And Both Were Young

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Flip cried. “Oh, Madame, thank you.”

  “Hello, Signorina,” Madame said on the telephone. “Madame Perceval.” Then she launched into Italian, which Flip did not understand. There was a good deal of laughter, then Madame hung up and took Flip’s cup. “All right, little one. Let me give you some more tea.”

  So Flip sat there and drank tea and ate Madame Perceval’s cakes and felt warmth from far more than the fire seep into her.

  Madame passed her the cake plate. “Have another. They come from Zürcher’s in Montreux and they’re quite special. I allow myself to have them every once in a while. What do you want to be after you leave school, Philippa? An artist?”

  Flip bit into a small and succulent cake, crisp layers of something filled with mocha cream. “I think so. But my father says it’s probably just because he paints and he doesn’t want me to do anything just because he does it. Anyhow, he says he’s not at all sure I have enough talent.”

  Madame laughed and filled Flip’s teacup for the third time. “I like your father’s work. Especially his illustrations for children’s books.”

  “Oh, do you know them?” Flip was excited.

  Madame reached up to the bookshelves and pulled down a copy of Oliver Twist.

  “Oh!” Flip said. “Oh, that’s one of my favorites!”

  Madame replaced the book. “Mine too. I keep your father’s things next to Boutet de Monvel, which shows you how much I think of him.”

  It was one of the most beautiful afternoons Flip had spent in a long time. She did not once think a dreary or bitter thought, such as, I’m the most unpopular girl in the school. That ought to make Eunice happy. When the bell rang for dinner and Madame sent her downstairs, for once she was almost eager to get to her place in the dining room. Tables were changed on Thursday, and she was at an unchaperoned table with only Erna from her room this week, but all the girls in the class whispered excitedly as she came in, “Philippa!” “Pill!” “Here she is!” “Where have you been?” “What happened to you?”

  She stood decorously behind her chair and waited for Mlle Dragonet to say grace. Erna burst out as they sat down, “Pill, we’ve been frantic! We thought you’d been kidnapped or something. If you hadn’t come to dinner we were going to tell Signorina you were lost. What on earth happened to you?”

  Flip actually grinned. “To me? What do you mean? Nothing.”

  “Stop being so smug,” Esmée Bodet said, tossing her hair back. “I told you she’d just sneaked off somewhere and there wasn’t any point worrying about her.”

  “But how could she just sneak off somewhere!” Erna cried. “We tied her so she couldn’t possibly get away.”

  “That’s right,” Flip agreed.

  “What happened, Pill, what happened?” Erna begged.

  “Oh,” Flip said airily, “my fairy godmother came and rescued me.”

  “But where were you during tea? Jackie and I missed tea looking for you and Signorina almost gave us deportment marks because we wouldn’t tell her what we were doing.”

  “Oh, I went over to Thonon,” Flip told her, “and had tea with a duke.”

  Erna and the other girls were looking at her with something like respect and for the first time Flip felt that she had triumphed.

  The next day was not easy for Flip, but somehow the fact that Madame Perceval knew it was the anniversary of her mother’s death helped. She thought she saw the art teacher looking at her during chapel, calmly, firmly, as though to give her strength.

  And it was Sunday, so she could escape the school and take her grief and go up the mountain with it, alone. And then she could go to the château. Paul was expecting her, and that, too, gave her strength.

  “Hello, Flip!” Paul shouted as soon as he saw her.

  “Hello!” she shouted back. She hurried across the rough ground to where he was waiting for her by the loose shutter. But when she reached him they both fell silent, somehow overcome with shyness. Paul ran his fingers over the flaking paint of the shutter, and Flip searched her mind for something to say. She hoped that any trace of the tears she had shed while she was climbing up through the trees had been wiped away by the wind. She thought of telling Paul that her mother had died a year ago, but something in his eyes made her sure that it would not be a good idea. Despite Paul’s loving mention of his parents, there was always grief in his eyes. She had no idea why, except that Paul’s eyes told her that he had endured something terrible, and that his own pain was all he could bear.

  Gloria or Sally or Esmée would know what to say to a boy, Flip thought. They had all been on dates; but Flip could not think of words that would not sound self-pitying; or, even worse, foolish.

  Then she looked at Paul’s face, at the shadowed eyes and the strong sensitive line of the jaw, and the way his mouth was tight, as though his teeth were clenched, and she felt that the things that Gloria or Sally or Esmée would say to Paul would not be the right things. She knew that they would say them, anyhow, unaware of their wrongness, and that they would think that Paul was handsome and romantic; but as she watched Paul standing there silently she felt with a sudden rush of confidence that he would prefer someone whose words were clumsy and inadequate, but honest, to someone whose words were glib and superficial; and this sudden sureness broke her fear of the silence and she no longer sought frantically for words.

  Then, because there was no longer any need to fear the silence, she was able to break it. “Where’s Ariel?”

  “He stayed home with my father,” Paul said.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind because I came back?” she asked. “Because if you’d rather be alone I’ll just go on walking somewhere.”

  “No—no—” Paul said quickly. “I’m sorry. We live alone and sometimes my father goes a whole day without saying anything. Of course some days he talks a great deal and reads to me, but I get used to being with someone and not talking.”

  “Who is your father?” Flip asked. “Where do you live?”

  “My father’s a professor of philosophy. He used to teach in Lausanne but now he’s at the Sorbonne. At least he’s there usually, I mean. This year he’s on a sabbatical leave and he’s writing a book. That’s why he doesn’t talk much. He spends hours in his study and then he comes to the table and I don’t think he has any idea what he eats. He just sits there and goes on thinking.”

  “Where do you live?” Flip asked again.

  “At the gate house to the château. But I stay over here most of the time and then I’m sure I won’t disturb my father and he won’t notice me and think I ought to be in school. Besides, there’s something I want to find out.”

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, Paul asked, “Would you like to see the château?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You aren’t afraid of bats and mice and rats and beetles and spiders and things, are you?”

  “Why?”

  “There are a great many inside.”

  Flip was afraid of bats and mice and rats and beetles and spiders and things; but she was more afraid of Paul’s scorn, so she said, “I don’t mind them.”

  Paul looked at her as though he knew that she minded very much indeed; then he slipped behind the shutter into the château, laughing back at her and calling, “Come on, Flip.”

  Flip followed him into a great hall with a fireplace the size of a room. The hall was bare and colder than outside.

  “There are rooms and rooms,” Paul said. “I’ve tried to count them, but each time I come out with a different number. There are so many little turns and passages. There are all these dozens of rooms and only one bathroom and it’s as big as our living room in the gate house. And the tub is the size of a swimming pool. But if you want hot water you have to build a fire in a sort of stove under the tub. Oh, come, Flip, I want to show you something.”

  Flip followed Paul down a labyrinth of passages into a small round room that must have been in one of the turre
ts. It had stained glass windows and, unlike most of the rooms, was not completely empty. In the center of the room was an old praying-chair with a monogram worked into the mahogany. Something was moving in the red velvet of the cushion and she leaned over and there was a tiny family of mice, the babies incredibly pink and soft.

  “Oh, Paul!”

  “We mustn’t disturb them, but I thought you’d like to see them. I found them only yesterday,” Paul said. “In the spring I’ll show you birds’ nests. Last spring in Paris I found a sparrow with its wing broken and I took care of it and helped it to learn to fly again and after that it came to my window every morning for crumbs. I kept them in the drawer of my desk and it used to fly through the window and over to the desk and jump up and down and squawk until I opened the drawer. I had a cat, too, who’d lost his tail in a fight. The concierge in our house is keeping the cat for me till I come back.”

  Flip bent over the mice again. “They’re so terribly sweet. I don’t see why people are afraid of mice.”

  “They don’t know them,” Paul said. “People are always afraid of things they don’t know. This room used to be the private chapel of the lady of the château, Flip, and that priedieu is where she used to kneel to pray.”

  “How do you know, Paul?” Flip asked.

  “My father told me. For a man who spends hours just sitting and thinking about philosophy he knows a tremendous amount about anything you can think of to ask him.”

  Flip crossed to one of the windows and looked out through a pane of blue glass onto a blue world. The sun was beginning to slip behind the mountain and she said, “I have to go now, Paul.”

  “Will you come next week?” Paul asked.

  “Yes, I could come on Saturday next week. I could come earlier in the afternoon if you’d like.”

  “I’d like it very much,” Paul said. “Do you really have to go now?”

  “I think I’d better.”

  “There are so many things I want to ask you. Do you like to ski?”

  “I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to learn this winter. Do you like it?”

  “More than anything in the world. I never can wait for the snow and they say it will be late this year. Do you like to read?”

  “I love it.”

  “I do too. Do you like the theatre?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So do I. We seem to like a lot of the same things. Maybe that’s why I can talk to you. Usually with other people I feel strange and as though there were a wall between us, or as though we were speaking a different language, even when we’re really not. I can speak four languages, yet I can’t talk at all to most people. But you’re different. I can talk to you so easily, and this is only the third time we’ve seen each other.”

  “I know,” Flip said, looking at the mice again instead of at Paul, at the tiny pink babies and at the little grey mother with her bright, frightened eyes. “I can talk to you, too, and I can’t talk to anybody at school.”

  Paul turned away from the mice. “We’re disturbing her. She’s afraid we might take her babies. Come on. We’d better go downstairs. I don’t want you to get into trouble at your school. They’d be very unpleasant if they knew you’d been here.”

  “You seem to know a lot about girls’ schools,” Flip said.

  Paul started to lead the way back through the maze of corridors. “Institutions in general are similar,” he said loftily. Then, “You really will come on Saturday, Flip?”

  “Come hell or high water,” Flip promised, feeling very bold.

  Paul held out his hand to say good-bye and Flip took it. She felt that Paul did not realize that he was shaking hands with the most unpopular girl in the school.

  She walked back to school, thoughtfully.

  She had been happy while she was with Paul, and while, underneath the happiness, there was still an ache of grief, there was also an acceptance. Her mother was dead. She would always miss her; she would always feel the loss of her mother’s confidence in her value; but she knew now that the confidence must come from within herself. Even if her mother had not died, Flip would have had to stop clutching at her mother’s faith in her, and find her own.

  At the clearing at the edge of the woods she stopped to make sure no one was around, and then ran across the open space, trying not to get out of breath because she knew that if she went into the common room, still panting, her cheeks flushed, someone would notice and try to find out where she had been. She wanted nothing more than to tell someone about Paul; she had always wanted to share her happiness with the world, but she knew that if she was to see him again she had to keep him a secret.

  And he wants to see me again! she thought exultantly. He’s not frightening the way I always thought being alone with a boy would be. It was just like talking to anyone, only nicer, and he wants to see me again!

  She had seen a tapestry once, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, of a young page standing with a unicorn. The page was tall and slender with huge dark eyes and thick dark hair, and Paul reminded her of him. He had the same unselfconscious grace, and when his hand rested on Ariel’s collar it was with the same self-assured nobility that the hand of the page rested on the unicorn’s neck. She was pleased and excited that she had thought of the resemblance. And I can imagine that Ariel’s magic like the unicorn, she thought. After all, it was he who brought me to Paul.

  Tuesday was fine, so Flip’s class was taken by Fräulein Hauser and Madame Perceval on the promised trip to the Col de Jaman. From the playing fields at school they could see the Dent de Jaman rising high and white above the Col, and Erna said that in the spring they would climb the Dent itself. It looked very high and distant to Flip and she was just as happy that they were to start with the Col, which was the flat high ridge from which the Dent pierced upward into the sky. It was to be an all-day trip. They were to be excused from all classes and would start right after call over.

  “It’s almost worth having new girls,” Erna shouted to Jackie, “to get an excursion like this!”

  They lined up on the cement walk under the plane trees while Fräulein Hauser called the roll. They did not have to choose partners, and this was a relief to Flip, because even the most polite girls in the class seemed to her to look annoyed when they were stuck with her, and on Thursday when one of the girls had been in the infirmary with a cold and there had been an odd number in the class, Flip had been left without a partner altogether, and Miss Armstrong, who was taking the walk, had had to say, “Philippa, go walk with Solvei Krogstad and Margaret Campbell.”

  Fräulein Hauser blew her whistle and they started off. At first they walked along the road that wound up the mountain past the school, passing chalets and farms and an occasional villa. Madame Perceval led the way, with two of the new girls. Fräulein Hauser brought up the rear with Erna and Jackie. Flip straggled along with Gloria and Sally and Esmée Bodet, not particularly wanting to walk with them, wanting even less to walk alone. After a while Madame Perceval turned off the road and they plunged into the shade of the forest and now Flip was able to pull aside and walk by herself without feeling conspicuous. Her feet were almost noiseless as she walked over a deep layer of fallen pine needles and moist leaves and she noticed that even Gloria and her group were walking more quietly. Gloria saw Flip and beckoned to her, but Flip no longer felt any need to straggle along beside anyone, and continued quite happily to walk by herself, Philippa alone with the forest.

  Here the trees were taller and of greater girth than the trees in the woods behind the school, and the sun came through them in delicate arrows, piercing the dark iris of Jackie’s left eye, bringing out the ruddy lights in Madame Perceval’s hair, striking the gold of the braces on Erna’s teeth. Then at last they emerged beyond the forest and came out into pastureland. Now, as they climbed, the trees would be below them; when they were high enough the trees would seem like a girdle about the mountains. The rough grass was broken here and there by rocks and the girls would climb onto t
hem and leap off, laughing and shouting. Sometimes they passed cows or goats; constantly Flip could hear the faint ringing of the animals’ bells.

  Fräulein Hauser blew her whistle. “We will stop here for lunch,” she announced.

  They sprawled about on the largest rocks, opening their lunches. They had bread and cheese, an apple and an orange, some sweet biscuits, and a little twist of paper containing salt and pepper for the hard-boiled egg in the bottom of the bag. Madame Perceval carried a canteen of coffee and a flask of brandy in case of emergency, and they each had a canteen filled with fresh water from the school.

  Flip sprawled on a small rock near Madame Perceval, who was laughing and joking with a group of girls. She smiled warmly at Flip and tried to draw her into the conversation, but Flip sat there shyly, afraid that if she spoke she would say the wrong thing and someone would laugh at her. One of the girls was missing salt and pepper from her package, and Flip offered hers. At the careless “Thanks, Pill,” Madame Perceval looked at Flip intently, not missing the quick flush that always came to her face at the use of the nickname.

  After they had finished eating they started to climb again. Now the way became rockier and steeper, and Flip and several of the less athletic girls were panting and ready to flop down on the turf long before they reached the flat plateau of the Col. Flip’s throat was dry and aching and her heart thumped painfully against her ribs.

  But when they finally reached the summit, she realized that the climb was more than worth it. She dropped onto a patch of rust-colored grass; the sky was incredibly blue above her and the Dent de Jaman rose out of the Col like a white castle, like the home of the snow queen in Andersen’s fairy tale. A small wind blew across her hot cheeks and the ache in her knee dwindled and the sunlight made the old, rusty grass seem almost golden. She closed her eyes and the sunlight flickered over her eyelids and the grass pricked through her uniform into her skin and she rolled over and laid her cheek against a flat grey rock and somewhere, far off, she heard a bird singing.