01 The School at the Chalet (4 page)

‘Shove the cases through the window!’ he called, as the train stopped. ‘Bustle the kids out! I’ve got a porter here! Rooms booked at the Europe!’

Under the influence of his suggestions Madge bundled out their belongings, and five minutes later they were all on the platform making for the exit, while a short, good-natured-looking Tyrolean followed them with the suit-cases and rugs. Dick was an experienced traveller, and both he and Madge spoke German fluently, so they were soon past the barrier and out into the big square, where carriages intended for two horses, but drawn by one only, were waiting for hire, while the coachmen, picturesque enough figures in their short open jackets, full skirts, and little green Tyrolese hats with the inevitable feather at the back, leaned up against the wheels, shouting chaff to each other, or smoking their long china-bowled pipes.

Beyond, they could see the great snow-capped mountains towering up on all sides, while round them thronged tow-headed, grey-eyed children, begging for
Krönen
with a persistence which suddenly died away as Dick addressed them with a ready flow of language.

‘Awful little beggars!’ he said as they dispersed. ‘They’re nearly as bad as the natives at Port Said. Tired, Grizel? Here’s our hotel; nice and handy for the station, you see! You kids had better have something to eat, and then hop it to bed. Plenty of time to see things in the morning.’

‘Is everything all right at the Châlet?’ asked Madge, as they entered the big hotel. ‘Has Mademoiselle’s cousin arrived? I’ve got another pupil-an American called Evadne Lannis. She’s coming in September.’

‘Good for you,’ replied her brother. ‘Yes, everything’s all right, and the kid-Simone, her name is-arrived Friday of last week. Mademoiselle stayed down here till to-day, and sent up the things by rail. I got the place scrubbed out, and dear old Frau Pfeifen came along, and her eldest girl, and we’ve got it quite shipshape.

There’s a big room they had built on for a
Speisesaal
, and we’ve turned that into a classroom. I knocked up some shelves, and we’ve got the books up. Two little rooms we’ve given to you and Mademoiselle, and a huge loft affair we’ve put the kids’ beds in. It holds eight easily, so you’d better buck up and get four more.

There’s a landing-stage just opposite, and the water’s quite shallow. Old Braun at the Kron Prinz Karl says you can bathe from there in the summer. Now I’ll get your keys, and then you can go and beautify yourselves while I order some food for you. Come down to the
Speisesaal
when you are ready.’

‘What’s a
Speisesaal
?’ asked Grizel, as they went up in the lift.

‘It’s German for dining-room,’ explained Madge. ‘Here we are! Now buck up, you two, and make yourselves tidy, and then come and tap at my door.’

They hastened joyously, and in a marvellously short time they were ready.

Then they went down to the Speisesaal, where they found Dick and a delightful meal awaiting them, together with a most obsequious waiter.

‘Nothing really exciting,’ said Dick. ‘Only
Kalbsbraten
-all right, Grizel! That’s German for roast veal!-and
Kartoffeln
, otherwise spuds, and
Apfelntorte
, which isn’t apple-tart, although it sounds like it.’

‘What is it, then?’ Grizel wanted to know.

‘Sort of cake with cooked apples on it,’ said Jo swiftly. ‘Oh, it is nice to have the funny things again! I think foreign food is much more interesting than. English! Must we really go to bed after supper? I don’t want to in the least.’

‘It’ll be nine o’clock before you’re settled,’ retorted her brother. ‘You can trot round Innsbrück to-morrow if you’re so keen! It won’t run away in the night, you know.’

‘When do we go up to Tiern See?’ asked Grizel.

‘Not till the half-past seven train to-morrow evening,’ replied Madge. ‘There are one or two things I want to get, and you really must see a little of Innsbrück while you are here. We will go to the Ferdinandeum Museum and the Hof Kirche, and you must see the old house with the golden roof.’

‘Is it really gold? ‘ asked Grizel in awestruck tones.

‘Oh dear no! And it is really just the roof of the balcony to a window. But it’s very famous, and you ought to see it.’

‘Then there’s the Mariatheresien Strasse with its swagger shops,’ chimed in Dick, ‘and the great Triumphal Arch. And you must go down and have a look at the Inn. You’ll have plenty to do to-morrow, I can assure you. I’ll go up during the morning, Madge, and take the cases, then you and the kids can come on later.’

Everyone agreed to this programme, and Jo and Grizel went off to bed quite happily, while their elders took a stroll up to the little station, where the electric railway, which is known as the Stubai Bahn, begins.

‘You ought to take the kids up here some day,’ observed Dick.

‘Some day,’ agreed Madge; ‘but do remember that I’m here to start a school in the first place!’

‘Geography,’ he said shortly, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘ You might make a week-end expedition of it in the summer and take them to the edges of the Stubai Glacier, You could get rooms in Fulpmes, and the Stubai valley is lovely.’

‘I know,’ said Madge, sighing. ‘It all is! But oh, Dick! Supposing it isn’t a success! Supposing I fail!’

‘Tosh!’ he said easily. ‘You won’t fail! You’ve too much grit for that. Other people. might; but you’ll go on! Buck up, old thing!’

‘But I’m so young,’ she said- ‘only twenty-four, Dick!’

He gave her arm a reassuring squeeze.

‘You’ll pull through all right! Keep your hair on, old girl! We’d better be getting back now. You’re tired, and ought to be in bed.’

‘Yes, I am,’ acknowledged Madge. ‘Oh, Dick, I shall be so thankful to get to our own house! I must say it sounds attractive. What is little Simone like?’

‘Didn’t see much of her,’ he replied. ‘She struck me as jolly quiet. Very dark, of course; not a bit pretty like that Grizel kid.’

‘Yes, Grizel will be lovely when she’s grown-up,’ said his sister. ‘ I should think she’s clever, too. Oh, Dick, she and Jo were too funny for anything in Paris! Joey was dreaming it all into history, and Grizel is so absolutely matter of fact. She simply couldn’t understand Joey and her dream-pictures.’

‘Jolly good job,’ said Dick austerely. ‘Jo dreams far too much,’

‘Well, she hasn’t had much chance to do anything else,’ replied Madge. ‘Perhaps Grizel and Simone, and Evadne when she comes, will make her different.’

‘Oh, she’ll be better in the mountains,’ was his answer. ‘Half the trouble has been her health. She’s better already, I think, even though she’s tired.’

‘It can rain at Tiern See,’ Madge reminded him.

‘I know that. But she’ll have companions of her own age. And don’t you worry, my chicken! Everything’s going grandly!’

With this assurance the subject was dropped, and presently they reached the hotel, and Madge retired to bed.

The next day was spent in shopping and sight-seeing. Dick left them early in the day, and went up to Tiern See with the cases and the rugs, while the three girls explored the city to their hearts’ content. Grizel, quick to learn, was already picking up phrases in German, and she took the greatest delight in practising them. Jo, whose German had been fluent in the past, found it coming back to her, even as her French had begun to do in Paris. She instructed her friend as they went about, and eventually poured so much information into her, that it was small wonder that Grizel became muddled. The result was a mistake that the Bettanys remembered against her for long enough.

Madge had decided to take both children to have their hair shampooed before going up to the lake. She remembered, from their last sojourn in the Tyrol, a very good hairdresser’s shop in the Museum Strasse, and thither she took them. The hairdresser had a little English, but not much. When the shampooing was over, he asked them whether the final rinsing should be of hot or cold water. The German for ‘ hot water’ is ‘heisses Wasser.’ Jo came through the ordeal all right, demanding a lukewarm rinsing for the last. Not so Grizel. She forgot what the German for ‘cold’ was, but remembered, as she imagined, the word for ‘ hot.’ The temptation to exhibit her knowledge of his language was too great to be resisted, and she reduced the man to horrified silence, and the Bettany girls to helpless laughter, by boldly demanding ‘heiliges Wasser.’ ‘

It was the expression of outrage on Herr Alphen’s face as much as anything that rendered it impossible for Madge to do anything but choke wildly; while he himself, a most devout Catholic, decided that this was only one more example of the madness of the English. It struck him as profane in the extreme that anyone should demand to have her hair rinsed with holy water. Still, doubtless these poor creatures knew no better. With a resigned expression and outspread hands, he carefully explained that it was impossible to give her what she asked. He assured her. however, that he would put some of his very best toilet preparations into what was used if she would only say whether she would have it hot or cold, or, like the other Fräulein, lukewarm.

Of all this harangue, which was poured forth at top speed, Grizel understood not one word. Finally Madge, choking back her laughter with great difficulty, came to the rescue, and the shampoo was finished.

‘But I don’t see what there was to giggle at,’ observed Grizel to Joey when they had finally left the shop.

‘And why did that man get so fussy when I asked for hot rinsing water? Did he think I should catch cold after it? I wanted a cold rinse, as a matter of fact, but I couldn’t remember the word for it, so I asked for hot.’

‘That’s just what you didn’t do,’ Joey informed her solemnly. ‘You’ve shocked poor Herr Alphen most horribly, and I’m not surprised! I only wonder he finished you at all!’

‘But why? What did I do? ‘ demanded the bewildered Grizel.

‘Oh, you only asked for a final rinsing of holy water! And he a Catholic-at least I suppose so!’

‘But I only said what you told me,’ protested Grizel.

‘They’re rather alike in sound,’ admitted Joey. ‘ The beginnings are the same anyhow. I wonder if he’s got over it yet?’

At first, Grizel was inclined to accuse her friend of ‘pulling her leg,’ but when she finally realised that the mistake was her own, she cheerfully joined in the laugh against herself.

‘Well, anyhow, that’s one thing I sha’n't forget,’ she said, as they made their way to the station. ‘ I couldn’t if I tried after that!’

‘I don’t believe you could,’ agreed Jo-Madge was buying their tickets to Spärtz. ‘If you’d insisted, I wonder if he would have tried to get some for you! They’re awfully obliging here, you know. Hullo, Madge!

Got them all right? Doesn’t it feel grand to count in hundreds and thousands?’

‘No, rather a nuisance,’ replied her sister. ‘Now come along. Our train is over here. Have you got those books safe, Joey?’

The journey from Innsbrück to Spärtz is of no particular interest, with the one exception of the old-world town of Hall, famous for its salt mines now, though in olden days it had a great reputation as the centre of plots and wars. But the little mountain railway, which carries you up to a height of three thousand feet and more above the sea-level, is something to remember. Higher and higher they climbed, now and then stopping at a tiny wayside station, till at last they reached the great Alp, or rather Alm, as they are called in the Tyrol, and there before them, dark, beautiful, and clear as a mirror, spread the Tiern See, with its three tiny hamlets and two little villages round its shores, and towering round on all sides the mighty limestone crags and peaks of the mountains.

The railway terminus is known as Seespitz, and here the steamer was waiting for the passengers. Dick was there too, ready to help with the parcels.

‘It’s a jolly walk round the lake,’ he said, ‘but to-night I think we’ll take the steamer. It’s about a quarter of a mile nearer from the Briesau landing-stage than it is from here, and I know you’re all tired.’

The little steamer waited ten minutes, then her whistle blew, and off she went- first to Buchau at the opposite side of the lake, and then to Briesau, where they were welcomed by good Frau Pfeifen, who almost wept for joy at beholding Madge and Joey once more. From the landing-stage to the Châlet was a good ten minutes’ walk, and then they saw the welcoming lights, and heard Mademoiselle’s warm French greeting.

They were at the Châlet School at last.

Chapter 5.

The Châlet School Opens.

By degrees they settled down in the Châlet. The end of April found them ready to begin work. The huge room, which had been built to accommodate eighty people at meals, had been partitioned off into two good

– sized classrooms. A third next to them had been made of a small room which had been used as a lounge-the former owner of the Châlet had tried to run it as a semi-restaurant. Another one, on the opposite side of the door, had been turned into a sitting-room, sacred to Madge and Mademoiselle. There were no carpets on the floors, but they were brought to a fine polish with beeswax and hard rubbing. The furniture, with the exception of the schoolroom appointments, was all old. There was but little as yet; Miss Bettany intended buying here and there, and having it as good as might be. In the long kitchen at the back of the house Marie Pfeifen reigned, with a younger sister and a cousin to help her, while Brother Hans cleaned shoes and knives, and attended to the huge porcelain stoves which warmed the place throughout. Dick Bettany’s furlough was up on 29th April, and he had to say ‘good-bye’ to them, before getting the Paris express, since he intended joining the boat at Marseilles. Actual schoolwork would start on the following Monday, and Madge was very thrilled over that, for, in addition to Joey, Grizel, and Simone, she had four day-pupils whose parents lived round about, because living was cheaper in the mountains than in the town. Hitherto the girls had gone into Innsbrück; but now that the Châlet School was starting at Briesau, it was both easier and less expensive to send them there. So they would begin with a very fair number.

‘And of course there are heaps of summer visitors,’ said Miss Bettany when she was discussing it with Mademoiselle. ‘When they see how well our school is run, I’m in hopes that they will send their girls to us.’