“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.
§ 9
In the bedroom of her cottage at High Wood, Catherine stood in front of the cheval glass and eyed herself critically. It seemed to her in that moment that a miracle had happened, a door unlocked to her that she thought would be for ever closed, a dream which she had scarcely dared to glimpse, even from afar, brought suddenly and magically within her grasp. A miracle indeed, and yet the very ease with which she acclimatized herself to new conditions gave almost the impression that the miracle had been to some extent anticipated, that she had so prepared and organized her soul that she could slip into the new scheme of things with a minimum of perturbation.
Standing before the mirror, she was surprised at her own calmness. And the more she pondered, the more stupendous seemed the miracle, and consequently the more amazing her own attitude. Already it seemed that she was beginning to take for granted what a day before had been a dream so far from fulfilment that she had scarcely dared to admit it into coherent form. A day ago the idea that her affection for Verreker was reciprocated seemed the wildest phantasy: she had not dared even to think of such a thing hypothetically, for fear it should grow into her life as something confidently expected: yet dim and formless it had lurked behind all her thoughts and ideas; shadowy and infinitely remote, it had guided and inspired her with greater subtlety than she knew. But now it need no longer be dim and formless: it entered boldly into the strong light of day, into the definition of word and sentence: she could ask herself plainly the question, “Does he love me?” because deep down in her heart she knew that he did. Her instinct told her that he did, but she was quite prepared to doubt her own instinct. She did not know that her feminine instinct in such a matter was nearly infallible. But she was no longer afraid of treating herself to the random luxury of thinking and dreaming.
All at once she was seized with a terrible sense of absurdity and incongruity. Was it possible, was it even remotely conceivable that he should love her? She did not know that she was on the brink of the perennial mystery that has surprised millions of men and women: she felt that her question was singularly acute and penetrating. What was there in her that could attract him? Not her intellect, for he knew full well the measure of that. Not her musical genius, for he was not an admirer of it. Not her sympathies and ideals common to his, for she was incapable of understanding the major part of him. Nor even her beauty, for she was not beautiful. What, then, could it be? And the answer was that love, the force he despised, the elemental thing to which he conceived himself superior, had linked him to her by bonds that he had not the power to sever. The strong man had toppled. He suddenly ceased to be a god in the clouds and became a human being on her earth. Would his ideals crumble to dust at the touch of this mighty enslaving force? Would he shatter the dreams of a lifetime, those mighty dreams of his that had nothing to do with love, would he shatter them and lay the ruins at her feet? How would he reconcile the iron rigidity of his theories with the impulse of his passion?