There was another surprise in store for Catherine.
In the front row of the stalls at the Bockley Victoria Theatre she saw George Trant. She was only a few feet away from him in the orchestra, and it was inevitable that he should notice her.
Now if Catherine had been asked if she would ever have anything to do with George Trant again, she would have said “No” very decisively. She had made up her mind about that long ago. If he ever spoke to her she had decided to snub him unmercifully.
But George Trant stood up and waved to her.
“I say, Cathie!” he said.
And Catherine looked up and said, quite naturally, “Hullo, George.”
It was a revelation to her. What had she said it for? What was the matter with her? A fit of self-disgust made her decide that at any rate she would not continue a conversation with him. But curiously enough George did not address her again that evening. She wished he would. She wanted to snub him. She wanted to let him see how firm and inflexible she was. She wanted to let herself see it also.
§ 4
At Gifford Road, in the little bedroom, Catherine’s dissatisfaction reached culminating point. Life was monotonous. The humdrum passage of day after day mocked her in a way she could not exactly define. She wanted to be swept into the maelstrom of big events. Nothing had yet come her way that was big enough to satisfy her soul’s craving. Things that might have developed dramatically insisted on being merely common-place. Even the fire of her musical ambition was beginning to burn low. Things in her life which had at first seemed tremendous were even now in the short perspective of a few months beginning to lose glamour. She thought of those dark days, not a year back, when the idea of saying “hullo” to George Trant would have seemed blasphemy. She thought of those June evenings when she had paced up and down the Ridgeway in the spattered moonlight, revelling in the morbid ecstasy of calling to mind what had happened there. All along she had been an epicure in emotions. She loved to picture herself placed in circumstances of intense drama. She almost enjoyed the disappointment and passion that George Trant had roused in her, because such feelings were at the time new to her. Yet even in her deepest gloom something within herself whispered: “This is nothing. You are not really in love with George Trant. You are just vaguely sentimental, that’s all. You’re just testing and collecting emotions as a philatelist collects stamps. It’s a sort of scientific curiosity. Wait till the real thing comes and you’ll lose the nerve for experimenting....” Yet the episode of George Trant had stirred just sufficient feeling in Catherine to make her apprehensive of similar situations in the future....
Now, as she undressed in the attic-bedroom in Gifford Road, life seemed colourless. The idea of refusing to speak to George Trant because of what had happened less than a year ago struck her as childish. She was glad she had spoken to him. It would have been silly to dignify their absurd encounter by attempting magnificence. Catherine decided that she had acted very sensibly. Yet she was dissatisfied. She had built up ideals—the ideals of the melodrama—and now they were crumbling at the first touch of cold sense. She had imagined herself being pitifully knocked about by fate and destiny and other things she believed in, and now she was beginning to realize with some disappointment that she had scarcely been knocked about at all. It was a very vague dissatisfaction, but a very intense one for all that.