§ 3
Helen left the train at Upton Rising, but Catherine went on to Bockley. The Town Hall struck the hour of ten as she was walking up the station approach. At this time the crowds along the High Street were beginning to disperse; the trams and buses were full of returning excursionists. Neglectful of the time and with no very definite aim in view, Catherine turned into the Ridgeway. It was directly opposite to the quickest way home, but its shady avenues and flower-scented front gardens suited her mood better than the stark frowsiness of Hanson Street. Her mind was in flux. She did not know whether what had happened was going to be an important stage in her life or not. She did not know how much of her feeling was disappointment, and how much was mere wounded dignity. She could not estimate the depth of the feeling she had had for George Trant. It seemed inconceivable that she had ever been in love with him....
She started to administer to herself wholesome correctives. “It’s no good,” she told herself brutally, “your imagining yourself the heroine of a tragedy, suffering more poignantly than ninety-nine people out of every hundred, because it’s not the truth. What you are feeling now is felt sometime or other by the majority of all people: there’s nothing a bit singular or exceptional in your case. It’s a mistake to pride yourself on suffering more exquisitely than other people.”
Then she poured cold logic over herself.
“He’s only one man among millions, and in no sense is he markedly superior to the average. A certain spurious cleverness, a talent for mockery, a deft finesse in expressing cruel things in soft words ... absurd that he should become so much to you or to any girl ... there’s nothing admirable in him, therefore you are lucky to get rid of him.”
It sounded convincing enough.
She walked on, scarce heeding whither she was going, and all the time her mood alternated between stormy resentment and cold self-reproach. There were moments too of grey hopelessness, and it was only her constantly recurring indignation that swept her out of these. Every inch of the roads she traversed was associated with him: every gate and tree seemed to call out in mocking melancholy—“This was where ... this was where....” Not a street corner but was inextricably bound up in her mind with some remark of his and the exact phase of their relationship when he had uttered it....
Under heavy trees that split the moonlight into a thousand fragments she suddenly heard the rich hum of a grand piano. She stopped. She stood in the shadow of the hedge and listened in rapture. The house was a large one, with a corner bay-window wide open, and it was from that room evidently that the music was proceeding. It was some rapid piece full of rippling streams of notes with very few chords, octaves in the base clef that thundered like the oncoming tide, swirling waves of treble triplets that were light as air, yet beneath all the laughter and freedom, a sense of dim, unuttered passion, half hopeful, half melancholy. Long afterwards she knew it was Chopin’s Black Note Study in G flat. But then it had no name to her. It might have been the latest ragtime craze for all she knew: all she cared was that it expressed all the feelings in her own heart that she had thought inexpressible, things that she had often and in vain tried to wring out of the Collard and Collard at home. At that moment it is probable that she would have given everything she had in the world for that piano. It stood to her as the one way to salvation. She would have bartered her soul for it. As it was, she stood there in the spattered moonlight and cried for it. At any rate, she cried.... The piece finished up in a tremendous cascade of double octaves, and she waited nearly half an hour after that, hoping the playing might begin again. Then she walked back to Kitchener Road almost in a state of trance. The Bockley High Street was very white and deserted, and far into the dim distance stretched the tram-rails, blue and infinite. It was long past eleven. But Catherine was dreaming—dreaming of one thing only (though that one thing was strangely complicated by other things)—dreaming of a grand piano, dreaming of the ecstasy of playing it as she had heard it played that night. The vision of her ambition came to her as she turned into Kitchener Road. She would become a great pianoforte player. Already discerning critics—adjudicators at musical festivals and such like—had prophesied a career for her if she would work hard. Hitherto it had not seemed worth while to work hard. Now it became suddenly and tremendously worth all the soul and energy she could give to it. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else could ever matter. Whatever stuff her soul was made of, music was part of it, and music would answer everything her soul asked.
At home her father was waiting up, vaguely remonstrative as usual.
“Worse and worse it gets, Cathie ...” he began ... “the first night you’re home after your holiday you land in at twenty to twelve! ... it’s not good enough ... you’ve had all the morning and afternoon. I can’t think what makes you want to go walking the streets this time....”
“I’m not having any supper,” she said brusquely. “Good-night....”
“But——”
“Oh, don’t worry ... I’ve had some,” she lied. As she fled upstairs she heard him murmuring something. A great change had come over him since his wife died. He had been getting ever slower and feebler. It was becoming more and more evident that it had been only his wife’s incessant nagging that had spurred him to the minimum of activity. Now he pottered aimlessly about the garden. His attendances at the Duke Street Chapel became more and more infrequent, and finally ceased altogether. People said (often facetiously) that he was pining away of grief at his wife’s death. It is doubtful if this were a complete diagnosis....
Up in the little back bedroom Catherine did a thing which she had not done for a long time. She prayed. Ch-artinevin was no longer a choleric old gentleman with white side-whiskers and a devouring passion for adulatory worship. He had long ago ceased to be that, and he had not begun to be anything else. Catherine, though she never altogether recognized her position, had no very definite belief in either Him or the rest of the accepted doctrines of Christianity. She prayed, not out of religious fervour, but from a variety of complex motives, one of which was certainly a desire to straighten out her own ideas by reducing them to more or less coherent form. Among other things, she prayed for a grand piano. “Lord, give me a grand piano,” was her unorthodox variant upon the more usual bedtime supplications. “Lord, do give me a grand piano,” she pleaded. It is curious, but she did not in the least expect the Lord to take any notice. She was even doubtful whether the Lord were listening. Yet she kept on repeating the demand for a grand piano. Also she decided how she would catalogue the whole George Trant episode. It was nothing. It was to be regarded as nothing. Tears broke in upon her decision to regard it as nothing. The grand piano and all that it meant to her kept looming on the horizon. Then she felt a little ashamed of crying. “I never used to cry,” she thought. “Not even after a sound thrashing.” She tried to calm herself. “I’m getting soppy,” she reflected. “Crying like a little kid. All because of that piano. That’s what done it....” It was long past midnight when she fell into troubled sleep.