Out in the Ridgeway, Catherine decided one thing. She would never take lessons off Verreker; she would never go near that house again....
§ 2
The fierceness of her indignation brought Catherine face to face with one other thing that she had never hitherto realized. And that was the absurd grandiloquence of her ambition. There was nothing that Razounov has said of which she could legitimately complain. He had even complimented her to the extent of saying that she would make a good player if she were careful, and that she might earn plenty of money as a pianist. Surely that was encouraging! ... No, it was not. For he had also told her that she was not a genius, and would never be supreme in her art. Well, what of that? Had she ever had the conceited effrontery to think she was a genius? Catherine decided no, not exactly that, but ... The fact was, Catherine, without knowing it, had inclined to give herself the benefit of the doubt. At any rate, she had always been serenely confident of the doubt. Quite unconsciously she had developed an opinion of herself to which there were no adequate frontiers. She was a supreme egoist, and her life had come to be worth living only on false understandings. Every book she read, every speech or sermon she listened to, occasioned in her the feeling: “How does that fit in with me?” At a school prize-giving once the speaker—a local vicar—had given an address to the scholars in which he mentioned the three things which a human being might legitimately desire—fine physique, genius, and strength of character. When he came to the consideration of the second, he said: “Of course, we’re none of us geniuses, but——” Catherine (she was only fourteen then) had been rather contemptuous of this modesty, “Of course, I suppose he has to say that, and yet how does he know whether ...” she had thought. To her his sweeping declaration savoured of the rash. It had been the same on many occasions. Somewhere at the back of Catherine’s mind had always been the supposition, so patent as to be almost axiomatic, that she was different from other people. That difference was, on the whole, the difference of superiority. She had done things that no other girl of her age and acquaintance had done. She had left home with five and sevenpence half-penny, obtained lodgings on her own, and kept herself by work. She had played at concerts (one concert to be precise). A young man who, whatever his drawbacks, was undeniably clever, had fallen desperately in love with her. Her own father, pining of remorse, had cut his throat to prove to her his undying affection. And the invitation to meet Razounov had at first seemed merely a further rung on the ladder of fame. There was no doubt about it: she was marvellous, extraordinary, a constant surprise both to herself and to other people. Her very faults became demi-virtues. Passionate she felt herself to be. After reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles her instinctive thought had been: “Am I like Tess?” And she had frequently asked herself the question: “Am I a genius?” and had shirked a plain answer. The crudity of the question, the awful conceit of replying in the affirmative, drove her to subterfuge. “Not exactly that, perhaps,” she told herself. “At least, how can I tell? I shall have to wait and see. I can’t give a direct answer.” Yet if she had been forced to give a direct answer, there is no doubt what it would have been.
And now, disillusioned, humiliated, self-scornful, the preposterous nature of her ambitions forced itself upon her. For the space of half an hour she was perfectly frank with herself. She did not spare that pitiable self-conceit of hers. She was ruthless. It was as if she thought that if she could wound that self-conceit so that it died of its injuries, so much the better. She employed first of all the cold steel of logic. The facts were these. She had been told frankly that she was not a genius. She was hurt and humiliated. Ergo, she must have been cherishing the notion that she was a genius. Absurd creature! Preposterous egoist! Conceited upstart! And all because she had played at a third-rate concert!
She wound up with a bitter piece of advice. You aren’t a genius, she insisted, you’re just an ordinary girl with as much extraordinariness in her as falls to the lot of most people. And the sooner you finish with your absurd dreams and ambitions and wake up to the facts the better.
It was good advice. She tried conscientiously to take it. She did take it—for about five and twenty minutes.
But those five and twenty minutes were among the most difficult and miserable she had ever spent.
She flung herself down on the bed in the attic at No. 14, Gifford Road, and was so wretched that she could not cry. Besides, she was convinced that there was nothing she had a right to cry about. Yet it was the utter horror, the unbelievable loneliness of existence that appalled her. She was quite alone in her struggle with the world, parentless, almost friendless. She knew now why it was that she had not mourned the loss of her parents, why it was that her solitary struggle had been up to then so exhilarating, so pleasant. It was that absurd faith in herself, that fearful egoism, that terrible conceit, that had enabled her to fight on alone. And now her succour, her comfort, her support had suddenly cracked and given way, and she was left clinging to wreckage. The future was simply blank, a dull, drab hereafter of self-effacement. Life was not worth living. For the first time in all her life she felt alone—alone with the wreckage of dead dreams and shattered hopes....
“O God!” she cried, “if I’m only ordinary after all! ...”
Horror upon horror! To think of Gifford Road, of the Victoria Theatre, without the conviction that these were but a means to something infinitely higher! Her ultimate triumph provided the only terms on which life amongst these things was worth living! To think of herself as a mere unit in the society that lived in Kitchener Road, Bockley, in Gifford Road, Upton Rising! To deny herself the privilege of thinking what a good joke it was that she should have been born in Kitchener Road! To realize suddenly that it was no joke at all, but an ordinary, not inappropriate circumstance in which she had no right to discover any irony at all. To regard herself as she knew Mrs. Carbass regarded her, viz. as “the little girl wot plys the pienner at the theayter.”