HOPE ENTERS
§ 1
ARRIVED at Gifford Road one summer’s evening after a dusty journey on
top of a crowded motor-bus, Catherine took pen and paper immediately
(without taking off her hat) and wrote:
DEAR MR. VERREKER,
I am thinking of giving a pianoforte recital in one of the London
concert halls. I should be very grateful for your advice and
assistance in the matter. Will you do this for me?
Yours sincerely,
CATHERINE WESTON.
When Catherine had set out some hours before she had had no thoughts
of a pianoforte recital. To be sure, the idea was always revolving
more or less nebulously in her line of vision, but till this moment
it had lacked definition. A pianoforte recital involved a good deal
of risk. It meant hours and hours of preparatory practice, much
worry and anxiety, and the possible loss of a good deal of money. It
meant running the gauntlet of all the blasé and supercilious musical
critics. It meant learning some good solid “background” piece of work
to placate the British public--something heavy and hackneyed and
academic--a Brahms sonata or some Beethoven pomposity. And to consult
Verreker on the matter was merely to invite showers of disappointment
and disillusionment. He would assuredly recommend her not to attempt a
recital. He would tell her candidly that her abilities were not equal
to it. And if she insisted, he would tell her to go somewhere else
for advice: he would not risk his reputation by backing her. He would
be violently rude and outspoken. He would repeat his dictum that she
could never advance beyond the front rank of the second-raters....
She knew all these things. She had thought of them, weighed them up,
and counted them nothing. She was impulsive, but she knew whither her
impulse led and what it involved. She knew that Verreker would insult
her.... And yet she wrote to him.
As she ran joyously down Gifford Road to post the letter she thought:
“What will he think of my note? What will he think of the wording of
it? How will the concluding sentence affect him?--‘Will you do this for
me?’--So charming, so delightfully personal, so intimate, with a dash
of roguish coquetry! But will he see all that?--or will he think it
merely impudent?”
Anyway, she decided, I should get an answer by Wednesday morning....
§ 2
She worked it out mathematically. He would receive the note by the
first post on Tuesday morning. If he wrote immediately it was just
possible that a reply might reach her by the seven o’clock post on
Tuesday evening. However, such promptness was unlikely and not to be
expected; it was much more probable that he would write later on in
the day, so that she should receive his answer by breakfast time on
Wednesday. She pinned her hopes to breakfast time on Wednesday. Yet she
could not help a feeling of tense anticipation when the postman knocked
at the door on Tuesday evening. He has been prompt, she told herself
triumphantly, and she sat down at the piano and started to turn over
the pages of a Bach Concerto. She would not betray her excitement by
rushing down into the kitchen to fetch the letter. She would let Mrs.
Carbass bring it up to her. After all, it was absurd to be so concerned
about a letter. And a few minutes made no difference in any case.
But Mrs. Carbass did not come. And the awful strangling thought came
to Catherine: “Perhaps there wasn’t a letter for me!” At least, it
was awful and strangling at first, until she told herself somewhat
irritably: “Well, you didn’t expect one, did you? Give the man time!”
And of course there was Bank Holiday traffic: possibly that accounted
for some delay. Curious that she should have neglected that superbly
facile explanation--of course, it must be Bank Holiday traffic....
Or perhaps Mrs. Carbass had forgotten to bring it up. Catherine
discovered a sudden desire to borrow Mrs. Carbass’s scissors. She went
down the short flight of steps into the dark kitchen.
“Can I have your scissors a moment, Mrs. Carbass?”
“Certainly, miss.... Leave ’em up there w’en you’ve finished with ’em
an’ I’ll take ’em w’en I brings the supper....” She took the scissors
off the hook and handed them to Catherine.
“By the way,” said Catherine at the door, “post been yet?”
“Yes, miss. Nothink for you. Only a Hodson’s dripery circular--they’re
always sendin’ ’em round.”
“Thanks!” replied Catherine nonchalantly, and went back to her
sitting-room.
“Of course,” she told herself, regarding the scissors vacantly,
“it’s almost impossible for him to have replied in time to reach me
this evening. What with the Bank Holiday traffic and one thing and
another....”
She pinned her hopes to Wednesday morning....
§ 3
On Wednesday morning she came downstairs early. The post came usually
at seven-fifteen, and letters were as a rule by her plate when she came
to breakfast at eight. Never before had the prospect of reading letters
enticed her from bed before seven-forty-five. But this morning was
beautiful and sunny, and she thought (as she lay in bed about a quarter
past seven): “It is shameful to lie in bed on such a morning as this!
I’ve a good mind to get up and have a stroll up the High Road before
breakfast.”
She dressed and came downstairs to the basement sitting-room. As she
turned the handle of the door her heart beat fast and she thought:
“Another five seconds and I shall know! Another five seconds and----”
There was something by her plate! Only it was rather too bulky to be a
private letter. But there was probably a letter hidden underneath it.
She approached quickly and snatched it up.... Nothing!
The bulky package was a copy of a book of words for a forthcoming
concert at which she was to play.
As she went out into Gifford Road the early pilgrims to the City were
already converging into the stream that flowed along the High Road
towards Upton Rising Station. It was, as she had before noticed, a
beautiful morning. Passing the pillar-box, she was struck by the
appalling possibilities of a letter being lost in the post. It had
to be taken from the pillar-box into a bag, carried to the central
post-office, sorted, put into another bag, and finally inserted in the
letter-box of just one out of the ten thousand houses of Upton Rising!
At a dozen crises in its chequered course it might stray, get lost, or
be waylaid. The arrival of it was a miracle! That a few words scribbled
on an envelope should guide a slip of paper through all the maze and
tangle of civilization, finally selecting one out of a possible million
spots for its delivery, was nothing less than a stupendous miracle! ...
Strange that it had never occurred to her before. On the pillar-box
plate she read: “Letters containing coin etc. should not be posted in
this box, but should be registered.” That, of course, was a safeguard
against theft. There were always letter thieves about. It was a
lucrative business. They opened letters at random hoping to find postal
orders inside. No doubt letters were often lost in this way....
But, of course, he had scarcely had time to reply yet. Perhaps he
was consulting Razounov. Perhaps he was not in Upton Rising, and his
letters had to be forwarded on to him. Or perhaps he had written and
delayed to post the letter. Or perhaps the Bank Holiday traffic....
She pinned her faith to the midday delivery....
§ 4
Wednesday passed, and no letter came. And then Thursday. Catherine had
never before been so eager about a letter. She took to going out for a
stroll about post-time so that if the letter should arrive it would be
there waiting for her when she returned. This manœuvre seemed somehow
to lessen the tension of waiting.... Friday came and went, and still no
reply from Verreker. Sometimes Catherine felt passionately and proudly
annoyed, sometimes she would be on the point of writing again to him.
Sometimes she thought: “It is my fault: the letter has irritated him;
he has disliked that concluding sentence, ‘Will you do this for me?’”
And sometimes she felt: I have written him a polite note, and it is his
place to reply. If he doesn’t, I shan’t write again.
And then she had intervals of amazing lucidity, when she upbraided
herself without stint. You are being as trivial and as paltry over
this letter as anybody might be, she accused herself--your behaviour
is absolutely absurd. There are a hundred reasons why he may not have
replied, and one of them is that he has completely forgotten. After
all, you do not occupy such an important place in his mind as to make
it impossible for him to forget you....
And then on Saturday morning (she deliberately stayed in bed till eight
in order to convince herself that she had ceased to be absurd) the
familiar handwriting lay uppermost beside her plate. With carefully
restrained eagerness she cut open the envelope with the bread-knife.
DEAR MISS WESTON (_she read_),
I am sorry I have delayed in replying to your note, but I have been
extremely busy and that must be my excuse. With regard to your
project, it is almost impossible to discuss it in correspondence, so
will you come to tea here on Sunday (4 p.m.)?
Yours sincerely,
R. E. VERREKER.
“H’m!” she thought. “So he was busy. That was what kept him from
writing.” She had never thought of that. And he wanted her to come to
tea on Sunday. Sunday was to-morrow....
Her first feeling was one of unutterable relief that the terrible
melancholy of Sunday afternoon would be staved off for one week....
Then she began to speculate what she should wear on the occasion....
And afterwards as she strolled along the clean white asphalt of the
High Road she yielded herself wholly to vague rapture....
§ 5
Sunday was very hot. It was the kind of day which normally would have
made her acutely depressed. The air was windless and sultry, the
streets dusty and paper-littered, the sky blazingly and mercilessly
blue. As Catherine walked briskly down Gifford Road she passed the
whelk-seller pushing his briny-flavoured handcart along the gutter.
Further down the road the Sabbath carnival of the suburbs had already
begun: a downstairs window was wide open at the bottom, and from within
came the throaty gargling strains of a gramophone. At another house a
piano was vamping to an antiquated music-hall ditty. The tar in the
roadway was sweating in great oozing blots, and the wheels of the whelk
cart had left conspicuous ruts in the soft tar-macadam near the kerb.
In the High Road (running north and south) there was no shade save from
occasional trees that overhung the sidewalks. Trams and motor-buses
fluttered by bearing crowds of white-frocked girls and men in sedate
browns and greys Forestwards. Now and then a wagonette rumbled over the
wooden blocks of the roadway, tastelessly beflagged and beribboned,
crammed to overflowing with miscellaneous juvenility, all shouting and
singing and waving paper streamers. Sometimes a middle-aged or elderly
group passed in similar vehicles, and the noise and clamour of these
was of the maudlin type. As each party drew up to the King’s Arms there
was a frenzy of horn-blowing and a quick descent for refreshment.
Catherine passed along the hot pavements with light step and light
heart. She passed through the crowded, gesticulating throng outside
the King’s Arms, where the marble ledges were crowded with empty,
froth-smeared beer glasses, and the diminutive shrubs in green-painted
barrels were yellow and parched for lack of water. Normally these
things would have struck her as tawdry and dismal, but to-day she
took no notice of them. She was not even conscious of the terribly
melancholy aspect of whole rows of shuttered shops with doors
blistering in the heat.
But in the Ridgeway all was strong light and deep shadow. The asphalt
roadway gleamed dazzlingly white under the sun, and the sidewalks,
overhung with heavy lime-trees, were avenues of green twilight. Along
them men’s sunburnt faces seemed strangely brown and handsome, and
the sweat that disfigured the noses and foreheads of girls no longer
glistened. Even a hawker bearing with an easy hand a monstrous cloud of
multicoloured balloons for sale on the High Road seemed rather to lend
a grotesque charm than a positive disfigurement. And the houses, well
set back from the road, displayed their gilded domes and sham minarets
and pseudo-Elizabethan gables with quiet, unostentatious pride.
Nicknamed “The Lovers’ Parade,” the Ridgeway was justifying the title.
But in the soft gloom there was only enchantment in the passing of
couples: their facial blemishes were toned down, their gestures took on
a strange and subtle grace, their wandering was shadowlike amongst the
shadows. Only when they stepped off the kerb into the garish sunlight
was the spell shattered, the dream brought to an awakening.
Catherine passed airily along. Just as she had not been conscious of
the brutal garishness of the High Road, so now the soft charm of the
Ridgeway did not affect her. Her heart was abundantly glad and joyous,
but her senses were quiescent. Had she been in her usual mood of lonely
introspection she would have thrilled at the beauty of all around
her--faces would have attracted and repelled her with fierce intensity,
she would have laughed at the cloud of colour towed by the balloon man,
she would have drunk in the cloying scent of geraniums like nectar. As
it was, she was vaguely but tremendously rapturous. And the rapture
came from within her, not from without.
§ 6
She found him in the garden seated in a deck-chair (adjusted to the
bottom notch) reading the _Observer_. He wore grey flannel
trousers and a sort of Donegal tweed sporting jacket. He was utterly
divorced from the prevailing atmosphere of Upton Rising in that his
attire betrayed no indication of the fact that it was Sunday. Catherine
thought: “How delightfully Bohemian!” and (an after-thought), “He
certainly hasn’t dressed up for me, anyway.”
“Hullo!” he cried, as she obtruded herself into the alcove of
shrubbery which ringed him round almost completely. And he rose (a
matter of obvious difficulty) and shook hands with her. He dropped
the _Observer_ on the lawn. Also he smiled at her: it was not a
beautiful smile, because he could not smile beautifully, but it was a
smile of welcome.
“Come along, and well find another chair,” he said. They strolled over
the lawn and towards the house.
“I’m taking a day off,” he said briskly, “and I think I deserve it. The
first day off I’ve had for months.”
“Except last Monday,” she put in.
“Why--what happened then?”
“You were at High Beech. I saw you.”
“Oh, Bank Holiday, you mean? Oh, that wasn’t pleasure exactly.
Miss Trant and I had gone to Hertfordshire to collect some data in
connection with a new book I’m on with. Coming back we thought we’d go
past High Beech--that was all.”
“Another book?”
“Only a treatise on economics--not at all interesting to most people, I
assure you. You’d probably find it extremely tiresome.”
“How do you know?” she asked aggressively. She disliked his readiness
to lump her among the “most people.” Also she was annoyed to think
that what he said was probably true, that she would find it extremely
tiresome. She had tackled his _Village Community_ (the first
chapter) and been unable to make head or tail of it.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I only think ... Mrs. Tebbutt!”
The summons was presumably to someone in the house. A female voice
called “Yes!”
“Bring some tea outside, will you?” he sang out, and the voice within
responded with a resigned, “Very well, sir.” ... Into an outhouse he
plunged, and emerged with a deck-chair and cushions.
“Come on,” he said, and handed her the cushions to carry. “It’s pretty
cool round by those shrubs.”
They strolled back over the lawn, and took up positions facing one
another.
“Mind if I smoke?” he remarked, and before she could murmur a “Oh, not
at all,” he had lit a cigarette and was puffing at it.
“Smoke yourself?” he then said.
“Thanks,” she replied, and took one out of a box of Egyptian cigarettes
that lay on the ground beside him.
“Now,” he began, “about that recital....”
“Yes?”
“Let me talk to you a bit.... Do you know anything about recitals? No,
of course you don’t. Well, listen to me.... A recital ...”
§ 7
What he told her might be summarized thus:
“A recital is an expensive business. It means taking a risk. If it
is a failure it is a big failure. If it is a success it opens up a
vista of bigger successes. It is the barrier which every first-class
_virtuoso_ has to approach and surmount. There is no reason why
you should not attempt to surmount it. Provided you are willing to
undertake the financial risk. After all, though you will never be a
first-class pianist, you may quite easily be a second, and a good many
second-class people pass the barrier successfully.”
As a sort of running undercurrent to his remarks there was the
implication:
“There is no knowing what the British public may do. I prophesy neither
success nor failure. Even if you aren’t tip-top the public may insist
on treating you as if you were, in which case you will no doubt have a
difficulty in believing anybody who tells you you aren’t. If the fickle
public makes an idol of you, I can’t help it. I can only assure you you
don’t merit it. In fact, I wash my hands of all responsibility for your
future.”
Practically what he said was:
“I will help you as far as I can. I will arrange your recital, get
you a hall, have tickets, programmes and announcements printed, and
secure you a tolerable press. All this I will do without in the least
guaranteeing that your enterprise will be anything but a howling
fiasco.”
She had expected so little that she was grateful even for this. She
had prepared herself to receive merciless rebuffs. What she had not
prepared herself to do was to express gratitude. Consequently she found
a difficulty in doing so. But no annoyance was discernible in him. He
did not appear to want her thanks or even to notice the absence of
them. And this in some inexplicable sense piqued her. She would have
liked him to say: “Aren’t you grateful?” (Though, of course, it was
just the last thing he would ever say.) But at least he might have
waited enquiringly for her to voice her gratitude. And if he had, she
would probably not have done so. But because he ran on talking of all
kinds of irrelevant things she was both quaintly annoyed and intensely
desirous of thanking him.
Suddenly she realized he was paying her the stupendous compliment of
talking to her about himself.
“Of course I love music,” he was saying, “but I do not let it occupy my
whole life. There are bigger things. Infinitely bigger things....”
She was pleased he had used the word “love” so straightforwardly, so
naturally, so unhysterically. She was glad he had not said “am fond
of,” or “am awfully keen on,” or “like very much.” Most men were afraid
of the word; she was glad he was not. And immediately she thought: “If
I had said it, it would have sounded schoolgirlish. What is it that
gives dignity to what he says?”
“What are they?” she asked.
“The biggest and most important thing in the world,” he replied, “is
life. Life is worth living, there’s not a doubt about that. But it’s
more worth living for some people than for others. And the things that
make or tend to make those differences are among those infinitely
bigger things of which I spoke.”
She did not properly understand what he meant, but she was striving
magnificently to seem as if she did. And the more she strove the more
she felt: There are parts of this man that I shall never understand.
And I am defenceless, I am at a terrible disadvantage, because there
are no parts of me that he could not understand if he would.... And
all the time during the conversation she had been noticing little
insignificant things which gave her a peculiar, almost a poignant
pleasure. His appearance was anything but effeminate, yet the whole
pose of him as he poured out tea was instinct with an almost womanly
grace. All his movements (excepting those that involved the rising
out of his deck-chair) were so free, so unfettered, so effortless,
even when they were uncouth. This does not mean that his table manners
were perfect. They were not. Some of them were extremely original.
He ate small triangular ham sandwiches at two mouthfuls. He dropped
cigarette ash into his saucer. His cake dissection was ungeometrical.
And yet he was all the while doing two things at once with such a
superb and easy-going facility--talking and having tea. She admired
him. She passionately admired him. She passionately admired him
because everything she admired him for was done so unconsciously,
so effortlessly, so unthinkingly. She watched the movements of his
face as he spoke, and admired the splendid lack of symmetry that was
there. She was fascinated by the appalling ugliness of some of his
facial expressions. And she was fascinated by his supreme neglect of
whether they were ugly or not. She shrank back at some of his facial
eccentricities; she wanted to cry out: “Don’t do that again--ever! It
looks terrible! It spoils you. You don’t show yourself to advantage a
bit!” And the next minute she was admiring the nonchalance that made
him so splendidly indifferent to the impressions he gave. The very
hideousness of him at times was the measure of his individuality and
of her admiration.
§ 8
It was eight o’clock when she left “Claremont.” In the Ridgeway the
long green avenue seemed scarcely darker than before, though twilight
was falling and the rising moon flooded the roadway in pale radiance.
Everything reminded her of those old evening walks from the Bockley
High School back home to No. 24, Kitchener Road. Groups of girls swept
past her like fleecy clouds, with here and there the swift sparkle
of an eye or the sudden flash of an ornament caught in the jets of
moonlight that fell through the lacery of leaves. She was very happy.
All the poetry in the world was greeting her. And the Ridgeway, so
sleek, so dapper, so overwhelmingly suburbanized, seemed to her full of
wonderful romance. Nothing was there in that soft light that did not
seem passionately beautiful. Someone was clipping a hedge close by, and
the gentle flip-flip of the shears was golden music to her. The rich
scent of the cut evergreen was like nectar. From an open window came
the chatter of children’s voices and the muffled hum of a gramophone,
and she suddenly awoke to the realization of how wonderful a thing a
gramophone can be. The long vistas of concrete pavement with their
alternating cracks making two lines of tapering perspective were to
her among the most beautiful visions she had ever seen. And out in the
High Road--the common, condemned, despised High Road--all was poetry
and romance. Trams passed like golden meteors flying through space; the
last rays of the evening sun had picked out a certain upstairs window
in the King’s Head and turned it into a crimson star. The King’s Head
was no longer a public-house; it was a lighthouse, a beacon flashing
hope and welcome on the long pale road whither the blue tram-lines sped
to infinity. And over the roofs the moon was splashing in streams of
silver foam. Bockley, that great, straggling, drab, modern metropolitan
suburb was no longer itself, but a city gleaming with strange magic.
She did not go straight home, but wandered amongst the stream of
strollers along the High Road towards the Forest. She was amazed at
the astonishing loveliness of this place, where she had been born and
had lived and worked and dreamed. She was thrilled at the passionate
beauty that was exuding from every house and building like some rare
essence. She had always taken it for granted: Bockley is an ugly place.
And now it seemed that Bockley was transfigured into a thing of wild,
tumultuous beauty, as if the flesh had fallen away and revealed a
soul of serene wonderment. Bockley! The very word became subtle and
mysterious, like a password or the sacred formula that frees the powers
of magic!
She was in a mood of childish impressionableness. When she reached High
Wood she found the great green arena round the tram terminus dotted
with couples.... She was not in the mood to call anything vulgar. She
was amazed at the things she had missed. She remembered countless
evenings at the Victoria Theatre when she had heard comedians make
cheap witticisms about love and the twilight.... And now, sauntering
about the fringe of the Forest, she glanced hastily at each couple as
she passed them and asked herself: “Is this love?”
Even in the noisy procession of youths and maidens arm-in-arm and
singing music-hall ditties, she could not discern vulgarity. And the
scampering of brown-legged and bare-footed urchins over the dark turf
was nothing but pure poetry. Life--life, she echoed in her mind, and
did not quite know why she did so.... And a single glance down the long
High Road, where the swirling trams glittered like a chain of gems,
made her wish to cry with the very ecstasy of being alive....