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 the entire mountains and all the valley were covered with
snow.
From the room behind her she could hear all the various evening noises,
the sound of the victrola 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 pot-pourri 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, 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.
7
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 which 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 grudge the iodine which 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 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 bed time 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 for the first time listening 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 towards 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 choir boys, 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 Rhône 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 non-denominational 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 complete; 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 frizzy dark hair and down at her feet. It seemed that she had
seen more of feet since she had been at school than 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.
8
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
towards the door.
There was almost fifteen minutes before lunch and Flip knew that she
could not go to the Class Room or the Common Room without losing the
happiness that the art lesson had given her and she wanted to go some
place 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 girls 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."