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Sophia wrote a great deal of poetry. She did not show it to me till I had known her over a year. I don’t know now if it was good; I thought so then. It was odd, passionate stuff, very correct in form. She wrote a good many sonnets, some obscure, rather mystical things about the universe, and some love poems, which surprised me very much. I wanted to show them to Hugo, but she would not let me.
‘I don’t want anyone to see them ever,’ she said. ‘I have only shown them to you—and I shall be sorry about that!’
At the end of her second year at school Sophia got pneumonia. She was very ill indeed, and there were special prayers for her in the school service.
Several girls cried. Ella Price came up to me afterwards, wiping her eyes.
‘I shall never forgive myself,’ she sobbed, ‘never, if anything happens to Sophia.’
‘You were always unkind to her,’ I said.
Then I was sorry for Ella, for I thought how terrible it would be if Sophia did die, and she knew she had been unkind.
‘I don’t think you mattered very much to her,’ I said.
It did not console Ella, but it was the most I could say. I was unhappy about Sophia, and it made me angry with the people who had been unkind.
Sophia got better, and when she was better I was allowed to sit with her, and I asked her one day if she had been frightened when she was so ill.
She looked at me a long time without speaking, and her eyes looked enormous.
‘Not frightened of dying,’ she said. ‘I heard them talking once, and they said, “Not much hope now—just a chance,” and I was glad.’
I thought:
‘ “Not much more to face.” I can’t face life when I am tired.’
It gave me a shiver to hear her.
‘Are you really so unhappy, Sophia?’ I asked.
And she said:
‘Not unhappy, exactly—but I do hate life. I feel it trying to down me all the time, and sometimes I am afraid that it will in the end.’
I wondered what Cousin Delia would have made of Sophia. She would not have felt like that, I thought, if she had been with Cousin Delia.
Sophia and I remained friends, but as the time went on it was not equal. She needed me more than I needed her. I think she wanted some one to admire and love very much, and she had no one else—and of course I had.
She said to me once:
‘I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be lovely like you.’
And I laughed at her and said:
‘But you don’t like pretty people.’ But I was pleased.
She said quite seriously:
‘I feel differently about it since I have known you, and besides, you’re more than pretty. You’re lovely. It’s like the sun coming out of clouds when you come into a room!’
I laughed at her, but I liked her saying that, all the same. Nobody had said things like that to me before.
When I went home the next holidays I wondered if Guy and Hugo thought me pretty, and Cousin Delia. I wanted to ask them, but I couldn’t.
What I enjoyed perhaps most at school was the dancing.
We had dancing lessons twice a week and practice dances on Saturday evenings.
It was like discovering a new world to me, learning to dance. We only danced with each other, of course, and with whichever partner was allotted to us, except on Saturdays, when we chose as we liked. There was one girl called Flora Hilman, whom I always danced with when I could. She was very tall, with red hair, and she danced beautifully. We hardly ever spoke to each other in between, but we danced together whenever we could, and I forgot everything else when we were dancing. I expect she did too, but she never said so and I never asked her.
I met her once after leaving school. She was walking in Kensington Gardens with a man in a top hat, and I was with Guy. We stopped when we saw each other and looked pleased. I think we both thought at first that we had lots to say to each other, and then found there was nothing at all. We said:
‘How funny to meet here.’
But it wasn’t funny really, as we both lived in London.
Then we said:
‘How nice to see you again,’ or something like that.
And she said:
‘Do you ever go down to Ellsfield now?’ (The School was called Ellsfield.)
And I said:
‘No, do you?’
And she said:
‘Yes, I do sometimes.’
Then we waited a minute or two, and Guy and the man in the top hat said something to each other, and then we said ‘Good-bye.’
I have never seen her again. Somebody told me she had married a German just before the war, but I didn’t believe it somehow, I don’t know why.
Sophia couldn’t dance at all. It was funny how she couldn’t learn, and I think she was sorry about it. And she couldn’t play the piano. She started to learn Russian about this time. She got a dictionary and grammar, and some Russian books, and she used to try and learn it in odd moments, in bed at night, and at times when she ought to be preparing lessons. She had a passion for Tolstoy at this time, and said she must read him in the original. She did not get time to do much at school, but she learned quite a lot by herself in the holidays.
It seems odd in a way, considering how much we were friends at that time, that we did not keep up with each other more afterwards. It was my fault, I think. I left school two years before she did, and my life was so full of other things and people that she slipped out. We wrote to each other for a time, and she kept on writing for a bit after I had stopped. It was on my mind, I know, that I had not answered her letters. I kept meaning to, and putting it off, and then I wrote and she did not answer, and we let it drop. When we met again, later, it was quite a different thing, just as one meets a stranger.