Читать книгу Swiss Sonata - Gwethalyn Graham - Страница 6

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All the rooms on the ground floor open off the T-shaped front hall. When you come in from the courtyard the doors of Mlle Tourain’s study are directly opposite you; on your right are the kitchens and laundry-rooms and between them and the study, occupying the whole corner, is the dining-room. On your left, behind the big dark staircase which curves up to the first floor, is the girls’ living-room, and in front of it on the south-east corner, the main classroom. The dining-room, study, drawing-room and classroom all face south, through wide french windows which extend from the ceiling to within a foot of the floor and which overlook the terraces, gardens, tennis courts, Lausanne, and the Lake of Geneva.

The bedrooms on the three floors above are all more or less alike, with white woodwork, flowered wall-paper with a white background, light oak furniture and two white basins set in an alcove at the back of each room with a cupboard on either side, so that the only dark place in the school is the main entrance hall, which is poorly lit by small, stained glass windows on the north side of the house. There is nothing to be seen from those windows in any case but the courtyard, the steep slope of the hill, a few scattered houses and institutions ... an orphanage, an insane asylum, a jail, and more schools.

There are several hundred schools in and about Lausanne, Geneva, Vevey, Montreux and Neuchâtel to which boys and girls of all nationalities have come during the past fifty or sixty years to receive instruction in French, deportment, winter sports and internationalism. Pensionnat Les Ormes was founded in 1884 by Jeanne d’Ormonde’s aunt, she who later bequeathed to her niece the ormolu clock, but the present building was erected by Jeanne herself in 1920. She was a quiet-mannered gentlewoman who was never able to reconcile herself to the sight of fifty young ladies ski-ing in trousers.

In 1930 she fell ill and appointed Amélie Tourain, her cousin, whose life had until that time been devoted to historical research, to take her place. For four years her successor remained in her study with her back to the china shepherdesses, cactus plants and potpourri jars with which Mlle d’Ormonde had seen fit to ornament her glassed-in bookcases, which ran along the west wall of the study and continued down the north wall as far as the door leading into the hall. Mlle d’Ormonde could not be said to have benefited greatly by the wills of her relatives; the husband of her aunt had found the atmosphere of a girls’ school intolerable and retired to a small cottage in Gruyère where he devoted the remainder of his life to the study of tropical fish. It was from him that Jeanne d’Ormonde, upon the death of her aunt, had acquired the books; the rest of his belongings he had sold at public auction and given the proceeds to charity.

During her five years as assistant to her aunt, Jeanne d’Ormonde had frequently visualized herself sitting in the study, behind a large and imposing desk, aiding and inspiring her girls with a background of books, but her entire collection burned with the old building in 1920. There was nothing for it then but to install the fifteen hundred volumes on tropical fish. This she did, but had a cabinet-maker put on glass doors with very small leaded panes, to make it more difficult to read the titles, and to distract attention from them she covered the tops of the bookcases with cactus plants and china ornaments.

When Amélie Tourain came to take her cousin’s place in 1930, she was mildly astonished at Jeanne’s choice of literature. She had not known the uncle in Gruyère; her life in the little house at the end of the lane which ran down from Avenue Ruchonnet had been remote and tranquil, undisturbed by family antagonisms. After a glance sufficient to tell her that all the books dealt with this curious subject, and two dismayed glances at the china shepherdesses and cactus plants, she called one of the maids and with her help turned the big desk which had always stood with its back to the french windows facing the door, so that it now stood with its back to the bookcases and faced the folding doors which separated the study from the drawing-room. Then she sat down to think.

For four years she sat there, waiting for Jeanne to get better. Her honour and her sense of duty forbade her to find a substitute and retreat to her house off Avenue Ruchonnet, for she had promised Jeanne that she would stay until she was well again and able to come back. At the same time, the thought of abandoning her own work was intolerable, so for those four years she tried unsuccessfully to do both.

On Thursday, January 10th, 1935, she suddenly became dissatisfied with the school, herself ... in fact her whole life as she was living it at that time ... and called a special staff-meeting for three-thirty, although the regular weekly meeting was scheduled for eight o’clock that evening.

The next three days were to determine the course of her future, although, at the time, she was only partially aware of their difference from the thousand other days she had spent in the study, and it was not until Saturday, January 12th, the day before the Saar elections, that she was able to see the relationship which so strangely existed between the personal life of Mary Ellerton, the games mistress; the tragedy of Rosalie Garcenot; Anna von Landenburg, Ilse Brüning, Vicky Morrison ... and herself.