03.5 Visitors for the Chalet School by Elinor Brent-Dyer Page A
Authors: Elinor Brent-Dyer
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were having about Bleak House to remark: “How simply marvelously your head girl speaks English! I’m rotten at languages myself. Of course some of our girls are very decent at French but even they don’t speak it as well as lots of your foreign girls speak English. Oh, dear!” Joan stopped, one eyebrow raised and a comical expression of distress on her round face. “I’d quite forgotten; we’re the foreigners here, of course, how very stupid of me! Anyway, I’m simply green with envy of Bette; and Gertrud speaks terribly well too, and so does that one over there; sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.” Here Joan indicated Grizel Cochrane who, back towards them, was sitting a few yards away, discussing with a group of the visitors whether tennis or cricket was the better summertime game for girls’ schools.
Not on muscle in Joey’s face flickered; with a churchwarden-like gravity she assented, “Yes, Grizel does talk fairly good English.”
Then she called out, “Hallo, Griselda! Joan here has been admiring your English. I was just going to tell her that of course you’ve been at school here for two and a half years and it’s helped you need to make quite amazing progress.”
“Really, Joey, you are too silly!” Grizel almost snorted with indignation. “I am English, of course,” she said abruptly to the somewhat abashed Joan. “That’s just Joey’s idea of a joke. And pretty feeble too.”
Grizel always tended to become excessively ruffled when she was teased, though she was, gradually and painfully, learning to be less touchy. She did now manage to join, a little reluctantly, in the laughter which greeted Joan’s mistake.
After twenty minutes exactly, Bette gave the signal for the return journey to begin and, still chatting away gaily, the girls started back towards Lauterbach, walking mostly in little groups of three or four.
Patricia Davidson, however, lingered behind the rest and wandered along dreamily by herself, utterly absorbed in the beauty of the scenery around her. A gentle breeze head arisen and this, together with the afternoon’s exercise, had brought a becoming rosy pink into her usually pale face. Her expression had lost some of the tenseness it had shown in London; and, in many ways, she looked a different girl from the Patricia who had entertained Juliet Carrick to tea a few weeks earlier.
Being any quick walker, Patricia knew she could easily catch up with the others; she stopped and turned round for one moment’s last look up the valley. There was a feeling almost of homecoming in the silence and peace that settled round her.
As a small child, Patricia had been devoted to her Scottish nanny, a person of enormous kindness who had done her utmost to give the lonely little girl some of the warmth and affection her parents so conspicuously failed to provide. It had been one of nanny’s customs to read aloud to her charge at bedtime, and on Sunday evenings the reading had always been chosen from the Bible, generally from the Psalms. Probably it was some distant memory of that gentle Scottish voice that now came back to Patricia. Without realizing that she was speaking her thoughts audibly she murmured: “‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …’,” and was startled when a quiet voice behind her finished the line, “‘From whence cometh my help’.”
Joey Bettany, noticing that the Grange House girl was lagging behind, had unobtrusively slipped back to see if anything was the matter.
Jo had no use for anything in the way of “slushy sentiment” (as she herself would have described it), but she was intensely responsive to beauty: the tone of her voice now made it obvious she both understood and shared the feelings that prompted Patricia’s quotation.
For a while neither girl spoke; both felt suddenly little shy. At last they turned reluctantly. And, still in a companionable silence, they began to follow the others, now quite some distance away on the road back to
Not on muscle in Joey’s face flickered; with a churchwarden-like gravity she assented, “Yes, Grizel does talk fairly good English.”
Then she called out, “Hallo, Griselda! Joan here has been admiring your English. I was just going to tell her that of course you’ve been at school here for two and a half years and it’s helped you need to make quite amazing progress.”
“Really, Joey, you are too silly!” Grizel almost snorted with indignation. “I am English, of course,” she said abruptly to the somewhat abashed Joan. “That’s just Joey’s idea of a joke. And pretty feeble too.”
Grizel always tended to become excessively ruffled when she was teased, though she was, gradually and painfully, learning to be less touchy. She did now manage to join, a little reluctantly, in the laughter which greeted Joan’s mistake.
After twenty minutes exactly, Bette gave the signal for the return journey to begin and, still chatting away gaily, the girls started back towards Lauterbach, walking mostly in little groups of three or four.
Patricia Davidson, however, lingered behind the rest and wandered along dreamily by herself, utterly absorbed in the beauty of the scenery around her. A gentle breeze head arisen and this, together with the afternoon’s exercise, had brought a becoming rosy pink into her usually pale face. Her expression had lost some of the tenseness it had shown in London; and, in many ways, she looked a different girl from the Patricia who had entertained Juliet Carrick to tea a few weeks earlier.
Being any quick walker, Patricia knew she could easily catch up with the others; she stopped and turned round for one moment’s last look up the valley. There was a feeling almost of homecoming in the silence and peace that settled round her.
As a small child, Patricia had been devoted to her Scottish nanny, a person of enormous kindness who had done her utmost to give the lonely little girl some of the warmth and affection her parents so conspicuously failed to provide. It had been one of nanny’s customs to read aloud to her charge at bedtime, and on Sunday evenings the reading had always been chosen from the Bible, generally from the Psalms. Probably it was some distant memory of that gentle Scottish voice that now came back to Patricia. Without realizing that she was speaking her thoughts audibly she murmured: “‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …’,” and was startled when a quiet voice behind her finished the line, “‘From whence cometh my help’.”
Joey Bettany, noticing that the Grange House girl was lagging behind, had unobtrusively slipped back to see if anything was the matter.
Jo had no use for anything in the way of “slushy sentiment” (as she herself would have described it), but she was intensely responsive to beauty: the tone of her voice now made it obvious she both understood and shared the feelings that prompted Patricia’s quotation.
For a while neither girl spoke; both felt suddenly little shy. At last they turned reluctantly. And, still in a companionable silence, they began to follow the others, now quite some distance away on the road back to
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