CHAPTER XXSTILL FALLING
IT was in the first week of April that Catherine began to look about for suitable lodgings. By this time the cottage at High Wood was half-naked of floor coverings: patches on the wallpaper showed where pictures had been wont to hang, and only essential furniture remained. The place was very dreary and inhospitable, and Catherine had many fits of depression during the last two weeks of March, which were bitterly cold and rainy. She was looking forward eagerly to the coming of the warm weather, and with the first of April, which was warm and spring-like, her spirits rose. Rose, that is, merely by comparison with her previous state: ever since her illness a melancholy had settled on her soul which, though it occasionally darkened into deep despair, never broke into even passing radiance.
The sale of her household effects had given her a credit balance of a hundred and ten pounds, and there was still a few pounds’ worth of furniture which she was keeping right until the last. Of late her arm had begun to improve somewhat, which made her unwilling to discontinue the massage treatment, though Madame Varegny was very costly. That and the incidental expenses of living would soon eat into her hundred and ten pounds.
Yet on the morning of the first of April she was quite cheerful, relatively. It was as if a tiny ray of sunshine were shyly showing up behind the piles of clouds that had settled shiftless on her soul. The forest trees were just bursting into green leafage; the air warm and comforting; of all seasons this was the most hopeful and the most inspiring. She took a penny tram down to the Ridgeway Corner, andenjoyed the wind blowing in her face as she sat on the top deck. At the Ridgeway she turned down Hatchet Grove and into the haunts of her earliest days.
The painful memories of her life were associated much more with “Elm Cottage” than with Kitchener Road. Kitchener Road, teeming with memories though it was, could bring her no pain and but mild regrets: the magnitude of more recent happenings took away from it whatever bitterness its memories possessed. She was walking down its concrete sidewalks before she realized where she was, and a certain vague familiarity with the landscape brought her to a standstill in front of the Co-operative Society branch depot. Everything was very little altered. A recent tree-planting crusade had given the road a double row of small and withered-looking copper beeches, each supported by a pole and encased in wire-netting. The Co-operative Society had extended its premises to include what had formerly been a disused workshop, but which now, renovated and changed almost beyond recognition, proclaimed itself to be a “licensed abattoir.” Catherine did not know what an abattoir was, but the name sounded curiously inhospitable. She passed by No. 24, and was interested to see that the present occupier, according to a tablet affixed to the side of the porch, was
H. Thicknesse, Plumber and Glazier. Repairs promptly attended to.
H. Thicknesse, Plumber and Glazier. Repairs promptly attended to.
The front garden was ambitiously planted with laurels, and the entire exterior of the house showed Mr. Thicknesse to be a man of enterprise.
In the sunshine of an April day Kitchener Road seemed not so tawdry as she had expected, and then she suddenly realized that during the years that she had been away a subtle but incalculably real change had been taking place. Kitchener Road had been slowly and imperceptibly becoming respectable. There was a distinct cæsura where the respectability began: you could tell by the curtains in the windows, the condition of the front gardens, and the occasional tablet on the front gate: “No Hawkers; No Circulars; No Canvassers.” What precisely determined the position of the cæsura was not clear: maybe it was the licensedabattoir, or most probably the cæsura was constantly and uniformly shifting in a given direction. At any rate, the road was immeasurably loftier in the social scale than it had been when she and her parents had occupied No. 24.
Turning into Duke Street, she discovered the Methodist Chapel under process of renovation: scaffolding was up round the walls and the railings in front were already a violent crimson. A notice declared that:
During the redecorating of the Chapel, services, both morning and evening, will be held in the schoolroom.
During the redecorating of the Chapel, services, both morning and evening, will be held in the schoolroom.
It was the schoolroom in which her father had given Band of Hope demonstrations and evenings with the poets; it was the schoolroom in which she had flung a tea-cup at the head of Freddie McKellar. Curiously vivid was the recollection of that early incident. If she had gone inside she could have identified the exact spot on the floor on which she stood to aim the missile.... One thing was plain: if Kitchener Road had risen in the social scale its rise had been more than compensated for by a downward movement on the part of Duke Street. Duke Street was, if such were possible, frowsier than ever. Many of the houses had converted their bay-window parlours into shops, and on the window-frame of one of these Catherine noticed the “Apartments” card. She wondered if she would ever have to live in a place like that. It was a greengrocer’s shop, and the gutter in front was clogged with cabbage leaves and the outer peelings of onions. The open front door showed a lobby devoid of floor covering, and walls scratched into great fissures of plaster. As she passed by a woman emerged from the shop, with a man’s cap adjusted with hat pins, and a dirty grey apron. In her hand she held a gaudily decorated jug, and Catherine saw her cross the road and enter the off-license belonging to the “Duke of Wellington.”
The summit of disaster was reached when Catherine received one morning in April a bill of eighty-five pounds from a London furniture company! At first she thought it must be a mistake, until she read the list of the specified articles sold to her and identified them as things that had been included amongst a lot that the second-hand dealers had bought from her for twenty-five guineas. It showed the chaotic state of her finances, as well as her complete carelessness in money matters, that she had not the slightest recollection of having incurred the bill. Nor did she recollect having paid for the articles: she had merely overlooked the transaction entirely. And now she must pay eighty-five pounds for a bedroom suite she no longer possessed! The way she had swindled herself irritated her beyond measure. And this time she became seriously alarmed for the future. Twenty-five pounds does not last for long, particularly with electric massage treatment costing three guineas a week. Her excursion to Duke Street had impressed her with the horror of what she might have to come to some day, and now this furniture bill had cut away the few intervening steps that had yet to be descended. She must fall with a bump. It was quite inevitable.
But at first she could not reconcile herself to the new conditions that must be hers for the future. Her dreams of fame as a pianist were still undiminished, and they helped her considerably by suggesting: This débâcle is but a swift excursion: it cannot last for more than a few weeks at the most. Before long I shall be back again, maybe at “Elm Cottage.” This adventure is really quite romantic. It should be interesting while it lasts. Nay, it even enhances the strangeness of me that such adventures should come my way.... Egoism for once helped her to submit to what, viewed in a sane light, would have been intolerable. Yet in her darker moments the thought would come over her: perhaps I shall never come back. Perhaps I shall never regain the heights I have surrendered. Perhaps this is the end of me....
Only once at this time did she give way to uttermost despair. And that was when a second-hand bookseller bought all her library for five pounds. There were shelves stocked with Wells and Shaw and Ibsen and Galsworthy and Bennett and Hardy and Granville Barker. The whole was worth at least twice what she received for it. But it was not that that made her unhappy. It was the realization that this was her tacit withdrawal from the long struggle to lift herself on to a higher plane. She had tried to educate herself, to stock her mind with wisdom beyond her comprehension, to reconstitute herself in a mould that nature had never intended for her. And there had been times when the struggle, vain and fruitless though it ever was, was a thing of joy to her, of joy even when she was most conscious of failure. But now these books held all her dead dreams, and she cared for them with an aching tenderness. All the things she had tried hard to understand and had never more than half understood were doubly precious now that she was beginning to forget them all.... One book alone she kept, and justified her action in so doing on the ground that the dealer would only give her sixpence for it. It was Ray Verreker’sGrowth of the Village Community. It had a good binding, she argued, and it would be a shame to let it go for sixpence. But after all, it was a mere piece of sentimentality that she should keep it. It was no use to her at all. Even in the old days, when a strange enthusiasm had prompted her to seek to make herself mistress of its contents, it had been woefully beyond her understanding. And now, when she tried to re-read its opening chapter, every word seemed cruel. All the technical jargon about virgates and demesnelands and manorial courts inflicted on her a sense of despair deeper than she had ever felt before. Finally, when she came to a quotation from a mediæval trade charter in Latin, she cried, for no very distinct reason save that she could not help it. After all the issue was plain, and in a certain sense comforting. However low she might descend in the social scale, she was not sacrificing intellectual distinction, for that had never been more than a dream and a mirage. If ever anyone by taking thought could haveadded one cubit to her intellectual stature that person must have been she. Time and effort and her heart’s blood had gone into the struggle. And nought had availed....
But she putGrowth of the Village Communityamongst the little pile of personal articles that she intended to take with her when she moved into lodgings....