"My father and I are going to spend the winter up the mountain
somewhere," Paul said. "My mother's a singer and she has to go off
on a tour for all winter. They've been wandering about the chateau.
They like it because that'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," he explained, "because
I don't like any place that's been a prison." Then he said, trying to
speak lightly, "Do you know that poem of the English poet, Byron? _The
Prisoner of Chillon?_ It's all about a man who was a prisoner in the
chateau."
"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 towards the
chateau of Chillon.
2
About half way to the chateau she saw her father coming down the path
towards 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 chateau 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 chateau, 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 thing. 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
chateau, of Eunice in the chateau, 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 Gâre 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 sort 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."
3
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 Troisieme 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
mountain side. 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 centre. 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 further 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 afterwards,
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 about 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 knee cap 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 in 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 Christmas time
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 further 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 rackets, ice skates, hockey sticks, skis, cricket bats, lacrosse
sticks, arms full of books. A wide marble staircase curved down into
the centre of the hall. To one side of it was a big cage-like 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 cubby holes 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 moustache 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, Phillipa Hunter, number 97, room 33." 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 97."
"Yes, Miss Tulip." Erna reached down for Flip's suitcase and a lock of
fair hair escaped from her barette 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
barette, yanking her short hair back tightly from her face. "Sprechen
sie deutsch?" she asked Flip.