And both were young

by Madeleine L'Engle

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.