§ 8
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 white symmetrical 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 thing was sentimental.’ ... 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. “Perhaps you’re getting 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 grace of 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 you don’t know, 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.