CHAPTER VIIIPOST-MORTEM
IT seemed to Catherine the most curious thing in the world that she should be sitting with George Trant inside a taxi. There was no light inside, and only the distant glimmer of London came in through the window. All was dim and dark and shadowy. Yet somewhere amongst these shadows sat George Trant. Perhaps he was thinking that somewhere amongst those shadows sat she, Catherine Weston.
A voice said out of the shadows: “We shan’t be long now.”
Catherine said: “How far are we going?”
“You’re going home ... to your lodgings, that is.... You fainted, I suppose you know....”
“Did I?” And she thought: “He killed himself out of loneliness. He couldn’t live without me. I am the cause, I am the reason.”
“Feeling all right now?”
“Oh yes ... must have been the excitement.”
“Probably.” His voice was cold, unsympathetic. She felt that he was deliberately looking away from where he thought she was.
“You needn’t take me all the way, you know. I can walk from the Ridgeway corner.”
“I shall take you all the way,” he said crisply.
With strange instinct she sensed his antagonism.
“I believe you’re angry with me,” she said. Yet all the while she was thinking: “I suppose there’ll be an inquest and a big fuss and all that. And the furniture and stuff will have to be sold.”
No answer.
“You are,” she repeated, and was surprised by her own persistence. After all, she didn’t care twopence whether he was angry with her or not. Only she would have been gratified if hewereangry with her. It was something to come into a man’s life enough to make him angry. And it was rather an amusing pastime, this flirting with George Trant.
“Perhaps I am,” he said coldly.
“Why?” It would interest her to know why. At any rate she might as well know why.
“You’ve disappointed me.”
That was all. It satisfied her. He had evidently been building ideals around her. He had dreamed dreams in which she had been epic and splendid and magnificent. He had thought of her sufficiently for her to have the power of disappointing him. She was gratified. After all, she did not like him, so there was no reason why she should mind disappointing him. And he had paid her the subtle compliment of being disappointed with her.
She did not particularly want to know how she had disappointed him. Yet the conversation seemed incomplete without the question: “In what way?”
She could feel him turning round to face her.
“Various ways,” he said vaguely, but his tone seemed to invite her to pursue the subject. For that very reason she kept silent. It was not a matter of sufficient importance for her to ask the same question twice over. And if hedidwant her to repeat her question, that was all the more reason for her not doing so.
After a moment’s silence he said: “You’ve changed a good deal since I last knew you.”
“Yes, haven’t I?” There was an almost triumphant jauntiness in her voice.
“And you haven’t changed for the better, either,” he went on.
“That’s whatyousay.”
“Precisely. That’s whatIsay.” He was trying to be sarcastic, yet she knew that he was feeling acutely miserable. There wassomething in his voice that told her he was feeling acutely miserable. And she had no pity. She was even exhilarated. He was miserable about her. In some way she was invested with the power of making him miserable.
“Oh, I can’t tell you——” he began bitterly, and stopped.
A queer thrill went down her spine. For the first time in her life she was conscious of the presence of passion in another person. It was quite a novel experience, yet it called to mind that scene in the Duke Street Methodist Schoolroom when she and Freddie McKellar had come to blows.... A flash of realization swept over her. He was in love with her. He wasreallyin love with her. She had so often wondered and thought and speculated, and now she knew. His voice had become transfigured, so to speak, out of passion for her. What a pity he could not see her hair! She did not care for him one little bit. She knew that now. She had not been quite certain before, but now, in the very moment of realizing his love of her, she thought: “How funny, I believe I really dislike him.... I don’t even want to flirt with him again.”
Yet she was immensely gratified that he had paid her the terrific compliment of falling in love with her.
A sort of instinct warned her that she should deflect the conversation into other channels. She was immensely interested in this curious phenomenon, yet she feared anti-climax. He might try to kiss her and grope round in the dark searching for her. That would be anti-climax. And also (this came as a sudden shaft of realization) she did not want him to kiss her. Many a time of late she had thought: “What shall I do if he kisses me?” She had resigned herself to the possibility that one day he might kiss her. She had been annoyed at his dalliance. “I wish to goodness he’d do it, if he’s going to,” had been her frequent thought, and she had provoked him subtly, cunningly, deliberately.... Now it came to her as an unwelcome possibility. She did not in the least desire him to kiss her. She knew she would actively dislike it if he did.
“Getting chilly,” she remarked nonchalantly, and she knew how suchan observation would grate upon him. She was fascinated by this new miraculous power of hers to help or to hurt or to torture. Every word she said was full of meaning to him: talking to him was infinitely more subtle than ordinary conversation. It was this subtlety that partly fascinated her. For instance, when she said, “Getting chilly,” she meant, “We’ll change the subject. I know what you’re driving at, and I don’t like it. It doesn’t please me a bit.” And what was more, she knew that he would interpret it like that, and that he would feel all those feelings which the expansion of her remark would have aroused.
“I’ll shut the window,” he said, and did so.
It was so subtle, this business, that his remarks, too, could be interpreted. For instance, his words, “I’ll shut the window,” meant really, “Is that so? Well, I guessed as much. You’re utterly heartless. I shall have to resign myself to it, anyway. So, as you suggest, we’ll change the subject.”
The taxi turned into the Bockley High Street.
Catherine was like a child with a new toy. And this toy was the most intricate, complicated, and absorbingly interesting toy that had ever brought ecstasy to its possessor. How strange that he should be in love with her! How marvellous that there should be something strange and indefinable in her that had attracted something strange and indefinable in him!
And she thought, in spasms amidst her exhilaration: “Probably Ransomes will sell the furniture for me.... He killed himself for me. I’m the reason....”
It tickled her egoism that he should have done so. He must have done so. It could only have been that.
Here was George Trant, head over heels in love with her. And here was her father, stupid, narrow-minded, uncompromising bigot, yet committing suicide because she had run away from home. She preferred to regard herself as a runaway rather than as a castaway.
Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable personage!...
As she entered the side door of No. 14, Gifford Road at the improper hour of three a.m., the thin voice of Mrs. Carbass called down the stairs: “That you, Miss Weston?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a telegraph for you on the table....”
“Righto!” How jaunty! How delightfully nonchalant! As if one were used to receiving telegrams! As if one were even used to arriving home at three a.m.!
Catherine turned the tap of the gas, which had been left burning at a pin-point in the basement sitting-room. Her hand must have been unsteady, for she turned it out. That necessitated fumbling for matches....
The telegram was addressed to the Upton Rising Cinema, and had been handed in at Bockley Post Office some twelve hours before. It ran:
Father had accident. Come at once.—MAY.
Father had accident. Come at once.—MAY.
Now who was May?
After much cogitation Catherine remembered an Aunt May, her mother’s sister, who lived at Muswell Hill. Catherine had seen her but once, and that was on the occasion of her mother’s funeral. She had a vague recollection of a prim little woman about fifty, with a high-necked blouse and hair done up in a knob at the back.
Catherine decided to go as soon as possible the following day. She went quietly to bed, but found it impossible to sleep. She was strangely exhilarated. She felt like a public-school boy on the eve of the breaking-up morning. New emotions were in store for her, and she, the epicure, delighted in new and subtle emotions. Yet even with her exhilaration there was a feeling of doubt, of misgiving, of uneasiness as to the nature of her own soul. Was she really heartless? How was it she had never grieved at her mother’s death? Try as she would, she could not detect in her feelings for her father anything much more than excitement, curiosity, amazement, even in a kind of way admiration, at what he had done. She felt he had done something infinitely biggerthan himself. For the first time in her life she felt towards him impersonally, as she might have done towards any stranger: “I should like to have known that man.”
The exact significance of her attitude towards George Trant came upon her. She was playing with him. She knew that. It was not so much in revenge for what had happened long before; it was from sheer uncontrollable ecstasy at wielding a new and incomprehensible power. She would have played ruthlessly with any man who had been so weak and misguided as to fall in love with her. She knew that perfectly well. Therefore it was a good thing the man was George Trant, for at least in his case she might conceivably justify herself. And yet she knew that justifying herself had really nothing at all to do with the matter; she knew that there was in her some mysterious impulse that prompted her to do and to say things quite apart from any considerations of justice or justification. Cruel? Yes, possibly.
She pondered.
No. She wasnotcruel. If she heard a cat mewing in the street she would scarcely ever pass it by. A child crying filled her with vague depression. She wasnotcruel. But she was immensely, voraciously curious, a frantic explorer of her own and other people’s emotions, a ruthless exploiter of dramatic possibilities. She had not developed these traits by reading novels or seeing plays or any such exterior means. They were inherent in herself.
Suddenly she remembered the note that had been given her that evening. By the light of a candle she sat up in bed and tore open the thin, purple-lined envelope.
She read:
DEAR MADAM,Will you come and see me to-morrow (Sunday) at three p.m., “Claremont,” the Ridgeway, Upton Rising?—Yrs., etc.,EMIL RAZOUNOV.
DEAR MADAM,
Will you come and see me to-morrow (Sunday) at three p.m., “Claremont,” the Ridgeway, Upton Rising?—Yrs., etc.,
EMIL RAZOUNOV.
Razounov!
She actually laughed, a little silver ripple which she immediatelystifled on reflecting that Mrs. Carbass slept in the room below.
Razounov!
Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable personage! ...
The door of No. 24, Kitchener Road was opened by Mrs. Jopson.
“Do come in,” she began effusively. “I’ve jest bin clearin’ up a bit....” Then she added mysteriously: “Of course, they’ve took ’im away....”
Nothing had seemingly changed in the interior aspect of the house. Her father’s overcoat and bowler hat hung sedately as ever upon the bamboo hall-stand. The Collard and Collard piano presented its usual yellow grin as she looked in through the parlour door. Catherine could not explain this yellow grin: there had been something in the instrument’s fretwork front with the faded yellow silk behind that had always suggested to her a demoniac leer. Now it seemed to be leering worse than ever.... The morning sunlight struck in through the drawn Venetian blinds and threw oblique shadows over the grin. Every article in that room Catherine knew almost personally. Even the unhorticultural flowers on the carpet were something more to her than a mere pattern: they were geographical, they held memories, they marked the topography of her earliest days. And the mantelpiece was full of memories of seaside holidays. A present from Southend, from Margate, from Felixstowe, a photograph of Blackpool Tower framed in red plush, an ash-tray with the Folkestone coat-of-arms upon it....
Mrs. Jopson related the story of the tragedy in careful detail. She revelled in it as a boy may revel in a blood-and-thunder story. She emphasized the mystery that surrounded the motives of the tragedy. He had been getting livelier again. Everybody was noticing that. He had been seen smoking his pipe in the Forest on a Sunday morning with the complacency of one to whom life is an everlasting richness. He hadstarted taking out library books from the Carnegie library. He had even had friends in his house—presumably colleagues from the Downsland Road Council School. And he had bought a gramophone. That was the strangest thing of all, perhaps. What on earth did he want with a gramophone? At one time the gramophone had been his pet aversion. All music bored him, but the sound of a gramophone used to call forth diatribes against the degeneracy of the modern world.... And yet it was there, in the tiny front parlour, with its absurdly painted tin horn sticking up in the air and a record lying flat on the circular platform. The record was one of a recent and not particularly brilliant ragtime. Catherine, accustomed professionally to such things, knew it well. And Mrs. Jopson said they had heard that ragtime night after night since he had bought the gramophone. Sometimes it was played over and over again. Really, Mr. Jopson had thought of complaining, only he did not wish to interfere with Mr. Weston’s efforts to liven himself up....
When Mrs. Jopson departed and left Catherine alone in the familiar house, the atmosphere changed. The very furniture seemed charged with secrets—secrets concerning the manner in which Mr. Weston had spent his evenings. Whether he had gone out much, or read books or merely moped about. Only the gramophone seemed anxious to betray its information, and the tin horn, cocked up at an absurdly self-confident angle, had the appearance of declaring: “Judge from me what sort of a man he was. I was nearly the last thing he troubled about. I am the answer to one at least of his cravings.” From the gramophone Catherine turned to the writing-desk. That at any rate guarded what it knew with some show of modesty. It was full of papers belonging to Mr. Weston, but they all seemed to emphasize the perfect normality of his life. Algebra papers marked and unmarked, catalogues of educational book publishers, odd cuttings from newspapers, notes from parents asking that children should be allowed to go home early, printed lists of scholarship candidates, and so forth. Everything to show that Mr. Weston had gone on living pretty much as he had been accustomed.Everything to make it more mysterious than ever why he should suddenly cut his throat while shaving. Catherine was puzzled. She had been constructing a grand tragedy round this pitifully insignificant man; under the stimulating influence of her own imagination she had already begun to sympathize; doubtless if her imagination had discovered anything substantial to feed on she might have ended by passionate affection for her own dead father. Several times recently she had been on the verge of tears, not for him personally, but out of vague sympathy with the victim of a poignant tragedy. For to her it did indeed seem a poignant tragedy that a man so weak, so fatuous as he was should be left entirely alone at a time when he most needed the companionship of someone stronger. She did not in the least regret leaving him. That was inevitable. He wanted to boss the show. He was so pitifully weak, so conscious of weakness that he manufactured a crisis rather than yield on what he regarded as a crucial point. Afterwards, no doubt, he had regretted his hastiness. Yet that strange interview on the train to Liverpool Street seemed incapable of being fitted in.... Catherine had often thought of him sorrowing, regretting, mourning. She had regarded his suicide as a tragic confirmation of his misery. And now the interior of his writing-desk seemed to say: “Oh, he was much the same—you’d scarcely have noticed any difference in him.” And the gramophone chuckled and declared: “As a matter of fact the old chap was beginning to have rather a good time....”
In a drawer beneath the desk she discovered his pocket diaries. Every night before retiring it had been his custom to fill a space an inch deep and two inches across with a closely written pencilled commentary on the day’s events. For ten, twelve, fifteen—perhaps twenty years he had done this. Catherine turned over the pages of one of them at random. They contained such items as: “Sweet peas coming up well. Shall buy some more wire-netting for them.... Clotters away at a funeral. Did his registers for him.... Gave paper on ‘Tennyson’ to Mutual Impr.Soc. Have been asked to speak at Annual Temperance Social....” Nearly all the entries were domestic, or connected with Mr. Weston’s labours in the school, the chapel or the garden. Catherine searched anxiously for any mention of herself. There were not many. Sometimes a chance remark such as: “C. came with me to chapel ...” or “C. out to tea.” And once the strange entry: “C. been misbehaving. But I think L. knows the right way to manage her.” (L. was, of course, Laura, his wife.) ...
Catherine looked up the entry for November 17th, the day on which she had left Kitchener Road. It ran: “Clotters away again this morning. Had to take IVAin mensuration. Feel very tired. Cold wind. Did not go to night-school.”
That was all! No mention of her!
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 herfather 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....