And Both Were Young (6 page)

Jackie and Erna came in then and Gloria turned back to making her bed.

Jackie pulled Flip aside one evening after chapel. They waited until everyone had gone into the common room, then Jackie pulled Flip into the dining room. The maids had finished clearing away the dinner dishes and the tables were already set for breakfast the next morning. Jackie seemed embarrassed and unhappy.

“Philippa, I want to say something to you.” They stood under the long box of napkin racks, each little cubbyhole marked with the inevitable number. Flip stared at Jackie and waited. Jackie looked away, looked up over Flip’s head, over the napkin racks, up to the ceiling. “I want to apologize to you.”

“What for?” Flip asked.

“My mother said I should apologize to you,” Jackie said rapidly, still looking up at the ceiling, her hands plunged deep into the pockets of her blue blazer, “about our laughing about your going to chapel. I always write my mother everything and I wrote her about our thinking it was funny and laughing and she wrote back and said who am I of all people to laugh.
She said if you got down on the floor in the middle of the common room and bowed toward Mecca I should honor and respect your form of worship.”

“Oh,” Flip said. She felt that she ought to try to explain to Jackie that it really wasn’t a burning question of religion that led her to brave Miss Tulip’s annoyance and go to the chapel, but she was afraid that Jackie would not understand and might even be angry.

Jackie had finished her uncomfortable quoting from her mother’s letter and she looked down at her feet. “So I do apologize,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Pill.”

“That’s all right,” Flip answered, embarrassed, but making an effort to sound friendly.

Jackie heaved a sigh of relief. “Well, I’ve got to go now,” she almost shouted. “The others are waiting for me.” She tore off and Flip was left standing under the napkin racks.

Saturday afternoons they had free time. Most of the girls clustered in the common room, talking, shrieking, laughing, playing records. Flip stood by the balcony window thinking that she had been at the school only a few weeks and yet it seemed as though she had been there forever. She felt in her pocket for her father’s latest letter that she had already read several times in the peace of the chapel. When she read his letters, those wonderful, wonderful letters, full of little anecdotes and sketches, she would look at the drawings of forlorn waifs, ragged and starving, and feel ashamed of her own misery which for the moment at any rate seemed completely unjustified. She had had a letter that morning from Mrs. Jackman, too, written on heavy, expensive paper saying that she hoped that Flip had settled down and was happy, and
signed, Affectionately, Eunice. Eunice signed all her letters to Flip that way, but Flip felt no affection in them. Eunice had written that she would send Flip a weekly note, since most of the girls would be getting letters from their mothers. “Your father,” Eunice had written, “will have little time for letters, and I don’t want you to have the humiliation of an empty mail box.” Flip read Eunice’s letter, which certainly did not make her feel any better, tore it up, and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

“I love you—u—u—” the phonograph wailed.

“And then he said to me, ‘Your legs are fascinating,’ ” Esmée was saying.

“He was the most divine boy,” she heard Sally saying, “until I heard he had a whole set of false teeth and a toupee.”

“During the holidays,” Gloria screeched, “I smoke at
least
a pack of cigarettes a day.”

Flip turned away from the window, slipped out of the common room, tiptoed through the big lounge, and slipped out the side door when the teacher on duty was busy talking to someone. The air was crisp and a light wind was blowing. She took deep breaths of it and walked swiftly, exulting in the unaccustomed freedom. She climbed the hill behind the school, knowing that as she got into the pine trees clustered thickly up the mountainside she would be safe from detection. She ran until she was panting and her weak knee ached, but soon the trees got thicker and thicker and she dropped down onto the fragrant rusty carpet of fallen pine needles. As soon as she had regained her breath she walked on a little farther, rubbing her fingers lovingly over the rough, resiny trunks of the pines. She felt free and happy for the first time since she had been at school. The air was full of piney perfume; the
needles were soft and gently slippery under her feet; high above her head she could see the blue sky shining in chinks and patches through the trees; and the sun sifted down to her in long golden shafts like the light in a church. She lay down on her back on the pine needles and looked up and up and it seemed that the trees pierced the sky. Oh, trees, oh, sky, oh, sun, something in her sang. Oh, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And she was happy.

After a while she stood up and brushed and shook the pine needles off her uniform and climbed still farther. There was a small clearing where the railroad track cut through on its zigzag way up the mountain. She crossed the track and climbed higher. She did not know where the school bounds ended and forbidden territory began; she had forgotten that there was such a thing as a boundary line, and she kept on pushing up, up the mountain.

Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, rushing in her direction with the most hideous baying she had ever heard, bounded a wild beast. Her heart leaped in terror, beating frantically against her chest, then seemed to stop entirely before she realized that the beast was Ariel.

“Ariel!” she cried, “Oh, Ariel!” as the bulldog knocked her down in the ecstasy of his greeting. “Ariel, please!” The dog began bounding around her, barking wildly, and she lay quietly on the fallen pine needles until he stopped and stood at her feet, sniffing her anxiously.

“Where’s Paul?” she asked, and she was amazingly pleased to see the dog’s hideous face with the drooling, under-shot jaw.

Ariel barked.

Flip sat up. Then, as Ariel waited quietly, she stood up
and looked around, but she could see no sign of the boy she had met down by the lake on the morning of the day she came to school.

“Paul!” she called, but there was no answer except from Ariel, who barked again, caught hold of her skirt, released it, bounded up the mountain, then came back and took her skirt in his teeth again.

“But I can’t go with you, Ariel,” she said. “I have to go back to school.”

Ariel barked and tried again to lure her up the mountain.

“I have to go, Ariel,” she told him. “I’m sure I’m out of bounds or something, being here. I have to go back to school.” Then she laughed at the serious way in which she had been trying to explain the situation to the bulldog, turned away from him, and started back down the mountain. But Ariel pranced along beside her, always trying to head her back up the mountain, catching hold of her skirt or the hem of her coat, tugging and pulling, gently, but persistently.

“Ariel, you can’t come back to school with me, you just can’t!” Flip tried to push the dog away, but he barked, reached up, and caught hold of the cuff of her sleeve.

“Oh, Ariel!” she cried, half exasperated, half pleased because she knew the dog was going to win. “All right!”

And she turned around and headed back up the mountain.

Ariel bounded ahead of her, running on a few yards, then doubling back to make sure she was following. Soon she saw grey slate rooftops through the trees, and as Ariel led her closer she saw that the rooftops belonged to a château. When the trees cleared and Ariel began to crash through the heavy undergrowth, Flip realized that the château was old and deserted,
for the shutters hung crazily by their hinges, some of the windows were boarded up, and at others the boards had come off and the glass was broken and jagged. Grass and weeds grew wild and high and late autumn flowers bloomed in undisciplined profusion. Birds flew in and out of the broken windows and as she pushed through the weeds they began calling to each other, screaming, Someone is coming! Someone is coming!

Her heart beating with excitement, Flip pressed forward, following Ariel, who suddenly leaped ahead of her, bounded across the remaining distance to the château, and disappeared. Flip pushed after him, calling, “Ariel! Ariel! Wait!” but there was no sound, no sign of life about the château except for the birds and the banging of a shutter against the grey stones. She crossed what had once been a flagstone terrace to a row of shuttered French windows. One of the shutters was open and hung by one hinge, and all the glass in the window was gone. It was through this opening that Ariel had disappeared. Flip peered in but could see nothing through the obscurity inside.

“Ariel!” she called, then “Paul! Paul!” There was no answer and her words came faintly echoing back to her. “Ariel! Paul! Paul!”

At last she turned and started back to school.

S
HE STUDIED
F
RENCH VERBS
in study hall that night, but because of her afternoon’s adventure school seemed different and she seemed different, and even while she was dutifully memorizing a difficult subjunctive she was thinking about the château and about Ariel and Paul. And when she thought about them her heart would lift suddenly and begin to beat rapidly inside her chest so that it seemed like one of the wild, excited birds flying in and out of the broken windows of the château. She sat at her desk and said, “Please, God, let me see Paul again. Please. Please, let me see Paul again.”

That night she and Gloria were already in bed, and she was lying there thinking that the next time she could escape from the school she would go back and look for Ariel and Paul again, when Erna and Jackie came in from the lavatory in their pajamas and bathrobes. Gloria was staring critically at Flip’s cotton underthings folded over her chair at the foot of her bed.

“I can’t stand anything but silk next to my skin,” Gloria
said. “Mummy’s always dressed me in silk. She says she’s going to send me some new silk undies from Paris.”

“You and Wagner,” Flip said. Jackie laughed.

Erna was tapping her foot on the floor impatiently. “Hey, we just remembered,” she broke in. “You’re new girls and we haven’t initiated you yet.”

“Oh, Erna,” Gloria groaned. “Do we have to be initiated?”

Erna pulled off her barrette, pulled her hair back more tightly, and clasped the barrette again, as she always did when she felt important. “Well, you don’t
have
to be, but it just means we can’t accept you if you aren’t. You want to be accepted, don’t you?”

“Oh, okay,” Gloria said. “I suppose we’ll survive. Go ahead.”

“Do
you
want to be accepted, Pill?” Erna asked.

Flip answered in a low voice. “Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll continue. Oh, first you’d better get out of bed and sit on your chairs, please.”

Obediently Flip and Gloria sat on the chairs at the foot of their beds. Erna nodded in satisfaction. She stood, hands on hips, looking at them, while Jackie lounged more comfortably on her bed.

“Do you promise to keep our dormitory secrets till the death?” Erna asked.

Flip and Gloria nodded.

“And to do anything we tell you to do during the period of probation?”

Flip and Gloria nodded again.

“Good. Now we want to ask you a couple of questions.”

Jackie took over. She sat up, her feet half in and half out
of her woolly crimson slippers, dangling over the foot of the bed, and pointed at Gloria. “Who do you like most in the school?”

“You and Erna,” Gloria answered promptly.

“I told you she’d say that.” Erna nodded at Jackie.

Jackie pointed at Flip. “And you?”

“Madame Perceval.”

“Percy? Well, she’ll do all right.” Jackie kicked one slipper onto the floor and pointed at Gloria. “Where were you born?”

“London.”

“Where?”

“London.”

“Where?” Erna asked.

“London.”

And Jackie asked again, “Where?”

“Oh, Brazil where the nuts come from,” Gloria cried in exasperation.

“Where did you say you were born?” Erna asked.

“I’ve told you three times,” Gloria muttered.

“You seem sort of confused.” Jackie kicked off the other slipper.

Erna tightened her bathrobe belt. Miss Tulip had taken her over to Lausanne that morning and the gold braces on her teeth had been tightened; her teeth hurt and her voice sounded cross. “If you don’t know where you were born we certainly can’t accept you. Where were you born?”

“London,” Gloria mumbled sulkily.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t Brazil?”

“No.”

“Why did you say it was Brazil?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean you say things and you don’t know why you say them?”

“No.”

“But that’s what you just said.”

Gloria wailed, “You’re trying to confuse me.”

Erna put her hands in the pockets of her bathrobe and smiled tolerantly. “Why should we try to confuse you? We’re just trying to find out whether or not you’re sure where you were born.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Where was it?”

“London.”

“All right. We’ll let it go this once. But we can’t have people in our room saying things without knowing why they say them. So be careful.” She turned to Flip. “Okay, Pill. Where were you born?”

“Goshen, Connecticut.” Warned by Gloria, Flip answered firmly while Erna and Jackie asked her seven or eight times.

Jackie slipped over the foot of the bed and pushed her feet back into her slippers. She smiled ravishingly at Flip and Gloria. “Well,” she told them, “I think you’ve passed the preliminary examination.”

Gloria stood up and stretched. “What’s next?”

“You each have to prove yourself.”

“How?”

“By some courageous deed. If it’s good enough, then you can help with the initiation Saturday afternoon.”

“The initiation?” Gloria asked suspiciously.

Erna grinned in anticipation and the light flashed on the gold braces on her teeth. “Oh, the big general initiation. All the old girls in our class are going to initiate the new girls who haven’t done a magnificent enough deed by Saturday lunch. It was my idea.”