And on the day he met her in the train to Liverpool Street he wrote: “Warm spring sort of day. Went to Ealing to see Rogers. Rogers got a job under the L.C.C. Two boys and a girl. Mrs. R. rather theatrical....” And in the corner, all cramped up, as if he had stuck it in as a doubtful after-thought: “Met C. in train to L’pool St. Seems well enough.”
Grudging, diffident, self-reproachful, sardonic, that remark—“Seems well enough.” With the emphasis no doubt on the “seems.”
Lately the entries had been getting more sprightly.
“Met Miss Picksley to-day. Promised her a paper on W. Shakespeare for the Mut. Impr. Soc....” “Walked to High Wood after chapel. Beautiful moonlight. Saw motor-bus collision in B. High St. coming back....” “Bought gramophone sec. hand off Clayton. £2 10. Like a bit of music. No piano now, of course....”
“Of course.”
Catherine was immensely puzzled by that entry. She realized its pathos, its tragic reticence, its wealth of innuendo, yet she could not conceive his feelings when setting it down. For he had never taken any pleasure in her “strumming,” as he called it. He had accused her of interrupting his work. He had said: “Not quite so much noise, please. Shut both doors....” And sometimes he had hinted darkly: “I don’t know whether it’s you or the piano, but——” And yet he had missed those piano noises. Vaguely, perhaps almost unconsciously, yet sufficiently to make him conquer a carefully nurtured hatred of the gramophone. The gramophone, viewed in the light of this new discovery, was the tangible, incontrovertible evidence of his sense of loss. He had missed her. He had been lonely. He had wanted her to come back. And because of that he had bought a gramophone.
Catherine felt the presence of tragedy. Yet the ingredients were all wrong. Gramophone buying, even in the most extravagant circumstances, does not lend itself to sophistication. And yet, that gramophone—absurd, insignificant, farcical though its presence was—was the evidence of tragedy. Once more Catherine’s melodramatic ideals crumbled. Her artistic sense was hurt by the deep significance of that gramophone. She felt a gramophone had no right to be the only clue she had to the tragedy of her own father. She felt humiliated. And then for a swift moment a passion swept over her. The false ideals collapsed into ruins, the sham sentiment, no less a sham because it was not the sham sentiment of other people, the morbid seeking after emotional effect, the glittering pursuit of dramatic situations, tumbled into dust and were no longer worth while. Nothing was left in her save a sympathy that was different from anything she had previously called sympathy, something that overwhelmed her like a flood. It was a pleasurable sensation, this sympathy, and afterwards she tried to analyse the sweet agony it had wrought in her. But at the time she did not realize either its pleasure or its pain, and that is the truest testimony that it was something more real and sincere than she had felt before. Tears welled up in her eyes—tears that she did not strive either to summon or to repress, tears that were the natural, spontaneous outpouring of something in her that she knew nothing about. She did not think in her egoistical, self-analysing way: “What a strange emotion I am experiencing!” She thought kaleidoscopically of her childhood and girlhood, and of one particular evening when her father had crept into her room at night and asked her to kiss him. It was terrible to remember that she had replied: “Oh, go away! ...” Terrible! All her life it seemed to her that her attitude towards him had been—“Oh, go away! ...” And now he had gone away out of her reach for ever. She sat down in front of the writing-desk with the diary in front of her and cried. She cried passionately, as a child who is crying because by his own irrevocable act something has been denied him. She bowed her head in her hands and gave herself up to an orgy of remorse. She was truly heartbroken.
For a little while.
The transience of her brokenheartedness may be gauged by the fact that on her way home she was strangely elated by a single thought. That thought—occurring to her some half-way down the Ridgeway—was begotten of her old ruthless habit of self-analysis. “I’m not heartless,” she told herself. “I can’t be. Nobody could have acted as I did who hadn’t got a heart. I believe I’ve got as much heart as anybody, really....”
She was rather proud of the tears she had shed.... Delicious to have such proof that she was a human being! Reassuring to find in herself the essential humanities she had at times doubted. Comforting to think that tragedy could move her to sympathy that was more than merely æsthetic.... Splendid to know that deep down in her somewhere there was a fount of feeling which she could not turn off and on at will like a water-main....