CHAPTER XVSUCCESS
A STRANGE thing had happened. Something unbelievable, something half-expected yet absolutely incredible when it happened. She had scored a brilliant success....
In the small room behind the concert hall the applause was still echoing in her ears. She looked proudly in the mirror and she saw herself flushed and triumphant. She knew instinctively that she had been hugely successful. She knew that she had exceeded her own expectations. Something had gripped her and carried her magnificently forward. And even the critics had smiled dourly upon her.
A press association man had requested an interview.... A photographer’s agency had asked for permission to photograph her.... And her vanity suggested: The next visitor ought to be from a gramophone company asking to record my playing.... But this proved premature....
She stood in front of the mirror and told herself in mad ecstasy: It’s done! You’ve done it! You’ve passed the barrier! Henceforward no more worries—no more fits of disappointment—no more dashed hopes—no more thwarted ambitions! This breaks up all pessimism. Whatever fit of despondency you fall into the remembrance of to-day will lift you out of it. You have in this an unfailing antidote for depression.... Taste this moment to the full—it will never grow stale, but it will not always be so fragrant as now. Drink in the ecstasy of success! ... The tears welled up in her eyes as she yielded to the enchantment of realization.
She looked at her hands. Strange, weirdly fascinating things—that could achieve what they had achieved! Wonderful fingers that could lift her so magically on to the pinnacles of fame!
Verreker entered. During the performance he had occupied an inconspicuous seat about the middle of the hall. He was dressed professionally—that is, in a dark lounge suit which threw into prominence his barbaric cast of countenance.
“Well,” he began, “I suppose I ought to congratulate you——”
She gave him an extraordinary glance of mingled triumph and defiance.
“Youought,” she said, “but you’re not going to, are you?”
He smiled grimly. “On the contrary,” he replied, “I will compliment you so far as to say that your playing was extraordinarily good.”
Like an impulsive child she seized hold of his coat sleeve.
“Say it again!” she cried ecstatically. “Oh,dosay it again! That’s the biggest compliment you’ve ever paid me, and I do love being praised! Say it again!” She was looking up into his face with delirium in her eyes. Also she was trembling, and her hot fingers tightened over his wrist.
“Don’t get excited,” he replied reprovingly. “And don’t imagine you’re famous all at once. You didn’t play the Mozart very brilliantly.”
She laughed hysterically.
“I don’t care what you say about that! You’re trying to unsay that compliment and you can’t! I don’t care whether you say it again or not—you’ve said it once. And I shall remember!”
“You shouldn’t live for compliments.”
“I don’t. But I should die without them.”
“You’re much too excited. Calm down.”
“I can’t.... Oh, I can’t.... I feel I shall never be calm again.”
“Well, get home as quietly as you can, anyway. I’m not going back to Upton Rising to-night or I’d take you.... Don’t think too much of yourself ... Good-bye!”
He went abruptly from the room.
She gazed after him and then again at herself in the mirror. A man appeared at the door and asked if she wanted a cab.
“Oh yes—a taxi,” she said, and was thrilled at the polygon significance of what had happened. Now she was suddenly translated tothat social sphere in which taxis are habitually employed....
She realized something of her indebtedness to Verreker when the following day she received a sheaf of interesting literature from a press-cutting agency. Nearly all the press notices were distinctly favourable, and some were well on the way to being fulsome. She experienced the rich delight of reading pleasant things about herself. And she felt: This is Fame!
When she went out into the streets she experienced all the subtle joys of a prince travelling incognito. She felt: If people knew who I was I should be stared at. She was conscious of the disadvantage of being always stared at, yet she was proud to think of herself as something more than what she seemed. She was conscious of the subtle democracy of her travelling on a London County Council tram-car. She thought: I, sitting amongst you all, so ordinary, so commonplace, so seemingly like yourselves, am really stupendously, immeasurably different I You might talk with me, walk with me, know me for years and years and never discover that difference. But put me in front of a grand piano and I will show you that difference in thirty seconds! ...
She began to regard her physical attractions dispassionately. She knew she was not good looking, nor even pretty, but hitherto she had shirked the recognition of the fact. Now she became almost impulsively eager to admit the width of the barrier that separated the peculiarities of her features from the ideal of feminine beauty. She had often regarded herself critically in the mirror and asked herself the question: What do I look like? She tried to think of her reflection as of a casual stranger seen in the street: on this basis she attempted to assess its qualities, good and bad. But concerning the whole, as opposed to the component parts, she had hitherto shirked a decision. She would not commit herself so far as to say whether it was good or bad, attractive or otherwise. But now she cheerfully agreed: I am not at all pretty and my red hair is only nice to those who like red hair.But I am distinctive. If you looked at me once you would probably look at me again. My face is not one you would easily forget. These remarks are ambiguous, I know, but they are none the less true for that. And a subconscious implication was: It adds to the extraordinary interestingness of myself that I am not conventionally good looking. Call me grotesque or what you will, but remember that my looks are no more astonishing than myself.... Viewing herself thus, she was rather proud of her facial eccentricities. And she was conscious that, good looking or not, there was a subtle attractiveness about her. She decided, quite without any evidence in support of the theory: The attractiveness of a person who is not good looking (if it exists) is an immensely richer, rarer, and more precious commodity than that possessed by one who is merely conventionally beautiful....
While being frankly and (she thought) rather charmingly conceited, she was stringently careful to avoid the taint of snobbishness. The thought occurred to her more than once that the very insistence of her efforts to eschew snobbishness might be even in itself a subtle manifestation of the dreaded evil. She was urgently careful to show Mrs. Carbass that her rise to success had made no difference at all in her relations with her. She enjoyed emphasizing the contrast between their two stations, and she enjoyed equally emphasizing the paradox of her behaving as if they were on equal terms together. She was glad for her to see her casually in expensive evening gowns, she enjoyed the thrill of having taxis waiting for her in the street; she liked Mrs. Carbass to bring her in a handful of letters and say: “All fer you, miss. You gits all the letters nardays.” These things indicated the gulf that was widening between their respective social positions. And she also liked to clean her own boots on a Sunday morning (when Mrs. Carbass stayed late in bed), and she enjoyed the mediocre thrills of travelling third-class. For these things indicated the amazing paradox that though she had achieved fame, fame had not changed her. Whereas famehadchanged her: it had made her more arrogant, more self-confident, more conceited. As she cleaned her boots on theSabbath she felt a delicious thrill at the thought: These fingers of mine, so deft, so delicate, fingers in a million, are now employed in the most ordinary, unromantic and menial of tasks. For the moment I am no better than a maid-of-all-work. But what amazing secrets these fingers of mine possess! And what a grand paradox it is! That these fingers, such incomparable exponents of Chopin and Liszt and Beethoven, should be prostituting themselves for the purpose of producing a black gloss on a pair of shoes!
And somewhere at the back of her mind was the thought: It adds to the extraordinariness of myself that I do these things....
Once in company with Verreker she went to see Razounov at a flat in Piccadilly. Razounov’s memory played him more than usually false. Verreker sent up his card, but it was plain to any beholder that Razounov had not the slightest recollection either of the name or, when he saw him, of the man.
“Ah, Mister Verrekair,” he stammered vacantly, and looked at Catherine. “And Mrs. Verrekair, eh?” he continued, leering at her babyishly.
“No,” said Catherine, and expected herself to blush, and was surprised when she didn’t.
“Zen zhe future Mrs. Verrekair, eh?” insisted Razounov, with dreamy cunning.
“No,” said Verreker, with what Catherine thought was unnecessary enthusiasm. “This is my former pupil Miss Weston—I expect you have heard of her.”
“I haf rhead of her,” corrected Razounov. “I deed not know that she wass a pupil of yours. I am very pleased to make her acquaintenance.” He bowed ceremoniously, quite unconscious that he had met her twice before.
The conversation languished. Razounov forgot so many things that it was impossible to rely upon reminiscence for small talk. And Catherine, who had hitherto been decidedly sceptical about the genuineness of his eccentricities, came to the definite conclusion that they wereinvoluntary, and not manufactured to captivate music-hall audiences. He was at once a genius and a baby. It was absurd to stay there long, so after ten minutes or so of artificially sustained conversation they took their leave, and descended into the electric radiance of the streets. Verreker seemed rather amused than annoyed at the reception Razounov had given them.
“You see now,” he said, “why it is impossible for Razounov to give pianoforte lessons in person. For one thing, he wouldn’t remember who his pupils were....”
It was while they were passing the shuttered frontage of Swan and Edgar’s that an amazing conversation sprang up.
“Razounov made some queer mistakes about me, didn’t he?” she said provocatively.
“Yes,” he replied laconically.
It was plain that the topic would languish if she did not pursue it further. So she resumed, with an audacity which startled no one more than herself.
“Would you mind if he had been right?”
The daring of the question nearly took her breath away when she had spoken it. But at the moment her mind was infected with daring. She looked at him boldly as much as to say: You heard right, Ididsay that. I’ll say it again if you didn’t hear. And there was in the poise of her head an enigmatic coquetry which declared: I may be serious or I may not. I shan’t tell you which....
He looked at her almost contemptuously. Or perhaps It was the changing lights of the shop windows that flung his face into unaccustomed silhouette.
“I’m not very particular,” he said nonchalantly.
She suddenly took up the air of one who has been contemptuously affronted. (Whether it was real or just an absurd make-believe she herself could not have told.)
“Well,” she replied sharply, “I’m sure I shan’t marry anybody who doesn’t want me to.”
“I should think not,” he said heavily, and once more the conversation seemed likely to die a natural death. She was so startled at the utter audacity of what she had said that she could not think of anythingto revivify it. Strangely enough, it was he this time who gave it an exciting, if not a long lease of new life.
“Of course,” he remarked speculatively, as if it were just occurring to him while he said it, “that remark of yours was really quite irrelevant. Logically, I mean. It had nothing to do with what I said.”
“What did you say, then?”
“I merely said that I was not very particular.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means—itself. That’s all....” He paused and added: “And supposing I were to marry you, it would prove it.”
“Prove what?”
“That I am not particular.”
Here the amazing conversation ceased, partly maybe because it had achieved a certain degree of finality, certainly in part because this crisis in it synchronized with their entrance into the tightly packed tube lift at Piccadilly Circus Station. The journey home to Upton Rising did not favour its resumption. Catherine was amazed at her own intrepidity, astonished and angry in almost equal proportions at her absurd daring. And she was also trying to grasp the significance of what he had said. In the end she decided: It was a rather silly joke, and his replies were about as silly as my questions.
The first-class compartment from Liverpool Street was empty save for the two of them. But the train stopped at all stations, and any intimate conversation was liable to sudden interruption. Catherine also was too chaotically minded to attempt to ruffle the finality with which the previous conversation had closed. She was content to chatter occasionally on trivial subjects and indulge in long intervals of uneloquent silence.
It was nearly ten o’clock in an evening late in September, and the train passing from the urban to the suburban districts seemed to gather with it the rich cloying scent of autumn. It was quite warm, though the breeze that blew in occasionally from the open window was of a delightfully perfumed coolness. Far back whence they had come the myriad lights of London reflected a warm glow in the sky, andahead over the broad belt of heath and woodland the sky was pale with a million stars. Station after station slunk into view and passed unostentatiously away; great sprawling vistas of suburb unfolded themselves with all the soft witchery of lamp-strewn residential roads; here and there the train swung over bridges and past terraces of winedark back gardens; the great suburban highways were swollen rivers of light. Suburb after suburb slipped by, like episodes in a crowded dream, suburbs that Catherine had never visited, or had only vaguely heard of, places as foreign and unrecognizable as Paris or Yokohama. And each one seemed weighed heavy with romance as the night sank upon it; each one seemed strangely, passionately beautiful. Ever and anon the train would glide effortlessly to a standstill at some half-deserted station with lamps that creaked in the breeze like the tuning of a hundred violins. And then off again into the scented twilight until Catherine, enchanted by the beauty of night, was too spell-bound to read the names on the stations, and so lost count of where she was.
And then the suburbs lost coherence and straggled vaguely into the countryside; clusters of light shone out from houses wreathed in trees; a chain of golden trams marked the course of a distant high road. And after a short respite of woods and meadows Bockley came cleanly into view—beautiful, poetic Bockley, with the High Road wreathed in a halo of soft, reddish light. The train rose high till it seemed to be passing on the very roofs of the town: window lights went winking by and with sweeping dignity the station curved into view. A breath-taking pause and the train was off again, and the panorama rose till it was nothing but a cliff of glowing windows; trees and turf embankments loomed hugyly in the foreground; the speed was gathering, the hum of wheels was swelling to a roar. Like a clap of thunder a tunnel engulfed everything. And Catherine leaned back amongst the cushions as one in whom tension has suddenly been snapped.
At one portion of the tunnel men were working on the line, and as the train shot by the lurid yellow light of naphtha-flares flooded thecompartment like a swift tide. And at that moment Catherine glanced at Verreker. His face was strong and stern in the flame silhouette; his eyes were closed. His profile was ruggedly, barbarically masculine. There were no soft curves, only angles of terrifying strength. And as she looked at him in that fraction of a second, when the yellow brilliance from the naphtha-flares was at its height, she felt a sudden impulse surge up within her. A strange emotion, entirely new in her experience, seized her and overwhelmed her. In one swift moment of vision she saw herself in shadowless panorama. Mists swam before her eyes, but they were mists in which she could view herself in cruel clearness. The light of the naphtha-flares seemed to penetrate her soul and illumine its darkest difficulties. And then, as quickly as her mind took to flash the vision to her brain, she knew. The revelation stood before her In horrible, terror-striking apparency....
She loved this man. The realization came upon her with a thrill of swift, palpitating horror. She knew now the explanation of a thousand tiny mysteries that had been lately puzzling her. She saw the awful consistency of what had till then seemed to her erratic and incomprehensible. She loved him. She loved everything of him and about him: she loved him with all the hungry passion that was in her. He had come upon her in a dream, and she had awakened to find him striding colossally above her life. She had not fallen in love; love had fallen upon her like a rushing avalanche. Her life had magically opened and broadened, as a river swells into the stormy sea. All the poetry in the world was about him. All the romance of days and nights was nothing but him. He had gilded everything in her life with new magic. He had poured new vision into her eyes, new thoughts into her brain, new music into her ears. Nothing of her was there which had not taken richer colour since his coming. He had infused poetry into all the world about her: he had breathed romance into every trivial thing of her life. He was in every sunrise and sunset, in every twilight, in every note of music that thrilled her. He was herself much more than she had ever been.... And she lay back amongst the cushions and could realize all this in asingle blinding flash. She saw everything revealed in this new light that had flamed up within her. And she was afraid, afraid, terribly afraid....
The train swept out of the tunnel and bore swiftly down upon Upton Rising station like an eagle pouncing on its prey. The vision that had come to her had changed every metaphor. No longer was the train a placid, exquisitely dreaming creature wandering to and fro amongst the spreading suburbs: it had become terrible and impetuous, a rushing virago of flame and passion. And in the deepest cleft in which the station lay it hissed and screamed in strained malevolence. The platform shrieked in echo: the green lamps of the signal flashed mournfully as swathes of steam waved limply through them and beyond. The night was suddenly black and fearful. She stood on the platform and shivered, not from the cold, but from the terror that was in her soul.
“Come along,” he said, walking to the steps that climbed to the station exit, and his words seemed to break the spell of horror. She became self-contemptuous and inclined to dose herself with cold logic. This is absurd, she told herself as she climbed the steps. An impossible state of things altogether, she decided, as she delivered up her ticket at the barrier. And as she stepped with him into the cool spaciousness of the High Road, she was energetically sermonizing herself. Conversation passed between them like a vague, irrelevant dream. At the corner of Gifford Road he shook hands and left her. And she knew with poignant emotion that she had displeased him. She knew with absolute certainty that her position was hopeless. The unutterable, unvanquishable horror came back to her: she saw a grim future of battle and defeat. And when she viewed herself in the mirror in her bedroom she noticed that her cheeks were pale and her eyes wide with fear....