“Let’s play Ping-Pong before the bell rings,” Jackie suggested.
“Coming, Pill?” Gloria cried.
Flip shook her head. “No, thank you.”
She wandered over to one of the long windows and stepped out onto the balcony. The wind was cool and comforting to her hot cheeks. The sky was full of stars and she looked up at them and tried to feel their cold clear light on her upturned face. Across the lake the mountains of France loomed darkly, suddenly breaking into brightness as the starlight fell on their snowy tips. Flip tried to imagine what it would be like when all the mountains and valleys were covered with snow.
From the room behind her she could hear all the various evening noises, the sound of the phonograph playing popular records, the click, click, click of the Ping-Pong ball Erna, Jackie, and Gloria were sending over the net, and the excited buzz of general conversation. Although the girls were supposed to speak French at all times, this final period of freedom was not supervised, and Flip heard snatches of various languages, and of the truly international language the girls had developed, a potpourri of all their tongues.
“Ach,” she heard someone saying, “I left mein ceinture dans le shower ce morgen. Quelle dope ich bin!”
She sat down on the cold stone floor of the balcony and leaned her face against the black iron rail. The rail felt cold and rough to her cheek. She looked down to the path below where Miss Tulip in her white uniform was walking briskly between the plane trees. Flip sat very still, fearful lest the matron look up and see her.
The bell rang. Out here on the balcony it did not sound so loud. She heard the girls in her class putting books, records, and note paper into their lockers and slamming the doors, and she knew that she would have to come in and follow them upstairs. But not yet. Not quite yet. It would take them a little while to get everything put away. She heard someone else walking along the path below and looked down and recognized Madame Perceval. Madame Perceval stopped just below Flip’s balcony and leaned against one of the plane trees. She stood there very quietly, looking down over the lake.
She thinks it’s beautiful, too, Flip thought, and suddenly felt happier. She scrambled to her feet and went back into the common room just as Gloria and a group of girls were leaving. They saw her.
“Oh, here comes Pill!” Gloria shouted.
“Hello, Pill!” they all cried.
The brief happiness faded from Flip’s eyes.
Almost the most difficult thing, Flip found, was never being alone. From the moment she woke up in the morning until she fell asleep at night, she was surrounded by girls. She was constantly with them, but she never felt that she was of them. She tried to talk and laugh, to be like them, to join in their endless conversations about boys and holidays, and clothes and boys, and growing up and again boys, but always it seemed that she grew clumsier than ever and the wrong words tumbled out of her mouth. She felt like the ugly sister in the fairy tale she had loved when she was younger, the sister whose words turned into hideous toads, and all the other girls were like the beautiful sister whose words became pieces of gold. And she would stand on the hockey field when they chose teams, looking down at her toe scrounging into the grass, and pretend that she didn’t care when the team that had the bad luck to get her let out a groan, or the gym teacher, Fräulein Hauser, snapped, “Philippa Hunter! How can you be so clumsy!” And Miss Tulip glossed over Jackie’s untidy drawers and chided Flip because her comb and brush were out of line. And Miss Armstrong, the science teacher, cried, “Really, Philippa, can’t you enter the classroom without knocking over a chair?” And when she fell and skinned her knees Miss Tulip was angry with her for tearing her stockings and even seemed to begrudge the iodine that she put on Flip’s gory wounds.
If only I knew a lot of boys and could talk about them, she thought, or if I was good at sports.
But she had never really known any boys, and sports were a nightmare to her.
So in the common room she stood awkwardly about and tried to pretend she liked the loud jazz records Esmée played constantly on the phonograph. Usually she ended up out on the balcony, where she could at least see the mountains and the lake, but soon it became too cold out on the balcony in the dark, windy night air and she was forced to look for another refuge. If she went to the empty classroom, someone always came in to get something from a desk or the cupboard. They were not allowed to be in their rooms except at bedtime or when they were changing for dinner or during the Sunday afternoon quiet period. She was lonely, but never alone, and she felt that in order to preserve any sense of her own identity, to continue to believe in the importance of Philippa Hunter, human being, she must find, for at least a few minutes a day, the peace of solitude. At last, when she knew ultimately and forever how the caged animals constantly stared at in the zoo must feel, she discovered the chapel.
The chapel was in the basement of the school, with the ski room, the coat rooms, and the trunk rooms. It was a bare place with rough white walls and rows of folding chairs, a harmonium, and a small altar on a raised platform at one end. Every evening after dinner the girls marched from the dining room down the stairs to the basement and into the chapel, where one of the teachers read the evening service. Usually Flip simply sat with the others, not listening, not hearing anything but the subdued rustlings and whisperings about her. But one evening Madame Perceval took the service, reading in her sensitive contralto voice, and Flip found herself listening for the first time to the beauty of the words: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. Sing unto the Lord with the harp, and the voice of a psalm . . . let the hills be joyful together.” And Flip could feel all about her in the night the mountains reaching gladly toward the sky, and the sound of the wind on the white peaks must be their song of praise. The others, too, as always when Madame Perceval was in charge, were quieter, not more subdued but suddenly more real; when Flip looked at them they seemed more like fellow creatures and less like alien beings to fear and hate.
After chapel that evening, when they were back in the common room, Flip pretended that she had left her handkerchief and slipped downstairs again to the cold basement. She was afraid of the dark, but she walked slowly down the cold corridor, lit only by a dim bulb at the far end, blundering into the trunk room, filled with the huge and terrifying shapes of trunks and suitcases, before she opened the door to the chapel.
Down one wall of the chapel were windows, and through these moonlight fell, somehow changing and distorting the rows of chairs, the altar, the reading stand. Flip drew in her breath in alarm as she looked at the organ and saw someone seated at it, crouched over the keys. But it was neither a murderer lying in wait for her nor a ghost, but a shadow cast by the moon. She slipped in and sat down on one of the chairs and she was trembling, but after a while her heart began beating normally and the room looked familiar again.
She remembered when she was a small girl, before her mother died, she had had an Irish nurse who often took her into the church just around the corner from their apartment. It was a small church, full of reds and blues and golds and the smell of incense. Once her nurse had taken her to a service and Flip had been wildly elated by it, by the singing of the choirboys, the chanting of the priest, the ringing of the bells; all had conspired to give her a sense of soaring happiness. It was the same kind of happiness that she felt when she saw the moonlight on the mountain peaks or the whole Rhone valley below her covered with clouds, and she could lean out over the balcony and be surrounded by cloud, lost in cloud, with only a branch of elm appearing with shy abruptness as the mist was torn apart.
Here in the nondenominational chapel at school she felt no sense of joy; there was no overwhelming beauty here between these stark walls, but gradually she began to relax. There was no sound but the wind in the trees; she could almost forget the life of the school going on above her. She did not try to pray, but she let the quiet sink into her, and when at last she rose she felt more comp
lete; she felt that she could go upstairs and remain Philippa Hunter who was going to be an artist, and she would not be ashamed to be Philippa Hunter, no matter what the girls in her class thought of her.
At last she rose and started out of the chapel, bumping into a row of chairs with a tremendous clatter. The noise shattered her peace and she stopped stock still, her heart beating violently, but when nothing else happened, when no one came running to see who had desecrated the chapel, she walked swiftly out on tiptoe. She opened the door and came face-to-face in the corridor with Miss Tulip in her stiff white matron’s uniform.
“Well! Philippa Hunter!”
Flip felt as though she had been caught in some hideous crime. She looked wildly around.
“Where have you been?” Miss Tulip asked.
“In the chapel—” she whispered.
“Why?” Miss Tulip snapped on her pince-nez and looked at Flip as though she were some strange animal.
Flip could not raise her voice from a stifled whisper. “I wanted to—to be alone.”
Miss Tulip looked at Flip more curiously than ever. “That’s very nice, I’m sure, Philippa, dear, but you must remember that there is a time and place for everything. You are not allowed in the chapel except during services.”
“I’m sorry,” Flip whispered. “I didn’t know.” She looked away from Miss Tulip’s dark frizzy hair and down at her feet. It seemed that she had seen more of feet since she had been at school than in the rest of her life put together.
“We won’t say anything about it this time.” Miss Tulip looked at Flip’s bowed head. “Your part’s not quite straight, Philippa. It slants. See that you get it right tomorrow.”
“Yes, Miss Tulip.”
“Now run along and join the other girls. It’s nearly time for lights-out.”
“Yes, Miss Tulip.” Flip fled from the matron and the musty dampness of the corridor.
But she knew that she would go back to the chapel.
The following day art was the last class of the morning. Madame Perceval had said to the new girls, “I want you to paint me a picture. Just anything you feel like. Then I will know more what each one of you can do.”
Flip was painting a picture of the way she thought it must look up on the very top of the snow-tipped mountains, all blues and lavenders and strange misshapen shadows. And there was a group of ice children in her picture, cold and wild and beautiful. During the first art class they had just drawn with pencil. Now they were using water color.
Madame Perceval came over and looked at Flip’s picture. She stood behind Flip, one strong hand resting lightly on her shoulder, and looked. She looked for much longer than she had looked at anyone else’s picture. Flip waited, dipping her brush slowly in and out of her cup of water. Finally Madame said, “Go on and let’s see what you’re going to do with it.” She didn’t offer suggestions or corrections as she had with most of the others, and as she moved on to the next girl she pressed Flip’s shoulder in a friendly fashion.
The art studio was on the top floor of the building. It was a long white room with a skylight. There were several white plaster Greek heads, a white plaster hand, a foot, and a skull, and in one corner a complete skeleton which was used only by the senior girls in advanced art. The room smelled something like Flip’s father’s studio and the minute Flip stepped into it she loved it and she knew that Madame Perceval was a teacher from whom she could learn. She chewed the end of her brush and thought fiercely about her painting and her ice children and then twirled her brush carefully over the cake of purple paint. Now she had completely forgotten the school and being laughed at and her incompetence on the playing fields and being screamed at and left out and pushed away. She was living with her ice children in the cold and beautiful snow on top of the mountain, as silver and distant as the mountains of the moon.
She did not hear the bell and it was a shock when Madame Perceval laughed and said, “All right, Philippa. That’s enough for this time,” and she saw that the others had put their paints away and were hurrying toward the door.
There was almost fifteen minutes before lunch and Flip knew that she could not go to the classroom or the common room without losing the happiness that the art lesson had given her. She wanted to go someplace quiet, where she could read again the letter from her father that had come that morning. She thought of the chapel and she thought of Miss Tulip. It’s Miss Tulip or God, she said to herself, and went to the chapel.
In the daylight there were no moving shadows; everything was as white and clean as the snow on the mountain peaks. Flip sat down and read her letter, warmed by its warmth. She was once again Philippa Hunter, a person of some importance, if only because she was important to her father and he had taught her to believe that every human being was a person of importance. After she had finished the letter for the third time she put it back in her blazer pocket and sat there quietly, thinking about the picture she had been painting that morning, planning new pictures, until the bell rang. Then she hurried up the stairs and got in line with the others.
Because she was the tallest girl in the class she was last in line, but Gloria twisted around from the middle of the row calling, “I say, Pill, where did you rush off to after art?”
“Oh—nowhere,” Flip said vaguely.
“Nowhere! You must have been somewhere!” Gloria cried. “Come on, Pill, where were you?”
Flip knew that Gloria would persist until she had found out, so she answered in a low voice, “In the chapel.”
“The chapel!” Gloria screeched. “What were you doing in the chapel!”
“You mean you went there when you didn’t have to go?” Erna asked. Flip nodded.
“What for?”
“Pill, are you nuts?”
They were all looking at her as though she were crazy and laughing at her.
Oh, please, she thought. I can’t even go to chapel to be quiet without its being something wrong.
Kaatje van Leyden, one of the senior prefects responsible for keeping order, called out, “Quiet!” and the chattering subsided.
But she knew that that would not be the end of it.
Gloria said one morning as they were making their beds and Erna and Jackie had not yet come up from breakfast, “I say, Philippa, you don’t mind my saying something, do you, ducky?”
“What?” Flip asked starkly.
“I mean because of us both being new girls and everything, I thought I ought to tell you.”
“What?” Flip asked again.
“Well, Pill, if I were you I wouldn’t keep running off to chapel, that’s all.”
Flip smoothed out her bottom sheet and tucked it in. “Why not?”
“The kids think it’s sort of funny.”
“I know they do.” Flip pulled up her blankets and straightened them out.
“How do you know?” Gloria asked.
Flip’s voice was tight. “I’m not deaf. Anyhow, I heard you laughing in the common room with them about it.”
“I never did.”
“I heard you.”
“You eavesdropped.”
“I didn’t. I walked into the common room and I couldn’t help hearing. Anyhow, I don’t go running off to chapel. I just go there once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You know, Pill,” Gloria said, cocking her head and looking at Flip curiously, “somehow I never thought of you as being particularly pious.”
Flip looked startled. “I don’t think I am. I mean, I never thought about it.”
“Then what do you go running off to chapel for? Don’t you go there to pray or something?”
“No,” Flip said. “At least I usually do say a prayer or something, because if I go there I think it’s only courteous to God. But I really go there to be alone.”
“To be alone?”
“Yes. There isn’t any other place to go.”
“What do you want to be alone for?” Gloria asked.
“I just do,” Flip
said. “If you don’t know why, I can’t explain it to you, Gloria.”
“You’re a funny kid, Pill,” Gloria said. “You’d be all right if you just gave yourself a chance.”
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.
And Both Were Young Page 4
