03 The Princess of the Chalet School (7 page)

Matron tried to enforce a few of her own. They mainly related to tidiness, mending, and so on; but one she did make, and which proved very unpopular, had to do with the Sunday morning reading. On Sundays the rising-bell did not ring until half-past eight. Several of the girls awoke at their usual hour – seven o’clock –and the Head had always given permission for them to have story-books by their beds on this morning in the week, so that they might read if they wanted to pass the time that way. The only provisos were that they should wear dressing-jackets if they did so, and that they were to sit up. Miss Bettany had a theory that reading while lying down was bad for the eyes, and the girls who wanted to read were allowed to take cushions to their cubicles the night before, so that they could prop themselves up. Matron now put a stop to this. On the second Saturday night she confiscated all books she found in the dormitories; and when the girls protested that they had always done it, she snapped out, “Then it ceases from this term! If you wake up, you may lie awake and rest yourselves. There is going to be no more reading in bed; so don’t let me catch any of you with books in your cubicles after this!’

Funnily enough, the school took it for granted that Miss Bettany had decided this, and they knew better than to make a complaint if that was the case. No one, afterwards, could explain how this had been decided.

The fact remained that the girls grumbled among themselves, but otherwise took it quietly.

Jo was the one most affected. She had a trick of waking very early, and as it was, always lay awake for an hour or more, since the headmistress had forbidden reading before seven o’clock. Lying awake, tossing restlessly from side to side for a couple of hours or more was no rest, and she always got up on Sundays tired out to being with.

This went on for three Sundays without the Head noticing it. Then, one Sunday, it struck her that her little sister was looking very shadowing about the eyes, and she made inquiries as to the reason for it. ‘Why are you looking so tired, Joey?’ she asked during the afternoon when she always had Joey with her for an hour or two. ‘Your eyes are like saucers and you are as white as a sheet. Haven’t you been sleeping?’

‘Yes; but I do so hate lying awake till the rising-bell with nothing to do,’ explained Joey.

‘Nothing to do!’ explained Madge. ‘Then what had become of all your books? Don’t tell me that you have read everything in the library yet, because I sha’n't believe it!’

‘Of course I haven’t,’ said Jo indignantly. ‘But that’s a lot of use to me when you’ve put an end to reading on Sunday mornings!’

‘When I’ve –
what?’
gasped Madge, sitting bolt upright.

‘Didn’t you?’ demanded Joey.

‘Put an end to the Sunday morning reading? No; I certainly have
not
. Who said I had?’

‘Matron did.’

‘Jo! Are you sure?’

Jo thought. ‘I don’t know that she actually said that you did,’ she admitted. ‘But she gave us all to understand that you had. I thought it was awfully mean of you, ‘cos you know I hate lying awake. I just get up so tired that I want to spend the whole day on my back.’

‘How long have you not been reading?’ asked her sister.

‘This is the third Sunday.’

‘I see. Well, I’m afraid I must have said something to lead Matron to think that I wished it to be stopped,’

said Madge, who knew very well she had done nothing of the sort, as the question had never arisen. ‘I will tell Matron that I never meant anything of the kind, and you had better go to bed after
Kafee
. You look like a boiled owl!’

Jo pulled a long face. ‘Oh, Madge! Need I? I do so hate bed.’

Madge reconsidered it. ‘Well, if you like to lie down here on the couch, you may do that. I’ll send someone in to keep you company. I’m going to take the others for a walk after
Kaffee
, and Miss Maynard is having the little ones for stories. Whom will you have?’

‘Elisaveta, I think,’ replied Jo. ‘All right, Madge. Though it’s a bore missing the walk! Where are you going?’

‘Up the valley,’ said her sister. ‘You can have Elisaveta if you like. Ask her at
Kaffee
.’

She changed the subject after that, and they said no more about it; but Joey took care to explain to the others that the order had been originated by Matron, and that the headmistress had had nothing to do with it.

The indignation in the school was great.

‘She is an old – horror!’ declared Grizel, mindful of a severe lecture she had received only the day before from Miss Maynard for talking slang.

‘She’s a freak!’ retorted Joey. ‘No one but a freak would go out of her way like that to make herself hated.’

The S.S.M. called a meeting as soon as possible, and decided that this last offence must not go unpunished.

Had they but known it, Miss Bettany had given Matron a bad half-hour in the study already, for she was seriously annoyed at the whole affair. It had been a calm putting of her on one side, and she resented it fiercely. She had very nearly requested the woman to hand in her resignation then and there, but finally resolved to giver her one last change. Miss Webb was not a young woman, and she would find if difficult to get another post if she left this after just a term.

The truth of the matter was that at her last school she had gained a great ascendancy over the headmistress, and when that lady had given up she had found it hard to get another, as her age was against her. She had come out to Briseau to find that her new Head was a mere girl, and hoped to gain the same kind of influence over her. Her methods were riding rough-shod over everything and everybody. Unfortunately for her, this was the last method to adopt with the Chalet School. Its members had been accustomed to working together, and not one of them was likely to submit to bullying.

The S.S.M. was one direct outcome of her behaviour. Margia summoned a meeting under the pines, and invited certain people from the middles to join them. Joey, Elisaveta, Frieda Mensch, Simone Lecoutier, and Bianca di Ferrara all accepted, and a rowdy gathering met and vowed that Matron should be taught the proper way of treating the Head of the school.

‘It’s rotten enough for us,’ said Margia in the course of a long and heated speech; ‘but it’s twenty times worse for Madame. I vote we jolly well show her that Madame is the boss here, not her!’ With which involved and ungrammatical statement she sat down amidst cheers from the others.

No less a person than Elisaveta got up next. ‘Matron is
canaille
,’ she stated calmly’ ‘and I think we ought to make things so horrid for her that she is thankful to go.’

Frieda rose to her feet. ‘I agree with that,’ she said – and, and coming from a quiet person like Frieda Mensch, the words were more startling that if they had been spoken by harum-scarum Margia, or Joey, who often gave vent to wild speeches – ‘Madame had been with us for two years, and we have never found her unfair or unkind. Matron is both, and it is not good for the school.’

‘All those who agree that we should try to get Matron to shove off, hands up!’ cried Evadne excitedly.

Every hand went up.

‘Good!’
said Margia. ‘Now, be quiet for a few minutes, and everyone think of something to do to her.’

They settled down to think, and there was a little silence. Elisaveta was the first to speak. ‘I have thought,’

she said plaintively. ‘How much longer do you others want?’

‘I’ve got an idea, too,’ said Ilonka. ‘Hurry up, you people!’

‘We’ve all had time to think,’ decreed Margia. ‘Now, don’t all yell at once. Paula, you’re the oldest; carry on, and tell us what your idea is.’

‘I think we ought to make a – how do you say it? – a booby-trap on her door,’ said Paula, who was not famed for originality, and had got this idea from her library-book.

‘And have her asking who did it, and dragging Madame into it again!’ said the president of the society contemptuously. ‘Talk sense!’

Paula retired, crushed; and Sophie Hamel made her suggestion: ‘Let’s nail her window down.’

Margia sighed. ‘I wish you’d all use your brains a little. I hope no one’s going to be idiotic enough to suggest an apple-pie bed. We must have something
subtle
. She’d know at once that some of us had done it –she isn’t
touched
!’

After that scathing remark nobody was anxious to make any suggestions. It was difficult, when you came to think of it, to fix on something which Marton wouldn’t at once lay to their account. Finally, Elisaveta made a suggestion which was the best so far. ‘Let’s tie something on a string and dangle it out the Blue dormitory window so that it keeps tapping against her window,” she proposed. ‘if we could do it during the night it would have a weird sound.’

‘Not bad,’ agreed the president.

What else she would have said remained buried in oblivion, for at that moment Joey Bettany leaped to her feet with a shout of, ‘Eureka! I’ve got it!’

‘Oh, what?’ cried the united S.S.M.

For reply Joey turned to Simone Lecoutier. ‘Simone, d’you remember what I told you about the time when Madame and the Robin and I went to stay with Maynie in the New Forest?’

Simone wrinkled up her brows. ‘But you told me so much, my Jo,’ she complained.

‘Sorry – so I did. But d’you remember what I told you about the fright the Robin and I had with the snail climbing up the window-pane?’

Simone nodded, her face flushing with excitement. ‘
Mais out
– I mean, yes! You said it was “orrrrreeble!”‘

she cried eagerly, putting an extra number of r’s into the last word, and becoming extra French over the memory.

‘What was it!’ demanded Margia. ‘You’ve never told
us
.’

‘I forgot. You see, we met Simone when we were coming back from England, and then, when we started school again, there was so much to think of that I never remembered it again till this minute,’ explained Jo.

‘Well, tell us now,’ commanded the president.

‘It was
gruesome
!’ declared Jo with a little shiver at the memory. ‘It was at three o’clock in the morning, and I woke up to hear the most ghastly squealing sounds just outside the window. It had wakened the Robin, too, and we were frozen with horror! I was too scared to speak. It sounded like – like a soul in torment.

Luckily, the Robin let out the most awful squall, and my sister heard 0 she was sleeping next door. She came dashing in, under the impression that one of us was being killed, and then we discovered what it was. A snail had got on to the glass somehow, and was creeping down. You know how they hump their bodies in the middle, and then spread out to move on? Well, that was what it was doing, and anything more uncanny I never want to hear!’

‘And you think it would be a jolly good thing to do with Matron? I do, too,’ said Margia eagerly. ‘Let’s go and catch snails after
Kaffee
. There are dozens in the garden. We can take one upstairs and stick it on the window, and she’ll never know that it didn’t get there on its own.’

‘But how will you put it on the window?’ asked Frieda, who possessed most of the common-sense of the society. ‘It is too far up to reach it from the ground, and too far below the window of the Blue dormitory for Jo or Elisaveta or Bianca to stretch down.’

‘Oh, we’ll manage somehow,’ declared Jo, who was delighted with her own scheme. ‘Trust me for that!’

Then they were obliged to break up the meeting as Margia was summoned to a music lesson with Herr Anserl, who came up from Spärtz, the little town at the foot of the mountains, twice a week for all the girls who showed enough promise to merit lessons from him. The others learnt with Mademoiselle.

After
Kaffee
that after noon the middles trotted off to the garden and had a snail hunt. They got six fat ones, which, for the present, were relegated to a box in Margia’s drawer, and then they went off to cricket practice with the air of archangels.

‘I wonder what those children are up to?’ observed Miss Durrant to Miss Wilson in the intervals of coaching. ‘They look too good to be true.’

‘Something awful must be hatching,’ agreed Miss Wilson. ‘I hope it’s nothing very bad.’

However, nothing happened, and the members of the S.S.M. went off to bed without creating any disturbance, so the mistresses drew breaths of relief and forgot all about it.

At eleven o’clock the window of the Blue dormitory was cautiously pushed up to its farthest extent, and three faces looked out. For once fortune had favoured them. Eigen, the boy-of-all-work, had been touching up the fresco which adorned the walls here, and he had left his ladder standing against the side of the house.

It was an easy matter for three active school-girls to climb over the balcony and get on to the nearest rung.

From that it was a mere step to get to Matron’s window, where Jo reconnoitred cautiously before she proceeded any farther. Matron was lying asleep, snoring lustily. Jo held out her hand, and took the snail Elisaveta handed to her with a little shudder. Then she put it on the window-pane, holding it for a minute until it had had a chance to stick to the glass.

‘Now me,’ insisted Elisaveta. ‘I want to do one.’

Joey amiably climbed farther down the ladder, and the Princess affixed her slimy pet to the glass. Then the three went softly back up the ladder and managed to climb back to the balcony without breaking their legs or arms in the process.

‘Even if she thinks it’s us, she won’t be able to swear to it,’ said Jo, with a low chuckle. – ‘What are you doing, Elisaveta?’

‘Going to make sure she won’t,’ replied Elisaveta as she pushed the ladder outwards.

It fell with a soft thud into the long grass, but, luckily for them, it woke no one, though it did disturb Matron, who rolled over on to her side, half-opening her eyes as she did so. She was not fully roused, however, and the trio got back into bed before anything further happened. They were all nearly asleep, when the Chalet was suddenly awakened by a wild yell. Another and another followed. There was a sound of opening doors and scurrying feet, and then Miss Bettany’s voice was heard, demanding to know what was the matter.