CHAPTER XIIILONELINESS
SHE began to be very lonely. She had no friends.
She began to long for companionship. Since her estrangement from George, the Trants’ household had of course been barred to her. This meant the loss of Helen’s benign, sweetening companionship. There was something in Helen.... Catherine missed those Sunday teas at “Highfield.” She missed Mrs. Trant’s anxious affability, Mr. Trant’s bluff hooliganism (which she detested), and Helen’s smile, aloof yet full of serene understanding. She missed even those lingering homeward strolls with George, the comfortable feel of his arm linked in hers, and the faint tobacco aroma of his clothes. Undoubtedly she missed his companionship and his passing flashes of brilliance. Once she composed a letter to him....
We can’t be lovers, but why shouldn’t we be friends? Surely we’re capable of it. I for one am desperately lonely.... But understand, there is not the slightest prospect of anything further than friendship developing.... But friendship I should be glad to have....
We can’t be lovers, but why shouldn’t we be friends? Surely we’re capable of it. I for one am desperately lonely.... But understand, there is not the slightest prospect of anything further than friendship developing.... But friendship I should be glad to have....
She tore it up as soon as she had read it over. It was no good. He would not understand....
Often in the midst of applause at her concerts she would think the awful thought: I am the loneliest person of you all. You who are envying me have friends and companions. I have none. I am utterly to be pitied.
And sometimes as she strolled along the tree-hung suburban roads the idea of suicide would come before her calmly and without effort. It was one solution of the difficulty. It was one she did not propose totake. For one thing, life was very precious. And for another, she had not the courage.... But suicide always took the position in her mind of a possible and perfectly feasible proposition. She was not hopelessly prejudiced against it....
She would undoubtedly have killed herself but for music. Music gave her courage. She felt that fame as a pianist would compensate for utter unhappiness and loneliness. She had always the feeling: If I am subject to some great trial, if I am miserable and unhappy, I can put my misery and unhappiness into my playing. If my heart is ever on the point of breaking, I shall play Chopin’s Nocturnes the better for it. My misery I shall not have to bear alone: the whole world (or a large part of it) will bear it with me. The miseries of other folk are no less intense than mine, but they are suffered in silence and forgotten. Mine will be bequeathed to the world. Even my loneliness will not be so tragic when all the world is sharing it with me.Ishall suffer, but thousands will throb, not with sympathy, but with an infinitely greater thing—my own agony made real in their hearts. I shall be immortal even if the only thing of me that lasts is what I have suffered....
The craving for immortality in her did not wear a religious aspect. All she desired was to leave behind some ineffaceable indisfigurable thing that she had felt, or that had been a part of her. I am not worth preserving, she told herself. No angel business for me. But my feelings, my sensations, my strange moods and aspects, these are exquisite, different from everything else that has ever existed—divine, imperishable, everlasting. When people have forgotten who I was I shall not mind if they will only remember some solitary fragment of what I have felt....
This was her aim in playing. She projected her personality into the music. Chopin was passionately Chopin when she played him: he was also passionately herself.
But she was tragically lonely.
Her loneliness made her do strange things. One Saturday afternoon in Epping Forest she found a boy fishing with a jam jar in a small pond. He was busy with tadpoles. He had glorious golden hair and blue eyes,and might have been about twelve or thirteen years old.
“Hullo!” she called. “Caught anything yet?”
He had waded ten or fifteen yards from the bank. He held up a jar.
“Do let me see!” she cried enthusiastically.
He waded back, and they sat down on a grassy bank and examined the contents of the jar. For over half an hour she tried to comprehend his enigmatic Cockney. She hated insects of all kinds, and tadpoles produced in her the same kind of revulsion as did insects. But for half an hour she conquered that revulsion. She held tadpoles in her hand, though her flesh shrank in horror. She was so utterly lonely that this was not too great a price to pay for chatter and companionship.
He was an ordinary gutter-urchin, the kind that runs after the wagonettes touting for halfpennies. His clothes were tattered and not too clean, but she did not mind. She wished she could have talked in his language. She wished he would tell her his secrets. As it was, their conversation was confined to tadpoles, of which subject she was lamentably ignorant.
In a dim, formless way she wished he might sprain his ankle or be taken ill so that she could wait on him and mother him. She wanted some excuse for touching his soft hair and his eyes and his beautiful bare feet.
But when his mates appeared suddenly round the corner of a bush he took up his jar and left her without a word.... Still, she was happy and smiling, though her flesh still crept at the thought of tadpoles.
Children were very nice ... especially boys.
But the maternal instinct was not very strong in her. It was only her loneliness that had intensified what of it that there was.
The thirteenth mazurka of Chopin filled her with strange ecstasy. It was so lonely....
She became increasingly conscious of the defects of her education. Literature at the Bockley High School for Girls had meant a painful annual struggle through a play of Shakespeare and a novel of Sir Walter Scott. Catherine did not like either of these authors. The former she regarded secretly as an uninspired country gentleman who had industriously put into blank verse thoughts so obvious that nobody had ever previously deemed them worthy of mention. Such remarks as “Evil and good are mingled in our natures.” ... Her acquaintance with the immortal bard had been confined to that small residue left of his plays when the censoring hand of Miss Forsdyke had excluded (a) those plays which are too poor to be worth reading, and (b) those which are unsuitable for critical analysis in the Bockley High School for Girls. Of Scott, Catherine’s opinion was no higher. She found him woefully dull. And invariably she had to learn his glossaries at the end of the book.
The net result was that Catherine’s literary equipment comprised a few score obsolete words and idioms culled in an entirely stupid fashion fromAs You Like It,The Merchant of Venice, andThe Talisman. Of Lamb, Hazlitt, Landor, Rossetti, the Brontës, De Quincey, Fitzgerald and the modernists she knew nothing. She had been brought up with a vague prejudice that reading anything less than a hundred years old was wasting time. It seemed to her on the face of it quite inconceivable that people should ever equal Scott and Shakespeare. Though she liked neither of them, she was overwhelmed by the mighty consensus of opinion labelling them as the greatest masters (for school use) of the English language. Only rarely did she rebel, and then she thought vaguely: “Supposing all this Scott-and-Shakespeare-worship is a great organized conspiracy!” ...
Of French literature she knew nothing. Her study of the French language had not progressed beyond an ability to demand writing implements. (“Bring me pens, ink, writing-paper, a blotter and a stamp. What time does the next post go? Say: At what hour departs the next post?”)That the French language possessed a literature she was but dimly aware. Her ideas of France and the French were derived from various stage Frenchmen she had seen upon the boards of the Bockley Victoria Theatre. France was a nation of dapper little gesticulating men with Imperial beards, and heavily rouged girls who wore skirts a few inches shorter than on this side of the Channel, and said “Cheri?” She was a land of boulevards and open-air cafés, and absinthe and irreligion. Her national industry was adultery.
Partly to occupy her time when she was not practising the piano Catherine joined the Bockley Free Library. She read most of the Victorian poets, and was oppressed by the heavy sentimentality of Tennyson. But she was not really fond of reading; it was only loneliness that drove her to it. Only one of Dickens’ novels fascinated her, and that wasGreat Expectations. But forJane EyreandWuthering Heightsshe had a passionate admiration.
Once she discovered a book by Verreker. It was calledGrowth of the Village Community. Obeying a swift impulse, she took it out and went home with it. That evening she wrestled with the first chapter....
Her amazement that anybody could write such a thing was only equalled by her amazement that anybody could read it. It was to Scott in point of heaviness as a hydraulic press is to a pound weight.
It did not precisely raise her opinion of Verreker in the way that might have been expected. It amazed her, but it also made her think: “What’s the good of all this useless learning? It makes no difference to him. Nobody would know how clever he is to look at him. And yet he must have been studying these weird problems for years.” ...
She had no sympathy with the remorseless pursuit of knowledge. Her forte was the pursuit of experience.