to her way of thinking, it didn’t really matter whether the Americans had remained part of the empire, or whether they broke away from it.

She simply could not understand Joey Bettany’s interest in people long since dead and gone. However, she wasn’t going to quarrel with the younger girl about it, so she subsided, and Joey remained victor of the field.

They finished their lunch with an amiable discussion of books for the school library, in which even the Robin joined, for she read a good deal for her eight years, and had her own views on the subject of stories.

“We’ve got plenty to take with us,” said Miss Maynard at last. “That case will be full now; and I won’t have any more to look after than I can help. Those three you have got today must go in your suitcase, Jo. As it is, we shall have a good deal of luggage, even though I’m going to register most of it through.”

“That’s the only bother about bringing books from England,” said Grizel. “I’ve got one to put in
my
case too.”

“Well, we can’t help it,” said Jo philosophically. “After all, we can’t expect to get books there in English –at least, not all the books we want. Yes, thank you, Miss Maynard,” in answer to a question from that lady,

“I’ve quite finished. Shall we get ready to go now?”

“Yes, I think so. Fasten up your coat collars, and collect your possessions, girls. Jo, see to the Robin. I want to go to the china shop to get one or two things, so we must hurry, as we ought to catch the early train if we possibly can. I don’t like motoring through the forest after dark in this weather.”

They got their things together, and left the restaurant. A thin drizzling sleet was failing now, which made them shiver. It is true that winter in the Tyrol is intensely cold as a rule, but it is a dry cold, not the raw dampness of our English climate, which penetrates through the whole system. Miss Maynard made all the haste she could, however, and an hour later saw them in the train for Southampton, the girls glancing at their books while the mistress made up her accounts and the Robin peered out at the fast failing dusk. “Me, I do not like the English winter,” she announced suddenly.

“Don’t you, darling?” asked Miss Maynard absently, as she tried to account for a missing sevenpence which refused to be accounted for. “Never mind; we’ll soon be back at the Tiern See. You like winter there.

Oh, there it is, thank goodness! I’d forgotten the stamps. Girls, we are nearly at Southampton; close your books and pack up, or we may miss the train. We shall have a rush as it is. This train is late.”

They got ready once more, and in the scurry for the little local train that took them to Lyndhurst, they forgot what they had been talking about. Once in the Lyndhurst train, they began discussing school once more, for all of them loved their school in the lovely, picturesque Tyrol; and though they had had a very good time at Miss Maynard’s home in the heart of the New Forest, yet to all three, Briesau, the little triangular valley on the Tiern See where the Chalet School was situated, spelt home for them. The school had been run by Joey Bettany’s sister, Madge, until the previous summer, when she had married Dr. James Russell, head of the big new sanatorium on an alm high up the Sonnenscheinspitze, a mountain on the opposite side of the lake. The present head was Mademoiselle Lapattre, who had been joint-head with Miss Bettany until her marriage. Miss Maynard was senior and mathematical mistress, and four other English girls formed the rest of the resident staff. An excellent matron ran the domestic side of the school, and Herr Anserl from Spartz, the little market-town at the foot of the mountains where the Tiern See lies, three thousand feet above sea-level, came twice a week to give piano-lessons to the most promising of the girls.

Singing was taught by Mr. Denny, who was obliged for the sake of his health to remain in the district, and whom the girls privately thought rather mad. Masters came from Innsbruck for the violin, cello, and harp; and young Mrs. Russell had, for the last term, come down from the Sonnalpe twice a week to give lessons in English literature. This term, however, the state of the roads would make such thing impossibility. When March should come, bringing with it the rapid thaw, the paths would be well-nigh impassable on the lake side of the mountain, and Dr. Jem, as all the girls called him, had vetoed the idea for that term, at any rate.

Consequently, when Miss Maynard had informed her ex-head that she intended to spend the Christmas holidays at home, and had begged leave to take Joey and the Robin with her that they might have a really English Christmas, Mrs. Russell had agreed. It suited her better, for her husband had been summoned to a medical conference at Vienna for the week between Christmas and New Year, and she naturally wanted to go with him. So Joey and Robin had come to England, and Grizel Cochrane had come with them to spend her Christmas at her own home in Devonshire. A week ago she had joined the others in the New Forest, and was to travel back with them to Austria. This would be her last year at the Chalet School, for she would be eighteen in May, and then she was to go to Florence to study music in earnest under one of the best masters there.

It cannot be said that Grizel looked forward to her future with much enjoyment. She was not really musical, though hours of practice rigorously enforced by her step-mother while she had been in England, and then carried on under Herr Anserl in Briesau, had made her a brilliant instrumentalist. Her chief interest lay in games, and she would far rather have been a second Betty Nuthall than an Adela Verne. However, her opinion had not been asked, and, as Jo had said once, “hers not to question why.” What was to happen after Florence no one seemed to know – Grizel herself least of all. She and her step-mother were not in sympathy with each other, and her father was too much immersed in his profession – he was a barrister with a wide practice – to care overmuch about the daughter he had seen comparatively rarely. Since she was ten, Grizel had been very much a lonely child, and to her the Chalet School was the only home she had ever known.

It was home to Joey Bettany too, though she knew that her sister and brother-in-law wanted her to feel that the pretty chalet outside the Sonnalpe stood for that now. She liked Jem very well, and she adored her sister, but Briesau, where she knew everyone and everyone knew her, was far dearer to her than the Sonnalpe with the big sanatorium and its sad community of people who had come there in search of health. Like most children, Joey shrank from sickness and suffering, though she had personally known a good deal of both in her short life, for the first years of her existence had been one long struggle with delicacy. Now, however, after nearly four years in the life-giving air of the mountains, that had been overcome. Robust she would never be, but the awful colds and attacks of bronchitis which had been sapping away her life as long as she had remained in England were practically a thing of the past.

As for the Robin, she had been left motherless two years before this story opens, and had been sent to the school while her father was in Russia on business. The business had long since been finished, and Captain Humphries was secretary to Dr. Jem. The little girl was a frail little creature, and her mother had died in rapid decline, so, since she was happy at school, it was deemed better to keep her there, away from the sorrow of the Sonnalpe except at holiday times, when she and Joey would generally he at the chalet, where the doctor, “Uncle Jem,” and his pretty wife, and her father lived.