But it was his presence there which startled her. Why was he at such a gathering? She knew his stormy contempt for the kind of musical suburbinanity that flourished in Upton Rising: it was his boast that he never attended a local concert and never would. “Suburbinanity”—that was his own word for it. She knew his fierce hatred of the kind of things that had been going on for over an hour—that particular violin piece by Dvořák, for instance, was anathema to him. She knew also his passionate intolerance of mediocrity of any kind. She could imagine his sensations when listening to that girl’s rendering of “The Dandy Fifth.” The puzzle was, why had he come? He knew the kind of thing it would be. He must have known the inevitable ingredients of a suburban musical evening. And yet he had come. He had conquered his detestation for social gatherings of this kind so far as to come. It was rather extraordinary, completely uncharacteristic of him.
To Catherine, always the egoist, came the thought: “Has he come here because he knew I should be here?” Yet even a second thought dismissed that idea as unwarrantly absurd. That would be rather an additional reason for his staying away. For every Saturday that she visited him convinced her more and more that he despised her and her ways.
And she also thought: “Will the effect of his being present make me play badly?” She did not know in the least whether it would or not, for the circumstances were so completely different from what they were at “Claremont.” Here she might possibly be able to forget he was in the same room with her. Certainly he would not be at her elbow, turning over the music pages with gestures that conveyed to her perfectly the sensations of disgust that he was experiencing....
But he was playing. Her surprised speculations were immediately cut short by the sound of the piano. She could see his fingers travelling magically over the keys and his strange, grotesque face looking vacantly over the top of the instrument. He looked different from usual. It was probably the unaccustomed angle from which she was watching him, for his features, perfectly unsymmetrical, presented an astonishing variety of aspects.... She suddenly forgot to look at him. Something that he played had thrilled her. A swift chord, passing into a strange, uncouth melody set all her nerves tingling. What was this piece? ... He went on through swirling cascades of arpeggios in the right hand, falling octaves, crashing chords, and then, once again, this strange uncouth melody, the same, but subtly altered. Tremendous, passionately barbaric, was this thing that he was playing. It seized hold of her as if it had suddenly given the answer to all her wants and desires: it stretched out clear and limitless over the furthest horizon she had ever glimpsed; it held all the magic of the stars. And far ahead, further than she had ever dared to look before, lay the long reaches of boundless, illimitable passion ... passion ... passion ... that was what it was.... Her hands twitched convulsively on the sides of the chair. She was caught in a great tide; it was sweeping her further and further outward and onward; she wanted to cry out but could not. Tears were in her eyes, but they would not fall. And for the first time that evening she forgot the pose of her head and hair....
Applause was to her the waking from a dream. They were applauding. A fierce storm of contempt for them overtook her, because she knew they had not heard and seen and felt what she had heard and seen and felt. Their applause was banal, atrociously common-place. Even in mere volume it did not exceed that which had been accorded to the song with the monosyllabic title or to “The Dandy Fifth.” And Catherine, vaguely annoyed that there was any applause at all, was also vaguely angry that it had been so indiscriminating. She did not applaud herself, but she heard George clapping almost in her left ear, and she shot a curious glance at him. She was thinking: “How much of it has meant anything at all to you?”
And then she heard Mr. Trant’s deep, suave voice: “What did you say that was? Peculiar piece, but awfully pretty.”
Verreker mentioned a title she could not hear. George had apparently caught something. He whispered to her in spasms:
“Jeux—something or other, I think he said. French, I suppose. Modern French. Debussy school, you know. Oh, it’s ‘Jeux d’Eaux.’ I heard him say it again. ‘Jeux d’Eaux,’ that’s what it is.... One of Ravel’s things, you know.” ...
§ 7
Verreker returned to his seat. There followed a baritone song of the rollicking variety, a ’cello solo, and then Mrs. Trant called for a “pianoforte solo by Miss Catherine Weston.”