And Both Were Young Read online

  “I don’t like to look at things with a lot of other people,” Flip said. “I like to look at them by myself. Anyhow, I like the lake better. The lake and the mountains.”

  Mrs. Jackman looked over at Philip Hunter and raised her eyebrows. Then she slipped her hand through his arm. Flip looked at him, too, at the short straw-colored hair and the intense blue eyes, and her heart ached with longing and love because she was to be sent away from him.

  “Wait till you get up to the school,” Mrs. Jackman said. “According to my friend, Mrs. Downs, there’s a beautiful view of the lake from every window. You’re going to adore school once you’re there, Philippa.”

  “Necessities are necessary, but it isn’t necessary to adore them,” Flip said. She hated herself for sounding so surly, but when she was with Mrs. Jackman she always seemed to say the wrong things. She stared out over the lake to the mountains of France. She wanted to go and press her burning cheeks against the cool whiteness of the snowy tips.

  “Well, if you’re determined to be unhappy, you probably will be,” Mrs. Jackman said. “Come on, Phil,” and she patted Philip Hunter’s arm. “It’s time to drive back to the hotel and have lunch, and then it will be time to take Philippa up to the school. Most girls would consider themselves extremely fortunate to be able to go to school in Switzerland. How on earth did you get so dirty, Philippa? You’re all covered with mud. For heaven’s sake, brush her coat off, Phil. We don’t want her arriving at the school looking like a ragamuffin.”

  Flip said nothing. She reached for her father’s hand and they walked back to the tram that would take them along the lake to the Montreux Palace.

  While they were washing up for lunch Flip said to her father, “Why did she have to come?”

  “Eunice?”

  “Yes. Why did she have to come?”

  Philip Hunter was sitting on the edge of the bed, his sketch pad on his knee. While Flip was drying her hands he was sketching her. She was used to being sketched at any and all odd moments and paid no attention. “Father,” she prodded him.

  At last he looked up from the pad. “She didn’t have to come. She offered to come since it was she who suggested this school, and it was most kind of her. You’re very rude to Eunice, Flippet, and I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning against him and looking down at the dozens of little sketches on the open page of his big pad. She looked at the sketch he had just finished of her, at the quick line drawings of people in the tram, of Eunice in the tram, of sightseers in the château, of Eunice in the château, of Eunice drinking coffee in the salon of the Montreux Palace, of Eunice on the train from Paris, of Eunice sitting on a suitcase in the Gare Saint-Lazare. She handed the pad back to him and went over to her suitcase filled with all the regulation blouses and underclothes and stockings Eunice had bought for her; it was so very kind of Eunice. “I don’t see why I can’t stay with you,” Flip said.

  Philip Hunter got up from the bed and took her hands in his. “Philippa, listen to me. No, don’t pull away. Stand still and listen. I should have left you in New York with your grandmother. But I listened to you and we did have a beautiful summer together in Paris, didn’t we?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “And now I suppose I should really send you back to New York to Gram, but I think you need to be more with young people, and it would mean that we couldn’t be together at Christmas, or at Easter. So in sending you to school I’m doing the best I can to keep us together as much as possible. I’m going to be wandering around under all sorts of conditions making sketches for Roger’s book, and you couldn’t possibly come with me even if it weren’t for missing a year of school. Now be sensible, Flip, please, darling, and don’t make it harder for yourself and for me than it already is. Eunice is right. If you set your mind on being unhappy, you will be unhappy.”

  “I haven’t set my mind on being unhappy,” Flip said. “I don’t want to be unhappy.”

  “Everything’s understood then, Flippet?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Come along down to the dining room then. Eunice will be wondering what on earth’s keeping us.”

  After lunch, which Flip could not eat, they took her to the station. Flip’s ticket said: No. 09717 Pensionnat Abelard—Jaman—Chemin de Fer Montreux Oberland Bernois Troisième Classe, Montreux à Jaman, valable 10 jours. Eunice was very much impressed because there were special tickets for the school.

  The train went up the mountain like a snake. The mountain was so steep that the train climbed in a continuous series of hairpin bends, stopping frequently at the small villages that clustered up the mountainside. Flip sat next to the window and stared out with a set face. Sometimes they could see the old grey stones of a village church, or a glimpse of a square with a fountain in the center. They passed new and ugly stucco villas occasionally, but mostly old brown chalets with flowers in the windows. Sometimes in the fields by the chalets there would be cows, though most of the cows were grazing farther up the mountain. The fields and roadsides were full of autumn flowers and everything was still a rich summer green. At one stop there was a family of children, all in blue denim shorts and white shirts, three girls and two boys, waiting for the pleasant-looking woman in a tweed suit who stepped off the train. All the children rushed at her, shouting, “Mother! Mother!”

  “Americans,” Eunice said. “There’s quite a considerable English and American colony here, I believe.”

  Flip stared longingly out the window as the children and their mother went running and laughing up the hill. She thought perhaps Paul and his mother were happy in the same way. She felt her father’s hand on her knee and she said quickly, “Write me lots, Father. Lots and lots and lots.”

  “Lots and lots and lots,” he promised as the train started again. “And the time will pass quickly, you’ll see. There’s an art studio where you can draw and paint. You’ll be learning all the time.”

  Eunice lit a cigarette although there was a sign saying NO SMOKING in French, Italian, and German. All the notices were in French, Italian, and German. DO NOT SPIT. DO NOT LEAN OUT THE WINDOW. DO NOT PUT BAGS OUT THE WINDOW. “The next stop’s Jaman,” Eunice said.

  Something turned over in Flip’s stomach. I should be ashamed, she thought. I should be ashamed to be so scared.

  But she was scared. She had never been separated, even for a night, from her entire family. During the war when her father had been in Europe, her mother was still alive; and then in the dark days after her mother’s death Gram had come to live with them; and afterward, whenever her father had to go away for a few days without her, at least Gram had been there. Now she would be completely on her own. She remembered her mother shaking her once, and laughing at her, and saying, “Darling, darling, you must learn to be more independent, to stand on your own feet. You must not cling so to Father and me. Suppose something should happen to us? What would you do?” That thought was so preposterously horrible that Flip could not face it. She had flung her arms around her mother and hidden her head.

  Now she could not press her face under her mother’s arm and escape from the world. Now she was older, much older, almost an adult, and she had to stand on her own feet and not be afraid of other girls. She had always been afraid of other girls. In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality. During recess she sat in a corner and drank her chocolate milk through a straw and read a book, and whenever they had to choose partners for anything she was always paired off with Betty Buck, the other unpopular girl. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays when they had gym in the afternoon, whenever they chose teams Flip was always the last one chosen; Betty Buck could run fast so she was always chosen early. Flip couldn’t run fast. She had a stiff knee from the bad time when her kneecap had been broken, so it wasn’t entirely her fault, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  However, in New York, Flip didn’t mind too much about school. She usua
lly finished her homework in her free period, so when she got home the rest of the day was hers. If her father was painting in his studio, she would sit and watch him, munching one of the apples he always kept in a big bowl on the table with his jars of brushes. Sometimes she cleaned his brushes for him and put them back carefully in the right jars, the blue ginger jar, the huge green pickle jar, the two brass vases he had brought from China. Flip loved to watch him paint. He painted all sorts of things. He painted a great many children’s portraits. He had painted literally dozens of portraits of Flip, and one of them was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and people had bought some of the others. It always seemed strange to Flip that people should want a picture of someone else’s child in their homes.

  Sometimes Philip Hunter did illustrations for children’s books and Flip had all of these books on her bookshelves; it seemed that she could never outgrow them. They were in the place of honor, and whenever she was sick in bed or unhappy she would take them out and look at them. The book he was doing illustrations for now was one which he said was going to be very beautiful and important, and it was a history of lost children all through the ages. There would be pictures of the lost children in the children’s crusade and the lost children in the southern states after the civil war and in Russia after the revolution, and now he was going to travel all around drawing pictures of lost children all over Europe and Asia, and he told Flip that he hoped maybe the book would help people to realize that all these children had to be found and taken care of.

  When Flip thought about all the lost children she felt a deep shame inside herself for her anger and resentment against Eunice and for the hollow feeling inside her stomach now as the train crawled higher and higher up the mountain. She was not a lost child. She would have a place to eat and sleep and keep warm all winter, and at Christmastime she would be with her father again.

  Now the train was slowing down. Eunice stood up and brushed imaginary specks off her immaculate white skirt. Philip Hunter took Flip’s suitcase off the rack. “This is it, Flippet,” he said.

  An old black taxi took them farther up the mountain to the school. The school had once been a big resort hotel and it was an imposing building with innumerable red-roofed turrets flying small flags, and iron balconies were under every window. The taxi driver took Flip’s bag and led them into a huge lounge with a marble floor and stained glass in the windows. There should have been potted palms by the marble pillars, but there weren’t. Girls of all ages and sizes were running about, reading notices on the big bulletin board, carrying suitcases, tennis racquets, ice skates, hockey sticks, skis, cricket bats, lacrosse sticks, armfuls of books. A wide marble staircase curved down into the center of the hall. To one side of it was a big cagelike elevator with a sign, FACULTY ONLY, in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. At the other side of the staircase was what had once been the concierge’s desk with innumerable cubbyholes for mail behind it. A woman with very dark hair and bushy eyebrows sat at it now, and she looked over at Eunice and Flip and Philip Hunter inquiringly. They crossed the hall to the desk.

  “This is Philippa Hunter, one of the new girls,” Eunice said, pushing Flip forward. “I am Mrs. Jackman and this is Mr. Hunter.”

  The black-haired woman behind the desk nodded and reached for a big notebook. Flip noticed that she had quite a dark mustache on her upper lip. “How do you do? I am Miss Tulip, the matron,” she said as she began leafing through the ledger. “Hartung, Havre, Hesse, Hunter. Ah, yes, Philippa Hunter, number ninety-seven, room thirty-three.” She looked up from the book and her black eyes searched the girls milling about in the big hall. “Erna Weber,” she called.

  A girl about Flip’s age detached herself from a cluster and came over to the desk. “Yes, Miss Tulip?”

  “This is Philippa Hunter,” Miss Tulip said. “She is in your dormitory. Take her upstairs with you and show her where to put her things. She is number ninety-seven.”

  “Yes, Miss Tulip.” Erna reached down for Flip’s suitcase and a lock of fair hair escaped from her barrette and fell over one eye. She pushed it back impatiently. “Come on,” she told Flip.

  Flip looked despairingly at her father, but all he did was to grin encouragingly. She followed Erna reluctantly.

  At the head of the stairs Erna set down the suitcase and undid her barrette, yanking her short hair back tightly from her face. “Sprechen Sie deutsch?” she asked Flip.

  Flip knew just enough German to answer “Nein.”

  “Parlez-vous français?” Erna asked, picking up the suitcase again.

  To this Flip was able to answer “Oui.”

  “Well, that’s something at any rate,” Erna told her in French, climbing another flight of marble stairs. “After prayers tonight we aren’t supposed to speak anything but French. Some of the girls don’t speak any French when they first come and I can tell you they have an awful time. I ought to know, because I didn’t speak any French when I came last year. What did Tulip say your name was?”

  “Philippa Hunter.”

  “What are you? English?”

  “No. American.”

  Erna turned down a corridor, pushed open a white door marked 33, and set the suitcase inside. Flip looked around a sunny room with flowered wallpaper and four brass beds. Four white bureaus beside the beds and four white chairs at the feet completed the furnishings. Wide French windows opened onto a balcony from which Flip could see the promised view of the lake and the mountains. Each chair had a number painted on it in small blue letters. Erna picked up the suitcase again and dumped it down on the chair marked 97.

  “That’s you,” she said. “You’d better remember your number. We do everything by numbers. That was Miss Tulip at the desk; she’s the matron and she lives on this floor. We call her ‘Black and Midnight.’ She’s a regular old devil about giving order marks. If one corner of the bed isn’t tucked in just so or if you don’t straighten it the minute you get off it or if a shirt is even crooked in a drawer, old Black and Midnight gives you an order mark. So watch out for her. Have you got any skis?”

  Flip nodded. “They were sent on with my trunk.”

  “Oh. They’ll be in the ski room then. Rack ninety-seven. Your hook in the cloak room will be ninety-seven too.” Erna pulled open one of the drawers in Flip’s bureau. “I see you sent your trunk in time. Black and Midnight’s unpacked for you.”

  “That was nice of her,” Flip said.

  “Nice? Don’t be a child. They unpack for us to make sure there isn’t any candy or money or food in the trunks, or books we aren’t supposed to read, or lipstick or cigarettes. Have you got anything to eat in your suitcase?”

  Flip shook her whirling head.

  “Oh, well, you’ll learn,” Erna said. “Come on. I’ll find your cubicle in the bathroom for you and we’ll see what your bath nights are. Then I’ll take you back down to Miss Tulip. I suppose you want to say good-bye to your mother and father.”

  Flip started to explain that Eunice wasn’t her mother, but Erna was already dragging her down the hall. “Himmel, you’re slow,” Erna said. “Hurry up.”

  Flip tried to stumble along faster with her long legs. Her legs were very long and straight and skinny, but sometimes it seemed as though she must be bowlegged, knock-kneed, and pigeon-toed all at once, the way she always managed to stumble and trip herself up.

  Erna pushed open a heavy door. Down one side of the wall were rows and rows of small cubicles, each marked with a number. Each had a shelf for a toothbrush, mug, and soap, and hooks underneath for towels. On the opposite wall were twelve cubicles, each with a wash basin, and a curtain to afford a measure of privacy. “The johns are next door,” Erna said. “Here’s the bath list. Let’s see. You’re eight forty-five Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. That’s my time too. We can bang on the partition. Once Black and Midnight found a girl crawling under the partition and she was expelled.”

  Erna’s French was fluent, with just a trace of German in it. Flip had learne
d to speak excellent French that summer in Paris, so she had no difficulty in following it, though she herself had nothing to say. But Erna seemed to be perfectly happy dominating the conversation.

  “Come on,” Erna said. “I’ll take you downstairs, and you can say good-bye to your parents. I want to see if Jackie’s come in from Paris yet. She’s one of our roommates. This is her third year here.”

  “Jackie what?” Flip asked, for something to say.

  “Jacqueline Bernstein. Her father directs movies. Last year he came over to see Jackie and he brought a movie projector with him and we all had movies in Assembly Hall. It was wonderful.”

  They had reached the big entry hall now and Flip looked around but could not see either her father or Eunice, and at this point even Eunice would have been a welcome face. Erna led her up to the concierge’s desk where Miss Tulip still presided.

  “Well, Erna, what is it now?” the matron asked.

  “Please, Miss Tulip,” Erna said, her hands clasped meekly in front of her. “You said I was to show this new girl our room and everything, so I did.”

  Miss Tulip looked at Erna, then at Flip, then at her notebook. “Oh, yes. Philippa Hunter, number ninety-seven. Please take her to Mademoiselle Dragonet, Erna. Her father is waiting there for her.”

  “Come on,” Erna told Flip impatiently.

  Mlle Dragonet’s rooms were at the end of the long corridor on the second floor and were shut off from the rest of the school by heavy sliding doors. These were open now and Erna pulled Flip into a small hall with two doors on each side. She pointed a solemn finger at the first door on the right. “This is the Dragon’s study,” she said. “Look out anytime you’re sent there. It means you’re in for it.” Then she pointed to the second door. “This one’s her living room and that’s not so bad. If you’re sent to the living room, you’re not going to get a lecture, anyhow, though the less I see of the Dragon the happier I am.”

  “Is she?” Flip asked.

  “Is she what?”