“A dragon.”
“Old Dragonet? Oh, she’s all right. Kind of stand-offish. Doesn’t fraternize much, if you know what I mean. But she’s all right. Well, I’ve got to leave you now, but I’ll see you later. You just knock.”
And Flip was left standing in the empty corridor in front of the Dragon’s door. She gave a final despairing glance at Erna’s blue skirt disappearing around the curve of the stairs. Then she lifted her hand to knock because if her father was in there she didn’t know how else to get to him. Besides, she didn’t know what else to do. Erna had deserted her, and she would never have the courage to go back to the big crowded lounge or to try to find her room again all alone. She tapped very gently, so gently that there was no response. She hugged herself in lonely misery. Oh, please, she thought, please, God, make me not be such a coward. It’s awful to be such a coward. Mother always laughed at me and scolded me because I was such a coward. Please give me some gumption, quick, God, please.
Then she raised her hand and knocked. Mlle Dragonet’s voice called, “Come in.”
The rest of the day had the strange, turbulent, uncontrolled quality of a dream. Flip said good-bye to her father and Eunice in Mlle Dragonet’s office, and then she was swept along in a stream of girls through registration, signing up for courses, dinner, prayers, a meeting of the new girls in the common room . . . she thought that now she knew what the most unimportant little fish in a school of fishes must feel like caught in the current of a wild river. She sat that night on her bed, her long legs looking longer than ever in candy-striped pajamas, and watched her roommates. On the bureau beside the bed she had the package her father had left her as a going-away present: sketch pads of various sizes and a box of Eberhard Faber drawing pencils. There was also a bottle of Chanel No. 5 from Eunice, which she had pushed aside.
“You’ll have to take those downstairs tomorrow morning,” Erna told her. “We aren’t allowed things like that in our rooms. You can put it in your locker in the common room or on your shelf in the classroom. They’ll be marked with your number.”
Flip felt that if she heard anything else about her number, she would scream. She was accustomed to being a person, not a number, and she didn’t like number 97 at all. But she just said, “Oh.”
Jacqueline Bernstein, the other old girl in the room, pulled blue silk pajamas over her head and laughed. Flip had noticed that she laughed a great deal, not a giggle, but a nice laugh that bubbled out of her at the slightest excuse, like a small fountain. She was a very pretty girl with curly black hair that fell to her shoulders and was held back from her face with a blue ribbon the color of her uniform, and she had big black eyes with long curly lashes. Her body had filled out into far more rounded and mature lines than Flip’s. “Remember when old Black and Midnight caught me using cold cream last winter?” she asked Erna. “She’ll let you use all kinds of guk like mentholatum on your face to keep from getting chapped, but not cold cream because it’s makeup.”
Flip looked at her enviously, thinking disparagingly of her own sand-colored hair and her eyes that were neither blue nor grey and her body as long and skinny as a string bean. That’s just it, she thought. I look like a string bean and Jacqueline Bernstein looks like somebody who’s going to be a movie star and Erna looks like somebody who always gets chosen first when people choose teams.
She hoped her grandmother was right when she said she would grow up to be a beauty, but when she looked at Jackie, Flip doubted it.
The door opened and Gloria Browne, the other roommate, came in. She was English, with ginger-colored permanent-waved hair. Erna had somehow discovered and informed Flip and Jackie that Gloria’s parents were tremendously wealthy and she had come to school with four brand new trunks full of clothes and had two dozen of everything, even toothbrushes. “Esmée Bodet says Gloria’s nouveau riche,” Erna added. “Her father owns a brewery and an uncle in Canada or someplace sent her the clothes.”
“Esmée always finds out everything about everybody,” Jackie had said. “I don’t know how she does it. She’s an awful snoop.”
Now Gloria walked to her bureau and took up her comb and started combing out her tangles.
“Use a brush,” Erna suggested.
“Oh, I never use a brush, ducky,” Gloria said. “It’s bad for a permanent.”
Jackie laughed. “That’s silly.”
“Your hair’s natural, isn’t it?” Gloria asked.
“But yes.”
“Have you ever had a permanent?”
“No.”
“Then don’t say it’s silly. If you brush a permanent, all the wave comes out.”
Jackie laughed again and got into bed. “Well, at least you speak French,” she said. “At least we won’t have to go through that struggle with you.”
“Oh, I went to a French school in Vevey before the war.” Gloria gave up on her tangles. “This is my fifth boarding school. I started when I was six.”
“How are you at hockey?” Erna asked.
Gloria shrugged and said, “Oh, not too bad,” in a way that made Flip know she was probably very good indeed.
“How about you, Philippa?” Erna asked.
Flip admitted, “I’m not very good. I fall over my feet.”
“How about skiing?”
Gloria pulled a nightgown made of pink satin and ecru lace over her head. “I just dote on skiing. We spent last Christmas hols at St. Moritz.”
“I’ve never skied,” Flip said, “but everybody says I’m going to love it.”
Erna looked at Gloria’s nightgown. “If you think Black and Midnight’s going to let you wear that creation, you’re crazy.”
Jackie looked at it longingly. “It’s divine. It’s absolutely divine.”
Gloria giggled. “Oh, I know they won’t let me wear it. I just thought I’d wait till they made me take it off. Emile gave it to me for a going-away present.”
“Who’s Emile?” Erna asked.
“My mother’s fiancé. He’s a count.”
“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 trou
ble 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.
And Both Were Young Page 3