03.5 Visitors for the Chalet School (6 page)

They were speaking in French, which had been the Robin’s first language and was the one she still tended to prefer.

“Never mind, Robin darling,” Joey said comfortingly. “Be a good girl, sweetheart, and go off now with Amy and the others; then tonight when we get back I’ll ask Mam’selle if I may come over to Le Petit Chalet to say goodnight and perhaps to tell you a story. That’s a promise.”

The Robin’s face lifted a little. She thought Joey the most wonderful person in the world; moreover, she was a sensible little girl, training all her short life to accept arrangements without fretting. With just a small sigh, she got ready to wave goodbye to the party when they set out.

Pamela Trent, one of the three Londoners who had encountered the Chaletians at Eben, was watching the Juniors with great interest as she waited for the expedition to begin. Her attention was caught by the Robin in earnest conversation with Joey, Pamela was fond of young children and hoped to train as a kindergarten teacher when she left school at the end of the year. Seeing Gertrud Steinbrücke come out of the Chalet, she asked: “Do tell me, who is the lovely little girl talking to Jo Bettany? She looks one of the most adorable children I’ve ever seen.”

Gertrud readily told her the Robin’s name and explained that Robin, whose Polish mother had died nearly three years ago, was Mrs Russell’s ward and Joey’s adopted sister. “When she came here two years ago, she was only six years old, such a very small little schoolgirl!” Gertrud continued, with a smile. “And she is still our ‘School Baby’. But she never has become spoiled.” Gertrud glanced round towards the front door. “Ah, good! Here now are the others.”

Bette Rincini, accompanied by the other prefects and the rest of the Grange House girls, had just emerged from the house and the word was at last given to start.

As the wave of girls surged through the gate, Simone Lecoutier ran up. “Joey! What has become of Joey?

Où donc est-elle allée?
“

Simone tended to be possessive, and at one time she would have done her utmost to monopolize Jo’s company on the walk. But today there was to be no chance of this; and in any case Simone had grown up quite a lot during her two years at the Chalet School. So when Frieda Mensch called out, “Will you not come and walk with us, Simone?” she was able to accept the invitation with a fairly good grace.

Meanwhile, Joey had already been swept off by a group consisting of Patricia Davidson, Pamela Trent and Joan Hatherley. They were brimming over with questions and Jo was kept busy answering as the party left the school behind and took the path towards the valley.

In her excitement, Joey was soon pouring forth such a spate of information about the names and histories of various places and mountain peaks that she left her hearers breathless.

Eventually Joan Hatherley protested, laughing: “I think I’ll need a map to help sort this out. I’m never going to remember it all with my enfeebled brain.” Joan’s round face and rather childlike expression, accentuated by her round tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, often caused her to be mistaken for less than her seventeen and a half years. Her air of innocence was deceptive: she was keenly observant and possessed a dry sense of humour.

“Is it possible to get maps of this district, Jo?” asked Pamela Trent, pushing back a dark curl which kept annoyingly straying into her eyes.

Their group had gone a little ahead of the rest; they were just coming to the bridge across the stream dividing Briesau from the beginning of the Tiern valley. Jo paused for a moment.

“I don’t think you can get any large-scale maps. Lots of ordinary maps of Austria and the Tyrol, of course.

But the Tiernsee and Briesau do look awfully tiny on those. I say, though – I’ve an idea! Why shouldn’t we Chaletians get together and make you a map ourselves? I’m sure Miss Wilson would help. She’ll probably think it’s jolly good practice for our geography, not to mention Guides. We’ll ask her as soon as we get back.”

It can be related in passing that Miss Wilson, who was responsible for geography as well as science throughout the Chalet School, was delighted to approve this scheme. The Fifth, Joey’s form, were entrusted with the map-making. With Miss Wilson’s assistance, they were able to produce a clear and workmanlike map of the Tiernsee and surrounding districts, and the visitors found it of great practical help.

The valley road lay partly through woods and partly through open meadows. Everywhere it was intensely still, the silence broken only by the laughing chatter of the girls and occasionally, as they went higher up the valley, by the distant tinkle of cow-bells.

“Whatever is that over there?” asked Patricia Davidson suddenly, pointed to her right when they were about three miles along the valley. “Surely it can’t be a road? I pity anyone walking along
that
!” Frieda Mensch looked round and smiled when she saw where Patricia was pointing. She explained that Patricia was actually looking at the stony bed of a large stream: this always dried up completely during the summer, although in just a few weeks’ time the stones would be covered again by the noisy stream rushing down to the Tiernsee.

“You’ll have to come up here and see, later on this month. It’s quite worth the journey, I can tell you,”

declared Joey.

“Well, I’m sure you’re right – must be, of course – but at the moment it’s quite hard to believe it’s really a river bed,” said Joan Hatherley.

And Pamela Trent, whose black hair and deep blue eyes were inherited from her Irish mother, observed:

“Indeed, yes! Now I could show you quite a few roads in the west of Ireland that look just like that! We go every summer to stay with my grandmother, and my father always complains that he can’t tell the road from the bog!”

At the mention of Ireland, Pamela became caught up in an animated conversation with Deira O’Hagan, one of the Chalet School prefects, a good-looking Irish girl whose family came from County Cork. Deira and Pamela had to answer a lot of questions about Ireland. In particular, Bette Rincini and Gertrud Steinbrücke, both Tyroleans, were interested to hear more about a country of which they knew very little.

The road was getting gradually steeper and rougher as the party went further up the valley. They were now nearing he foot of the giant Tiernjoch, the highest mountain in the district; its steep summit was still wreathed in clouds, although the afternoon sun had long since chased away the morning’s mist from all the lower peaks and the sky was a soft blue.

Bette Rincini, as head-girl, was mainly responsible for the expedition; consulting her watch, she called up that there would now be a twenty-minute interval, after which they must start the return journey. During the pause they could either rest in enjoy the view, or push on a little further to see whether there might be an even better view round the next corner.

Bette rejoined the group that she had been with, who had all chosen to sit and rest; and conversation was resumed.

Joan Hatherley, sauntering up with Joey, broke off the discussion they were having about
Bleak House
to remark: “How simply marvelously your head girl speaks English! I’m rotten at languages myself. Of course some of our girls are very decent at French but even they don’t speak it as well as lots of your foreign girls speak English. Oh, dear!” Joan stopped, one eyebrow raised and a comical expression of distress on her round face. “I’d quite forgotten;
we’re
the foreigners here, of course, how very stupid of me! Anyway, I’m simply green with envy of Bette; and Gertrud speaks terribly well too, and so does that one over there; sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.” Here Joan indicated Grizel Cochrane who, back towards them, was sitting a few yards away, discussing with a group of the visitors whether tennis or cricket was the better summertime game for girls’ schools.

Not on muscle in Joey’s face flickered; with a churchwarden-like gravity she assented, “Yes, Grizel does talk fairly good English.”

Then she called out, “Hallo, Griselda! Joan here has been admiring your English. I was just going to tell her that of course you’ve been at school here for two and a half years and it’s helped you need to make quite amazing progress.”

“Really, Joey, you are too silly!” Grizel almost snorted with indignation. “I
am
English, of course,” she said abruptly to the somewhat abashed Joan. “That’s just Joey’s idea of a joke. And pretty feeble too.”

Grizel always tended to become excessively ruffled when she was teased, though she was, gradually and painfully, learning to be less touchy. She did now manage to join, a little reluctantly, in the laughter which greeted Joan’s mistake.

After twenty minutes exactly, Bette gave the signal for the return journey to begin and, still chatting away gaily, the girls started back towards Lauterbach, walking mostly in little groups of three or four.

Patricia Davidson, however, lingered behind the rest and wandered along dreamily by herself, utterly absorbed in the beauty of the scenery around her. A gentle breeze head arisen and this, together with the afternoon’s exercise, had brought a becoming rosy pink into her usually pale face. Her expression had lost some of the tenseness it had shown in London; and, in many ways, she looked a different girl from the Patricia who had entertained Juliet Carrick to tea a few weeks earlier.

Being any quick walker, Patricia knew she could easily catch up with the others; she stopped and turned round for one moment’s last look up the valley. There was a feeling almost of homecoming in the silence and peace that settled round her.

As a small child, Patricia had been devoted to her Scottish nanny, a person of enormous kindness who had done her utmost to give the lonely little girl some of the warmth and affection her parents so conspicuously failed to provide. It had been one of nanny’s customs to read aloud to her charge at bedtime, and on Sunday evenings the reading had always been chosen from the Bible, generally from the Psalms. Probably it was some distant memory of that gentle Scottish voice that now came back to Patricia. Without realizing that she was speaking her thoughts audibly she murmured: “‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …’,” and was startled when a quiet voice behind her finished the line, “‘From whence cometh my help’.”

Joey Bettany, noticing that the Grange House girl was lagging behind, had unobtrusively slipped back to see if anything was the matter.

Jo had no use for anything in the way of “slushy sentiment” (as she herself would have described it), but she was intensely responsive to beauty: the tone of her voice now made it obvious she both understood and shared the feelings that prompted Patricia’s quotation.

For a while neither girl spoke; both felt suddenly little shy. At last they turned reluctantly. And, still in a companionable silence, they began to follow the others, now quite some distance away on the road back to Lauterbach.

And, as they walked, Patricia found, to her own surprise, that she was telling Jo how she had set her heart on the medical career and how everything seemed hopeless because of her mother’s determination to turn her into a social butterfly.

There was some indefinable quality about Jo Bettany that would, all her life, draw others to confide their troubles in her. In spite of the difference in their ages Patricia felt a bond of sympathy with the younger girl as she tried to explain her strong call towards becoming a doctor.

“But it’s a wonderful thing to give your life to healing sick people,” protested Joey, who had learned, from observing her brother-in-law and his colleagues at the sanatorium, something of the dedication a good doctor brings to his work. “Why on earth should your mother be so awfully against it?

Patricia did not make the sharp retort that would have leapt from her and London. Instead she said, after a moment’s pause: “I suppose it’s really very difficult for her, Joey. She and my father separated. He’s been living out in America for ages now, running some huge company. That’s how he got his title, by the way,

‘services to commerce’, I think they call it, but of course my mother loves it! And I’m sure it’s partly being left on her own like this that makes Mother such a stickler for all the social nonsense. I think she feels people are criticizing her all the time. And you see, Jo,” Patricia stopped for a moment and looked earnestly at her young companion, “in a way
I
really am all she has left. She just can’t – and won’t – understand that I’m not interested in her sort of things … being presented at Court, endless parties and so on. And she can’t see how any girl who isn’t obliged to work for a living can want to have a career. I suppose it’s something completely outside her world.”

“Well, anyway, you mustn’t dream of giving up hope now,” Joey said stoutly as they moved on again, rather more rapidly. “If you’ve got enough grit to keep going, I’m sure you can get there in the end.”

They had almost reached the little
Gasthaus
. There were cheerful sounds issuing forth, which proclaimed that the other girls were inside.

Jo paused for a moment at the door. “You must meet my sister and her husband,” she said with a purposeful air. “He’s a doctor, you know, and he’s head of the sanatorium on the Sonnalpe that you can just see from Briesau. I’ll tell you about that later, you’ll probably be interested; but we must go in and get our
Kaffee
or we shan’t get any.”

So saying, she pushed open the door and went inside, followed by Patricia.

Joey Bettany was never one to leave the daisies flowering over her feet. Three days after the expedition up the Tiern valley, Madge Bettany arrived at the Chalet School in time for
Mittagessen
; and she gathered from Joey’s gesticulations across the dining-room that her sister had something important to communicate.

After lunch, Madge called Joey to her and remarked that there was really no need for such extraordinary antics. However she did promise to set aside half an hour after
Kaffee und Kuchen
for private talk, so Joey was well contented.