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.’