§ 1
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....
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 to take. 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. I shall 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....