LONELINESS
§ 1
SHE began to be very lonely. She had no friends.
She began to long for companionship. Since her estrangement from
George, the Trants’ household had of course been barred to her. This
meant the loss of Helen’s benign, sweetening companionship. There
was something in Helen.... Catherine missed those Sunday teas at
“Highfield.” She missed Mrs. Trant’s anxious affability, Mr. Trant’s
bluff hooliganism (which she detested), and Helen’s smile, aloof yet
full of serene understanding. She missed even those lingering homeward
strolls with George, the comfortable feel of his arm linked in hers,
and the faint tobacco aroma of his clothes. Undoubtedly she missed his
companionship and his passing flashes of brilliance. Once she composed
a letter to him....
We can’t be lovers, but why shouldn’t we be friends? Surely we’re
capable of it. I for one am desperately lonely.... But understand,
there is not the slightest prospect of anything further than
friendship developing.... But friendship I should be glad to have....
She tore it up as soon as she had read it over. It was no good. He
would not understand....
Often in the midst of applause at her concerts she would think the
awful thought: I am the loneliest person of you all. You who are
envying me have friends and companions. I have none. I am utterly to be
pitied.
And sometimes as she strolled along the tree-hung suburban roads the
idea of suicide would come before her calmly and without effort. It
was one solution of the difficulty. It was one she did not propose to
take. For one thing, life was very precious. And for another, she had
not the courage.... But suicide always took the position in her mind of
a possible and perfectly feasible proposition. She was not hopelessly
prejudiced against it....
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.
In a dim, formless way she wished he might sprain his ankle or be taken
ill so that she could wait on him and mother him. She wanted some
excuse for touching his soft hair and his eyes and his beautiful bare
feet.
But when his mates appeared suddenly round the corner of a bush he took
up his jar and left her without a word.... Still, she was happy and
smiling, though her flesh still crept at the thought of tadpoles.
Children were very nice ... especially boys.
But the maternal instinct was not very strong in her. It was only her
loneliness that had intensified what of it that there was.
The thirteenth mazurka of Chopin filled her with strange ecstasy. It
was so lonely....
§ 2
She became increasingly conscious of the defects of her education.
Literature at the Bockley High School for Girls had meant a painful
annual struggle through a play of Shakespeare and a novel of Sir Walter
Scott. Catherine did not like either of these authors. The former
she regarded secretly as an uninspired country gentleman who had
industriously put into blank verse thoughts so obvious that nobody had
ever previously deemed them worthy of mention. Such remarks as “Evil
and good are mingled in our natures.” ... Her acquaintance with the
immortal bard had been confined to that small residue left of his plays
when the censoring hand of Miss Forsdyke had excluded (_a_) those
plays which are too poor to be worth reading, and (_b_) those
which are unsuitable for critical analysis in the Bockley High School
for Girls. Of Scott, Catherine’s opinion was no higher. She found him
woefully dull. And invariably she had to learn his glossaries at the
end of the book.
The net result was that Catherine’s literary equipment comprised a
few score obsolete words and idioms culled in an entirely stupid
fashion from _As You Like It_, _The Merchant of Venice_,
and _The Talisman_. Of Lamb, Hazlitt, Landor, Rossetti, the
Brontës, De Quincey, Fitzgerald and the modernists she knew nothing.
She had been brought up with a vague prejudice that reading anything
less than a hundred years old was wasting time. It seemed to her on
the face of it quite inconceivable that people should ever equal
Scott and Shakespeare. Though she liked neither of them, she was
overwhelmed by the mighty consensus of opinion labelling them as the
greatest masters (for school use) of the English language. Only rarely
did she rebel, and then she thought vaguely: “Supposing all this
Scott-and-Shakespeare-worship is a great organized conspiracy!” ...
Of French literature she knew nothing. Her study of the French language
had not progressed beyond an ability to demand writing implements.
(“Bring me pens, ink, writing-paper, a blotter and a stamp. What time
does the next post go? Say: At what hour departs the next post?”)
That the French language possessed a literature she was but dimly
aware. Her ideas of France and the French were derived from various
stage Frenchmen she had seen upon the boards of the Bockley Victoria
Theatre. France was a nation of dapper little gesticulating men with
Imperial beards, and heavily rouged girls who wore skirts a few inches
shorter than on this side of the Channel, and said “Cheri?” She was a
land of boulevards and open-air cafés, and absinthe and irreligion. Her
national industry was adultery.
Partly to occupy her time when she was not practising the piano
Catherine joined the Bockley Free Library. She read most of the
Victorian poets, and was oppressed by the heavy sentimentality
of Tennyson. But she was not really fond of reading; it was only
loneliness that drove her to it. Only one of Dickens’ novels fascinated
her, and that was _Great Expectations_. But for _Jane Eyre_
and _Wuthering Heights_ she had a passionate admiration.
Once she discovered a book by Verreker. It was called _Growth of the
Village Community_. Obeying a swift impulse, she took it out and
went home with it. That evening she wrestled with the first chapter....
Her amazement that anybody could write such a thing was only equalled
by her amazement that anybody could read it. It was to Scott in point
of heaviness as a hydraulic press is to a pound weight.
It did not precisely raise her opinion of Verreker in the way that
might have been expected. It amazed her, but it also made her think:
“What’s the good of all this useless learning? It makes no difference
to him. Nobody would know how clever he is to look at him. And yet he
must have been studying these weird problems for years.” ...
She had no sympathy with the remorseless pursuit of knowledge. Her
forte was the pursuit of experience.