And Both Were Young (2 page)

“But the boat comes to shore and everybody has to get off at last,” Paul told her.

“Why?” Flip asked. “Why?” She looked longingly after the boat for a moment and then she looked at the mountains that seemed to be climbing up into the sky. They looked like
the mountains that she imagined when she looked up at cloud formations during the long, slow summers in Connecticut. Now she was in Switzerland and these were real mountains, with real snow on their dazzling peaks. “Well—” She stood up, dislodging Ariel. “I’d better go back now. Eunice Jackman will think I’m off weeping somewhere. She says Mother’s been dead nearly a year and I should stop moping. She’s doing her best to stop Father moping, that’s for sure.” Now that she had started talking about Eunice, it seemed she could not stop. “She’s already had two or three husbands, and she wants to add Father to her collection. If I’m in boarding school I can’t stop her. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, going on this way. I’m sorry, Paul.”

“It’s all right.” Paul took her hand. His grip was firm and strong. “Ariel doesn’t usually take to people the way he’s taken to you. When Ariel doesn’t like people I know I’m never going to like them, either. He has very good taste. Perhaps we’ll meet again sometime. I’d like that.”

“I’d like it, too.” Philippa returned his smile. “It doesn’t sound likely, with me being incarcerated in boarding school.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Paul said. “It sounds awful. I hate institutions. But Switzerland’s a small country, and my father and I are going to spend the winter up on the mountain while Mother’s on tour. She goes tomorrow. They’ve been wandering around the château this morning; they love it. It’s where my father proposed to my mother.” He smiled again and then his face changed and became so serious that Flip looked at him in surprise. “I
don’t
like it, because I don’t like any place that’s been a prison.” But then his face lightened and he said, “Do you know that poem of the English poet, Byron?
The
Prisoner of Chillon
? It’s about a man who was a prisoner in the château.”

“Yes,” Flip said. “We studied it in English last year. I didn’t like it much, but I think I shall pretend that my school is a prison and I am the prisoner and at Christmas my father will rescue me.”

“If he doesn’t,” Paul said, “I will.”

“Thank you,” Flip said. “Are you—do you go to school?”

The same odd, strained look came into Paul’s eyes that had darkened them when he mentioned prisons. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to school right now.”

“Well . . . good-bye,” Flip said.

“Good-bye.” Paul shook hands with her again. She turned clumsily and patted Ariel’s head; then she started back up the path toward the château of Chillon.

About halfway to the château she saw her father coming down the path toward her. He was alone, so she ran up to him and caught hold of his hand.

“All right now, Flippet?” Philip Hunter asked.

“Yes, Father.”

“It’s not as though it were forever, funny face.”

“I know, Father. It’s all right. I’m going to pretend that the school is the château of Chillon and I’m the prisoner, and then at Christmas you’ll come and liberate me.”

“I certainly will,” Philip Hunter said. “Now let’s go find Eunice. She’s worried about you.”

Eunice Jackman was waiting for them, her hands plunged into the pockets of her white linen suit. Her very black hair was pulled back from her face into a smooth
doughnut at the nape of her neck. “Only a very beautiful woman should wear her hair like that,” Philip Hunter had told Flip. Now he waved at Eunice and shouted, “Hi!”

“Hi!” Eunice called, taking one hand leisurely out of her pocket and waving back. “Feeling better, Philippa?”

“I can’t feel better if I haven’t been feeling badly,” Flip said icily. “I just wanted to go for a walk.”

Eunice laughed. She laughed a great deal, but her laugh never sounded to Flip as though she thought anything was funny. “So you went for a walk. Didn’t you like the château, Philippa?” Eunice never called her Flip.

“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 usually 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.