Mountain Magic Page 5

  When Toni made her application she was surprised to find that in addition to the week’s wages owing to her, the envelope contained a sufficient sum of money to cover two months’ work at the Hotel Rosenhorn. At first she was inclined to protest that it was too much, and she hadn’t earned it, but the attractive fair girl who handed her the envelope didn’t seem to follow the point she was trying to make. She shrugged, and suggested that that was not her affair, and one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, and Toni went away with the slightly uneasy feeling that, whatever happened, she was bound to work for another seven weeks at the Rosenhorn.

  “There is a staff car leaving for Innsbruck in about an hour,” the fair girl told her. “If you wish to be one of the passengers you had better be in the forecourt in good time.”

  Toni thought the idea a good one, and hastened to change into a more suitable dress for a shopping and sightseeing expedition. For she had made up her mind that, being in possession of a sum of money which she hadn’t earned, she would buy herself one or two badly needed additions to her wardrobe.

  The staff car left promptly, and she found she had Pierre as her immediate neighbour on the back seat. He was wearing his best grey flannel trousers, and a thin shirt open at the neck, and he looked delighted at the prospect of sharing a drive of thirty miles with Toni,

  “You will, perhaps, let me show you something of Innsbruck?” he said, when they were halfway there. “I have nothing in particular to do, and it would be a great pleasure to act as your guide.”

  “Thank you,” Toni returned, smiling at him, “that would be nice. But I’ve a certain amount of shopping to do, and I’d like to get through that first. Could I meet you somewhere for lunch? Paying for my own lunch, of course!” she added, hastily.

  Pierre looked slightly wounded.

  “But it will give me great pleasure to buy you lunch ... And I know the very place you will like. It is agreed?” he asked eagerly.

  Toni replied that it was agreed, so long as she started on her shopping as soon as they arrived.

  When the car decanted them, Pierre took her by the arm and led her towards the main shopping centre. On the way she tried to recall her sensations on the morning when Kurt Antoine led her just as purposefully towards his parked car, and she had had no opportunity at all to take in the charm of Innsbruck.

  This morning, however, she was able to do so, and she thought it a delightful little mountain town. The mountains seemed so close to Innsbruck that they practically dwarfed it, and it had the same medieval atmosphere as the villages through which they had passed on the way there.

  There were a lot of shops designed to attract tourists, any number of restaurants and hotels, and at last she found the very shop she was looking for, one that displayed gay cotton frocks and skirts like mountain flowers; and she said goodbye—or rather, auf wiedersehen—to Pierre (who was most reluctant to leave her) and entered the shop.

  She was able to ask for what she wanted in her careful German, although the assistant gathered at once that she was English, and insisted on talking English. She brought out some of the most attractive frocks the shop had to offer for Toni’s inspection, and the only difficulty the latter had was in making her selection.

  In the end, she chose a candy pink with a very full skirt and white trimmings, and a gay scarlet and white that made her look like a scarlet poppy when she had it on. She also bought stockings and underwear, and enquired where she could buy shoes.

  When she had bought the shoes—wedge-heeled white casuals, that gave her more height than ordinary flat-heeled sandals—she returned to the dress-shop and asked if she could change in one of their changing-alcoves.

  The assistant agreed at once, and when she emerged Toni was looking so different that the girl gasped. She had decided to put on the brightest of the dresses, the gay scarlet, and it not merely put colour into her cheeks, but made her eyes look several degrees brighter and clearer.

  The assistant nodded with enthusiastic Austrian approval.

  “That is good,” she said. “You look charming.” And then she frowned. “But there is one thing, Fraulein...”

  “And what is that?” Toni asked.

  “The hair!” the assistant returned, touching her own exceedingly modern coiffure. “It is a little—ordinary! And some make-up would be a good thing. You do not use it, no?”

  Toni, who occasionally used a little lipstick, admitted that she didn’t exactly go in for make-up.

  The assistant shook her head disapprovingly. She conducted her to the door, indicated a hairdressing establishment and beauty parlour across the street, and gave her a gentle push in its direction.

  “You go and become transformed, yes?” she suggested, gaily.

  Toni hesitated only a moment, and then plunged across the street to the hairdresser. But unfortunately it was by this time very close to lunch time, and if she was attended to immediately it would mean that she would miss her lunch with Pierre, or at least be very late for it, and she felt certain that would disappoint him acutely. So she made an appointment for two o’clock, and then raced off to keep her rendezvous with Pierre.

  Although it was still early he was waiting for her. He was looking up and down the street eagerly, and as soon as he saw her he threw his hands into the air.

  “But the frock! ... It is wonderful!” he declared. And then with a slight air of proprietorship he took her by the aim and piloted her into the restaurant.

  It was one of those semi-cellar-like restaurants, so many of which are to be found in places like Munich, and the novelty of it appealed to Toni almost as much as the food, which was excellent. Pierre insisted on ordering a bottle of wine with their meal, and a pseudo-gypsy orchestra played folk music while they ate.

  It was a change from the inevitable accordions and zithers, and Toni was quite beguiled by it. Pierre asked her whether she had a favourite piece of music, and she named a Viennese waltz, and as he seemed to be on very good terms with the leader of the orchestra it was played for her at once. With a rush of colour to her cheeks, and sparkling eyes, Toni thanked the leader of the orchestra, and then thanked Pierre in an undertone.

  “It was nice of you,” she said.

  Pierre, his handsome dark eyes rolling with pleasure, declared that it was nothing.

  “I am happy the unpleasant Englishman scared you so much the other morning,” he remarked in a soft undertone, “for otherwise we might not have got to know one another so well, or so soon, nein?”

  Toni experienced a minor uneasy moment. She was not accustomed to masculine admiration, but she knew that she was looking at it in Pierre’s eyes, and she hoped he wouldn’t get any wrong ideas into his head. She even thought she ought to insist on paying for her lunch, but he would not allow that. He threatened to get quite excited about her un-feminine independence, and she had to drop her insistence.

  She was sorry that she had to rush away and leave him before their coffee was brought to the table, but she promised to be at the staff car in good time for the return journey home.

  “Four o’clock,” he reminded her anxiously. “If you are any later the driver will not wait.”

  The one thing she did not bargain for was the length of time it took to have her hair washed and set—and also shorn slightly, for the assistant declared it was too long—and so many improvements made to her face and her nails that she hardly recognised herself when the slight ordeal was over.

  She had refused to allow her nails to be varnished, but they had lost their broken, stubby look, and some hand cream massaged into them had already worked miracles. Her face was the biggest miracle of all—in her own opinion—and it seemed to glow back at her when she gazed at herself in the mirror. It reminded her of the smooth sides of a peach, and her mouth was a flaunting scarlet. She had refused eye-shadow, but had allowed a touch of mascara to be applied to her lashes, with the result that her eyes looked positively enormous, and had acquired a depth of colour that was fascina
ting.

  As for her hair, it was like a feathery, burnished cap topping her slimness, and she knew that it was an immense improvement.

  When she was paying her bill the young woman who had attended to her picked up a perfume spray and sprayed her with it.

  “Now you will smell like a garden of flowers,” she remarked, smilingly, and Toni was weakly induced to buy a phial of the perfume. She also bought lipstick and powder, and emerged from the shop hugging her purchases up in her arms.

  But, to her horror, she had seen that it was twenty minutes past four, and she had to find her way to the appointed rendezvous where the car waited for her. Or she hoped it still waited for her...

  But the streets were unfamiliar, and she lost her way several times, and by the time she arrived the car had gone. She gazed desperately-round her, looking for it, but there was no sign of the pale grey convertible in which she had travelled so blithely that morning.

  She remembered that Pierre had warned her that the driver would not wait. She had hardly believed him at the time, for it seemed unreasonable not to wait just a short while for anyone who might have been held up, as she had. And then she remembered the iron-bound rules and regulations of the Hotel Rosenhorn so far as the staff were concerned, at any rate—and she knew that she ought to have listened to Pierre’s warning, and made it clear when she started to have her beauty treatment that a car was picking her up at four o’clock. And that four o’clock meant four o’clock in the case of this particular car!

  She felt very conspicuous standing with her arms full of parcels, and her brand-new hair-style, wondering what in the world she was going to do. She supposed she could take a taxi ... but a taxi would cost a lot of money, and she knew nothing about the local train services.

  She was peering around her and looking completely dismayed when a car approached her at a considerable rate of speed, and then slowed and came to a standstill. She blinked at it in wonderment, and then recognised Kurt Antoine’s pale cream car with the scarlet leather upholstery. Kurt Antoine himself was at the wheel, and beside him—all delicate cream and dark-eyed loveliness—was Mademoiselle Marianne Raveaux.

  It was Mademoiselle Raveaux who spoke first to Toni.

  “We hardly recognised you,” she said.

  Kurt Antoine was staring rather strangely at Toni. But without offering any comment he reached behind him and opened the rear door.

  “Get in,” he said.

  “I suppose you missed the staff car,” Marianne remarked, with great brittleness.

  Toni was abject in her apologies.

  “I had a lot of shopping to do, and I also went to the hairdresser, and I didn’t realise that time was passing—” She felt her face begin to burn as Marianne looked back at her and smiled faintly. The smile was so unpleasant, and so full of meaning ... it made the English girl feel as if she had developed into a tawdry doll in the course of a morning, and part of an afternoon.

  “Which hairdresser did you go to?” Marianne asked.

  Toni told her, and Marianne smiled again and nodded her head meaningly.

  “You’ll have to be more careful in future, won’t you?” she said. “You’re hardly the type for such drastic transformations, although I must admit the new dress is pretty. I expect it was cheap, and you were tempted, weren’t you? If you had consulted me before setting out on this shopping spree of yours I could have given you some useful information as to the kind of shops to avoid!”

  “Marianne!” Kurt Antoine spoke so sternly and sharply that she glanced at him in surprise. But he was staring through the windscreen at the road ahead, and the thickness and darkness of his puckered brows was very noticeable.

  Marianne shrugged her shapely shoulders.

  “I was merely pointing out to Miss Darcy that there is a possibility she has been a little impulsive. Money hardly earned should be hoarded carefully, not dissipated in one wild burst dining the course of a morning.” She glanced over her shoulder again at Toni. “I don’t suppose you have very much left of the advance of salary you received this morning, have you?” she enquired.

  Toni admitted she had made rather a hole in it.

  “But I have a little money of my own,” she said huskily.

  Marianne smiled really unpleasantly this time.

  “That is, perhaps, fortunate,” she observed. “For if we have to sack you before eight weeks are up you may have to return some of the money you received this morning!”

  After that they proceeded in silence, and when they reached the Hotel Rosenhorn Antoine handed Marianne out of the car, and then walked round to the back to open the door for Toni. But she had it open herself long before he could touch the handle, and together with her parcels she prepared to disappear inside the hotel.

  But he laid a quiet hand on her shoulder.

  “Did you have a good day, Toinette?” he asked, smiling down into her face in a way he had never smiled at her before.

  “A very good day, thank you,” she answered. She stammered slightly. “I’m so sorry I missed the—the staff car. Next time I’ll be careful not to miss it!”

  “That’s all right,” he said softly.

  Marianne, incredibly graceful in her tailored silk, smiled too sweetly.

  “Next time—if there is another time—you might not be so fortunate as to have Monsieur Antoine and myself come along at precisely the right moment. So I really would be a little more attentive to rules and regulations, if I were you.”

  Inside the hotel Toni ran into Pierre, who had just donned his white coat to reappear on duty.

  He looked at her reproachfully.

  “What happened to you?” he demanded. “I tried to get them to wait for you, but it was no use. Ulrich is too anxious to please Mademoiselle Raveaux to wait even a second for one of us! But I did warn you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, I know, Pierre,” she answered, smiling at him penitently. “But once I got inside the hairdresser’s it took ages ... much longer than I thought. And when I got outside at last it was twenty minutes past four! I was horrified, but fortunately Monsieur Antoine came along and gave me a lift.”

  “You were fortunate,” Pierre remarked. “Fortunate, also, not to be severely rebuked.” Then his eyes revealed how infinitely he appreciated her new hair-style. “I hardly recognised you when you came through the door. You look like one of the guests!”

  But Toni didn’t feel like one of the guests when she was upstairs in her room, and having deposited her parcels on the bed she stood looking at them.

  Mademoiselle Raveaux had succeeded in making her feel cheap and vulgar by comparison with her own soignee elegance. That remark about, “You’ll have to be a little more careful in future, won’t you?” had not failed to find its mark, and even her hairstyle struck her as vulgar when she studied herself in the mirror.

  By comparison with Marianne—whose hair was always neatly coiled about her head, and looked like black silk when the sun shone on it—she might be any junior typist or shop assistant whose one aim was to look showy and attractive, rather than smart and chic.

  But at least Antoine had been kind! For the first time since she had known him he had been really kind, and she could still feel that warm, friendly hand of his on her shoulder, pressing it a little, recommending her not to forget that she had had a good day!

  In the morning the housekeeper again sent for her and told her that Mademoiselle Raveaux wished to see her in her private office.

  Steeling herself, Toni prepared for another sharp criticism of her carelessness in missing the staff bus, but that was not what Marianne wished to see her about. Wearing another of her tailored silk dresses—this time in a sort of lavender-grey—and seated in a graceful attitude at her desk, with a large number of flowers in the room for a background, she eyed Toni intently.

  “Yes; I think you will do very well,” she remarked, at the end of the survey. “Before there was a certain drabness about your appearance, which would hardly be likely to appeal
to the customers; but now that you have had your hair done, and have gone in for that rather noticeable make-up, you should do excellently.” Toni stared at her.

  Marianne helped herself to a cigarette from the silver box on her desk, and lighted it thoughtfully. Through the faint cloud of smoke she narrowed her eyes at the girl in front of her.

  “The dress is a very gay one, so now you have your opportunity to appear gay to some purpose!”

  “I don’t understand,” Toni returned, puzzled. “For what purpose am I to appear gay?”

  Marianne smiled at her slightly.

  “It’s a good thing you had your hands attended to yesterday. That was one sensible thing you did. Well now,” relaxing gracefully, “you will get your dress from the linen-keeper. She keeps them amongst her stores, and I’ve no doubt she will be able to fit you out very adequately. Skirt, petticoats, blouse, frilly apron and so forth...”

  Toni looked startled.

  “But that is the dress of the girls who serve drinks in the bar, and wait on the terrace!” she exclaimed.

  “But of course.” Marianne’s smile this time was quite definitely amused. “And we flatter ourselves that it is a very attractive dress, a modernised version of the dress of the country until a few years ago, worn still in a good many of the villages.”

  “But not as short as the girls wear it here!” Toni exclaimed, remembering the musical comedy aspect of the girls who floated about the terrace accepting orders for drinks and cigarettes. One or two of them looked like blonde dolls, and the only dark one amongst them was so constantly engaged in inviting admiring glances that she was not as efficient as the others.

  “I am removing Trudi Dorfus from terrace duties, and putting you in her place,” Mademoiselle Raveaux confessed at last. “She has given very little satisfaction since we engaged her, and it occurred to me in the car yesterday that you were rather wasted on the floors. You have a certain superficial attractiveness which should be made use of, and at the same time I think you are modest enough not to embarrass the customers—I’m thinking of the men, of course—by flirting outrageously with them. That was Trudi’s weakness, and is the reason why I have decided to dispense with her services.”