Peach and Lathergrew, butchers, High Road, Bockley, £6 16s. 2d.
Batty, fish merchant, The Causeway, Upton Rising, £5 5s. 10d.
The crisis was coming nearer!
§ 5
The persistent piling up of disaster upon disaster inflicted on her a kind of spiritual numbness, which made her for the most part insensible to panic. The first bill (the one from the grocer’s) had had a much more disturbing effect on her than any subsequent one or even than the cumulative effect of all of them when she thought about her worries en masse.
There came a time when by constant pondering the idea of being hopelessly in debt struck her as a very inadequate reason for unhappiness. But at odd moments, as blow after blow fell, and as she slipped insensibly into a new stratum of society, there would come moments of supreme depression, when there seemed nothing in the world to continue to live for, and when the whole of her past life and future prospects seemed nothing but heaped-up agony. Her dreams mocked her with the romance of her subconsciousness. She would dream that she was the greatest pianist in the world, that the mightiest men and women of a hundred realms had gathered in one huge building to taste the magic of her fingers, that they cheered and applauded whilst she played things of appalling technical difficulty until she had perforce to stop because her instrument could no longer be heard above the frenzy of their shouting; that in the end she finished her repertoire of difficult concert pieces, and in response to repeated demands for an encore started to play a simple minuet of Beethoven, and that at the simple beauty of the opening chords the great assembly hushed its voice and remained tense and in perfect silence whilst she played. And, moreover, that her quick eye had noticed in a far and humble corner of the building Ray Verreker, straining to catch the music of the woman whose fingers he had guided to fame. He was in rags and tatters, and it was plain that fortune had played despicably with him. But, amidst the thunderous applause that shook the building when her fingers had come to rest, her eye caught his and she beckoned to him to approach. He came, and she held out both her magic hands to raise him to the platform. “This is my master,” she cried, in a voice that lifted the furthest echoes, “this is my teacher, the one whose creature I am, breath of my body, fire of my spirit! The honour you heap upon me I share with him!”
Beautifully unreal were those dreams of hers. Always was she the heroine and Verreker the hero. Always were their present positions reversed, she, famous and wealthy and adored, and he, alone, uncared for, helpless and in poverty, unknown and loving her passionately. Always her action was the opposite of what his was in reality: she was his kind angel, stooping to his fallen fortunes, and lifting them and him by her own bounty....
Beautiful, unreal dreams! During the day she had no time for these wandering fictions: work and worry kept her mind constantly in the realm of stern reality; but at night-time, when her determination held no longer sway, she sketched her future according to her heart’s desire and filled it in with touches of passionate romance. To wake from these scenes of her own imagining into the drab reality of her morning’s work was fraught with horror unutterable....
Worst, perhaps, of all, her arm did not improve. It seemed as if the three guineas’ worth per week of electric massage treatment were having simply no effect at all, save to bring nearer the day of financial cataclysm. And even if her neuritis were now to leave her, the long period during which she had had no practice would have left unfortunate results. Even granted complete and immediate recovery, it would be fully a month, spent in laborious and intensive practising, before she dare play again in public. Then, too, it would be necessary for her to play brilliantly to retrieve the reputation tarnished by her performance at the New Year’s concert. Moreover, she had no organizer now, and she did not know quite what the work entailed by that position was. And she felt nervous of playing again, lest she might further damage her reputation.
But as long as she could not use her right arm these difficulties were still hidden in the future.