And Both Were Young (4 page)

“A count—pfft!” Jackie laughed.

“He is too. And he has lots of money, which most counts don’t nowadays.”

“Your mother’s
what
?” Erna asked.

“Her fiancé. You know. The man she’s going to marry. Emile is a card. And he gives me wonderful presents. And then Daddy gives me presents so I won’t like Emile better than I do him. It really works out very well. I’m just crazy about Emile. Daddy likes him too.”

“Your
father
!” Jackie squeaked.

“Oh, yes. Mummy and Daddy are still great friends. Mummy says it’s the way civilized people behave. She and Daddy both hate scenes. Me too.”

“But don’t you just feel awful about it?” Erna asked.

“Awful? Why? I don’t expect it’ll make much difference to me. I’ll spend the summer hols with Mummy one year and with Daddy the next, and as soon as I’m out of school I expect
I’ll get married myself unless I decide to have a career. I might get Emile to give me a dress shop in London or Paris. I expect he would and I adore being around pretty frocks and things. Isn’t it a bore we have to wear beastly old uniforms here? We didn’t have uniforms at my last school, but there were vile ones the school before.”

A bell rang, blaring so loudly that Flip almost fell off the bed. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to hear that bell without jumping. It rang for all the classes, Erna had told her, and in the evenings it rang at half hour intervals, announcing the times at which the different age groups were to put out their lights. For meals one of the maids got in the elevator with a big gong and rode up and down, up and down, beating the gong. Flip liked the gong; it had a beautiful resonant tone, and long after the maid had stopped beating it and left the elevator you could hear the waves of rich sound still throbbing through the building, and with closed eyes you could almost pretend it was a jungle instead of a school.

“That’s our bell,” Erna said. “Black and Midnight comes in to put out the light. That’s one trouble with being on this floor. She gets to us so soon.”

As she finished speaking the door was opened abruptly and Miss Tulip stood looking in at them. She had changed to her white matron’s uniform. “Everybody ready?” she asked.

Erna and Jackie chorused, “Yes, Miss Tulip, thank you, Miss Tulip.”

Then Miss Tulip spotted Gloria’s nightgown. “Really!” she exclaimed. “Gloria Browne, isn’t it?”

Gloria echoed Erna and Jackie. “Yes, Miss Tulip, thank you, Miss Tulip.”

“That nightgown is most unsuitable,” Miss Tulip said disapprovingly.
“I trust you have something else more appropriate.”

“That depends on what you call appropriate, please, Miss Tulip,” Gloria said.

“I will go over your things tomorrow. Report to me after breakfast.”

“Yes, Miss Tulip,” Gloria said meekly, and winked at Erna.

“Good night, girls. Remember, no talking.” And Miss Tulip switched out the light.

Flip lay there in the dark. As her eyes became accustomed to the night she noticed that the lights from the terrace below shone up through the iron railing of the balcony and lay in a delicate pattern on the ceiling. She raised herself on one elbow and she could see out of the window. All down the mountainside to the lake the lights of the villages lay like fallen stars. As she watched, one would flicker out here, another there. Through the open window she could hear the chime of a village church, and then, almost like an echo, the bell from another church and then another. She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears. Now she saw the lights of the train as it crawled up the mountain, looking like a little luminous dragon. And on the lake was a tiny band of lights from one of the lake boats.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! she thought. Then she began to long for her father to show the beauty to. She couldn’t contain so much beauty just in herself. It had to be shared, and she couldn’t whisper to the girls in her room to come and look. She couldn’t cry, “Oh, Erna, Jackie, Gloria, come look!” Erna and Jackie must know how beautiful it
was, and somehow Flip thought that Gloria would think looking at views was stupid. Father, she thought. Oh, Father. What’s the matter with me? What is it?

Then she realized. Of course. She was homesick. Every bone in her ached with homesickness, as though she were getting the flu. Only she wasn’t homesick for a place, but for a person, for her father. How many months, how many weeks, how many days, hours, minutes, seconds, till Christmas?

She sat in the warm tub on her first bath night and longing for her father overflowed her again and she wept. Miss Tulip entered briskly without knocking.

“Homesick, Philippa?” she asked cheerfully. “I expect you are. We all are at first. But you’ll get over it. We all do. But you mustn’t cry, you know! It doesn’t help. Not a bit. Sportsmanship, remember.”

Flip nodded and watched the water as it lapped about her thin knees.

“Almost through?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, Miss Tulip,” the matron corrected her.

“Yes, Miss Tulip,” Flip echoed obediently.

“Well, hurry up then. It’s almost time for the next girl. Mustn’t get a tardy mark by taking more than your fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll hurry,” Flip said.

“Washed behind your ears?”

“Yes.” Flip was outraged that Miss Tulip should ask her such a question. But Miss Tulip with another brisk nod bounced out as cheerfully as she had entered. Flip stepped out of the tub and started to dry herself.

_______

They were supposed to start hockey, but it rained, and Flip’s class had relay races in the big gym at the other end of the playing fields from the school. The gym had once been the hotel garage, but now it was full of bars and rings and leather horses and an indoor basketball court where the class above Flip’s was playing. Erna and a Norwegian girl, Solvei Krogstad, were captains. Erna chose Jackie, then dutifully chose Gloria and Flip. It was to be a simple relay race. The girls were to run with a small stick to the foot of the gym and back, putting the stick into the hand of the next girl. Flip was fifth in line, following Gloria.

Gloria ran like a streak of lightning. Sally Buckman, the girl behind Flip, was jumping up and down, shrieking, “Keep it up, Glory! Oh, Glory, swell!”

Gloria snapped the stick smartly into Flip’s fingers, but Flip fumbled and dropped it. Sally groaned. Flip picked up the stick and started to run. She ran as fast as she could. But her knee seemed stiffer than it ever had before and her legs were so long that she had no control of them and her feet kept getting in their own way. She heard the girls screaming, “Run, Philippa,
run
, can’t you!” Now she had reached the end of the gym and she turned around and started the long way back to Sally Buckman. The girls were jumping up and down in agony and their shouts were angry and despairing. “Oh, Philippa! Oh, Philippa,
run
!”

Panting, her throat dry and aching, she thrust the stick into Sally’s hand and limped to the back of the line.

After gym she locked herself in the bathroom and again read the letter from her father which had come in the morning mail. It was a gay, funny letter, full of little sketches. She
answered it during study hall, hoping that the teacher in charge would not notice. She drew him a funny picture of Miss Tulip, and little sketches of her roommates and some of the other girls. She told him that the food wasn’t very good. Too many boiled potatoes. And the bread was doughy and you could almost use it for modeling clay. But maybe it would help her get fat. She did not tell him that she was homesick and miserable. She could not make him unhappy by letting him know what a terrible coward she was. She looked around at the other girls in the study hall, Sally chewing her pencil, Esmée twisting a strand of hair around and around her finger, Gloria muttering Latin verbs under her breath.

Gloria had whispered to her that the teacher taking study hall was the art teacher. Her name was Madame Perceval, and she was Mlle Dragonet’s niece. The girls called her Percy, and although she had a reputation for being strict, she was very popular. Flip stared at her surreptitiously, hoping that she wouldn’t be as dull and unsympathetic as the art teacher in her school in New York. She had finished her lessons early and now that she had written her letter to her father she did not know what to do. She thought that Madame Perceval looked younger and somehow more alive than the other teachers. “I wonder where her husband is?” Gloria had whispered. “Jackie says nobody knows, not even Esmée. She says everybody thinks there’s some sort of mystery about Percy. I say, isn’t it glamorous! I can’t wait for the first art lesson.”

Madame Perceval had thick brown hair, the color of well-polished mahogany. It was curly and quite short and brushed back carelessly from her face. Her skin was burnished, as though she spent a great deal of time out of doors, and her
eyes were grey with golden specks. Flip noticed that study hall tonight was much quieter than it had been the other nights with other teachers in charge.

She reached for a pencil to make a sketch of Madame Perceval to put in the letter to her father and knocked her history book off the corner of her desk. It fell with a bang and she felt everybody’s eyes on her. She bent down to pick it up. When she put it back on her desk she looked at Madame Perceval, but the teacher was writing quietly in a notebook. Flip sighed and looked around. There was no clock in study hall and she wondered how much longer before the bell. Erna, sitting next to her at the desk by the window, was evidently wondering the same thing, because Flip felt a nudge; she looked over, then quickly took the rolled-up note Erna was handing to her. She read it. “How many more dreary minutes?”

Flip reached across the aisle and nudged Solvei Krogstad, who had a watch. Solvei took the note, looked at her watch, scribbled “ten” on the note, and was about to pass it back to Flip when Madame Perceval’s voice came clear and commanding.

“Bring that note to me, please, Solvei.” Flip was very thankful that she wasn’t the one who had been caught.

Solvei rose and walked up the aisle to the platform on which the teacher’s desk stood. She handed the note to Madame Perceval and waited. Madame Perceval looked at the note, then at her own watch.

“Your watch is fast, Solvei,” she said with a twinkle. “There are fifteen more dreary minutes, not ten.”

Very seriously Solvei set her watch while everybody in the room laughed.

After study hall, while they were all gathered in the common room during the short period of free time before the bell that sent them up to bed, Gloria said to Flip, “I say, that was decent of Percy, wasn’t it?”

Flip nodded.

“Imagine Percy being the Dragon’s niece!” Then Gloria yawned. “I say, Philippa, have you any brothers or sisters?”

Flip shook her head.

“Neither have I. Mummy and Daddy didn’t really want me, but I popped up. Accidents will happen, you know. They said they were really glad, and I’m not much trouble after all, always off at school and things. In a way I’m rather glad they didn’t want me, because it relieves me of responsibility, doesn’t it? I always have enough responsibility at school without getting involved in it at home.”

Erna and Jackie wandered over. “Hello. What are you two talking about?”

“Oh, you,” Gloria said.

Erna grinned. “What were you saying?”

“Oh, just how lucky we were to get you two as roommates.”

Erna and Jackie looked pleased, while Flip stared at Gloria in amazement.

“Are you ever called Phil, Philippa?” Erna asked suddenly.

Flip shook her head. “At home I’m called Flip.”

Jackie laughed and Erna said, “Flip, huh? I never heard of anyone being called a name like Flip before.”

Gloria began to giggle. “I know what! We can call her Pill!”

Jackie and Erna shouted with laughter. “Pill! Pill!” they cried with joy.

Flip did not say anything. She knew that the thing to do was to laugh, too, but instead she was afraid she might burst into tears.

“Let’s play Ping-Pong before the bell rings,” Jackie suggested.

“Coming, Pill?” Gloria cried.

Flip shook her head. “No, thank you.”

She wandered over to one of the long windows and stepped out onto the balcony. The wind was cool and comforting to her hot cheeks. The sky was full of stars and she looked up at them and tried to feel their cold clear light on her upturned face. Across the lake the mountains of France loomed darkly, suddenly breaking into brightness as the starlight fell on their snowy tips. Flip tried to imagine what it would be like when all the mountains and valleys were covered with snow.

From the room behind her she could hear all the various evening noises, the sound of the phonograph playing popular records, the click, click, click of the Ping-Pong ball Erna, Jackie, and Gloria were sending over the net, and the excited buzz of general conversation. Although the girls were supposed to speak French at all times, this final period of freedom was not supervised, and Flip heard snatches of various languages, and of the truly international language the girls had developed, a potpourri of all their tongues.

“Ach,”
she heard someone saying, “I left
mein ceinture dans le
shower
ce morgen. Quelle
dope
ich bin
!”

She sat down on the cold stone floor of the balcony and
leaned her face against the black iron rail. The rail felt cold and rough to her cheek. She looked down to the path below where Miss Tulip in her white uniform was walking briskly between the plane trees. Flip sat very still, fearful lest the matron look up and see her.

The bell rang. Out here on the balcony it did not sound so loud. She heard the girls in her class putting books, records, and note paper into their lockers and slamming the doors, and she knew that she would have to come in and follow them upstairs. But not yet. Not quite yet. It would take them a little while to get everything put away. She heard someone else walking along the path below and looked down and recognized Madame Perceval. Madame Perceval stopped just below Flip’s balcony and leaned against one of the plane trees. She stood there very quietly, looking down over the lake.