IX
Sophia Lane Watson and I made friends. It was a rather odd friendship, never very intimate. I used to doubt sometimes if she could be intimate with anybody. She seemed to live her own life inside a sort of fortress, and although she would open the door a little way, she never opened it wide and let one really in. And for me, any friendship at school was a subsidiary thing, not comparable really to my friendship for Guy and Hugo.
But life at school was very different for me after she had come.
She used to surprise me often; sometimes she shocked me; she seemed to have thought and decided upon so many subjects which had never crossed my mind at all.
She told me about the second week of our acquaintance that she was an atheist and an anarchist. She looked at me with a sort of quiet defiance as she said it, and added:
‘It is best to be quite plain about it—now you know.’
I don’t think I was very sure at the time what either meant. We had never discussed religion or politics at Yearsly. That may seem odd, but it had never come our way, and I only associated anarchists with bombs; but I was not disturbed, for I was sure that I liked Sophia.
She leant me Shelley’s Essays, and expounded Atheism and Anarchy of a very theoretic kind to me, and I was a good deal impressed. The very fact of not having defined my own beliefs made the shaking of them less severe. Afterwards of course I told Hugo what she had said, and he too read the Necessity of Atheism and was interested in it; but Hugo never cared very much for Shelley, not as he cared for Keats, and Shakespeare, and Campion, and Paradise Lost.
Sophia was at this time a Shelley devotee. She knew hundreds of lines by heart, not only the lyrics, but a great deal of the political verse as well. I remember her walking down the passage from her bath, in a blue dressing gown, saying over and over with intense feeling: ‘I met Murder by the way; He had a Mask like Castlereagh,’ and she told me about this time that she thought if Castlereagh were alive now she would kill him.
‘Or at least I would like to try,’ she added with the sudden drop into reasonableness which often surprised one.
She would talk endlessly on subjects of this sort—freedom and tyranny, and what truth was, and whether there was such a thing as goodness. I expect most of what she said was nonsense, but even so, she must have been precocious for a child of thirteen. But of her personal feelings she hardly ever spoke, nor of her home.
I thought at first she was homesick, but she was not. I don’t think she liked her home any more than school. She gave me the feeling sometimes of a creature at bay, on the defensive somehow against life. She said once—I forget how the subject came up:
‘I hate pretty people—my sister is pretty.’
And another time when I had been speaking about Yearsly, she looked at me seriously with her big green eyes and said:
‘It is curious how you love Guy and Hugo. I should have thought you would dislike them, being brought up with them like that.’
These were the sort of things that shocked me at first, but not when I knew her better. I realized then that she did not mean them in a shocking way.
I thought how differently I should feel if I had not lived at Yearsly, if, for instance, my own mother had brought me up, and I felt very sorry for Sophia, and that made me like her more.
She was in a higher form than me, although she was younger, and I did not see much of her during the day, but in our second term we were put to sleep together, just us two in the room, and we used to talk in the mornings and evenings, and on Sundays, when we went for walks. Sophia had been ill and she was not allowed to play games. She always went for walks, and I did so too when I could, and walked with her.
It was the end of that second term that she made her sensation.
There were always recitations at the end of that term, and a prize for the best recitation. That time there was a choice of three pieces, all Shakespeare, and one was Lady Macbeth’s speech.
I was considered good at this, and there were two or three others who were good. Nobody expected anything of Sophia—she was so unemotional and stiff as a rule.
And then suddenly she took us all by storm.
She stood up on the platform, looking like a ghost, and the moment she began to speak a thrill ran through us all. There were visitors there, parents and people, and they too were completely taken by surprise.
It was not like a child reciting at all. Her great deep voice rose and fell, with an odd little break in it at times. She held her hands in front of her and rubbed at the spot like some one in a dream. It was, I still believe, a marvellous bit of acting, quite on a different level from anything we were used to. When it was over there was a thunder of applause, and Miss Ellis, the head mistress, went across to Sophia and shook hands with her. The recitals were her special subject, and the visitors were all asking who Sophia was.
Sophia slipped off at the back of the platform and came back to her seat in the hall, but afterwards when the prize-giving was over people crowded up to her, girls and their parents and mistresses. There was a buzzing and a fuss, and I could see that Sophia was not liking it. Then she disappeared, and when Miss Ellis wanted to introduce her to a distinguished old man who had written about Shakespeare she couldn’t be found, and Miss Ellis was annoyed. Afterwards I found her under her bed, crying bitterly on the floor. She was quite wild and wouldn’t come out, and told me to go away. At last I got her to come out, and tried to find out what had upset her, but for a long time I couldn’t make out. She kept saying that she could never come back to school now, she could never face the girls again.
‘Why did I do it?’ she wailed. ‘What possessed me to do it? Now I have let them inside and I have given myself away. Oh, it is awful! And perhaps they will say something about it at home!’
I thought vaguely that she must have some plan of going on the stage, but it was not that.
‘Don’t you understand?’ she said at last. ‘It is as though you had got up and told all that crowd just what you feel about Guy and Hugo and Cousin Delia. You couldn’t live if you had done that, could you? Can’t you imagine it?—Ella Price and Rosa Baylis and all of them.’
She was beside herself. I think now it was probably a reaction from excitement, and that she hardly knew what she said, but I was frightened then. I did what I could with her, and got her into bed. I think she agreed to go to bed as a means of avoiding the girls downstairs. Then I told a Miss Singleton, whom we both liked, that she was not well, and Miss Singleton came up to see her. I don’t know how much she told Miss Singleton.
The next morning the school broke up, and we all went away. I wondered if Sophia would come back after all the next term. She did; but she would not speak about that evening, and she would not recite again all the time she was at school.
I told Hugo about it in the holidays, and he did not seem at all surprised.
‘I quite understand her feeling like that,’ he said. ‘That is if it was really good, you know, not just good, but really first-rate, and it must have been from what you say. Like saying your prayers aloud, real prayers, and then finding suddenly you had done it. . . . I should like to see that Sophia.’
I asked Sophia to come to Yearsly at Easter, but she couldn’t. One of her brothers had whooping cough, and she was in quarantine; and I asked her again in the summer, but for some other reason she couldn’t come.
When she did come for a few days the next year, Hugo was disappointed in her. She didn’t talk and seemed out of it, and Guy thought her too ‘intellectual.’ He was in a phase of disliking ‘intellectual women.’