§ 3
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 were involuntary, 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, I did say 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 anything to 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, and ahead 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 the compartment 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 a single 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....