She would undoubtedly have killed herself but for music. Music gave her courage. She felt that fame as a pianist would compensate for utter unhappiness and loneliness. She had always the feeling: If I am subject to some great trial, if I am miserable and unhappy, I can put my misery and unhappiness into my playing. If my heart is ever on the point of breaking, I shall play Chopin’s Nocturnes the better for it. My misery I shall not have to bear alone: the whole world (or a large part of it) will bear it with me. The miseries of other folk are no less intense than mine, but they are suffered in silence and forgotten. Mine will be bequeathed to the world. Even my loneliness will not be so tragic when all the world is sharing it with me. I shall suffer, but thousands will throb, not with sympathy, but with an infinitely greater thing—my own agony made real in their hearts. I shall be immortal even if the only thing of me that lasts is what I have suffered....
The craving for immortality in her did not wear a religious aspect. All she desired was to leave behind some ineffaceable indisfigurable thing that she had felt, or that had been a part of her. I am not worth preserving, she told herself. No angel business for me. But my feelings, my sensations, my strange moods and aspects, these are exquisite, different from everything else that has ever existed—divine, imperishable, everlasting. When people have forgotten who I was I shall not mind if they will only remember some solitary fragment of what I have felt....
This was her aim in playing. She projected her personality into the music. Chopin was passionately Chopin when she played him: he was also passionately herself.
But she was tragically lonely.
Her loneliness made her do strange things. One Saturday afternoon in Epping Forest she found a boy fishing with a jam jar in a small pond. He was busy with tadpoles. He had glorious golden hair and blue eyes, and might have been about twelve or thirteen years old.
“Hullo!” she called. “Caught anything yet?”
He had waded ten or fifteen yards from the bank. He held up a jar.
“Do let me see!” she cried enthusiastically.
He waded back, and they sat down on a grassy bank and examined the contents of the jar. For over half an hour she tried to comprehend his enigmatic Cockney. She hated insects of all kinds, and tadpoles produced in her the same kind of revulsion as did insects. But for half an hour she conquered that revulsion. She held tadpoles in her hand, though her flesh shrank in horror. She was so utterly lonely that this was not too great a price to pay for chatter and companionship.
He was an ordinary gutter-urchin, the kind that runs after the wagonettes touting for halfpennies. His clothes were tattered and not too clean, but she did not mind. She wished she could have talked in his language. She wished he would tell her his secrets. As it was, their conversation was confined to tadpoles, of which subject she was lamentably ignorant.