CHAPTER IIJEUNESSE
CATHERINE won an open scholarship to the Upton Rising High School for Girls. She did not win it because of any particular brilliance or erudition in her examination papers; she won it, as a matter of fact, because Mr. McGill, one of the Governors, happened to remark to Miss Forsdyke, the headmistress: “I hear Weston’s got his daughter in for a scholarship.”
Miss Forsdyke said, “Weston?—Weston?—Let me see—I believe I’ve heard the name somewhere ... Er ... who is he?”
“One of the men at the Downsland Road School.... Not a bad sort.... I bet old Clotters’ll be mad if Weston’s girl gets anything. Clotters’ boy missed last year....”
Now Clotters was the headmaster of the Downsland Road Council School. Mr. Weston did not like Mr. Clotters.... Mr. McGill did not like Mr. Clotters.... And even Miss Forsdyke did not like Mr. Clotters....
Thus it happened that Catherine obtained a scholarship to the Upton Rising High School for Girls.
In her English paper she was asked to analyse: “There is a tide in the affairs of men....” She began:
“There”—subject; “is” predicate; “a tide” object—according to a well-established form of procedure which sometimes enabled her to get her analysis right without in the least understanding what she was about.
And in her Scripture paper she was asked: What is a phylactery? She answered: a kind of musical instrument.
Catherine was rather surprised to get a scholarship.
Long lingering September evenings with the sun splashing over the roofs of Upton Rising; the soft scented dusk creeping through gravelled roads; tier upon tier of houses astride the hill, with every window like a crimson star.... In the high road the newsboys were calling, the trams swirled citywards like golden meteors flying through space.... In the quiet residential roads was always the chatter of the lawn-mower, the drowsy murmur of hedge-clipping.... In these delectable hours of twilight Catherine passed from Upton Rising into Bockley.... Every night she passed, with swollen satchel under her arm—Luke’s Grove, over Makepiece Common, then along the Ridegway into the Bockley High Street.... And from the High Street into Kitchener Road there was a bewildering choice of routes, differing only in degrees of frowsiness....
Men passed her by like dim shadows heralded by the glowing tips of their cigarettes....
The policeman on point-duty in the Bockley High Street knew her. He said, “’d evenin’, miss,” and Catherine and the other girls who accompanied her on her way home used to giggle hysterically, for he was tall and handsome and presumably young.
Catherine went home with Madge Saunders and Helen Trant. Madge was fat, good-natured, but lymphatic and uninteresting. Her father was on the council and kept a big drapery stores in the High Street. He called his daughter “Maggers,” and was excessively jovial and contented. When Catherine went to tea at the Saunders’, he called her “Carrots.” His humour was exhausted in the invention of nicknames....
Helen Trant was almost the antithesis of Catherine and equally of Madge. She was quiet, undemonstrative, but her quietness was not the quietness of laziness. She worked hard, was moderately clever, almost excessively conscientious, and in a quiet, unobtrusive way immensely powerful and self-reliant. She was a scholarship girl, and her father was in a good position in a London Insurance Office. Neither Madge norHelen was good-looking, but Helen had a quiet dignity that made a fair substitute for beauty.... They were a rather distinctive trio as they sauntered home together.
As they passed the policeman on point-duty Catherine made provocative eyes at him. Madge rolled into heavy, undisciplined laughter. And Helen sometimes smiled, but when she did it was the smile as of one who knew all about policemen, their lives, wages, conditions of existence, their baulked aspirations, confident hopes and undying ambitions.... She looked to have the sympathy of one who knows everything without being told anything....
Miss Forsdyke, in a spiteful mood, said:
“I wish, Helen, you would be more particular in your choice of companions....”
Yet Catherine and Helen became close friends, and Madge was merely an adjunct to their evening journeys home....
Time was passing; Catherine was creeping through her teens, and every night in the drawing-room at 24, Kitchener Road the piano strummed for exactly one hour, and then stopped. By and by the music-lover might have begun to detect certain tunes that were familiar to him. A few of Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” Tchaikovsky’s “Valse Triste,” the adagio part of Beethoven’s “Pathetic Sonata.” ...
Once, too, a prelude of Chopin’s, chosen for its unChopin-like qualities....
There came a day when Catherine’s playing began to be very slightly superior to the instrument at her disposal. Nor did the latter improve as time passed. All the lower notes responded with a nasal twang reminiscent of a Jew’s-harp. The upper ones were so physically inert that when pushed down they refused to come up again without assistance, and so unanimous as to pitch that the striking of the wrong note was no more inharmonious than the striking of the right one....
Yet it was on this instrument that Catherine practised a certain Fantasia in D Minor of Mozart’s that won her a first prize at the Upton Rising Annual Eisteddfod.... The examiner was a wizened old man with blue spectacles. From the first he annoyed Catherine. Her music persisted in curling up.
“You should use a flat case,” he said, “not one of these roll ones.”
Then she discovered that the middle page of the music was not there. Presumably she had left it in the waiting-room.
“You can’t go and fetch it,” he said. “I think you’re very careless....”
“Do you?” she answered impudently. “Then I’ll play from memory.”
“You ought not to play from memory ... at your age ...” he protested.
Nevertheless she did so, and played better than she had ever played at her practices. It was partly the ecstasy of manipulating a splendid instrument, partly a reckless desire to defy and confute this old man.
“H’m ...” he said, when she had finished. He bore her no malice for her carelessness or impudence, he simply judged her fairly, totted up her marks, and discovered them to be higher than the rest.... Accordingly he adjudged her the winner. He looked neither pleased nor sorry.
Catherine decided that he was utterly soulless....
On a certain Monday morning Catherine and Helen took a day off from school, and went picnicking in Epping Forest. Helen’s brother George was with them, and also a friend of the latter’s, one Bert, who took over the financial management of the outing with marked efficiency, but was otherwise vague and indeterminate. George was a moderately good-looking fellow of nineteen, clever in a restricted kind of way, and very entertaining when the mood was upon him. He worked for a City firm of accountants, and was taking his annual fortnight’s holiday.
It was very pleasant to be strolling up the hill leading to High Beech at ten o’clock on a fresh April morning. The party inevitably split up into couples. Bert was walking on in front with Helen; George and Catherine formed up the rear. There was a wonderful atmosphere of serenity over everything: not a soul was about save themselves; the hotels and refreshment châteaux seemed scarcely to have wakened out of their winter’s sleep. And overhead the sky was pure blue.... Up the steep, gritty road they trudged, and in the hearts of each of them something seemed to be singing: “We are going to have a glorious day.”
Bert was saying to Helen: “Yes, of course they’re very nice and comfortable and all that, I know, but they fairly eat up the petrol.... Can’t possibly run them on less than ...”
“Indeed?” said Helen, sympathetically.
And a hundred yards behind them George was saying to Catherine: “I suppose woman is a few inches nearer to mother earth than man.... She is more ... primal ... no, not exactly that.... I mean elemental ... that’s the word, I think....”
“She’s got more common sense, if that’s what you mean....”
“No, I don’t mean exactly that.... Besides, is common sense such a virtue? ... The great things of the world have been done as a rule by people with uncommon sense.... No, I mean this: woman seems to know by instinct what man only learns by patient study and not always then.... Isn’t that your experience?”
“I don’t think I’ve had any experience.”
“H’m! ... the others are waiting for us at the top. I suppose they want to know what we’re going to do....”
They quickened their steps to the summit.
They chose for lunch a quiet spot hemmed in by ferns and bushes. Catherine’s spirits soared higher and higher as the hours flew.... The sun was splashing over the hills as they came upon the red roofs ofChingford. The quantity of feeble, flippant conversation that passed amongst them was colossal. But they had had a glorious day....
“I’ll see you home,” said George, as they entered the straggling outskirts of Bockley.
“Please don’t,” replied Catherine. “It’s quite out of your way.”
“I assure you ...” he began.
“Please ...” she reiterated. The truth was she did not wish her mother to see her in the company of a young man.
Amidst the winedark fragrance of an April evening they passed until they reached the corner of the road where the Trants lived. They stopped talking here for three-quarters of an hour, and then said good-bye. At the last minute George said:
“By the way, I’ve got to call in at a shop in the High Street to see about something, so I may as well walk back part of the way with you.”
Catherine blushed, but the darkness shielded her.
“The shops’ll be shut by this time,” said Helen, quietly.
“Er ... not ... er ... the shopImean,” replied George.
He walked back with Catherine as far as the corner of High Street and the Ridgeway. Their talk was rather vaguely, indefinitely sentimental. Twice he quoted from Swinburne and once from Omar Khayyám.
As they descended the hill Catherine took off her tam-o’-shanter hat and stuffed it in her pocket. The soft night breeze blew her hair like a dim cloud behind her....
They shook hands in the dark interval between two brilliantly lighted shop-windows.
“My God,” he whispered softly, “your hair!”
He brushed it lightly with his hand.
“What about it?” she said, and her voice was nearly as soft as his.
“Passionate,” he cried; “like flame ... flame ... good-night....”
He fled into the dark vista of a side-street.
The clock on the Carnegie library said, Ten minutes past ten. Catherine thought, Now for a big row at home....
She had been forbidden to come in later than nine o’clock.
“WhenIwas young ...” her mother had said.
And her father had argued: “I can’t see..what you need ever to be out later than nine for.... You’ve got all the daytime, surely you don’t need the night as well.... I can’t understand.... It’s not as if we didn’t let you do what you like on Saturday afternoons....”
She put her hat on as she turned into Kitchener Road. She sauntered slowly to No. 24. A minute or two won’t make much difference, she reasoned, on top of an hour and a quarter. The crowded memories of the day just past, coupled with anticipation of a domestic fracas when she got home, combined to make her somewhat excited. The day had been so full of incident that she would have enjoyed walking the cool streets till midnight, reckoning things out and sizing them according to their relative importance.
Then she recollected it was Monday night. Her father would be at night-school; he did not usually arrive home till half-past ten.
The street-lamp in front of No. 24 revealed the interesting fact that the blinds in the front parlour were drawn. There was no light behind them, but the tiny gas-jet in the hall was burning; she could see its beam through the fanlight. Her heart leaped within her. She felt like a prisoner granted a reprieve.... There were visitors. That seemed certain. Somebody had come to spend the evening, and her mother had “put a light in the front room,” the highest mark of respect known. Now probably they were all having supper in the kitchen. The hall-light, too, pointed to that conclusion, for ever since Mr. Tuppinger took the wrong hat from the hall-stand, and failed to discover his mistake afterwards, Mrs. Weston had made it a rule that the hall should be illuminated when visitors came Catherine knocked at the door.... Thiswas really lucky. With good fortune the lateness of the hour might not be noticed: at any rate the fracas would be postponed. Also there would be a good supper awaiting her.... Cold beetroot; perhaps even stewed prunes and custard....
A strange woman came to the door. Catherine did not know her name, but she recognized her as someone who lived “up the road,” and who used to push in front of her when she was a little girl at the co-operative stores.
“Is it Cathie?” said the strange woman.
“Yes,” replied Catherine.
“Come inside,” answered the strange woman, with peculiar solemnity. Then she went on, like the intoning of a chant:
“Your mother is not well ... in fact ... she’s had an accident ... in the street ... in fact ...docome inside ... in fact....”
In fact, Mrs. Weston was dead.
Mrs. Weston had been out shopping during the evening. In the crowded part of the High Street she had been knocked down by a bicycle. She had fallen upon her face, but had not apparently received much hurt, for after having a cut attended to at the chemist’s, she went home unattended. But at the very door of her house in Kitchener Road, something went “snap” inside her head; she collapsed and fell all in a heap on the doorstep. She was putting the key in the lock when this happened, and the key was found in the lock when neighbours came to her assistance. They carried her in the front room (where the Collard and Collard piano was) and laid her down on the sofa. She uttered vague scraps of conversation for some moments: then she died....
When Catherine went in to look at her she could not help thinking how death had made her look ridiculous. She was lying under the window, and the lamp in the middle of the ceiling threw her features into heavy shadow. There was a piece of sticking-plaster over the cut on her forehead, and her chin was bruised as well. The most prominent ofher front teeth had broken off half-way, and as, seemingly, she had died gasping for breath, her mouth was wide open. The massive, almost masculine jaws hung unsymmetrically: there was no beauty or calm in her last attitude. She looked as if she had died fighting. An aperture in the drawn Venetian blinds allowed a slit of pale light from the street lamp outside to cross her face diagonally, making it appear more grotesque than ever. Catherine could scarcely believe it was her mother. She had the old workaday blouse on, because she had gone out shopping in a mackintosh and had thought it would not show underneath. Catherine could not help thinking how ashamed her mother would have been at the thought of being seen in this blouse by all the neighbours, and especially to have had the neighbours crowding in her own drawing-room with all the cheap bamboo furniture and the faded carpet, and the “Present from Margate” on the mantel-piece, and the certificate on the wall certifying that John Weston, aged twelve, had achieved merit in writing an essay on “Alcohol and its Effects on the Human Body.” (This latter would have been removed long since, had it not successfully covered up a hole in the wallpaper.) ... Catherine felt sure that if her mother had known she was going to die, she would have dressed up for the occasion. But it had come upon her unexpectedly. There she was, with her shabby blouse and her ghastly face, and her mackintosh and string-bag on the chair beside her. There was some tea in the bag, and her fall had burst the paper wrapper, for the latter was half-full, and there were tea grains about the floor....
Mr. Weston had been sent for. He came in tired after a tiresome day, plus the usual Monday feeling of discontent. He was in a bad temper.
“Hell!” he muttered, as he bashed his shins against the piano in the gloom. “These blinds ...” he began, and checked himself.
He seemed annoyed that she had done such a dramatic, unexpected thing. He was annoyed that there was no supper ready for him. “You mighthave got me a cup of tea ready,” he said to Catherine. Then he tried to be conventional. “She was a good woman,” he said, as if it had just occurred to him.
When the strange woman had departed, and Catherine and he were sitting down in the kitchen to a frugal supper, he began the conversation again.
“By the way,” he said, “apparently you didn’t go to school to-day. Mrs. Jopson thought you’d be staying to the evening-class, and sent a message to the school to fetch you. Miss Forsdyke said you hadn’t been present at all to-day.... Is that so?”
“I didn’t go to-day,” admitted Catherine.
“Where did you go?”
“We ... took a day off ... picnicking in the Forest ... it seemed such a fine day....”
“Who’s we?”
“Helen and ... and ... me.”
“Are you in the habit of taking days off like that?”
“Oh no.... It’s the first time we’ve ever done it.”
There was a pause.
“You know,” he went on protestingly, “this sort of thing’s not good enough, Catherine.... You ought to see that this sort of thing can’t go on ... it’s too bad of you ... running off to play truant ... and on the very day that ... that your mother ...”
“How on earth could I——” she began hastily, and then stopped, for she saw that big tears were rolling down both his cheeks.
“Not good enough,” he kept muttering, vaguely reproachful.
Then later on he reopened the question.
“I suppose—er—you and Helen were the only people at the picnic?”
“No—there were two others.”
“Girls, I suppose?”
“No.”
“Not young men, I hope?”
“Yes, one of them was Helen’s brother. The other was a friend of his....”
For a few moments he was very thoughtful. Then he continued:
“I don’t think you ought to have gone with them, Catherine ... at your age, you know.... Besides, you’ve plenty of girl friends—I can’t think what you want with young men and boys.... Girls should stick to girls....”
“But surely, Father——”
“If you want friends, let them be girl friends ... surely you can find plenty of your own sex without——”
Catherine could think of no adequate answer to this argument, so she bade him good-night and went upstairs to bed....
In the little back bedroom she sat down on the bed and tried to gather her wits. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of physical weariness: that was not surprising, for she had walked perhaps fifteen miles that day. In the candle-light she saw her face in the mirror: she was surprised to find herself almost ashen pale. Her red hair floated cloud-like around her head: in the little hand-mirror there was not room to see all of it at once. But it was still flying as if in the wind, and it was gorgeously wild and untamed....
“My God,” George Trant had said, “your hair!” ...
... Catherine was surprised, almost shocked that she had as yet shed no tears for her mother. It seemed such a brutally callous piece of negligence, and Catherine was sure she was neither brutal nor callous.... Yet tears would not come.
She undressed and got into bed....
The pumping-engine at the water-works went on at its patient chug-chugging, and forthwith a myriad memories of childhood came back to her.... She could feel the tears welling up into her eyes, and then she realized that it was sentiment and not grief that was affecting her. She would not weep for sentiment, like the heroines in thesix-penny novels that Madge Saunders read.
Ever and anon the whisper came echoing through her mind: “My God ... your hair!” ...
From the very insistence of her thoughts she could not fall asleep until morning was well advanced, but when she did, her sleep was calm and dreamless....
Of course there was a splendid funeral. It was infinitely more gorgeous than anything that had taken place in Mrs. Weston’s lifetime. Relatives were summoned to attend the obsequies, relatives that Catherine had never seen and had not known existed, relatives with black ties and rubicund faces and Cockney accents, and that deplorable foreign flavour that comes of dwelling in another London suburb. They all gathered together in the drab little front room amongst the bamboo furniture, and gazed curiously at Catherine. Evidently she did not quite realize their ideal of a bereaved daughter. They were all a trifle nervous of the undertaker. Finally, they were all squashed into four black coaches and driven slowly to the cemetery behind a glass hearse. In front of the horses walked two men, each bearing what appeared to be a mace.
The day was chilly and sprinkled with April showers; the mourners in the first coach (in which was Catherine) insisted on having all the windows closed, until the rain-washed panes were dim with the reek of their breaths. They carried their pocket-handkerchiefs in their hands, and spoke in tremulous murmurs.... The cavalcade swept on, through the dreariest and frowsiest streets in all Bockley, out on to the murky highways where the mud splashes from passing motor-buses reached the tops of the window-panes. Then past the Town Hall, magnificently impeding traffic as they crossed the tram-lines at the Ridgeway corner, on to the outer fringes of the town, where public-houses and tin-missions indulged in melancholy stares at one another across cat-haunted waste land. A slow progress past an avenue of cars at the tram terminus, and at last to the gates of a pretentious butinfinitely dismal burial-ground. The latter was owned and run on business lines by a limited liability company, and for many years it had paid twelve per cent, on its ordinary shares. That dying was a profitable industry could be seen from the great gates, opening far back from the road, with their ornate metal-work representing winged angels.
As they left the coaches a shower began. They walked about a quarter of a mile amongst a welter of acrobatic angels, broken columns and miscellaneous statuary; then they reached the grave. The rain plashed dismally on the pile of brown earth by the side, and everybody stood on the brink with a precarious footing on the sodden soil. There was a diminutive Methodist parson with a bad cold, who coughed at every comma in the burial-service and sneezed into the grave at the end of each verse. All around them was the litter of gravediggers’ tools, faded flowers and wreath-skeletons. Catherine thought it by far the most depressing business she had ever come across. Her father scattered a handful of cold, clammy mud on top of the coffin, and everybody (especially the bald-headed men with their hats off) seemed eager to get back to the fetid warmth of the coaches.... So back went the procession, down the long cemetery avenue, with nothing in sight save untidy vistas of unsymmetrical gravestones, back into the steaming coaches, home again through the mud and rain to Kitchener Road. The carriages reeked with the smell of wet kid gloves and damp mackintoshes. In the Bockley High Street they passed a crowd round a street accident. A motor-bus had skidded into a tram-way standard, and there were mud-splashed, white-painted ambulances in attendance. Mr. Weston rubbed the vapour off the window with his hand. “Some poor devil,” he muttered, and there was a whole world of humanity in his voice. And Catherine felt that nothing in death itself was half so terrible as the dismal fuss that people make over it.
When the carriages arrived back at No. 24, Kitchener Road, and everybody went into the house, they found that the fire in the frontroom had gone out. Half an hour was spent in trying to relight it with damp coal and damp firewood and damp newspaper. Mr. Weston held up theBockley and District Advertiserto make a draught. The newspaper caught alight and fell back on to the carpet, whereupon Mr. Weston danced a sort of dervish cake-walk to stamp it out. This acrobatic performance exercised a stimulating effect upon the visitors, who became conversational. In a moment of riotous abandon Mr. Weston directed Catherine to run over to the co-operative stores and purchase two small tins of lobster and one large tin of pineapple chunks....
About ten minutes to midnight, when all the mourners had departed, and Catherine was pulling down the blinds in the back bedroom, her father came up and sat down on the end of the bed Unlacing his boots.
“You know, Cathie,” he began, nervously, as if there were something he wished to get off his mind, “this business is so ... so ... so sudden.... That’s what’s the matter with it. It don’t give a chap time to gather his wits.... Last weekshewas here. Fussing about and rushing round and seemingly in the best of health. And this week—dead an’ buried.... Bit of a shock, isn’t it?”
She did not answer. He continued in a spurt:
“You know there’s a sort of way in which you miss anybody you’ve been used to seeing about the place for years an’ years. Without any ... er ... what people call love, you know, or anything of that sort.... Well, I miss your mother in that way. Quite apart from any other way, I mean.... If she was here now she’d nag at me for not taking my dirty boots off downstairs. It’s funny, but I shall miss all that nagging. I got used to it. I didn’t particularly like it, but things’ll seem pretty dull for a time without it....”
Pause.
“For twenty years I’ve chucked my dirty boots under the sofa downstairs, and wouldn’t have dreamt of bringing them up here.... And now the first night she’s laid to rest I come up here with ’em onwithout thinkin’ about it....”
He kept on making vague remarks.
“Life’s passing, Cathie ... one thing an’ then another.... Time waits for no man—or woman.... We’re like those clocks at the railway stations.... We seem not to be moving and then we fall forward with a jerk at the end of the minute.... It’s easy to notice the jerks ... but time goes steadily on whether we notice it or not....”
Then he changed the subject.
“It’s lucky for you it wasn’t an ordinary night last Monday, or you’d have got in a fine row, I can tell you. Playing truant and going out with young fellers.... A girl of your age ought not to bother her head with fellers.... I never knew your mother till she was twenty-two.... This sort of free-and-easy-carrying-on won’t do, Catherine. For one thing it’s not respectable. And for another thing it’s not right.... Find some girl friends to go out with, and leave the fellers alone....”
“Fellers,” he called them. The word jarred on her.