02 Jo of the Chalet School (24 page)

‘And, anyway, a Guide can’t! Oh, I know we aren’t Guides yet! But we’re
going
to be!’ replied Grizel.

‘I should just about think we are! O-o-oh! Isn’t it a
gorgeous
day!’ Joey gazed round her rapturously. ‘I loved the winter here; but it’s been deadly dull since the snow melted. I must say I think thaws are the most boring things imaginable. Let’s join the others over there, shall we?’

They walked along towards the little rivulet which acted as the outlet for the mountain streams. In the summer it was rarely more than a trickle of clear water bubbling over the pebbly bed. There was nothing of the trickle about it to-day. The snows on the lower slopes of the mountains were melting rapidly, and a perfect torrent of grey, rushing water fought its way between the narrow banks to the lake, whence the ice had melted for the most part, thought blocks of it still floated here and there.

‘If that river rises much more, it’ll flood,’ said Grizel, as they stood watching it for a moment. ‘Look at those alders, Joey. They’ve nearly washed out!’

‘Not quite, though! Madge says they root pretty firmly,’ replied Jo. I s’pose they
have
to or they
wouldn’t be able to grow by the sides of rivers. What a noise the water makes, doesn’t it?’

‘Come on! Let’s cross,’ said Grizel. ‘Miss Durrant must be talking of something awfully jolly, to judge by the row they’re all making! Let’s go and see what it is.’ They hurried down the path to the light plank bridge which crossed the stream. Grizel danced over without a thought, but Joey shut her eyes as she made the crossing.

‘Why on earth-’ gasped her friend. ‘Joey! Why do you do that?’

‘The water makes me so giddy,’ explained Joey. ‘I love the
sound
of it; but I do loathe to see it rushing along like that. It makes me feel all queer and funny.’

‘Silly flop!’ said Grizel, a little contempt flavouring her tone.

‘I can’t help it!’ Jo flushed scarlet. ‘It always does! It looks so – so
cruel
; as though it didn’t’ care for anybody or anything! Ow!’ She concluded with a wild yell as Rufus leapt up against her, wild with the spring scents in his nose. He was growing up into a handsome dog; very big, with enormous paws, and a fine head. Several pounds of excitable St Bernard puppy flung against her proved too much for Jo, and she sat down violently on the wet grass, Rufus rolling madly beside her, frantic with joy.

‘Get
up
, Joey!’ began Grizel. Then she stopped as a scream of terror cut across her speech.

There was a splash. Then a little grunt from Joey, and the next minute she was tearing over the ground like a possessed creature, while Miss Durrant, who had seen what had occurred, raced after her.

The Robin and two or three of the other juniors had been playing together with the paper dolls which had Simone’s hobby during the previous term. The French child had come back after the Christmas holidays with two postcard-albums and several post-cards. The paper dolls had been cast aside, and, later, handed on to the babies, who adored them. The Robin, in particular, loved hers. She took them with her everywhere, and at night they lay on the chair by her bed, so that she had them first thin in the morning.

She had brought them out with her to-day, and had been playing with them quite happily on some big stones a little way on past the bridge. A sudden breeze had lifted Napoleon, who was standing a little apart from the others, and drifted him slowly across the grass towards the water. The Robin, loving him because Joey did, had run to catch him. But the wind had blown him on, and the baby, in her eagerness to save him, had forgotten to look where she was going, and had fallen headlong into the icy torrent that was raging down to the lake.

It all happened so quickly that no one could reach her in time to save her, and it seemed as if she must be whirled down to the lake before any of them could prevent it. Mercifully, her coat caught for a moment on one of the alder-trees swept by the water, and this just gave Joey time to clamber down a little in front of her. Then the coat gave and she was swept onwards. The current drove her into the rushes where Jo was waiting, and clinging to them with one hand, she stretched out and caught the baby’s shoulder with the other. Then she set her teeth and held on.

The racing water was frightfully near, and she was sick and giddy, partly from terror, partly from watching that swirling torrent. But any idea of giving up was very far form her. She clung with might and main to the little shoulder and the bushes, wondering sully how long it would be before the alders would give under the strain and send them both down with that wicked grey water that seemed to be coming higher and higher.

It seemed hours to Joey, though actually it was barely two minutes before there was a crash and a splash, and Miss Durrant was standing beside her, waist-deep in the water, and lifting the Robin with one arm comfortably round her, while with the other hand she too held on to the bushes, for the force of the snow-fed torrent nearly took her off her feet, strong, big woman as she was. ‘Hold on, Joey!’ she said. ‘Here come the others! Hold on!’

Then Gisela and Bernhilda bent down from the bank, and between them took the unconscious Robin from the young mistress. Miss Durrant promptly transferred her support to Joey, who found things fast becoming misty and unreal to her. Then there came fresh help, as a huge tawny body plunged in, and Rufus caught his little mistress’s skirt between his strong young teeth! It was an easy matter after that for Miss Durrant to scramble up the bank, still holding Joey with one hand, lest even Rufus’s strength should prove unequal to the strain. After that the world grew black, and Joey never knew what happened next. Of Miss Durrant’s lying down on her face and lifting her by degrees from the water, while Rufus tugged and scrambled up beside her; of the sudden appearance of Dr Jem on the scene, and his picking her up and racing back to the Chalet with her; of the stripping off of her wet clothes, and the plunging of her into a hot bath, she remembered nothing. She came back to the world with a hot stinging taste on her tongue – a nasty taste –and the rough hairy feeling of blankets next to her skin.

‘Hallo!’ she remarked. ‘I say! What’s up?’

‘All right, old lady! Lie still,’ said Dr Jem’s voice. ‘Drink this like a good girl!’

Jo obediently swallowed it, and spluttered. ‘Ugh! What
filthy
stuff!’ Then she remembered. ‘The Robin!’ She gave a sharp cry.

‘Quite safe,’ replied the doctor. ‘Snug in bed and fast asleep.’

‘Sure?’ Jo was growing drowsy.

‘Certain. She’s had a bit of a shock, of course, but she’ll soon get over it. Now we’re going to pack you off to bed. Come along.’

Joey felt him left her, but she was too sleepy to think of anything. Her head dropped on to his shoulder, and by the time he and an agitated Miss Maynard had her snugly tucked up in bed with hot bottles all round her, and thermogene dipped in turpentine on her chest and at her back, she was lost to the world.

‘She ought to be all right,’ murmured the doctor. ‘We’ve been so quick, I’m in hopes that she may even escape a cold.’

‘And the Robin?’ queried Miss Maynard.

‘She ought to do all right, too. She struck her head as she fell, so she was a bit stunned and didn’t take in the full horror of it. There
may
be a little concussion – I can’t say yet! But otherwise, there’s no need for alarm, I hope. You said Miss Bettany and Miss Bettany and Mademoiselle had had to go to Spartz?’

Miss Maynard nodded. ‘They went to get some things we needed.

‘I see. Well, I’ll go and meet them – they are coming by the sawmills, aren’t they? And break the news gently. Don’t leave these two alone – you can send up that sensible head girl of yours. The way that child carried the kiddy straight in and undressed her and popped her into a bath without fussing of worrying speaks well for her. I’ll just go and see how Miss – Durrant, is it? – is getting on, and then I’ll go off.’

So it happened that half-an-hour later Madge Bettany and Mademoiselle la Pattre, climbing up the last bit of the mountain-path, were met with the story of the latest doings of the Chalet girls. They were horrified, but the doctor managed to calm their fears. He walked back with them before going off to the Post, where he had been staying ever since the night of the ice carnival, and, as he had predicted, neither Joey nor the Robin was much the worse for their adventure. Joey woke with a bad headache, the result of the neat brandy he had made her swallow to stave off a cold; and the Robin had a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg on the top of her head, and was inclined to be miserable and fractious for a day or two, but otherwise they were both all right.

Miss Durrant cam off worst, for she developed a violent cold in her head, and had to spend a week in her own room. She was badly upset, too, over the accident, though it was no one’s fault, and the Robin had been well away from the water’s-edge before the wind had taken a hand in the game. The worst off was Napoleon. He had been drowned, and they never saw him again, much to the Robin’s grief.

The girls were tremendously thrilled over having a heroine in the school; and Rufus was in a fair way to be spoilt for his share in the business.

The most discontented person was Grizel. ‘It’s too bad!’ she mourned. ‘If only our Guide company had been formed, Joey would have been a Guide, and then she might have had the Silver Cross for saving life at the risk of her own. It’s hard luck!’

Thanks to the doctor’s rapidity of treatment, and also to the treatment itself, nobody was much the worse for the ducking so far as bodily comfort went. But there was a certain amount of unpleasantness over it. For one thing, the juniors were forbidden ever to play near the brook again, no matter
who
was with them. For another, it was requested that, for the remainder of the term, walks should avoid that side of the valley, and should be taken either up to the Barenbad Alpe or in the Seespitz direction.

Hitherto, no one had minded much where the walks went; but it only needed this prohibition to fill all the middles, at any rate, with a deep desire to go in the Geisalm direction. Even Frieda, the law-abiding, was overhead to say that she wished Madame had not made that rule. As for Grizel, she was nearly speechless with indignation. Nearly; but not quite. She managed to rake up enough breath from somewhere to voice her disgust. ‘It’s too bad,’ she wailed. ‘The water from the dripping rock will be simply
shooting
down! I did want to see it in full swing!’

Thus reminded of the rock which overhung part of the way to Geisalm, and over which water trickled from a spring at the tope on to the footpath, making it necessary to rush past at full speed- a proceeding not unattended by danger, since the path had broken away here, and the lake was deep at this point – everyone was seized with a deep desire to see what it would be like now. ‘I expect it’s a regular waterfall,’ said Joey mournfully. ‘Oh, I
should
like to see it.!’

‘I also,’ put in Simone, who was standing at her elbow as usual. It was significant that no one suggested going to the Head and asking her to remove her embargo. They had learnt by this time that when Miss Bettany
said
‘No,’ she
meant
‘No.’

‘It’s all your fault, Simone!’ cried Margia unexpectedly. ‘Yes it is!’ as Simone bristled up furiously. ‘If you’d never played with those idiotic paper dolls of yours, we wouldn’t have had them. If you hadn’t got tired of them, you wouldn’t have given them – some of them, anyway – to the Robin. If -’

‘Oh, choke her off, somebody, do!’ groaned Grizel. ‘It’s worse than the house that Jack built! -Dry up, Margia, and give someone else a chance to talk! The amount you do, it’s impossible to get a word in edgeways! Madame has said we’re not to go there, so we
can’t
go there, and that’s an end of it! Now shut up and talk about something else!’

‘Shut up yourself!’ Margia was beginning heatedly, when Miss Bettany herself appeared on the scene.

‘Grizel! Margia! Is that the way you talk when you are by yourselves? I think I had better send someone to sit with you children during your free time if that is the case. Clear away those books at once, and put this room tidy; it’s more like a pig-sty than a form-room in a school! And please don’t let me hear
any
of you talking like little hooligans again!’

She walked off, leaving them all angry and rather afraid that she might carry out her threat and send them someone to sit with them while they played.

‘It’ll be Grizel’s fault if we do,’ said Joey, who was feeling the effects of the spring weather, and was cross and out of sorts.

In fact they were all of them more or less affected by it; even Frieda, usually quite placid and contented, had slapped Simone that night when they were going to bed, just because Simone tripped up over her.

Simone, of course, wept loudly, and Mademoiselle, coming to the rescue, promptly decided that both were poorly, and administered a
tisane
, whereupon they imaged themselves both thoroughly ill-used.

Grizel considered it beneath her dignity to argue with a mere child like Simone, so she stalked off with her nose in the air, as being the next best thing to do. Margia and Simone began to clear the books away, and Joey wandered over to the window and stared dismally out at the high fence of withes which cut off the view of the lake. There was little else to see, although in a week or a fortnight’s time the ground would be green with the young grass.

‘What are you staring at?’ demanded Margia unamiably. ‘You might come and lend a hand instead of gawping out of the window like that at nothing.’

‘”Gawping” is slang,’ pointed out Joey, somewhat priggishly, it must be confessed. ‘You’re breaking the rules.’

‘You’re so particular yourself!’ fumed Margia, who felt that this was adding insult to injury, and resented it accordingly.

‘You’ve
never
heard
me
say “gawp”!’ mentioned Joey self-righteously.