01 The School at the Chalet (10 page)

‘Oh, Grizel, will you please take the ink?’ she said. ‘I want to finish this before the bell rings! It is in the big jar at the bottom.’

‘All right, Bernhilda! Don’t you worry; I’ll get it all right,’ replied Grizel cheerfully. Juliet had been absent on the Thursday and Friday of the previous week, and had not yet turned up, so Grizel was a much nicer child in consequence.

Having directed the Junior’s attention to the big ink-jar, Bernhilda returned to her task, while Grizel, pushing back the long, thick curls which, despite the ribbon that tied them back, would get in her way, uncorked the jar, and, carefully tilting it on one side, began to fill her can. Both were absorbed in their work.

Grizel had very nearly finished, when Bernhilda gave a sudden shriek, and dived forward, nearly collapsing on to Grizel, who echoed her shriek. At the same time there was a crash as the large pint bottle of red ink fell heavily against the step-ladder, and smashed, sending a fountain of red ink in every direction. Bernhilda’s tunic suffered, but the one who came off worst was Grizel, who was almost directly underneath. In her dive forward, the Prefect managed to catch the bottom portion of the bottle, and the rest fell clear of the Junior; but the ink deluged her-hair, frock, hands, even her legs were dripping with it. As Madge said afterwards, a more gory-looking spectacle it would have been hard to find anywhere.

The combined shrieks of the two drew the staff hastily to the spot. Mademoiselle, under the impression that there had been a fearful accident, rushed forward with a cry of ‘Where, then, is the injury?’

Miss Maynard and the headmistress, who had both realised almost at once what had occurred, were hard put to it to keep from laughing, although the latter promptly produced a handkerchief, and set to work to try to wipe off some of the ink. By this time Bernhilda had reached the ground, and was giving a somewhat incoherent account of what had occurred.

According to her story, she had turned some books round sharply, and had caught the ink-bottle with a corner. She had tried to catch it, but had not been in time to prevent its breaking. The rest they could see for themselves. Grizel, who had not been actually hurt, was furious.

‘I’m all ink, and my gymmer is ruined! ‘ she said in choked accents.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Miss Bettany gravely. ‘You must get out of it at once, of course, and Marie must wash it immediately. Then I think it will be all right. Luckily it’s your cotton tunic. And you must go and get a bath. I’ll come and wash your hair, and then you’ll be all right by recreation. Don’t look so distressed, Bernhilda. It was an accident, and you couldn’t help it. But I advise you, for the future, to put all liquids on the floor of the cupboard.’

Accordingly, Grizel was marched off to sundry ablutions, and Bernhilda was requested to give up her tunic so that it, too, could be washed. While it was drying, she put on a skirt of Miss Maynard’s.

When recreation came, a very clean and exceedingly indignant Grizel joined the others, secretly expecting to be well teased about her unexpected bath. Luckily for her, however, she found everyone buzzing with excitement over some news Juliet Carrick had brought that morning.

It appeared that a certain well-known firm of film producers had decided to use the Tiern See as part of the setting for a film which should give
Life in the Austrian Tyrol
. It was one of a series of educational films that they were doing; and since it was not, of course, always possible to get the natives of the country to pose for them, they had sent the ‘principals’ over from America. These six important people, together with the director, the camera man, and a business manager, were making the Tyroler Hof their headquarters for the time being. They were going to use all the villages and hamlets round the lake as settings, and also some of the Alms, where the cowherds lived during the summer in wooden huts, while the cows browsed contentedly on the sweet, short grass of the upland pastures. They intended to go beyond the lake and, following the course of the little Tiern, take some of the hamlets and villages on its banks. Just why they should have hit on the Tiern See was hard to say. Juliet was not occupied with that question. It was the whole idea which appealed to her, and she was full of it.

‘They are going to the Ziller Thal after this,’ she chattered eagerly, ‘and Kufstein as well, before they go south to the Dolomites. They’ve done Innsbrück and the Stubai Thai and round about there, and Mr Eades-that’s the camera man-said they had some glorious close-ups of Hall and Spärtz. He was awfully interested in us, and I think they mean to ask Miss Bettany to let them take us. Isn’t it thrilling?’

Miss Bettany, however, when approached on the subject by the said Mr Eades and a Mr Sindon, the business manager, refused to hear of it. She was icily courteous and absolutely decided. Nothing would induce her to reconsider the matter, and the two gentlemen left the Châlet, realising that, as one of them later expressed it to Juliet,’ It was abso. N.G. Nix on the ‘movies’ stunt!’

Most of the girls cared very little either one way or the other, but Juliet herself, Grizel, and one or two of the more thoughtless ones were bitterly disappointed. They had already, in imagination, seen themselves on the screen. People all over Europe and the British Isles, at any rate, would know them, and now it was all spoilt by Miss Bettany’s refusal.

‘It’s a shame!’ cried Juliet, to a select gathering on the afternoon of the day on which she learned of her headmistress’s decision. ‘Why couldn’t we be filmed? Big schools like Eton and Winchester are! But Miss Bettany always does that sort of thing! She’s thoroughly narrow-minded!’

‘No, she isn’t!’ returned Grizel, who had moments when she realised that her present behaviour was anything but what Madge had the right to expect of her. ‘It’s different photographing boys at sports, and doing us here by the lake. Oh, I can’t tell you how, but it is!’ And from this position she refused to budge.

Juliet gave it up, for she was clever enough to realise that once Grizel had made up her mind to a thing, wild horses wouldn’t move her. However, Anita Rincini, Sophie Hamel, and Suzanne Mercier were more easily swayed, and were soon persuaded into thinking that they had a grievance against Miss Bettany. The manager of the ‘movies’ also felt he had a grievance. He had foreseen a glorious advertisement in the school. It was, so far as he knew, an entirely fresh idea, and the girls looked so fresh and dainty in their uniform, and the whole thing would have made an excellent foil to his continental scenes.

‘If only I could get just one or two of your kids!’ he said to Juliet. ‘It would be an easy matter to rig up a schoolroom scenario. And we could take you sculling, and swimming, and so on.’

These words gave Juliet an idea. ‘Could you really do it? ‘ she asked. ‘ If I got some of the girls together in our uniform, could you really manage?’

‘Of course I could!’ he said impatiently. ‘Come to that, I suppose I could rig up something in the States when we get back.’

‘But it wouldn’t be the same scenery,’ said Juliet earnestly.

‘We could fake it near enough for the public,’ he replied.

‘But it would be better with the same backgrounds, wouldn’t it? ‘ she asked.

‘Of course it would! But that school-ma’am of yours won’t even listen to the idea, so where’s the good of talking about it?’ he returned irritably.

‘Supposing I were to get two or three of the others to come, couldn’t you take us? ‘ queried Juliet.

Mr Sindon’s face lit up at the idea. He was not so thick-skinned that he could not feel the disdain in Miss Bettany’s icy voice when she had refused his suggestion, and it seemed to him that here was a chance to get even with her.

‘I could manage it, of course,’ he said slowly. ‘When could you arrange for it? Because we are off next Friday, so it would have to be before then.’

‘Would Saturday do?’

‘Yes, that would do very well. Saturday, then, at ten o’clock in the morning. Bring your swimming suits, and we’ll get you in the water.’

Juliet tackled her four satellites, and by dint of flattery, coaxing, and, in the case of Sophie Hamel, frank bullying, got them to agree to join her. As she had expected, Grizel was the hardest of them to capture. If it had not been for the fact that she had been caught talking in the dormitory the previous night after ‘lights out,’ and had been roundly scolded by the Head that morning, she would probably never have done it. As it was, she gave in when Juliet had alternately scolded and pleaded with her for nearly half an hour, and agreed to be at Geisalm, a little hamlet a mile and a half up the lake shore, on Saturday morning. It would be an easy matter for her to be there; for, on Saturdays, they were left very much to themselves, Madge Bettany having a theory that it was better to trust girls than to watch them continually. They were not allowed to bathe or go boating unless a mistress was there; but otherwise no one interfered with them, and so far there had been no necessity for interference. Therefore, ten o’clock on Saturday morning found Grizel, in company with Juliet, scrambling along the narrow rocky path that leads from Briesau to Geisalm.

‘Aren’t you thrilled?’ demanded Juliet, as they stopped to rest on the great ‘fan’ of alluvial rock which marks the half-way between the two places. ‘ I am! I’ve never acted for ” movies ” before.’

Grizel did not suppose Juliet had, and her conscience was beginning to wake up very thoroughly, which may have accounted for the vehemence with which she said, ‘Oh, rather! Awfully!’

Juliet shot a quick glance at her from her queer, dark eyes, but she said nothing beyond, ‘Well, we’d better be getting on!’

They went on their way-slowly and carefully, for at this part the path was not very wide, and went almost sheer down to the water, whose vivid blueness told how deep it was. At any other time Grizel would have enjoyed that scramble over the rocks, and the rapid run past the place where the mountain water dripped from a crag that overhung the path. She had enjoyed this very walk a score of times. But now she felt half angry and wholly unhappy, and I think that if it had not been for her fear of Juliet’s mocking tongue, she would have turned back even then. So absorbed was she in her uneasiness, that she never noticed a broad-bottomed rowing-boat with four people in it heading for Scholastika.

Juliet, who, at the moment it passed, was gathering a bunch of purple scabious and white moon-daisies, did not notice it either.

The occupants of the boat glanced up, attracted by the splash of brown against the green of the Alm which they had reached. Juliet they passed over, but as Joey Bettany’s eyes lingered on the other gym-frocked figure, she gave a gasp.

‘Herr Mensch!’ she cried. ‘That’s Grizel! Whatever is she doing here?’

Herr Mensch turned a placid face towards the place, but the two girls had vanished behind the clump of trees which protects the footpath from the lake at this point.

‘So?’ he said politely. ‘Then that is why we could not find her when we came to fetch you? But is it wrong for her to be here?’

‘I’m sure my sister doesn’t know about it,’ declared Joey. ‘She thought Grizel must have gone to buy apples from the old woman at Seespitz, ‘cos she said so!’

Herr Mensch’s fair, German-looking face became troubled.

‘That is very wrong of das Mädchen,’ he said gravely. ‘Would you like us to land at Geisalm and take her into the boat?’

Joey thought rapidly for a moment. They had never been told that they were not to go to Geisalm by themselves, but she knew that Madge was always a little nervous about that path, especially the narrow bit of it. She also knew that Grizel would be furious at being interfered with-and she had been furious so often lately! But Joey Bettany was not the kind to shirk doing what she ought to do just because other people would be furious with her, so she nodded her head.

‘Yes, please! I think it would be better, if you don’t mind!’

Without a word, the good-natured Austrian turned the boat towards the little green triangle with its big white Gasthaus, which forms Geisalm. A group of people were standing there talking together. Joey recognised the cinema folk, but still she didn’t guess what was up until Bernhilda cried, ‘Why, there are Sophie and Anita. How strange for so many of the Châlet girls to meet here to-day!’

Then Joey understood.

‘Oh!’ she said, and her face, pale no longer, but tanned by the hot sunshine, flamed with sudden anger.

‘Oh! How can she, when Madge said not!’

‘How can she do what?’ asked Bernhilda, who was slow at grasping things. ‘And of whom are you speaking, Joey?’

‘It’s Grizel! Juliet’s done it, of course! She’s mad on them!’ replied Joey incoherently. ‘Oh, Herr Mensch!

Please stop them! Madge will be so angry, and it isn’t fair when she said she wouldn’t!’

Herr Mensch was quicker than his daughter. With a final pull he brought the boat neatly to the landing-stage and sprang out.

‘Stay here!’ he said curtly to the three girls with him, and then he strode off to the group by the Gasthaus.

Mr Sindon was considerably surprised when he found himself confronted by an angry giant of a man, who requested to know, in very good English, if he intended taking photos that day. Something in the angry giant’s voice warned him that he had better give an answer at once, and to the point, so he replied that he was. It was at this moment that Grizel and Juliet came upon them. Herr Mensch took not the slightest notice of the elder girl, but he turned to Grizel and, in tones which literally scared her, told her to go to the boat at once. With her he sent Anita and Sophie. Then he spoke to the paralysed Mr Sindon.

‘I am sorry, mein Herr, if in taking these young ladies away I am causing you any inconvenience, but they are here without the knowledge or permission of their parents and guardians. I wish you good-day!’ And with this he turned and strode back to the boat, where Anita Rincini, who happened to be the daughter of his own great friend, had dissolved into tears. Sophie looked scared, and Grizel was beginning to recover sufficiently to feel furiously angry at having been treated in this summary fashion. But Herr Mensch took no notice of her at all.