03 The Princess of the Chalet School (6 page)

Elisaveta recognized an event from her beloved school-stories, and thrilled with joy as she replied, ‘I am Elisaveta of Belsornia.’

There was a gasp. ‘
Who
did you say?’ demanded Margia in her natural tones.

‘Er – I mean, Elisaveta Arnsonira,’ stammered Elisaveta, realizing that, in her excitement, she had let the cat out of the bag.

‘
That
wasn’t what you said at first,’ declared Margia. ‘Explain your meaning my love, or you don’t join us, I can tell you! The S.S.M. doesn’t have any secrets – I mean its members don’t. If you want to be one of us, and I think you ought, you’ve jolly well got to tell us why you gave your name in such a funny way at first.’

Elisaveta thought rapidly. ‘I’ll tell you, if you’ll swear not to tell the others,’ she said finally.

‘Righto! Consider it done!’ returned Margia amiably.

‘Well then, my father is the Crown Prince of Belsornia.’

There was a little silenve, broken by Evadne, who gave vent to a long whistle. ‘I say, you aren’t – er –sticking us?’ she queried.

‘I tell the truth,’ returned Elisaveta, lifting her head proudly.

‘Oh, all right! I didn’t mean to get your goat. Only it seems such a
rum
thing to happen in a school! I thought all princesses had governesses and things!’

‘I had,’ replied the Princess ruefully. ‘There were three of them, and I hated them, really. But after I was ill the doctor said I was to come to school, so I came.’

‘Well, it’s a jolly good thing for you that you came here,’ declared Margia. ‘This is the decentest school int eh world, and you ought to have a rip-er-
splendid
time here, if you’re decent yourself.’

‘Aren’t we going to get on with the meeting?’ suggested Ilonka, a Hungarian child. ‘The bell will be going for afternoon work if we do not make haste.’

There was wisdom in her works, and the little assembly pulled itself together, and Margia, having resumed her former dignity, inquired, ‘Why comest thou?’

‘Because you told me to do so,’ replied Elisaveta promptly.

‘Tis well. Wilt thou be one of us? We are sworn to be the bitter enemies of Matron, and to harry her till she leaves the place. We are the Society for the Suppression of Matron. Wilt thou become one of us?’

Elisaveta flushed. ‘Yes, I will,’ she said firmly.

‘Then take the oath. The Lady of the Revels will administer it.’

The Lady of the Revels – Suzanne Mercier – stepped forward. ‘Hold up both thy hands and repeat this after me,’ she said impressively.

Elisaveta held up both arms to the pine branches above her, and duly repeated after her: ‘I, Elisaveta Margherita of Belsornia, do swear by the trees, the mountains, and the Tiern See that I will do everything in my power to make out present Matron’s life a burden to her, and to make her leave us.’

This interesting ceremony had just been completed when Joey Bettany appeared on the scene, looking furious.

‘What’s up?’ asked Margia, putting her mask away into the elastic at her knee.

‘That
beast
Matron has been ragging the Robin!’ choked Joey. ‘She made her cry, and then when the Robin told her that she had nothing to do with
her
drawers, Matron marched off to the study to my sister, and she had to scold the baby for being rude to Matron, and send her to bed as a punishment. Robin said she would say she was sorry, to please Madame, but she didn’t mean it; so now the poor babe’s been shoved off to bed, and it’s all Matron’s fault. The Robin never cheeked anyone in her life before, and I’m jolly well sure she wouldn’t have done it now if Matron hadn’t been such a
pig
!’

What else Joey might have had to say on the subject they did not hear, for at that moment the headmistress appeared among them. ‘Jo, were you using slang?’ she asked briefly.

‘Yes,’ replied Jo.

‘Forbidden slang?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am sorry. You know the rule as well as I do, I think. Well, I shall have to punish you, and you know that I dislike punishing anyone. Go to your dormitory, take your Milton with you, and learn by heart his sonnet to “Cyriack Skinner.”‘

‘Please, Madame, I was talking slang too,’ said Margia.

‘Then I am ashamed of you both. You are two girls who have been longest in the school, and I should have thought you would have remembered my wishes on the subject. You may take the same punishment as Josephine. Repeat the poem to me after
Kaffee
. Now you may go.’

‘I was me, too,’ said Evadne.

‘The same thing applies to you. Have any of you other girls been breaking the rule as well?’

They hastily searched their memories, but Margia spoke up for them. ‘No, Madame.’

‘Just as well,’ said Miss Bettany in chilling tones. ‘Go now, you three.’

They went dejectedly, and the headmistress followed them. She was half-way across the field when she heard the sound of hurrying steps behind her. She turned round. Elisaveta was running after her with a flushed face. ‘If you please, Madame, may I speak to you?’ she panted.

‘Yes, of course,’ replied the young Head, wondering if Elisaveta were going to confess to having spoken slang also, though Margia had seemed positive that no one but the three had done so.

‘It is that I have told the girls that I am a princess,’ said Elisaveta. ‘I didn’t mean to, but it slipped out.’

Miss Bettany looked at her thoughtfully. ‘What did they say?’ she asked.

‘That it was lucky for me that I had been allowed to come to the Chalet School,’ replied the Princess promptly. ‘They promised they wouldn’t tell the others,’ she added.

‘I see.’ Miss Bettany sounded as though she was trying not to laugh. Truth to tell, she had been so surprised at Margia’s view of the affair as reported by Elisaveta, that she wasn’t very sure how to take it.

Finally she said, ‘Don’t broadcast it, Elisaveta. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter so much. It was mainly on your own account that your father and I thought it better the girls should not know. I was afraid it might make them a little stiff with you. If they only think, however, that you have been lucky to escape from governesses to school, it won’t make any difference.’

‘No,’ agreed Elisaveta.

‘Are you having a good time?’ queried the Head.

‘Splendid!’ was the reply. Elisaveta
did
think she was having a good time when she was invited to become a member of a secret society. It was
just
like the stories. Miss Bettany nodded as she looked at her new pupil. There could be no doubt that she was settling down quite happily, despite Matron, and she already looked a very different child from the one that had been brought to Briesau by Mademoiselle Séguiné ten days ago. There was nothing suppressed or tired about this long-legged school-girl, with her thick curls tied back with an untidy bow, and her short blue cotton frock all crumpled and stained with ink.

‘You are not very tidy,’ she said. ‘I think you had better go and change your frock before we begin the afternoon work. Give that one to be Marie, and she will try to take the inkstains out for you. And don’t use your frocks as pen-wipers!’ She finished off with a little laugh as she left the child, and went her way to the prefect’s room to see if she could find Grizel Cochrane, a search which had led her to the meeting of the S.S.M.

Meanwhile Elisaveta mounted the stairs to the Yellow dormitory to change her frock, deep admiration for this mistress, who did not seem to worry unduly over crumples and inkstains, welling up within her. She felt that she would do anything to please Miss Bettany.

In the dormitory she found Margia struggling with John Milton’s tribute to Cyriack Skinner, rebellion in her heart. Not against the Head – oh dear, no! The person Margia blamed for incarceration was Matron. She did not look up or speak when the Princess came into the room. Honour was a tremendously important thing in the Chalet School, and any girl under punishment knew that she was trusted to keep silence until her punishment was over. But once it
was
over, Margia meant to say a good deal.

She went to have her task heard after
Kaffee
in no penitent mood, and Miss Bettany guessed as much. ‘I’m afraid you aren’t really sorry, Margia,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry if you are angry with me,’ said Margia frankly, ‘but not for anything else.’

‘I’m not angry,’ replied the headmistress. ‘I
am
rather disappointed to find you are so lacking in self-control, but that’s all. Ran away, now, and send Jo to me.’

Margia dropped her regulation curtsey and fled. The Head’s remarks hurt her a good deal more than a scolding would have done, and it was one more charge to be laid up against Matron.

Jo, who was the last one, went to her sister, inwardly dreading her reception. She knew perfectly well that any breach of rules was more serious in her than in any other girl, and, contrary to Miss Webb’s opinion, it was the rarest thing in the world for her to take any advantage of her relationship with the Head. She found her sister standing looking out of the window. ‘I know the sonnet, Madame,’ she said nervously. She dared not use the Christian name till she knew how her sister was felling.

Miss Bettany put the proffered book gently aside. ‘I won’t bother to hear it,’ she said. ‘Come over hear beside me, Joey.’

She went over to the couch, and sat down on it. Jo came and stood beside her. ‘I wish you’d be angry, Madge,’ she murmured. ‘I hate it when you won’t rag me.’

‘Why?’ asked Madge with interest.

‘Because then I’d feel I’d some right on my side,’ explained Jo. ‘When you just treat me like this, I feel such a worm!’

‘Well, that’s not such a bad thing for you to fell occasionally,’ replied her sister. ‘I shall say nothing further about what occurred this afternoon – I don’t think it’s necessary.’

‘It isn’t,’ agreed Jo.

‘All I want to ask you it to try to put up with Matron. The Robin was really very, very naughty to say what she did! She deserved her punishment.’

‘I know,’ replied Joey, curling herself up on the floor. ‘The thing was that
you
were dragged into it. She was all upset about it. She was crying when she went to bed to-night. Frieda heard her as she was passing the door.’

‘Do you know, Joey,’ said her sister solemnly, ‘I begin to think that it’s a very good thing that we have Miss Webb with us for a short time, at least.’

Jo sat back on her heels and regarded her sister as if she thought she had gone mad.

‘Yes; I mean it!’ Madge nodded her pretty head. ‘Everything has gone so smoothly with us since we started, that it’s just as well we should realize that there must be difficulties sometimes.’

‘I don’t think it’s always been so easy as all that,’ replied Jo. ‘There was the time when Grizel and I were lost on the Tiernjoch; and when I dished my ankle at the ice carnival last year; and the flood; and measles last term. It hasn’t always been “everything-in-the-garden’s-lovely” by any means.’

‘No; I agree with you. But where we
have
been singularly fortunate is in our staff.’

‘Yes. That’s so.’

‘Now, Joey, you must try to remember that Matron is in authority – a certain amount – over you all. I have given her that authority, and you can surely trust me to see that it isn’t abused. So I want you to control your temper. Understand?’

Jo nodded. ‘Um. But it’s horribly difficult sometimes.’

‘My good child, are you so week-kneed that you can only keep it when everything goes right? Do talk sense, Joey! Now you must go. I’ve got lots to do.’

Jo scrambled to her feet. ‘I’ll do my best, of course. But I won’t promise that I’ll always succeed. There are some things a
saint
wouldn’t endure.’

She waited to see if her sister had anything to say in answer to that, but Madge had turned to her desk and was busy with something there, so she left the room.

As soon as she had gone, the Head put down the letters she had been playing with and went over to Le Petit Chalet, where the Robin was crying herself to sleep, broken-hearted because ‘Tante Marguerite’ was angry with her.

A little talk, and a lot of cuddling soon put her all right again, and she dropped off, happy at last. Miss Bettany left her when she was safely in the land of dreams, and went to Mademoiselle’s study.

‘Mademoiselle,’ she said as she collapsed into a chair, ‘I’m becoming a preaching bad-tempered headmistress, and I don’t know what to do.’

Mademoiselle, who had know the Bettany girls for years, and loved them both dearly, looked at her young Head. ‘It is that woman, Miss Webb,’ she said shrewdly. ‘Well,
ma chérie
, do not vex yourself. It can but last for the term, and already we have passed ten days. Let us consider, instead, if it will be well to make Margia Stevens do all her own mending. She has torn yet another dress.’

For a full week after that, the membership of the S.S.M. rather languished. For one thing, Margia, the noble president, was subdued by being told that she had disappointed the Head. Miss Bettany rarely found fault with the girls. She possessed the magic gift of personal charm in a high degree, and generally managed to maintain discipline by means that by punishments or fault-finding. When she did punish, she always did it thoroughly, and there was an end of it. In selecting Milton for the three people who had broken the slang rule, she had known very well what she was doing. Margia and Evadne hated learning by heart, and Jo had an unconquerable dislike for the great Puritan poet. Besides, they had had their spare time docked, and had been under the silence law until they had repeated it to the Head. It was a rule at the Chalet that any girl who was under punishment must observe this law, and anyone who tried to make her break it came under it too –if she were caught. To do them justice, the girls rarely did try.

There were so few rules in the school that, as a rule, punishments were not often needed. The one about the use of slang had been absolutely necessary, since it was not to be expected that the mothers of girls who were not English would be pleased if their daughters picked up vocabularies of English slang. The others were based on the same principle. It was an English school, so English had to be spoken during school-hours, except during lessons in other languages; the girls were not supposed to speak at all after ‘lights out’; the little ones were forbidden to play by the lakeside or on the banks of the little stream which flowed through the valley, without special permission. These were the bulk of the regulations, and the slang one was the most frequently broken.