CHAPTER XVIALLEGRO CON FUOCO
REACTION visited her. Walking along the sun-white pavements the next morning the self-revelation of the night before seemed incredibly absurd. It had rained during the night, and the cool scent of the gravel roadways seemed somehow to radiate the suggestion that life was cool and clear and fresh, to be taken light-heartedly and never to be feared. As she walked with springing step along the High Road, there seemed such an infinitude of interests in her life that she could afford to say: If I never saw him again it would not matter much. Every shop-window seemed bulging with reasons why, if she were never to see him again, it would not matter much. And when she stood by the counter in Burlington’s music emporium and leisurely scanned through piles of pianoforte music, she decided sincerely and clinchingly: It is impossible that I am in love with him.
In the few novels she had read, being in love had been symptomized by dreamy abstraction, random melancholy, a tendency to neglect worldly duties, a replacement of clear-cut ambitions by a nebulous ideal. This was not true of her. Three hours of Chopin practising awaited her when she returned, and she was looking forward to it eagerly, enthusiastically. Never were her ambitions so clear and business-like, never had she less time and inclination for dreamy abstraction and random melancholy.
The air was clean and clear as after a storm. She saw nothing but sheer absurdity in herself. She went back to Gifford Road and threw her whole soul into Chopin. That she was able to do so seemed to be convincing proof of what she desired to prove. She wrote half a dozenletters, and as she methodically stamped the envelopes one after another she thought: This is life! Not emotional fireworks, but the sheer methodical doing of one thing after another. And I am not in love.... From the businesslike stamping of her envelopes she extracted that subtle consolation. Somehow there existed in her the weird idea that being in love would militate against the successful stamping of envelopes. She was immensely, incalculably pleased at the decision she had come to. Thereafter, every action of hers confirmed it. When she went for a motor drive into the Forest and enjoyed it thoroughly, she thought: This shows that I cannot be in love. And when she played Chopin she felt vaguely: A person in love would not play Chopin like this.... She discovered that platonic friendship meant the friendship of men and women devoid of ulterior motives.... Henceforth she was a passionate disciple of platonism, ignorant of the fact that a disciple of platonism must never be passionate. She applied platonism thus: I can be friendly with him without being in love with him. I can be and shall be. He is capable of platonic friendship: so am I....
A time came when she told herself: I am changing.... She was becoming more serious, less impressionable. Or so, at any rate, it seemed. Conversations with him had given her intellect a stimulus. She read Shaw and Ibsen, not so much to give herself ideas (though that result was inevitable) as to provide fascinating topics of discussion with him. For in those days Shaw was a rising and Ibsen a waning star in the intellectual firmament. Platonism was ever in her mind. She and Verreker met with moderate frequency, for his position as her concert organizer involved much business intercourse. They talked music and politics and economics and literature, and always she was afraid of two things, lest the conversation might flag, and lest she might make some absurd remark which would betray the poverty of her knowledge. And yet when she managed to discuss with him intelligently she neverimagined that she was deceiving him. She knew that he knew that all her knowledge was recently acquired, that her brain was only slightly above average, that she only imperfectly comprehended most of the topics she ventured remarks upon. An occasional remark of rank stupidity was almost inevitable under such conditions, and she knew it would not surprise him. He had no illusions about her which she could break. And yet the fear always hung over her when she was with him that some day she might say something irrevocably, catastrophically absurd. It was almost a relief to her when their meetings were over. The sensation was of having piloted a ship through a channel infested with rocks and succeeded somehow or other. Yet there was pleasure in the exercise. And she treasured up certain things he said, not for their intrinsic value, but because she had made him say them....
She was quite sincere and enthusiastic about the platonic basis of their friendship. She almost sentimentalized about it. She deified it till it shone with a flame infinitely more dazzling than that of love. She despised love. Love was elemental. Basically, it was animal: she watched the couples strolling at twilight beneath the trees of the Ridgeway, and saw nothing in them but the primitive male seeking the primitive female. The poetry, the idyllic quality fell from the amorousness of men and women and revealed it to her as something of sheer brute passion. (A cold douche from one of Shaw’s plays had assisted this transformation.) She felt herself consciously superior to these couples. She speculated on their thoughts, their conversations, their sympathies, and she almost despised them because their thoughts were not high, nor their conversations intellectual, nor their sympathies complex. She felt: the further and higher mankind develops the less prominence will be given to the merely brutish and physical aspect of passion. Until there shall at last be evolved the Higher Love, which is the union of twin affinities, indissolubly one by community of thought and sympathy and ideal. (This, by the way, she had read somewhere, and her mind seized hold of it greedily.) She couldnot conceive of Verreker and herself as man and wife. But as twin-souls their future seemed promising; and the strictly platonic nature of their association was consecrated by the application of the twin-soul theory. She diligently read abstruse, religious-cum-psychological works on the subject. She became possessed with a fierce enthusiasm for masculine camaraderie. Men, she thought, are easily able to enjoy delightful and perfectly platonic friendships with both men and women. Men have a greater capacity for friendship than women. They are less intensely sexual. They have a glorious sense of camaraderie which is as the breath of a gale over uplands. Whereas women are narrower, more passionate, maybe, in what attachments they do make, but incapable of realizing the male ideal of comradeship. She admired men for their wider and more spacious outlook on life. She became fond of the novels of Michael Fairless and Jack London. And, as a sort of reaction, she was profoundly affected by readingThe Hill, Vachell’s Harrow school story of a great friendship. Then she got hold of Wells’Passionate Friends, and it thrilled her by its seeming applicability to her own life. She felt, with some superiority: Most people would not understand this book. They would condemn it as unreal, exotic, untrue to life. But I understand it and know that it is very real and very true.... There were sentences inWuthering Heightswhich she treasured as enshrining her ideal in words of passionate epigram. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” was one of them. “I am Heathcliff!” she could scarcely read without poignant emotion. The enigma of Emily Brontë’s life made her construct many theories to account for the peculiar passion ofWuthering Heights....
Sometimes she would think proudly: This is an amazing friendship. We are people in a million. We are immeasurably higher in the human scale than those to whom such a relation as exists between us would be incomprehensible and incredible. It is not love that binds us—that reckless fuser of incompatibilities—it is an affinity of soul, rare, intense, exquisitely subtle....
And also there were moments of terrible lucidity, when the subtleties and complexities resolved themselves into a single pattern of tragic simplicity. She loved him and he did not love her. The relation between them was compounded of nothing but that. Everything else was artificial and a sham....
Yet platonism was her acknowledged ideal. She was curiously anxious in discussions with him to emphasize it, even to rhapsodize upon it, to pour scorn on the sentimentality that finds it unworkable. She strove to re-create herself on the lines of what she strangely imagined would be his ideal of womanhood. And somehow this re-creation of herself was inextricably bound up with the paramount necessity that their relations must be strictly platonic. She would show him (and herself) that she was capable of maintaining such a relationship. She found a savage pride in the restraints she was called upon to exercise. She took fierce delight in saying things which were not only not true, but which were like knife-thrusts directed against her own heart. Her life became interwoven with intrigue against herself. As time passed, the complexity of what she was attempting began to demand ruthless self-suppression and a constant cumulative duplicity. Some of the traits of her newly manufactured character she identified so thoroughly with herself that she almost forgot whether they were real or not. Some of the lies that she told and acted became as real to her as the truth. Moments came when her brain as well as her soul went reeling under the burden of the tangle she had herself created.
One of the cruellest moments of her life was when she realized for the first time that she was capable of jealousy. Hitherto she had extracted a kind of pleasure from the thought: However passionate I may be, I am not jealous. I am above that.... This supposed quality in her seemed to raise her emotions and her desires above the common level, and she was always grateful for any excuse to lift herself out of the world ofordinary passions and ordinary emotions. Her emotions lacerated her so much that she could not endure to think that she was one of millions suffering likewise. The communion of sorrow was no good to her. She wanted to be alone, to be unique, to be suffering more intensely than, or at any rate differently from the rest of the world. There was a subtle consolation in being a pioneer in experience.... And till now she had been able to think: My feelings cannot be quite the same as those of other people, because I am not jealous....
It came upon her with terrible lucidity that the only reason why she had not been jealous was that there had been nobody to be jealous of.... She was playing Chopin in a small West-end concert hall. Verreker and Helen Trant were seated in the front row. (Helen was now his stenographer, shorthand-typist and general amanuensis.) Just before she started to play she glanced down at the audience. She noticed Verreker and Helen, they were both bending their heads close together as if sharing some confidence; also, they were both smiling. And Catherine speculated: Has anything that I have ever said made him smile like that? ... She wanted to know what was the cause of their amusement. If she were with them she could ask. But here she was, condemned to play Chopin for an hour and a half, and by the end of the recital she knew that they would have probably forgotten the incident, even if she were to remind them of it. It was, no doubt, something ludicrously trivial and unimportant. Yet, whatever it was, it was being shared between Verreker and Helen.Shedid not come into it. And for a single blinding moment she felt angrily, contemptuously, vehemently jealous of Helen....
Then she was scornfully angry with herself. And bitterly humiliated besides. For the fact of her jealousy placed her immediately on a level with all the thousands of girls she passed every day in the streets—girls who did not give Chopin recitals at West-end concert halls.... She played Chopin automatically. All the while she was bitterly reproaching herself.
Is it possible, she speculated, to get jealous over a strictly platonic friendship? ...
Before long she had thoroughly convinced herself that Verreker, whether consciously or not, preferred Helen’s companionship to her own. A fiendish pleasure in lacerating herself made her ever observant for trivialities that seemed to confirm her conviction. A word, a look, a quick movement of his became overcharged with significance.... And so ashamed was she of this miserable jealousy, so angry with herself for harbouring it, that she deliberately encouraged his friendship with Helen. She told him of Helen’s splendidly sympathetic disposition, of her wonderful capacity for understanding, and of the staunchness of her friendship. She thrust Helen to the front whenever the three of them were together. She would say: “I’m sorry I’m engaged on Saturday afternoon, so I can’t come to the opera.... But you and Helen go. Don’t stay behind on my account.” Sometimes Verreker would show evident reluctance at her withdrawal from the triangle of friendship. And this reluctance, rare and slight though it was, was worth all the pain she had inflicted on herself. This reluctance was the thing in her life that she treasured most.
She was becoming distinctly morbid.
From thrusting Helen forward at every opportunity, her morbidity developed into the deeper folly of avoiding him herself. If she met him in company she would treat him curtly. Her one aim was that he should notice the change in her demeanour. He did so after a week or so of this treatment, and his manner to her became curiously tender and sympathetic. And although she knew the terrible morbidity of her manœuvring, she drank in his tenderness and sympathy until he had seemingly no more to give. She knew the situation could not last, but she had not the courage to put an end to it. Something impelled her to accentuate the curtness that had produced such bitter-sweetness for her. She did so, and overreached herself. His sympathy vanished if she avoided him, he avoided her as much if not more. And all the timefriendship with Helen was growing apace: Catherine’s withdrawal left the two of them more than ever together.... Secretly, Catherine was conscious that she was ruining whatever relationship existed between Verreker and herself. She had only herself to blame.
Casually, unostentatiously, she slipped back into the triangle. But her position was subtly different from before. The difference was indicated by his manner of inviting her to concerts, theatres, etc. Formerly he said: “I am going to the opera to-night: would you and Helen care to come?”
But now he said: “Helen and I are going to the opera to-night: would you care to come with us?”
It betokened a change, subtle, but of immense significance. And to endure it was all the harder, because Catherine knew that she was entirely responsible for it herself.
His character began to unfold itself to her in spasms of intimate revelation. But with each passing glimpse of something new she caught sight also of dim vistas of his soul, which she knew she could never explore. The more she learned the more she felt she could never learn.
He was tremendously ambitious.
Once he said to her: “If you knew my ambitions, if you knew what I hope to do some day, you’d be amazed, absolutely amazed!”
“Should I?” she replied. “I don’t know.... I’m very ambitious myself.” She was pleased that she was incidentally speaking the truth.
He looked at her sceptically.
“My ambition is to be a great pianist,” she continued quietly.
“That,” he replied, “is a thoroughly selfish ambition. It is not as bad as some selfish ambitions, but it is selfish, for all that. Unless you have some other ambition in life besides that, your life will never be really worth while.... Now my ambition has nothing to do with my own greatness or fame. There is no fame—except of a secluded kind—to begot from economics and sociology.... But nevertheless my ambitions are bound up with those things. Quite impersonally.... I mean ...” he was searching for some method of explanation. “In fact,” he added with a trace of bitterness, “I mean something you can’t understand and never could.”
It was true: she knew it, but she said with real passion: “How do you know? Icould, but you never give me a trial! I believe Icouldunderstand, anyway!”
He smiled, sceptically, but not contemptuously. “Then what do you imagine to be my ambitions?” he asked quietly.
And she was floored. In her deepest soul she told herself: I haven’t an idea. The man is an enigma to me. How do I know his ambitions?
“I suppose,” she faltered, “you want to benefit humanity and—and——”
“And all that sort of thing, eh?” he interrupted sardonically. “You certainly ought to finish up that way.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.... Am I right?”
“Of course you are right,” he replied whimsically, and left much to be implied.
“Then I knew what you didn’t think I knew?”
“Oh no, not at all.... My doubts were not of your knowledge.... It is a question of understanding....”
“And I am not capable of that, eh? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it is....”
There came a pause. An overmastering impulse made her say something which, if she had been wiser, she would have been content to think.
“But I read!” she cried passionately, “I ought to be able to understand I ... I sympathize with all those—things ... I read heaps of books—Shaw and Wells and—and——”
It was absurd. She knew that what she was saying was quite absurd. But she was not quite prepared for his reply.
He stroked his chin reflectively.
“And what the devil,” he said deliberately, “has that got to do with it?”
She bit her lip heroically. She was on the point of bursting into uncontrollable tears. Her eyes flashed wet and lustrous. And as she realized the pivotal significance of his reply, a great fragment of her universe tumbled to ruin....
They were strolling at a leisurely pace along the High Road. It was a late October afternoon, and Catherine was playing at a London concert in the evening. She was now well known: a poster depicting her red hair and a post-impressionist keyboard was a familiar sight in the district between Upper Regent Street and the Marble Arch. Also her name in spidery capitals was a common feature of that wonderful front page of the SaturdayTelegraph. Undoubtedly she was “making a name for herself.” Also money. She was thinking of buying a car and learning to drive. And she began to regard it as inevitable that some day she would have to leave Mrs. Carbass. A tiny cottage near High Wood appealed to her. There was a large garden, and the Forest surrounded it almost completely. It would be idyllic to live there....
It piqued her that her rapid rise to fame made no difference at all to her relations with Verreker. He treated her exactly as he had always treated her—that is to say, rudely, disrespectfully, sometimes contemptuously, always as a master dealing with a pupil. She admired him for his absolute lack of sycophancy, yet there were times when she almost wished for an excuse for despising him. Especially since the very things that hurt her were among those that drew her admiration.
Now she was stormily resentful because she had not succeeded in imposing on him. She had desired to appear capable of sympathy and understanding: she had striven to guide their relations into the paths of “soul-affinity.” He had dealt a death-blow to that particular sphere of enterprise.
For several hundred yards they walked on in silence. Then he began to talk, as if recording impressions just as they crossed his vision.
“You know,” he started, “when you consider the thousands of millions that inhabit the world you must realize that the chance of anybody meeting the one person most ideally suited to him is so mathematically small as to be not worth considering.... We all have to put up with either nothing at all or the thousandth or the millionth best.... Somewhere in the world there is, no doubt, somebody who would fit in with me so exquisitely that every phase of my life and endeavour would be the better for the fusing of two into one.... Same with you.... But what earthly chance is there of either of us ever discovering that person? Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack! It’s worse than that: you do know the needle when you have found it, but if a man were to meet his ideal partner, the chances are he wouldn’t recognize her! ... I tell you, the quest of an ideal mate is hopeless from the start. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you may get somebody not many thousand places down on the list that is headed by that theoretical ideality who lives in the next street or the next continent....”
“And what if you’re not extraordinarily lucky?” she put in.
“Providence, or whatever you choose to call it,” he replied, “has realized that the vast majority of people cannot in the nature of things be extraordinarily lucky. But providence has wisely contrived that if a man is unable to get the woman he wants, there is at least one method by which he can be made to want the woman he gets.”
“And what is the method?”
“Very simple.... Falling in love with her.”
“I suppose you don’t agree with falling in love?”
He laughed.
“You might as well ask me if I agreed with eating and drinking. Certainly a good deal of time and labour would be saved if we didn’t have to perform these functions.... What I object to in falling in love (and it’s a purely personal objection: I mean it applies to me and not necessarily to anybody else) is simply that it’s such a monopolizer of energy.... I’m one of those people who’re used to doing many thingsat once. There are heaps of important things in my life that love has never had anything to do with and never could have ... and yet love, if it were violent enough, and if I were weak enough, might completely paralyse them for a time” ... He began searching for a simile—“like,” he added, “like a perfectly loyal and orderly body of workpeople compelled to take a rest because of a strike hundreds of miles away that has really no connection with them at all....”
She nodded.
“There is, or ought to be, in every man and woman some divine sense of purposefulness, some subtle foretaste of greater things that would make life worth living if everything else were taken away. And it ought to be completely independent of and separate from every other living creature in the world. Call it personality, or ‘ego,’ or anything you like. It is above jealousy and envy. It gives every man a sunken indestructible pride in being himself and no one else. That’s where novelists, sentimental folk and such like make their mistake. They give love far too prominent a place in the scheme of things.... Love is only one phase of life. At critical moments no doubt it does take precedence of everything else, but think of the heaps of other things that go to make up life! Ambition, for instance. And ideals.... A man may have ideals so utterly removed from all connection with love that if they were blurred by any act of his, love would be a worthless recompense.... Oh yes, falling in love may be a passably pleasant means of frittering away a dull seaside holiday, but for a busy ambitious spirit it spells—usually—ruination—unless—unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless,” he resumed, “the fates were so miraculously thoughtful as to provide such a man with somebody whose dreams and hopes and ambitions were in mystic harmony with his own.... And that, of course, is a miracle not to be expected once in a hundred years....”
Pause.
“And it is such a confoundedly casual business too,” he went on.“Falling in love, I mean. It’s about as sudden and spontaneous and unreasonable and unthought-out as walking down a railway platform beside a train of empty carriages and selecting one compartment in preference to all the others.... And think of the horror of falling in love, not merely with somebody you don’t like, but with somebody you actively dislike. Oh, I assure you, it’s quite possible. Some wretched creature with whom fate had capriciously made you infatuated! Someone who would monopolize selfishly everything in you that was free and open to all; someone who would divert everything high and noble in you to swell that tragic outflow of wasted ambitions, warped enthusiasms, cramped souls and stunted ideals! And someone, moreover, who would make it hard for you to value the people you liked but did not love! Think of it—all your life thrown out of perspective by something as casual and involuntary as a hundred unremembered things one does every day of one’s life!”
They had entered the station-yard. It was beginning to rain in big, cold drops.
“I suppose you think intellectual attachments are all right?” she remarked.
He grunted.
“If you want to know my candid opinion,” he replied gruffly, “intellectual attachments, so called, are all bosh. If you like a clever woman (or a clever man, for that matter), the feeling is not, properly speaking, intellectual. And if you merely feel æsthetic admiration for somebody’s nimble intellect, then I should say there was no real attachment.”
“But I presume you prefer a woman should not be too intensely sexual?”
“If you mean do I prefer a woman who is half a man as well as not quite half a woman, I certainly do not. The best women, let me tell you”—(he began fishing out money from his pocket and advanced to the ticket office. Their conversation went spasmodically)—“are all sex.” (He took the tickets and rejoined her slowly, counting his change as he did so.) “Let me see, what was I saying? Oh yes, I remember....Well, the best women, as I say, are all sex—but—but”—(interruption while the man punched their tickets at the top of the steps)—“but not always.... All sex, but not always.... That’s how it appears to me.... There’s the train just coming in. Hurry along, or we shall have to get in anywhere....”
They were in time to select an empty first-class compartment. There the conversation was resumed, though not precisely where it had been broken off.
“You see,” he went on, “there is a part of me that in the ordinary sense neither is nor could be in love with anybody. And that’s this ...” he touched his head. “My head is always capable of stepping in at the most awkward moments to tell me what a damn fool I am.... And I am so queerly constituted that I care more for what my head tells me than for any other advice in the world. I could not ignore its directions and still keep my own self-respect.... I said just now that providence had contrived that when a man can’t get what he wants he can be induced to want what he gets by the mere incidental process of falling in love.... That’s true enough generally, but it isn’t in my case. All my life I’ve been wanting what I can’t get. Dreams bigger than the world, ambitions beyond my own capabilities, visions higher than the stars—every idealist knows what that is. But I’m not merely an idealist. I like Debussy’s stuff, but I like Bach’s more, because Bach always knows what he’s talking about. As an economist, I dislike froth and sentiment, which always obscures truth, and that’s why I can’t stand a lot of the music that would send the average idealist into the seventh heaven. Contrariwise, as you might say, my idealism creeps into my economic work and makes me see behind all the figures and documents the lives of men and women. And that’s what a lot of economists can’t see.”
Pause.
“You see it’s not in my power to want what I can get. I shall always be reaching for the impossible.”
“Then you will never be satisfied,” she said.
“No, never,” he replied, “not even if I got what I wanted.... But you can’t understand that, can you?”
She reflected.
“I don’t know,” she answered, hesitating, “whether I understand it or not.”
And she thought passionately as she listened to him: Why can’t I understand? Why am I not like him? Why is he on a plane different from mine? Why has providence brought us together when we are so far apart?
On a dull December afternoon, Catherine stood in a tiny room at the back of the Guildhall at Cambridge. She was to play at a combined violin and pianoforte recital, arranged by the University Musical Society. She was tired, for the journey down had been tedious. Verreker was at York: he had discovered a pianoforte genius of twelve years old amongst the northern moors, and was very much engrossed in her. “Superb child,” he had said of her to Catherine, and Catherine, knowing the rarity of his praise, had felt angrily jealous of her. Yet she knew that his enthusiasm was strictly professional: the girl was nothing to him: it was only her genius that counted.
Through the half open door that led to the platform Catherine could see the audience filtering in. Loosely dressed undergraduates and senile professors formed the bulk. From the drab walls the portraits of gaily caparisoned mayors and aldermen looked down in vacuous reproach. Queen Victoria presented her angular profile chillingly at one side of the platform: the only cheerful thing in the entire building was a large open fire, in front of which a crowd of undergraduates were standing.... Slowly the clock at the back of the hall climbed up to three. Catherine sighed. It was not often she felt uninterested in her work. But this afternoon the huge bulk of the Kreutzer Sonata loomed in front of her as burdensome as a cartload of stones to be shifted. She knew that her hands would perform their duty, just as a tired walker knows that his legs will assuredly carry him the last long mile.But at the thought of the Sonata, with all its varying movements and repetitions of theme, the greatest violinist in England scraping away beside her, and a front row composed of doctors and bachelors of music, she shivered. She was annoyed at the ominous fact that she was not the least interested in music that afternoon. She was annoyed at the spiritless architecture of the Guildhall. She was annoyed because she knew she would have to start punctually at three.
Just as the minute hand of the clock was almost on the point of twelve, the door at the back of the room opened suddenly, and she caught a swift glimpse of a man in a huge fur overcoat and gloves. She was about to ask him his business when he turned his face to her. She started. A rush of overmastering joy swept over her. It was Verreker. The moment was delectable. To see him there when she had not expected him, when she did not know why he had come! Never in all her life was she so happy as in that moment. She was too joyful to speak to him. She just looked up into his face smilingly and took the hand he offered.
“Surprised to see me?” he began, and from his tone she knew he was in an unusually good humour.
“Yes. I thought you were at York.”
“So I was till this morning. The child-genius is a fake.... I came down here to give a lecture on Economics ... five o’clock in the Arts School....”
“So you’ll stay to hear me, then?”
“As long as I can stand it.... I’ve heard the Kreutzer till I’m sick of it. Still, it suits a Cambridge audience.... What’ll you play if they ask for an encore?”
“I don’t know ... Debussy, maybe.”
“Not after the Kreutzer. Give them something sweet and sugary. The adagio out of the Sonata Pathétique, for instance.”
The conversation developed on technical lines.
Then the clock showed three. Catherine had to appear on the platform. Verreker disappeared by the back door and reappeared shortly in thestalls as a member of the audience. The greatest violinist in England commenced to tune up. The secretary of the University Musical Society placed Catherine’s music on the music rest, and prepared himself for the task of turning over the pages. Then the Kreutzer commenced. For over half an hour the performers worked hard, and then tumultuous applause indicated that Cambridge appreciated the sacrifice offered up at the altar of the academic muse. Beethoven had finally routed Debussy.
Catherine’s solo was theRondo Capriccioso. It was encored, and she played a simple minuet of Beethoven. Afterwards a Haydn Concerto was laboriously worked through, and by the conclusion of that the concert was over and the time a quarter to five.
Verreker saw her at the back entrance. He was in a hurry and had only time to say: “See me at the ’Varsity Arms Hotel at seven to-night.” Then he snatched up a bundle of lecture notes and departed down Bene’t Street.
In Downing Street that afternoon she met Buckland, one of the leading professors of Economics. They had met several times before at Verreker’s house at Upton Rising. After a few insignificant remarks Catherine said:
“So you have asked Verreker to come up and lecture, I notice?”
Buckland smiled.
“Well, we didn’t exactly ask him. He asked himself. Of course, we are very glad to get him. As a matter of fact, he wrote to me saying he should be in Cambridge to-day and suggesting that I should fix up a lecture appointment for him. Only I’m afraid it won’t be well attended: there has been such short notice.”
The rest of Buckland’s remarks were comparatively of no significance at all. All that mattered to Catherine was this sudden amazing revelation of something that Verreker had done. He had come to Cambridge, not primarily to deliver a lecture on Economics, but for something else.He had intended to come to Cambridge on this particular date, even if a lecture could not be arranged for. What, then, could be the real, the primary, the basic object of his visit? Obviously it was her concert that attracted him, and how could it be her concert? He had scores of opportunities of visiting her concerts in London. He was not (he had frequently asserted) an admirer of her playing. He knew she was going to play the Kreutzer Sonata, and he hated the Kreutzer Sonata. The Guildhall he had declared unequivocally to be the ugliest building in England. It could not be the concert that brought him to Cambridge. Then what could it be?
All the way from the café in Sidney Street to the University Arms Hotel, Catherine debated that question.
Could it be herself, for instance?
That was a very daring thought for her to think. For all the past was strewn with the memories of occasions on which he had insulted her, avoided her, ignored her, shown her as much consideration as if she were no more than the dust he trod on. And yet (it was strange that this had never entirely occurred to her before) this was no worse than the treatment he accorded to everybody. She had never known him to be polite. Even when he was trying to be so it was for him so consciously an effort that he appeared sarcastically urbane and nothing more. She had suffered his vagaries of temper no more than others who knew him. And their arguments! Was it not a subtle mark of his appreciation of her that he condescended to spend irritating hours explaining to her what a fool she was? Was not the very pain she had suffered something she might have treasured as indicating his deep and abiding interest in her?
He was standing at the entrance of the hotel when she came in sight. Not often since that night at the Forest Hotel had she seen him in evening dress, and now she was reminded poignantly of that far-off occasion with all its strangely distorted memories. He descended the steps to meet her. His handshake was cordial. The whole of his attitude towards her seemed different from anything she had previously experienced.
“Come into the lounge,” he said, and took her arm. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She was ten minutes late, and was glad to think he had noticed it and had been kept waiting. And besides that, she was amazed at his cordiality, at the sudden phase of courtliness which prompted him to take her arm as they strolled down the hotel lobby. She felt that her arm touching his was trembling, and she summoned every effort, mental and physical, to curb this manifestation of her excitement. They entered the lounge and occupied adjacent positions on a chesterfield. The room was comfortably full of fashionably dressed men and women. Catherine felt that many eyes of recognition were upon her. But that caused her no thrill of pleasurable triumph. Her mind and soul were centred on this unique phenomenon that was unfolding itself to her by degrees—Verreker, the curt, the abrupt, the brutally direct, transformed into a veritable grandee of courtliness.
In the dining-hall they had a table to themselves that overlooked the dark spaciousness of Parker’s Piece. Once again she was quaintly fascinated by the peculiarities of his table manners. In this respect, at any rate, he was still himself, and she marvelled at the intense personality that crowded into every movement, however bizarre and unconventional, of his knife and fork. Evening dress gave his weird facial expressions a touch of sublimity. She looked round at the other tables and compared him with men there. There was scarcely one that was not more handsome than he, certainly none whose table manners were not infinitely smoother and more refined. There were men whose cheeks and chin were smooth as a shave ten minutes ago could make them. A glance at Verreker showed that a razor had not touched him for at least twenty-four hours. Other men had hair carefully brushed and pomaded, artistically parted in the middle or at the side, compelled into spray-like festoons above the ears. But Verreker’s hair was black and thick, coarse, horsey hair, innocent of pomade and parting, hair that he occasionally ran his fingers through without in any real sense disturbing. Other men in the room were smiling with rows of whitesymmetrical teeth, speaking in cultured university accents, gazing with animated eyes at their fellow-diners. And yet she knew that compared with him they were all as nothing. The whole secret of him flashed out upon her. He was a man. His personality invaded everything he did and everything that belonged to him: it overflowed like a bursting torrent into his most trivial actions. With all his facial ugliness, his abrupt manners, his disposition, which people called “difficult,” he was the towering superior of any man she knew. And not all the oiled and manicured youths in the world could give her what he could give. She looked triumphantly round the room as if to say: This man here, whom you all think is so ugly and ill-mannered, is, if only you knew it, the personal superior of every one of you! ... She was proud to be with him, proud of every bizarrerie in him of which others might be ashamed.
After dinner he led her into the lobby and said: “I want you to come up into my room for a little while. I have engaged a room with a piano in it.”
Thrilled and excited, she went with him. The room was heavily and tastelessly furnished, the piano upright and metallic.
He did not seem particularly conversational.
After a silence he said:
“Oh, what was that little piece you played as an encore this afternoon?”
“One of Beethoven’s Minuets.”
“Oh?—I don’t remember ever having heard it. Play it now, will you?”
His courtliness had vanished, for he let her carry a chair to the piano unassisted.
Towards the conclusion of the piece he rose and stood at her elbow, leaning on the top of the piano. She could see him frowning. When she had finished, she was expecting some ruthless technical criticism of her playing.
But he stood for a long while in silence. Then he said gruffly:
“Damned sentimental. I thought as much.”
“What do you mean?” she asked quietly.
He paused and commenced to walk about the room with his hands in his pockets.
“Look here,” he began irritably, “when I heard that piece this afternoon I liked it very much. Then I asked myself why I liked it, and found it difficult to say. A sensible man should, of course, be prepared to give reasons for his likes and dislikes. ‘Is it possible,’ I asked myself, ‘that you like the thing because it is sentimental?’ I shuffled basely by telling myself: ‘I don’t know: I don’t even remember if the thingwassentimental.’ ... Well, now I’ve heard it a second time and I know for certain. It is sentimental—damned oozy, slimy, slithery sentiment from beginning to end. And the question is: What the devil’s the matter with me that I should have liked it this afternoon?”
She turned round to face him and laughed.
“How should I know?” she replied. “Perhapsyou’regetting sentimental.”
“Heaven preserve me from such a fate,” he muttered gruffly. “Play me a Bach’s fugue to take that beastly sugary taste away.”
She did so, but if ever an attempt was made to infuse sentiment into a Bach’s fugue, it was on that occasion. All the while her soul was revelling in a strange airiness.
“Bach would turn in his grave if he could hear,” was his sole comment when she had finished. “Get up and I’ll show you how to do it.”
Once again the relationship of master and pupil had ousted every other.
He played the same fugue over again, and she was lost in admiration of his supreme technical facility. Obviously this was Bach as he should be played, Bach as he was meant to be played, every note mathematically in place and in time; every arpeggio like a row of stones in one triumphant mosaic. She was not fond of Bach, and in her deepest self she knew that she disliked him for precisely the reason that Verreker liked him: he was so totally devoid of sentimentality. Yet she could not but admire the stern purposefulness of his style: the lofty graceof his structures, that serene beauty of which, because it is purely æsthetic, one never tires.
When he had finished she said: “I want you to play some Debussy.”
At first he seemed disinclined to accede to her request, but after a few seconds’ pause he started a slow sarabande movement. She listened enraptured till the end.
“Isn’t that sentiment?” she asked.
“No,” he replied curtly.
“Then what is it?”
He ground his teeth savagely.
“Passion,” he snapped.
“And what,” she asked softly—her voice was trembling—“is the difference between sentiment and passion?”
He looked at her searchingly.
“Don’t you know?”
“I may do—I’m not certain.”
“Well, if you do know, you don’t need me to tell you, and if youdon’tknow, I can’t tell you.”
At a quarter past nine they went downstairs. Catherine was leaving by the 9.30 train to Liverpool Street. They left by taxi to the station. Fortunately the train was late, or they would have missed it. In the alcove formed by two adjacent open carriage doors Catherine and he stood and talked till the guard whistled for the departure of the train.
Their farewell was curious. She was leaning out of the window so that her head was above his. He sprang on to the foot-board as the train was moving and seized her hand. She wondered what he was going to do. She thought perhaps he might be going to kiss her. She waited for what seemed hours and then he suddenly vanished into the gloom of the station platform. Almost simultaneously she heard a porter’s raucous voice crying out: “Clear away there! What d’yer think yer doin’——” The rest trailed into inarticulate sound. Obviously he had been pulled down.
The whole incident was somewhat undignified.
Yet all the way to Liverpool Street she was speculating on what he had been about to do when the porter pulled him away.
And she was happier than she had ever been in her life.
In the bedroom of her cottage at High Wood, Catherine stood in front of the cheval glass and eyed herself critically. It seemed to her in that moment that a miracle had happened, a door unlocked to her that she thought would be for ever closed, a dream which she had scarcely dared to glimpse, even from afar, brought suddenly and magically within her grasp. A miracle indeed, and yet the very ease with which she acclimatized herself to new conditions gave almost the impression that the miracle had been to some extent anticipated, that she had so prepared and organized her soul that she could slip into the new scheme of things with a minimum of perturbation.
Standing before the mirror, she was surprised at her own calmness. And the more she pondered, the more stupendous seemed the miracle, and consequently the more amazing her own attitude. Already it seemed that she was beginning to take for granted what a day before had been a dream so far from fulfilment that she had scarcely dared to admit it into coherent form. A day ago the idea that her affection for Verreker was reciprocated seemed the wildest phantasy: she had not dared even to think of such a thing hypothetically, for fear it should grow into her life as something confidently expected: yet dim and formless it had lurked behind all her thoughts and ideas; shadowy and infinitely remote, it had guided and inspired her with greater subtlety than she knew. But now it need no longer be dim and formless: it entered boldly into the strong light of day, into the definition of word and sentence: she could ask herself plainly the question, “Does he love me?” because deep down in her heart she knew that he did. Her instinct told her that he did, but she was quite prepared to doubt her own instinct. She did not know that her feminine instinct in such a matter was nearlyinfallible. But she was no longer afraid of treating herself to the random luxury of thinking and dreaming.
All at once she was seized with a terrible sense of absurdity and incongruity. Was it possible, was it even remotely conceivable that he should love her? She did not know that she was on the brink of the perennial mystery that has surprised millions of men and women: she felt that her question was singularly acute and penetrating. What was there in her that could attract him? Not her intellect, for he knew full well the measure of that. Not her musical genius, for he was not an admirer of it. Not her sympathies and ideals common to his, for she was incapable of understanding the major part of him. Nor even her beauty, for she was not beautiful. What, then, could it be? And the answer was that love, the force he despised, the elemental thing to which he conceived himself superior, had linked him to her by bonds that he had not the power to sever. The strong man had toppled. He suddenly ceased to be a god in the clouds and became a human being on her earth. Would his ideals crumble to dust at the touch of this mighty enslaving force? Would he shatter the dreams of a lifetime, those mighty dreams of his that had nothing to do with love, would he shatter them and lay the ruins at her feet? How would he reconcile the iron rigidity of his theories with the impulse of his passion?
There had been a time when she thought: All I want is his friendship, his sympathy, his understanding, the consciousness that our souls are affinite. Intellectual and spiritual sympathy with him, she had argued, is the summit of my ambition. To talk with him on terms of candid intimacy, to be the sharer of his deepest confidences, to realize in their relationship something of the glorious male ideal of camaraderie, that had been her grand aim. She had deceived herself. That was not so. In the moment that he stood on the foot-board of the departing train at Cambridge every vestige of the platonic camouflage was torn from her. There was one thought that was infinitely more rapturous, infinitely more seductive and alluring, than even the thought that he and she were on terms of deep intellectual and spiritual intimacy. And thatwas the thought that whilst he was standing there on the foot-board he was wondering whether to kiss her. If now her platonic dreams were to be fulfilled, she would be strangely and subtly disappointed. Deep communion with a god-like personality was fine. But she preferred the impulse that changed the deity into a man, that dragged him from the stars into the streets, that caused all his dreams and ideals to be obscured by that single momentous triviality, the desire to kiss her.
She was cruel, merciless in her hour of seeming triumph. She loved him more passionately than ever now that he was a being dethroned from heaven. She had thought formerly: I cannot understand him: we are on a different plane. But now she thought: He has come down to my plane. One thing at least I can understand: I can understand why he wanted to kiss me. And that crude fragment of understanding was more precious to her than all the subtleties and spiritual nuances which had made his soul a hitherto uncharted sea.
If she could break his ideals, if she could shatter everything in him that had nothing to do with her, she would be glad. Already, not content with the footing she had gained on what had seemed an unscalable cliff, she wanted to dominate the heights and destroy everything that was independent of her. Never had the essential selfishness of her nature so revealed itself. She grudged him every acre of his soul that was not sown with seeds of her own planting. She wanted him, all of him, passionately, selfishly: his soul and intellect would be for ever beyond her, so she was jealous of their freedom. That he should fall from the lofty heights of his idealism was epic, a thing of high tragedy, yet thrilling with passion: that she should be the means of it was something that convulsed her with rapture. Her passion was terrible and destructive. She wanted it to scorch his soul until he desired nothing save what she could give. She wanted entire possession of him: she grudged him everything that was beyond her comprehension.
All this was somewhat premature.
As yet he had not spoken a word save what was easily compatible with disinterested friendship. He had treated her many times with such curtness and incivility that it seemed absurd on the face of it to imagine that he could love her. And yet there was in her that strange instinct which told her that he did.
After her return from Cambridge she began to wonder when she should see him again. Since she had left Mrs. Carbass and had taken the cottage at High Wood, he had been a moderately frequent visitor. He liked the situation of “Elm Cottage,” he liked to sit in a deck-chair on the lawn and watch the sun dipping down over the roofs of Upton Rising. The æsthetic pleasure made him talkative and companionable. In the summer time she would open the windows and play Debussy on the baby grand piano she had bought. She had furnished the interior in masculine taste. There were great brown leather armchairs of the kind common enough in clubs, and innumerable facilities for smoking (she was not a great smoker herself), and a general atmosphere of freedom and geniality. She had bought an expensive club-fender with leather seats at either end and a leather rail, because she had noticed that at his own house he liked to sit with his back to the flames. The front room was really very comfortable and cosy, though she was lost when she sat in either of the two great armchairs.
There was no particular business reason why he should see her, yet for several nights after his return to Upton Rising she expected him to come. She laid in a stock of his favourite cigarettes: she diligently learned a little known and mathematical work of Bach because she knew he would appreciate it. But he did not come. Then she had a spell of concerts which kept her in town until nearly midnight: he did not come to see her after the performance, as he sometimes did, so that she did not know if he had been among the audience or not. She knew that he had returned from Cambridge, and she knew that an abstruse work onsociology was occupying a good deal of his time and attention. Yet it seemed strange that he did not visit her. Their farewell on Cambridge platform was already past history, and she sometimes found it hard to believe it had taken place at all. She wanted further proof that it was no delusion. She felt that every day made that incident more isolated, more inconsistent, more meaningless. And in another sense every day was adding to its tremendous significance.
A fortnight passed and still he did not come. She did not want to go and see him. She wanted him to come and see her. She made a vow: I am not going to see him; I am going to wait till he comes to see me: if he doesn’t want to, he needn’t. And she was glad when a concert or other engagement kept her busy in the evenings, for the temptation to break her vow was strong if she were alone at “Elm Cottage.”
On Christmas Day the temptation was overmastering. An offer from a Scotch concert agency had come by post that morning, and she found it easy to persuade herself that she had to visit him to talk it over.
Snow was falling through the skeleton trees on the Ridgeway as she approached “Claremont.” Through the window of the front room she could catch the glow of leaping flames. That indicated that he was at home. He had no relatives and no friends of the kind that would share Christmas Day with him. Besides, he was quite impervious to the Christmas type of sentimentality. Yet possibly he would be pleased to see her.
She found him sitting on the club-fender with the fire behind him. He was reading long proof-slips. As she entered he merely glanced up casually.
“Come in,” he drawled, and went on correcting until he had finished the slip.
There are no words to convey how deeply that annoyed her.
“Well,” he began, when the last marginal correction had been inserted, “and how are you getting on?”
“All right,” she asserted, with some pique. Then, in a spitefully troubled tone: “What have you been doing with yourself since you came back from Cambridge?”
He pointed to the litter of proof-slips on the floor.
“Working,” he replied.
“I half expected you’d come and see me,” she remarked tentatively.
“So did I,” he replied quietly, “but I didn’t after all....”
“What d’you mean?”
“I mean I half thought I might visit you. I really didn’t know....”
“I suppose you didn’t want to.”
“On the contrary, I wanted to very much. That was just why I didn’t.”
“I don’t quite——”
“Listen. Did I ever tell you that I detest worms?”
“No, but what——?”
“Well, I do. I can’t stand them at any price.”
“Nor can I, but how——”
“Listen. When I was a tiny boy it used to send me almost into hysterics if I touched one, even by accident. Well, when I grew older, I used to despise myself for being so weak-minded. I used to gather all the worms I could find, fat juicy ones, you know, with red bellies, put them all into one single writhing heap and run my fingers through the lot! My flesh crept with the loathsomeness of it: I was often sick and gasping with horror after I had done it. But it gave me confidence, because it taught me I wasn’t at the mercy of arbitrary feelings. It showed me that I had myself under iron control....”
“Well?”
“Since I returned from Cambridge I have wanted to see you so often and so intensely that it seemed to me a capital opportunity for finding out if that iron control had at all relaxed.... I am pleased to say that it has not done so.”
“But you wanted to see me?”
“I did.”
“Then what on earth was there to keep you from coming to visit me?”
“Nothing at all except this—my own desire to be complete master of myself—greater even than my desire to see you.”
“Why did you want to see me?”
“I could think of no sensible reason for desiring to see you, and that was why I decided not to.”
“Are you glad I have come now?”
“No. I am sorry. You have interrupted my work.”
“Have I? Thanks for telling me. Then I’ll go——”
“Your going would not alter the fact that my work has been interrupted. I shall do no more work to-day, whether you go or not. I—I”—his voice became thick with anger, or scorn, or some complex combination of the two—“I have—been—spiritually interrupted!”
She took off her thick furs and muff.
“I’m going to stay,” she said quietly, “and we’re going to have tea and then go for a walk. I think you and your arguments are very silly.”
It was immensely significant, that final sentence of hers. Before, she would never have dared to say such a thing to him. But now she felt he was in some strange way delivered into her power: she was not afraid of treating him like a baby. The truth was, he was no longer a god to her. And her task was, if possible, to strip from him the last remnants of his divinity. His strange conversation she had but half understood: but it immensely reassured her as to this subtle and mysterious power she possessed over him. But she divined that her task was difficult: she feared an explosion that would be catastrophic. The atmosphere was too tense for either comfort or safety: she would have to lower the temperature. And all the time her own heart was a raging furnace within her.
“Mrs. Tebbutt is out,” he said gruffly. “I’m hanged if I know where anything is. I was going to go out to tea at Mason’s.” (Mason’s was the café in the Bockley High Street.)
“How like a man not to know where anything is!” she commented lightly, removing her hat. “Never mind, I’ll soon find out. And you’ll be savedthe trouble of going to Mason’s.”
She discovered it was absurdly easy to treat him like a baby.
She found crockery and food without much difficulty, and while she was making tea he followed her about from room to room, chatting quite genially. His surliness seemed to vanish entirely: he became charmingly urbane. Evidently her method of treatment bad been completely successful. The tension of the atmosphere had been very much lowered, and he seemed quite schoolboyish in his amateur assistance at what he called “indoor picnicking.” As she emerged from cupboards carrying cups and plates and fancy cakes he looked at her very much as if she were a species of conjurer.
They behaved just like a couple of jolly companions as they sat round the fire and had tea.
Afterwards he became less conversational.
“Leave the things,” he commanded. “Mrs. Tebbutt will see to them when she gets back.”
“All right,” she agreed. “Now we’re going for a walk, eh?”
“I’ve got heaps of work——” he began.
“Not on Christmas Day,” she urged.
“Oh, that makes no difference.”
“Besides, you said you weren’t going to do any more work, in any case.”
“No—but—I thought of dropping in at the Trants.”
Impossible to describe the fierce stab of jealousy that passed through her. It changed her mood completely.
“Mr. Verreker,” she said, with emotion, “after a fortnight of not seeing me, can’t you spare me one evening?”
“Of course if you’ve anything particular to say to me—any help you want—of course—I——”
“Not that! That’s not the point. Mayn’t I never come to you except when I’ve something definite I want to ask you for? Aren’t we friends?”
“Certainly.”
“Then why can’t you come out with me when I ask you to?”
“Oh yes, I will, but——”
“You’re the only friend I have. Don’t you know that?”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I am bound to say it is to some extent your own fault that you have not more.”
They were standing in front of the fire. At this last remark she moved till her face was a few inches from his. Her eyes were flashing with anger, yet dim with tears like a mirror breathed upon: her hands were clenched and quivering as if she were thinking to strike him. All her body, every limb and muscle of her, was vibrant with passion.
“Mr. Verreker,” she cried, “why do you keep saying things that hurt me? Am I nothing to you at all? Don’t you care one tiny scrap for what I feel? Oh, I know I’m very imperfect—I daresay I’m all wrong, to your way of thinking, but have you ever lifted a finger to make me different? Have you ever cared whether I was different or not?”
“I have helped you always as much as I have been able,” he replied, with dignity.
“Then why do you treat me as you do? Why do you despise me? Youdodespise me! I know you do. Why do you feel that you ought to control yourself just because you have a desire to come and see me?”
“Not because I despise you. I despise nobody. Who am I to——”
“There you are again! Do you think I’m not clever enough to see the sly way you wriggle off the point? I’m not as clever as you, maybe, but I am clever enough to be hurt by what you say! The only way you can truthfully say you don’t despise me is by saying you don’t despise anybody! Do you really think I am dull enough not to see that? Oh, Mr. Verreker, what have I done? WhathaveI done?”
“You are being foolish, Miss Weston.... You have——”
“Miss Weston now, eh? Something else. Do you think I don’t noticethese things? Do you know the last time you ever called me Cathie? I don’t suppose you remember, but I do: it was on May 19th last. Over six months ago.”
“This is childish,” he muttered scornfully, and his lips curled in contempt. He turned away from her and began walking about the room.
“Childish, is it?—Is it childish to be hurt at little things that show you’re going down—in the—estimation of people you—you—whom you like?”
“I have given you no valid indication that you have gone down in my estimation.”
“Do you deny that I have?”
“It is a matter I do not care to discuss.... At any rate you have grossly exaggerated the whole affair....”
“What I want to know is, why are you disappointed with me? Why have you left me alone this last fortnight?”
“I have already told you that I wanted to see you very intensely.”
“Why?”
“I can think of no satisfactory reason.”
“What do you mean by ‘satisfactory’?”
“I mean what I say. I can think of no reason satisfactory to me—that satisfies me.”
“And aren’t there any reasons at all why a normal person might wish to see me’?”
“Arguing is quite useless if you accept as a hypothesis that I am a normal person.”
“Aren’t there any reasons at all, then, why you might want to come and see me?”
“Possibly there are.”
“Couldn’t you think of any?”
“No, I could not.”
She became fiercely passionate again.
“Mr. Verreker,” she said, “I’ll tell you one thing for your own good, and for the good of everybody you meet who gets to know you well. You ought to be more kind. You ought to consider other people’s feelings. You ought not to say things that hurt. You ought to put yourself onthe level of people who feel. Do you know you have hurt me more than ever I have been hurt before?”
She was crying now. She leaned on the back of a chair and bent her head on her hands. There was something very wildly tragic in her attitude.
And he was profoundly stirred. He had not believed her capable of such passionate outburst. For a moment he stood perfectly still, viewing her from that part of the room to which his pacings up and down had chanced to lead him at the moment. Then he slowly approached her cowering form. She was sobbing violently. He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and drew it away immediately. The spectacle of her grief made him curiously embarrassed. He seemed afraid to touch her.
“Cathie,” he spoke gruffly.
She made no sign of answer. But the sobbing stopped, and in a moment she raised her head. She stood upright, with her head flung backwards and her face turned to his. She was not beautiful, but passion had given her face a spiritual sublimity. Tears were still in her eyes and down her cheeks; her eyes, dim and blurred, were shining like the sun through the edges of April clouds. And all about her head and face and shoulders her hair was flung in gorgeous disarray. Red as flame it was, and passionate as the whole look and poise of her.
He bent to her very simply and kissed her on the forehead. There was no hungry eagerness about his movement, yet the very simplicity of it seemed to indicate terrific restraint. She stood perfectly still, as if hypnotized.
“Now,” he said quietly, “you and I are friends again, aren’t we?”
She nodded. There was the grating of a key in the lock of the front door. They both waited in silence. Then there were footsteps in the hall.
“Mrs. Tebbutt!” he called. He was tremendously, inexpressibly relieved at her arrival.
Mrs. Tebbutt, discreet as always, opened the door and entered.
“You might come and clear these things away, will you?” he said, in a perfectly ordinary tone.
“Very good, sir.”
The spell was broken.
Catherine did not stay long after that. Conversation between them was difficult because it was carefully commonplace. Mrs. Tebbutt kept coming in and out. And when Catherine left, his handshake at the gate was just normally cordial, neither more nor less so than usual....