The Abbess

 

‘Are you sure you can manage, Hilda?’

Madge Russell looked anxiously at the tall, slender woman, with the few threads of grey in her bright brown hair, who stood in the doorway of the Edel Ritter hotel where the Chalet School had moved last spring. It had not lasted long, that move, for this was 1938 and the Nazi authorities had made it impossible for the school to continue in Austria. The remaining girls had left for their respective countries and the building which only a few days ago had echoed to the sound of youthful voices was silent, and about to be closed down.

‘Yes, of course’, Miss Annersley said briskly. ‘Be off with you, my dear – I know how anxious you are to get those children out of the country. We’ll meet again in England’.

‘It’s heartbreaking’, Madge said, a little shakily. ‘But if the school does start again, Hilda, I promise that you’ll be the first person to know’.

After her friend had got in the car and been driven off, the headmistress took a last walk around the deserted classrooms. She was feeling desperately sad, for the school had been her only home for the past seven years. Hilda Annersley was now thirty-eight. Her childhood had been spent in Switzerland, where her father had been a chaplain at a British embassy, and her only brother Herbert had come out every summer to stay with them. Sometimes he brought his schoolfriends, Stanley and Ernest, and the young people had formed a happy little quartet. She saw herself, a bright-faced little girl, showing the three older boys Lake Geneva and making them laugh when she chatted to the shopkeepers in fluent French. But they had all joined up in 1914 and all been killed; Ernest at the Somme, Stanley a year later and Herbert only one month before the Armistice. Miss Annersley believed that the grief and strain had caused her father’s early death. For the next ten years she had taught at a girls’ school in the West Country until her mother, too, died, and after that there had been nothing to keep her in England. Her knowledge of languages had then brought her to the Chalet School.

‘Olim meminisse juvabit‘, the headmistress quoted to herself as she glanced over the empty desks and blackboards. Every day of her life she thought about those three young men; Ernest, a gifted violinist; Stanley, who had been her special friend, and her beloved brother. When she began to work here she had believed she was dong her bit to prevent another war happening. And now it seemed that it was going to happen all over again.

‘You are looking very thoughtful, Fraulein!’

Miss Annersley turned round sharply, but relaxed as she recognised her visitor, Herr Alfred Strauss, the bank manager from Spartz, whom she had come to know fairly well. She smiled a greeting; people did tend to smile when they met him. In his forties, distinctly plump and with receding hair, Herr Strauss had one of those round good-natured faces which made everybody feel that little bit more cheerful. She stepped out on to the terrace and shook hands.

‘I came’, the bank manager explained in German, ‘hoping for a chance to say goodbye. You are travelling very soon?’

‘Yes. I am catching the midnight train from Innsbruck’.

‘We shall miss you’, Herr Strauss said.

They walked around the swimming pool together, keeping in the shade of the trees, as it was very hot. Miss Annersley was thinking that, although no one would have guessed, Herr Strauss had suffered more than his share of sorrow. It was three years since he had called on her to ask whether his two daughters, Ursul and Kattrin, could be received as pupils while their mother was a patient at the Sonnalpe. She had died in the sanatorium eighteen months later. Miss Annersley had taken a special interest in the little girls – very quiet, white, flaxen-haired children – who, in those days, had clung to each other constantly. Over the last year they had slowly been coming out of their shells and making new friends.

‘I wanted to apologise’, Herr Strauss said, ‘ for taking my girls away. They miss you and their classmates very much. But, as I explained in my letter, I had no choice’.

‘I quite understand. The school has lost almost all its German and Austrian girls’.

The sun was climbing higher and the heat was stifling. Miss Annersley suggested they sit down at a little table beneath the pine trees and apologised for being unable to offer refreshments.

‘Never mind’, Herr Strauss smiled. ‘Coffee and cream cakes are not  exactly good for my waistline! – So you are leaving? And not coming back?’

‘The school can never come back to the Tyrol. I am afraid’, Miss Annersley said hesitantly, ‘that there is probably going to be another war. But I shall be taking a course at London University, and if we reopen, as I hope -‘

‘But that cannot happen!’ Herr Strauss said with emotion. ‘I have no liking for Herr Hitler – indeed, I think he is a little mad – but I cannot believe he wants to go to war against the British Empire. There has already been too much of that; I lost many good friends in the trenches. Yes, you might not think it to look at me, but I was a slim young soldier twenty years ago’. There was a little pause. ‘And you also have memories of the Great War, Fraulein?’

‘Yes’, said Miss Annersley. ‘My brother was killed’.

‘I am sorry. So you feel bitter, perhaps, towards Germany and Austria?’

‘Oh, no. I have never believed that the ordinary people in any country wish for war. That is partly why I took this job, to encourage young people from different nations to live together peaceably. But – ‘ The headmistress sighed. ‘Well, I’ve had several very good years here, and I shall miss my friends in the Tyrol’.

‘In that case’, Herr Strauss said, ‘I have something to ask you. I hesitated because – well, you were obviously very wrapped up in your job, but now there is no job – ‘

‘Yes?’

‘And I thought perhaps I should give you time, but now there is no time. Don’t catch that train, Fraulein – Hilda. Stay with me. The little girls are already devoted to you, and I – well, I do not think I am very difficult to live with’. His usually jolly face was unwontedly serious. ‘It would make me very happy, if you said yes’.

Miss Annersley sat thunderstruck. Nothing like this had ever crossed her mind, but she knew him to be a good and kind man, and he was offering her a home of her own and a readymade family, all the things she had assumed were not for her. For a few moments neither of them spoke.

‘Have you thought’, she said slowly, ‘that if you married an Englishwoman, it could be very unpleasant for you, in the event of a war?’

‘That is no problem at all’, Herr Strauss said. ‘As my wife you would become an Austrian citizen, and I could and would protect you’.

‘I see’.

She looked past him to the mountains, where she had so often taken her girls for long hikes, and saw in her mind’s eye the blue gentians and the rushing waterfalls.

‘You need time, perhaps, to think it over?’ Herr Strauss asked.

Miss Annersley sighed.

‘No, I have decided. Herr Strauss, I am honoured. If we had been born in another time and place, I might have been happy to do as you ask. But I think that, after all, I must get on that train. As your wife I would be the subject of a Nazi state and would not be allowed to speak out against the things which are happening. I have given the last seven years of my life to this school and it means a lot to me. I think – I hope that one day the school will start again. But whether or not, I have a job to do in England and it may be many years before I can come back’.

‘But Hilda’, Herr Strauss said earnestly, ‘if you like me – and I think you do – you ought not to allow our lives to be ruined by politics’.

Miss Annersley said a little sadly, ‘I wonder if you know the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”? I sometimes think that I might not be doing this job, if I hadn’t been young during the Great War. You and I are living in a very bad time, and we cannot do what we might wish’.

 

Readers of these chronicles will be aware that the school did start again, in Armishire on the Welsh border, and it is not necessary to describe exactly how an old Tyrolese friend came to be shown into the headmistress’ s study on a grey day in the January after the war. The two women talked for a long time about the former pupils and teachers, who had been scattered to the four winds since they were last together.

‘It is bad here’, said the friend, ‘but in Europe it is much, much worse’.

‘I believe you’, Miss Annersley said.

‘Well, I think I have told you about all our friends from Spartz. Oh, yes, you remember Herr Strauss, the bank manager, whom we all liked?’

‘Yes?’

‘He died. A heart attack, in the first winter of the war’.

‘I am very sorry’, the headmistress said after a brief silence. ‘And the little girls?’

‘I do not know what happened to the girls’.

Miss Annersley got up and walked across to the window where she stood with her back to her friend for a moment, not seeing very clearly, if the truth be told, the snow-covered Black Mountains which reminded her so vividly of those magic years in the Tyrol.