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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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