CATHERINE

                                HERSELF

                            _By_ JAMES HILTON

                          T. FISHER UNWIN LTD

                        LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

                       _First published in 1920_

                        (_All rights reserved_)

CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                 PAGE

I.      PRELUDE                           11

II.     JEUNESSE                          26

III.    THE FIRST TRANT EPISODE           41

IV.     NOCTURNE                          51

V.      DISILLUSIONMENTS                  64

VI.     CRESCENDO                         77

VII.    TRAGEDY                           91

VIII.   POST-MORTEM                      101

IX.     NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH            113

X.      ACCELERANDO                      125

XI.     THE SECOND TRANT EPISODE         141

XII.    DISCONTENT                       159

XIII.   LONELINESS                       174

XIV.    HOPE ENTERS                      179

XV.     SUCCESS                          192

XVI.    ALLEGRO CON FUOCO                202

XVII.   THE CRISIS                       236

XVIII.  DÉBÂCLE                          244

XIX.    AFTERWARDS                       253

XX.     STILL FALLING                    270

XXI.    FALLEN                           276

XXII.   MR. HOBBS                        284

XXIII.  ONCE AGAIN                       295

XXIV.   THE LAST PHASE                   302

CATHERINE HERSELF

CHAPTER I

PRELUDE

§ 1

CATHERINE thought: Day is white, Night is black, but sometimes it is
half-white and half-black.... There were five knobs on the brass rail
of the bed: one of them would come off.... The baker came to the door
every night and said: “And how is Cathie?” ...

It was cold, and blue flames flickered on top of the coals in the
fire-grate. They said: “Lappappappap....” The Man tore off his collar
from the stud--“plock”--then he screwed off his boots--“Hr-rooch--flop
... Hr-rooch--flop.” ... The mother said: “Cathie’s asleep: don’t make
such a noise.” ...

Then her mother carried her past the brown banisters up to bed....
It was nearly black. The pumping-engine at the water-works went:
“Chug-chug ... chug-chug ... chug-chug-chug....”

There were five knobs on the brass rail of the bed....

§ 2

The Man was Father.

Every morning mother called upstairs: “John: come on! Past eight”...
and father said: “Just about to.” The sun fell in a slant over the
table and climbed up the wall. Father ate porridge and milk: he went
“Ooflip-oorooflip.”

The sunlight slid off the table on to the floor. There was nothing to
do except listen to the clock. It went “tick-tock—tick-tock”--then it
went “ticky-ticky.” ... The milkman said: “Mornin’, m’m. Lavly mornin’.
Thenk you, m’m. Mornin’, m’m.” ...

The sunlight ran away....

The face of the man next door had a big bulge. Mother said it was
called a goitre. You had them in Derbyshire. The man’s name was
Jopson. All the street-children used to follow him singing “Old father
Jopson”--like this:

There were other fathers besides old father Jopson. There was one whom
Catherine had never seen. He was called “Ch-artinevin,” but he was not
like old father Jopson....

Every night her mother sang:

    Now the day is over,
    Nighties drawing nigh.

and made her talk to our father, Ch-artinevin. Only Ch-artinevin never
said anything in reply.

There were two places where little girls went to. One was heaven, the
other was hell. Hell was hot, heaven was cold. Heaven was full of white
tiles and marble-slabs, like a fish-shop. But hell would be far too
hot for you even if you were feeling cold. It would be a pity to go to
hell, especially in the warm weather. Sometimes her father said: “O
Hell!” ...

§ 3

Father was an elementary school teacher at the Downlands Road Council
School. In winter and on wet nights in summer he sat indoors and put
great sprawling ticks and crosses on exercise-books. Sometimes he
frowned while he was working: Catherine used to watch him.

He was a little man and he wore cycling stockings under his trousers.
Every fine night he put on an old Norfolk tweed jacket and went out
into the garden with the two ends of the waistband dangling behind
him. He would bend down and make minute examinations of plants. He
would twine sweet-pea tendrils round their sticks. Sometimes he would
pounce upon a weed and remove it with cruel precision.... On Saturday
afternoons he took a bucket and went into the roads to collect
horse-manure. To Catherine Saturday afternoon was always signalized by
the hard scraping of the kitchen shovel on the gritty surface of the
roadway.

Mother was big and billowy. She kept her hair in papers during the
mornings and wore stays whose ribbed outline showed through the back of
her blouse. She talked more than father. At the Duke Street Methodist
Chapel she appeared in the front row of the choir, whilst father took
round the collection-plate. She was vaguely religious and vaguely
patriotic and vaguely sentimental. When she said “John!” very slowly,
father knew he had better be careful.

Catherine sat in the front pew on a Sunday morning, and wondered what
it was all about. Why had mother got her hat on? ... Why did everybody
come here once a week? What was the man in the round box talking
about? Her mother had said, “About God, Cathie.” But he didn’t say
God; he said Gahd. Sometimes Ch-artinevin was mentioned and Catherine
caught the words with enthusiasm. It was plain that Ch-artinevin was a
well-known personage.

The little boy next to her had curly hair. He was eating peppermints.
During the prayer he kept taking them out of his mouth to see if they
got smaller. Once he gave her one. It was very nice, but she cracked it
during the benediction, and it was a loud crack.

Father stood at the door shaking hands with people. He said: “Good
evening, Mrs. Lawson”--“Good evening, Ethel”--“Good evening, Miss
Picksley, shall we be seeing you at the Band of Hope on Tuesday?”

And to Catherine he said:

“Go and wait in the back pew; there’s a Kermunion.”

A Kermunion, at any rate, was interesting....

§ 4

Father, being an elementary schoolteacher, did not send Catherine to
an elementary school. She went to Albany House (principal, Miss Leary,
L.R.C.P.). Miss Leary wore her hair in a knob and said to Catherine:
“Darling, if you do that again I shall have to smack you hard.”

Catherine learnt: Solomon was the wisest man that ever lived; Gibraltar
belongs to England; the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
Henry the First never smiled again; three barleycorns one inch; the
messenger rushed up to Wolfe saying, “They run, they run!”--“Who run,
who run?” cried Wolfe....

On wet winter days the fireguard was hung with steaming clothes.
The row of benches was a mere misty vista of wet noses and
pocket-handkerchiefs. Everywhere was the stench of damp mackintoshes.
Catherine sat by the window and looked through the streaming panes.
She could see Polly, who brought them cups of cocoa in the middle of
the morning, washing up the breakfast things in the kitchen. Every
now and then the water gurgled out of the slopstone into the sink and
made Jack, the black retriever dog, cautiously open one eye in his
kennel. Catherine liked Jack. He was very staid and solemn, his sole
dissipation being the crunching of snails. Miss Leary said: “Catherine,
I do declare you are looking out of that window again! How often have I
told you ...” etc., etc.

Every Friday afternoon as a special treat they had reading out of
a reading-book. It was not like “Pat sat on the mat: is that Pat’s
mat?” and the sentences about the cat and rat; it was a real book of
adventures, the adventures of a boy and his uncle at the seaside. The
avuncular relationship seemed to consist entirely in a readiness to
return prompt and plausible answers to all sorts of questions. Uncle
Tom and his nephew carried between them a complete outfit of odds and
ends, marbles, pieces of string, oranges, scissors, card-board, cubes
and prisms, even jars and glass-funnels, and it was their custom to
perform experiments with these upon all suitable occasions, wherever
they might chance to be. The observations of passers-by, including
park-keepers and bath-chairmen, were not recorded. Local byelaws seemed
never to impede them from digging up roots and defacing flower-beds.

§ 5

Day followed on day and Catherine grew. As she walked by the sides of
brick walls her eye ran along the lines of mortar tapering into the
distance. Even she noticed how she kept rising brick by brick until the
mortar-line that her eye followed was somewhere between four and five
feet high. She left off her very childish habits, such as walking on
the cracks of the pavements.... She ceased to ask absurd unanswerable
questions about trams and buses; she stopped lamenting if she failed to
secure a window-seat in the train. But she was still a child. She still
sang out after old father Jopson.

She discovered that the second line of the hymn was not “Nighties
drawing nigh,” as she had naturally supposed, but “Night is drawing
nigh.” The discovery was a disappointment.

She began to read. She read _Alice in Wonderland_ and _The
Walrus and the Carpenter_. She even began to write. At Albany House
she wrote in large copybook style: “Honesty is the best policy.” Once
also she wrote on the back of a birthday card: “Dear Auntie Ethel, Many
Happy Returns of the Day, from Your Affectionate Niece, Catherine.”
... And on the wooden fence at the end of the road she wrote in chalk:
“Freddy McKellar is a Soppy Fool.”

She began to do naughty things. She played in the game of “last
across”; she hung on to the backs of passing motor-lorries. She danced
in the streets to the tune of itinerant barrel-organs. Something may
here be said of her appearance. She had hair of a rich and fiery red,
and eyes of a fierce compound of brown and green. In the summer-time
her face was freckles all over. She was not good-looking, and few
people would have called her even pretty. But she was known everywhere
in the vicinity of Kitchener Road as “Cathie Weston, that red-haired
girl.”

§ 6

In the Co-operative Stores the shopman kept her waiting out of her
turn. He had seen her sticking “transfers” on his shop-window and he
did not like her. The Bockley and Upton Rising Friendly Co-operative
and Industrial Society was an imposing institution with patent
bacon-slicers and profuse calendar-distributing habits. Behind the
polished mahogany counter the shopman fluttered about, all sleek and
dapper, and in front stood Catherine, tired and impatient. There was
a large co-operative almanac on the wall, and this she used to peruse
diligently, supplementing therefrom the meagre knowledge of English
history given her at Albany House. The almanac introduced a sort of
miscellaneous historical calendar--for example: September 22nd. Battle
of Zutphen, 1586. September 23rd. Massacres in Paris, 1789. Then in
great staring red letters: September 24th. Opening of the Head Office
of the Bockley and Upton Rising Friendly Co-operative and Industrial
Society by Lord Fitzroy, 1903. With absolutely no sense of historical
perspective at all, Catherine was quite prepared to believe that the
last of these was the most prominent because it was also the most
important.

When Kitchener Road was first built, in the full-flood of the Soudanese
war-fever, it was for a time drowsily suburban. Then a too enterprising
religious organization built a tin-mission at one end of it. The
mission had a corrugated iron roof. Until then Kitchener Road had not
quite decided whether it would tend in the social sense to rise or to
fall. The corrugated iron roof forced a decision. Kitchener Road fell,
and fell rapidly. From drowsiness it degenerated into frowsiness.
A sleek off-licence appeared, with yellow-glazed tiles and an
ungrammatical notice board: “No beer to be drank on the premises nor
on the public highway.” Passing the tarred fence at the upper end the
pedestrian ran the whole gamut of flippancy and indecency. And on the
gate of the corner house could be seen--a final tribute to disappointed
hopes--that sultry hall-mark of respectability: “No Hawkers, No
Circulars, No Canvassers.” When the headmaster of the Downsland Road
Council School heard that an intending pupil lived in Kitchener
Road, he generally said: “I am very sorry, but we have no more room.
If I were you I should try at Cubitt Lane.” ... The headmaster of
the Downsland Road Council School did not like the headmaster of
the Cubitt Lane Council School.... And on all the tram-standards in
Bockley a handbill declared that “On July 11th, at the Upton Rising
Petty Sessions, Gabriel Handcote, 21, and Richard Moulton, 19, both of
Kitchener Road, Bockley, were fined 40s. and costs for travelling on a
tramway-car with intent to avoid payment of fare.”

§ 7

Bockley was a sprawling urban district on the edge of the metropolitan
area. Itself and Upton Rising had spread till they touched like
adjacent blobs of ink on blotting-paper. But Upton Rising was
aristocratic, plutocratic.... Its inhabitants had first-class
season-tickets, wore spats, and read _The Times_ on the 9.27 “Up.”
They became district councillors, bazaar-openers, hospital-subscribers
and such like. They wrote letters to the _Bockley and Upton Rising
Advertiser_ complaining of municipal apathy in the matter of
water-carts. They said “Bockley must have a park to keep it out of
mischief,” and lo! Bockley had one, with “keep-off-the-grass” notices
and geometrical flower-beds, and a code of byelaws half a yard long,
and a constant clientele of old-age pensioners and children flying
paper windmills....

And in the meantime Bockley became conscious of its destiny. It bore
all the unmistakable signs of a township that expects to be great some
day--insurance agencies out of all proportion to the population, a
Carnegie library, and a melancholy statue outside the Town Hall....

The origin of Bockley is simple and unconfusing.

Somewhere early on in the latter half of the nineteenth century the
Great Eastern Railway Company, seeking parliamentary sanction to extend
its suburban lines to Bockley, was compelled by law to carry workmen
to and from Bockley and the City for twopence.... It was that twopence
which made Bockley....

§ 8

In the front room of No. 24, Kitchener Road there was a Collard and
Collard piano. It had jaundiced keys and a bosom of yellow silk
interlaced with fretwork. Most of the lower notes said “Hanng-g-g,” and
the five bottom ones all said the same “hang-g-g.” ... The piano-tuner
came. He was of the “ping-ping-wrench” and the “see-what-can-be-done”
variety. He said:

“It’s bin a good interment in its time.... Pity the dampness got in it.”

Catherine watched him as he tightened the wires and prodded the notes.
At the end he played Thalberg’s “Home, Sweet Home,” with variations.

That night Mrs. Weston said: “Now that the pianer’s bin tuned you might
start havin’ lessons.... I’ll see Mr. Monkhouse about it to-morrer.”

And Catherine bought a shilling instruction book and learned: E G B D
F--Every Good Boy Deserves Favour....

Mr. Monkhouse was a versatile man. In the _Bockley Advertiser_ he
announced: “Mr. Reginald Monkhouse has still a few dates vacant during
April and May for engagements as entertainer, expert conjurer, pianist,
accompanist or children’s lecturer Write Box 77.” At Masonic dinners
Mr. Monkhouse sang “Where did you get that hat?” and other relics of
the Victorian music-hall stage. Every evening from 8 till 11 he played
the piano and conducted the orchestra at the Victoria Hall, Bockley,
vamping with his left hand and beating time with the first finger of
his right. And on Saturdays and at odd times whenever possible he
gave pianoforte tuition at the rate of sixpence a lesson.... He was
always shabbily-dressed, always good-humoured, patient and not too
conscientious. The little front parlour where he lodged in Cubitt Lane
was full of playbills and concert programmes and signed menu-cards....

He gave Catherine a piece called “White Wings,” and initiated her into
a few elementary five-finger exercises. She was not particularly apt in
picking them up, but at the end of forty-five minutes he said:

“Good-night, my dear. You’ll be a female Paderewski before long....”

Those were the days when a pianist had achieved the signal distinction
of becoming known to the man-in-the-street. Paderewski was as well
known as Krüger.

§ 9

Freddie McKellar and Catherine Weston were seated side by side in the
back bench of the Duke Street Schoolroom. The occasion was a Band of
Hope entertainment. Mr. Weston was on the platform, surrounded by weird
articles of glass and metal.

“I want you all to notice carefully,” he said. “Here I have a jar
of clean pure water. The little fellow who is gambolling about so
playfully inside it is a stickleback. He is having a fine time because
the water is so pure and fresh.... Now watch ... here I have a flask of
whisky.... I pour it into the water ... so.... I want you to watch very
carefully....”

Freddie McKellar, aged fifteen, bent his head slightly to the left in
order to see round the corner of Mrs. Mole’s hat. In doing so he felt
the soft spray-like touch of Catherine’s hair against his ear.... It
was not unpleasant.

Catherine was dreamily conscious that something tense was going to
happen.

“It doesn’t always work,” she whispered, vaguely, “some sticklebacks
like it.” ... She bent her head slightly to the right to circumvent the
obstruction of Mr. Mole’s shiny hairless head. To Freddie McKellar it
seemed that this time, instead of his ear touching her hair, her hair
had performed the more positive act of brushing against his ear. The
difference, though subtle, was not to be ignored.

“Now,” cried Mr. Weston, brandishing aloft his jar with the stickleback
inside it either dead or drunk or in some way incapacitated for further
movement, “if the effect of this foul spirit upon this tiny animal is
...”

“There’s refreshments afterwards, ain’t there?” said Freddie, _sotto
voce_.

“Yes,” she whispered, hoarsely. The tragedy of the dying stickleback,
“butchered to make a Roman holiday,” had made her unwontedly solemn.

... “Now,” proceeded Mr. Weston, “if somebody will kindly lower the
lights, I will show you on the screen some of the effects of strong
drink.... First of all, perhaps you would care to have a look at a drop
of whisky as it is seen through the lens of a microscope....”

The lights went out in successive “pops.”

Freddie McKellar’s left hand slowly closed over Catherine’s right one.

“Ugh,” said Catherine, presumably at the horrible picture on the
screen. Then the thought came to her (she had had no experience of such
matters)--“He must be flirting with me.”

Simultaneously there came to Freddie McKellar (who, for his age, had
had considerable experience of such matters) the thought: “She must be
flirting with me.”

And at the same time Gladys Stockwell nudged Bessie Millar and
whispered: “Just look at Cathie Weston and Freddie McKellar ... at
their age, too....” (Gladys was twenty-three and unbeautiful.)

In the refreshment room afterwards Catherine and Freddie sat together
on a bench munching ham-sandwiches. You were only expected to take one
ham-sandwich, but Catherine had already taken three and Freddie five.
The caretaker was stoking up the fire at the other side of the room.

“Ain’t you two goin’ ter join in the Musical Chairs?” he remarked,
contemplatively, “they’ve started ’em in the other room.”

Freddie took another ham-sandwich.

“I don’t feel extra like Musical Chairs,” he replied.

The caretaker grinned and shuffled out with the empty coke-scuttle. It
was precisely at that moment that Catherine began to dislike the scent
of Freddie’s lavishly spread hair-oil....

Catherine thought: “I don’t think I like him at all. I wonder if he
knows it was me who chalked up on the fence, ‘Freddie McKellar is a
soppy fool.’ ... ’Cos he is one, really....”

And then suddenly Freddie had an unfortunate inspiration.

He put his arm round her neck and touched her cheek. In an instant she
was up and flaring and standing before him.

“What on earth did you do that for?” she cried, passionately; “I don’t
want your smelly fingers on me!” (“Smelly fingers” was an attribute she
bestowed on everybody she disliked.)

He was astonished at her vehemence, but tried to carry it off
laughingly.

“Come back,” he called, advancing to her, “and don’t be silly ... silly
... don’t be ... silly....” He was rather nervous. His nervousness made
him desperate.

There occurred a somewhat unseemly fracas. He stood before the door and
slowly got her trapped into a corner. She aimed a tea-cup at him but
missed. Maddened by this he rushed full tilt at her. She struggled,
snatched, tore, kicked, pinched. She was stronger than he, but he got
hold of her hair, and so held her at his mercy. He just managed to
kiss her. She spat in his face. Then he let her go. She marched out
of the room, seizing another tea-cup as she went. When she was at the
door she took a careful aim and flung it at him with all her might. It
struck his head. There was that tense pause just after children are
hurt, and just before they begin to cry. Then he broke into a wail....
Most dramatically the piano in the next room stopped, and there was the
scuffle of finding chairs.... She paused at the door and tossed her
last words at him in uttermost scorn.

“Oh, you great big softie ...” she said, and passed out into the cool
night air.

She never enquired whether he were seriously hurt (he might have been);
she never stopped to think of the broken crockery on the floor or her
own red hair streaming in disarray; at that moment she would not have
cared if she had killed him.

And she never spoke to him again....

Afterwards she was doubly angry with him because he had made her lose
her temper....

§ 10

Mrs. Weston said: “Jus’ look at your hair! You’ve bin larking abeaout,
I darebebound.”

Catherine did not contradict her. “Larking about” was a punishable
misdemeanour.

“Everybody was larking about,” she put in, irrelevantly.

“You’re a disgrace,” continued Mrs. Weston, equally irrelevantly. Then
as an afterthought: “Larking about with the boys, I daresay....”

Catherine did not reply.

“Well, you’re going to have a sound thrashing, that’s all, so you may
as well know.... I’m about sick of your hooligan ways....”

Catherine went white. She was not afraid of a sound thrashing (they
were not very fearsome things when you got used to them); it was the
atmosphere of strained expectancy that was almost intolerable. She went
whiter when her mother said:

“Have your supper first.... There’s some cold rice pudding....”

She ate in silence. Her mother was rushing in and out of the scullery
preparing her father’s supper. In the middle of all this her father
entered. He was tired and hoarse after the evening’s effort. He
noticed the strained atmosphere. He said to Catherine:

“What’s the matter, Cathie?”

Mrs. Weston began to talk very fast and very harshly. Her voice was
like the sudden rending of a strip of calico.

“She’s bin behaving herself badly again, that’s what’s amiss with
her.... Larking about all this evening, she was. A regular disgrace. I
tell you, I’m not going to put up with it. She’s going to get a sound
thrashing to teach her to remember....”

Simultaneously Mrs. Weston planked down a plate of greens and
vegetables in front of her husband. He attacked them nervously.

“It’s not good enough,” he said, after a pause, with the air of being
vaguely reproachful against nobody in particular, “I tell you it’s not
good enough.... I don’t know why these things should happen. It’s not
as if she was a little girl....”

That was all he said.

The sound thrashing began soon afterwards. It was an extremely
unscientific battery of slaps, in which Catherine dodged as best she
could amongst the crowded furniture of the kitchen. Once she lurched
against the table and knocked over the vinegar-bottle.

“I wish you wouldn’t ...” began Mr. Weston, and then stopped and
continued eating.

After some moments of this gymnastic display both parties were hot and
flushed with exertion, and the finale began when Mrs. Weston opened the
door of the lobby and manœuvred Catherine out of the kitchen.

“Off you go,” she said. “Straight to bed ... str-h-aight to b-bed....”

The chase proceeded upstairs. Mrs. Weston’s stertorous breathing
and heavy footfalls were the most conspicuous sounds.... A few
seconds afterwards a loud banging of an upstairs door announced that
hostilities were over.

In her tiny back bedroom Catherine sat down on a chair for breath. She
was not physically hurt; in her “larking about” with boys and girls of
her own age she had often paused for breath like this, and at such
times there had been joy in her heart even when there had been pain in
her body. But now she was conscious only of profound indignity. Her
father’s vague protest echoed in her memory: “It’s not as if she were a
little girl....”

She undressed and got into bed. It was quite dark, and she felt
acutely miserable. Far away the pumping engine at the water-works
whispered, as it always did at night-time, “Chug-chug ... chug-chug ...
chug-chug-chug....” Ten, twelve years had passed since she had counted
the five knobs on the brass rail of the bed. She was growing up, out of
a child into a girl. She was not growing up without faults: she knew
that. The worst trait in her was temper ... she would have to conquer
that. She must learn self-control....

From below came the old familiar sound of her father taking off his
boots and dumping them under the sofa. “H-rooch-flop ... h’rooch-flop.”
... That sound was bound up with all her memories of childhood.

Ten minutes later there came a cautious tap at her door, and her father
entered in an intermediate stage of attire. He lit a candle clumsily
and shone it down upon her. She did not move. He prodded her with his
thumb in a vague, experimental way. She made no reply, though her eyes
were wide open and staring into his.

“I say, Cathie,” he began, vaguely and nervously, “you’ve bin
misbehaving, I’m told.... It’s too bad, you know.... Come now ... be a
good girl and go to sleep.”

Pause.

Then: “Kiss me.”

It was the first time for many years that he had asked for such a
thing. With no apparent reason at all the tears welled up into her
eyes, tears that she had hidden since her tenth birthday.

She was just about to raise her head to meet his when a drop of liquid
candle grease fell on her bare arm. The sharp, unexpected pain made her
a prey to a sudden gust of tempestuous emotion....

“Oh, go away,” she muttered angrily, “don’t come bothering me ... I’m
tired....” She crouched down beneath the bedclothes with her face
turned away from him.

Mr. Weston retired a little sheepishly.

“Oh, well,” he said, “if you’re going to be sulky ... I suppose....”

When he had gone she cried as she had never cried before, and all
because she had spurned his proffered reconciliation. From the other
side of the thin partition that separated the two rooms, she could hear
the sharp “plock” as her father wrenched his collar off the stud, and
the steady nasal monotone of her mother’s voice. She could not discern
any words, but from the vicious way in which her father kept stumbling
up against things she guessed that they were quarrelling....

CHAPTER II

JEUNESSE

§ 1

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.

§ 2

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 nor
Helen 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....

§ 3

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....

§ 4

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.

§ 5

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 of
Chingford. 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 shop _I_ mean,” 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.

§ 6

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.

“When _I_ was 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.... This
was 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 ... _do_ come inside ... in fact....”

In fact, Mrs. Weston was dead.

§ 7

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 of
her 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 might
have 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....

§ 8

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 the
six-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....

§ 9

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 but
infinitely 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 front
room 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 the _Bockley and District Advertiser_ to 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 week _she_ was 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 on
without 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.

THE FIRST TRANT EPISODE

§ 1

JUNE sunlight was scorching the tarred asphalt of the Ridgeway, and
Catherine and Helen were sauntering homewards beneath the heavy trees.
Their conversation savoured of “shop.”

“Two hours the last map took me,” said Catherine, indignantly, “and
we’ve got another in less than a fortnight.... Rivers and mountains as
well.... And it isn’t as if North America was easy, either ... there’s
all those lakes....”

“I shan’t put in those islands at the top, anyway,” observed Helen.

“I shall leave mine till to-morrow morning,” continued Catherine. “That
is, if I do it at all.... And I shall do it on typewriting paper so I
can trace it.”

“She won’t take it if you do.”

“She’ll have to....”

At the corner of the Post Office the conversation took a personal turn.

“We’re having a social at the Baptist Church next Saturday. Will
you come?” asked Helen (Helen attended a rather prosperous Baptist
establishment in Upton Rising).

Catherine walked on for some moments before answering. She seemed to be
weighing things up.

“I might,” she answered. Then, as an after-thought, she added: “I
suppose you’ll all be there?”

“Oh yes. There’ll be me and father and mother and Millie, perhaps the
Lester girls as well....”

“George?” Catherine’s voice rather overdid itself in the effort to
appear casual. Helen looked at her keenly.

“Possibly,” she replied, in a voice that might have meant anything.
There came a rather curious pause. They had reached the corner of the
High Street before Helen spoke again.

“So _that’s_ it, is it?” she remarked, as they crossed the tramway
junction.

“That’s _what_?” said Catherine gruffly.

“That’s what’s been making you so ... so different--lately.... I’d been
wondering what it was. I never guessed it was George.”

“How did you find out?”

“I didn’t find out. You just told me.”

Catherine turned down Hanson Street, the road immediately opposite the
Ridgeway.

“Let’s go down here,” she suggested. “It’s quieter. I can see you’ve a
lot to say to me.”

Helen took her arm.

“No, I haven’t.... I don’t know that I can say anything, really....
Only I think you’re silly.”

“Why?” The word rang out like a pistol-shot.

The reply did not come immediately. When it did it sounded limp and
uncertain.

“Because ... because you’ll be disappointed in him.”

“What’s the matter with him, then?”

“Nothing much. He’s all right ... only ... he’ll disappoint you, one
way or another. He’s not as clever as he seems. Besides----”

“Yes?”

“He doesn’t like you.”

“He _doesn’t_? Has he told you so?”

“Not in so many words. But I know. He may like you to flirt with, but
he doesn’t like _you_. My advice is, if you’re getting serious,
give up the flirting. With him, at any rate.... After all, you can
always find plenty of chaps to flirt about with....”

(Her father had said “fellers.” She said “chaps”!)

“But I don’t want them, maybe.”

“Well, go without them, then.” (They were at the corner of Kitchener
Road.) ... “I never thought much of flirting about as a pastime.”

It was a curiously elliptical conversation throughout, and at the gate
of No. 24 they both seemed eager not to prolong it by standing. They
said good-bye immediately, and both were conscious of electricity in
the atmosphere.

That evening Catherine found herself unable to concentrate on homework.
Mr. Weston was out at night-school, and she was thus left alone in the
house. The nine o’clock rule was now virtually inoperative, since her
father did not return till half-past ten on three nights out of the
week. At about ten past nine Catherine put aside her books and went out
for a walk. She had finished all her work excepting the map.

Cubitt Lane at this time on a glorious June evening was full of
courting couples. They lurched along in a peculiarly graceless fashion,
each leaning against the other.

“I wouldn’t do _that_,” thought Catherine, virtuously. “That
_is_ silly, if you like.”

At the bridge over the railway she heard a brisk “good evening”
addressed to herself. She turned and saw it was George Trant....

“Where’re you off to?” he asked good-humouredly.

“Taking a walk.”

“So’m I.... Let’s go up the road....”

“All right.” ... They climbed the hill past the King’s Arms, and
entered the Forest.

§ 2

The first leaves of autumn were beginning to fall when Catherine
returned to Bockley after a fortnight at Hastings. Day after day of
glorious September weather had covered her cheeks and arms and hands
with freckles: her hair, too, was fluffed and shining with continual
sea-bathing: her general appearance was rather wild and undomesticated
for such a place as Bockley. She returned on Saturday night, and Sunday
found her waiting outside the Baptist Church at Upton Rising. Evening
service was over at eight o’clock, and she judged that Helen would be
there.

Helen greeted her at the church door.

“Only you?” said Catherine.

Helen nodded. “The others went for a walk.... It’s a fine night--let’s
take a tram to the Forest.”

The trams of the London County Council ran along the end of the road.
They boarded one; it was full, and they had to stand on the top.

“You look well,” remarked Helen.

“Oh, I’m all right,” replied Catherine, and the conversation languished.

What ensued after that would always in Catherine’s mind be inextricably
bound up with the sway and purr of trams along the high road.

“George has gone away,” remarked Helen, à propos of nothing.

“Oh?”

“His firm’s given him a job in Manchester. A good opening, it seems....
I got a letter from him yesterday. He enclosed a note for you: I
suppose he didn’t know your address.... I believe I’ve got it on me....”

She fished in her hand-bag and extracted an envelope, from which she
took a folded half-sheet of paper and handed the latter to Catherine.

It was rapidly getting dusk, but the lights in the tram were not yet
lit. On every alternate tramway standard hung an arc lamp, and these
were now fizzing and spluttering into pale brilliance. Catherine read
the note (it was roughly written in copying pencil) in quick spasms as
the car swirled along.

 MY DEAR CATHIE,

 As you will perceive, I have got shifted to Manchester, where I shall
 no longer have the pleasure of your delightful society, which, as you
 will not doubt, is a great loss to me personally. However, I am likely
 to enjoy my stay here: there are some splendid girls working in the
 same office with me, though none of them has your own Inimitable red
 hair. If there is one thing I regret it is that the before-mentioned
 red hair has occasionally led me to say things I did not mean and
 to do things I did not mean to do. I am sure that you, with your
 wonderful capacity for understanding, will grasp what I am trying to
 sketch out. We have had some interesting discussions together during
 the last few months, and for these at least (not to mention the
 spiritual inspiration given me by the passionate flame of your hair) I
 am deeply grateful.

 I hope you will always believe me to be what I am, viz., your sincere
 admirer,

                                                 GEORGE TRANT.

 P.S.--My lodgings are not permanent, so there would be little point in
 enclosing my address.

Catherine was slow to grasp the full meaning of the note. As it dawned
upon her her lips tightened, and she gripped fiercely the rail against
which she was leaning. The tram lurched to a standstill, and there was
the usual scramble to get down the stairs. “High Wood,” the conductor
called out.

“Come on,” said Helen, and they descended.

In the Forest glades the night air was cool and sweet. For some
distance they walked on in silence. Catherine was the first to speak.
They had reached a clearing, and under the open sky the daylight still
lingered.

“I daresay you’d like to read it,” said Catherine. She held out the
note at arm’s length.

Helen gave a queer ejaculatory laugh.

“I’ve already done so,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh, I know it’s not quite the thing to read other people’s letters....
But I wanted to know what ... what he would say to you, and I thought
perhaps you wouldn’t show me.”

Catherine crumpled up the note and put it in her pocket.

“Well, you know, anyway,” she said gloomily.

They passed again into the cool Forest glades.

“I was right,” said Helen, quietly. “I knew he’d write you something
like that. He’s good at that kind of letter-writing ... sort of cheap
cleverness he excels at I’d half a mind not to let you see it.”

There came a long pause. They had reached the high road to Chingford
before it was broken.

Catherine suddenly took the crumpled letter from her pocket, and began
tearing it up into minute fragments.

“See,” she cried passionately, “you can tell him this is what I did
with his letter I You can tell him there’s better fellows in the world
than he is, and Cathie Weston isn’t going to break her heart over
_him_! ... Tell him I’m not a soppy little schoolgirl.”

She flung the pieces on the ground, and began stamping on them.

“You’re being silly,” said Helen, quietly.

“And tell him,” went on Catherine, “that if he thinks he’s under an
obligation to me, he’s made a mistake. I’m grateful to him--for letting
me see what he really is.”

Her words rattled like the passage of a lorry over granite setts.

“Come on,” said Helen, “we’ll get to Chingford, and take the train
back.”

“You’ll tell him?”

“I don’t promise. I think you’d better forget all about him ... after
all, you can’t do anything....”

“I don’t want to! I merely want him to know that I don’t mind.”

“Well, that’s all right, then. He’ll know that if he hears nothing from
you.”

“He won’t. He’ll think he’s left a broken-hearted girl to cry over him.”

“I don’t think he will.”

“... because I don’t believe in being broken-hearted. I don’t think
it’s possible to die of a broken heart. I’m certain I shan’t, anyway. I
won’t let any man mess about with _my_ life. It’ll take a pretty
big misfortune to make life not worth living to me. If he’s tired of me
I’m just as tired of him. Tell him that!”

“This way ...” said Helen, guiding her into the Station Road. “We’ll
just be able to catch the 9.45....”

§ 3

Helen left the train at Upton Rising, but Catherine went on to Bockley.
The Town Hall struck the hour of ten as she was walking up the station
approach. At this time the crowds along the High Street were beginning
to disperse; the trams and buses were full of returning excursionists.
Neglectful of the time and with no very definite aim in view, Catherine
turned into the Ridgeway. It was directly opposite to the quickest way
home, but its shady avenues and flower-scented front gardens suited
her mood better than the stark frowsiness of Hanson Street. Her mind
was in flux. She did not know whether what had happened was going to
be an important stage in her life or not. She did not know how much of
her feeling was disappointment, and how much was mere wounded dignity.
She could not estimate the depth of the feeling she had had for George
Trant. It seemed inconceivable that she had ever been in love with
him....

She started to administer to herself wholesome correctives. “It’s no
good,” she told herself brutally, “your imagining yourself the heroine
of a tragedy, suffering more poignantly than ninety-nine people out of
every hundred, because it’s not the truth. What you are feeling now is
felt sometime or other by the majority of all people: there’s nothing
a bit singular or exceptional in your case. It’s a mistake to pride
yourself on suffering more exquisitely than other people.”

Then she poured cold logic over herself.

“He’s only one man among millions, and in no sense is he markedly
superior to the average. A certain spurious cleverness, a talent for
mockery, a deft finesse in expressing cruel things in soft words ...
absurd that he should become so much to you or to any girl ... there’s
nothing admirable in him, therefore you are lucky to get rid of him.”

It sounded convincing enough.

She walked on, scarce heeding whither she was going, and all the time
her mood alternated between stormy resentment and cold self-reproach.
There were moments too of grey hopelessness, and it was only her
constantly recurring indignation that swept her out of these. Every
inch of the roads she traversed was associated with him: every gate
and tree seemed to call out in mocking melancholy--“This was where ...
this was where....” Not a street corner but was inextricably bound
up in her mind with some remark of his and the exact phase of their
relationship when he had uttered it....

Under heavy trees that split the moonlight into a thousand fragments
she suddenly heard the rich hum of a grand piano. She stopped. She
stood in the shadow of the hedge and listened in rapture. The house
was a large one, with a corner bay-window wide open, and it was from
that room evidently that the music was proceeding. It was some rapid
piece full of rippling streams of notes with very few chords, octaves
in the base clef that thundered like the oncoming tide, swirling
waves of treble triplets that were light as air, yet beneath all the
laughter and freedom, a sense of dim, unuttered passion, half hopeful,
half melancholy. Long afterwards she knew it was Chopin’s Black Note
Study in G flat. But then it had no name to her. It might have been
the latest ragtime craze for all she knew: all she cared was that
it expressed all the feelings in her own heart that she had thought
inexpressible, things that she had often and in vain tried to wring out
of the Collard and Collard at home. At that moment it is probable that
she would have given everything she had in the world for that piano.
It stood to her as the one way to salvation. She would have bartered
her soul for it. As it was, she stood there in the spattered moonlight
and cried for it. At any rate, she cried.... The piece finished up in
a tremendous cascade of double octaves, and she waited nearly half an
hour after that, hoping the playing might begin again. Then she walked
back to Kitchener Road almost in a state of trance. The Bockley High
Street was very white and deserted, and far into the dim distance
stretched the tram-rails, blue and infinite. It was long past eleven.
But Catherine was dreaming--dreaming of one thing only (though that
one thing was strangely complicated by other things)--dreaming of a
grand piano, dreaming of the ecstasy of playing it as she had heard
it played that night. The vision of her ambition came to her as she
turned into Kitchener Road. She would become a great pianoforte player.
Already discerning critics--adjudicators at musical festivals and such
like--had prophesied a career for her if she would work hard. Hitherto
it had not seemed worth while to work hard. Now it became suddenly
and tremendously worth all the soul and energy she could give to it.
Nothing else mattered. Nothing else could ever matter. Whatever stuff
her soul was made of, music was part of it, and music would answer
everything her soul asked.

At home her father was waiting up, vaguely remonstrative as usual.

“Worse and worse it gets, Cathie ...” he began ... “the first night
you’re home after your holiday you land in at twenty to twelve! ...
it’s not good enough ... you’ve had all the morning and afternoon. I
can’t think what makes you want to go walking the streets this time....”

“I’m not having any supper,” she said brusquely. “Good-night....”

“But----”

“Oh, don’t worry ... I’ve had some,” she lied. As she fled upstairs
she heard him murmuring something. A great change had come over him
since his wife died. He had been getting ever slower and feebler. It
was becoming more and more evident that it had been only his wife’s
incessant nagging that had spurred him to the minimum of activity.
Now he pottered aimlessly about the garden. His attendances at the
Duke Street Chapel became more and more infrequent, and finally ceased
altogether. People said (often facetiously) that he was pining away
of grief at his wife’s death. It is doubtful if this were a complete
diagnosis....

Up in the little back bedroom Catherine did a thing which she had not
done for a long time. She prayed. Ch-artinevin was no longer a choleric
old gentleman with white side-whiskers and a devouring passion for
adulatory worship. He had long ago ceased to be that, and he had not
begun to be anything else. Catherine, though she never altogether
recognized her position, had no very definite belief in either Him
or the rest of the accepted doctrines of Christianity. She prayed,
not out of religious fervour, but from a variety of complex motives,
one of which was certainly a desire to straighten out her own ideas
by reducing them to more or less coherent form. Among other things,
she prayed for a grand piano. “Lord, give me a grand piano,” was her
unorthodox variant upon the more usual bedtime supplications. “Lord,
_do_ give me a grand piano,” she pleaded. It is curious, but she
did not in the least expect the Lord to take any notice. She was even
doubtful whether the Lord were listening. Yet she kept on repeating the
demand for a grand piano. Also she decided how she would catalogue the
whole George Trant episode. It was nothing. It was to be regarded as
nothing. Tears broke in upon her decision to regard it as nothing. The
grand piano and all that it meant to her kept looming on the horizon.
Then she felt a little ashamed of crying. “I never used to cry,” she
thought. “Not even after a sound thrashing.” She tried to calm herself.
“I’m getting soppy,” she reflected. “Crying like a little kid. All
because of that piano. That’s what done it....” It was long past
midnight when she fell into troubled sleep.

CHAPTER IV

NOCTURNE

§ 1

ON a certain bitterly cold night in November, Catherine stood on the
doorstep of No. 24, Kitchener Road, with her overcoat and hat in her
hands. Despite the chilliness of the atmosphere her cheeks were hot
and flushed, and her sensations took no notice of the blustering wind
that raged along the road. For several moments she stood still on the
doorstep, with heaving breast and head flung back defiantly. Then,
still carrying her hat and overcoat, she went out into the street,
omitted to shut the gate behind her, and walked at a terrific pace in
the direction of the Bockley High Street.

It was eleven p.m. Her steps rang loudly along the deserted pavements;
occasionally she lurched forward as if desiring to increase her pace,
and this disturbed the rhythmic beat of her steps. She passed nobody,
except at the junction of Hanson Street, where a couple of belated
revellers slunk past with the furtive attitude of those who know they
ought to have been home long since. They were too intent upon their
destination to notice her. Only where there were large front gardens
did her passing excite attention, and here congregations of cats,
gathered for midnight revelry, dispersed with mournful sound as her
footsteps approached.

At the corner of the High Street she stopped. It seemed to occur to
her for the first time that to carry one’s hat and overcoat upon such
a night was in some degree unusual. With careful deliberation she put
them on. Then she laughed softly, and her laugh was a strange mingling
of rapture and defiance. That which she had thought impossible had come
to pass. After years of undeviating placidity fate had at last done
something dramatic with her.

She had been turned out of the house at No. 24, Kitchener Road.

Her father had done what he had never before been known to do: he had
lost his temper, and lost it thoroughly.

He had said: “My God, Cathie, I won’t stand that! ... Out you go!” He
had pushed her into the lobby, and while she was reaching for her hat
and coat he had struck her on the face with the back of his hand.

“Out you go!” he repeated, and Catherine saw that his temper had not
yet reached its height. “I’m done with you! ... Are you going?” He
actually picked up an umbrella and began brandishing it with his hand
grasping the ferrule.

Catherine had opened the front door in vague terror of what he was
going to do. The door was banged after her with a vicious kick from
within. Then her cheek where he had struck her began to hurt....

§ 2

The cause of the altercation had been Catherine’s determination to
accept a situation which he did not wish her to accept. She had
answered the advertisement, interviewed her prospective employer, and
received word that she had been appointed before even mentioning the
matter to him. Then at teatime on a Friday afternoon she casually
remarked:

“By the way, I’ve decided to get some work.”

He looked up at her as if the word were unfamiliar to him. “Work?” he
said, astounded. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve applied for a job and been offered it.”

He seemed to have difficulty in comprehending what she said.

“A job? What job?”

“They want a pianist at a cinema. Good salary. Only work in the
evenings....”

“But, my dear girl----”

“Well?”

“Don’t cut me short like that.... I was about to say....”

“Oh, I know what you’re about to say. You’re hopelessly against it,
aren’t you?”

“Well, if I am, you----”

“Why are you?”

“I do wish you’d give me time to speak, Catherine. You spring this
on me so suddenly.... I had no idea you were ever thinking of such
a thing, to begin with. Even now it seems incredible to me. I can’t
understand it.”

“Can’t understand what?”

“Why you want to do it ... it’s ... it’s unnecessary. Haven’t you
enough money?”

“Oh, it’s not a question of money. I want to have some work to do,
something to get interested in.”

“But you have the work of the house to carry on with. Surely that’s
enough.”

“Oh, _that’s_ enough. In fact, that’s a great deal too much. I’m
sick and tired of housework. Some girls may like it, but I don’t. I’d
sooner pay some girl who likes it to do it for me. Besides, I want to
be independent.”

He gave a start of surprise. “What’s that you said?” he asked,
incredulously.

“I said, independent.”

There was a tense pause.

“Somebody’s been putting some silly modern ideas into your head. All
that bosh about independence, I mean. A girl’s place is in the home,
when she’s got one. Until you make a home of your own your place is
here.”

“I suppose you think I ought to get married.”

“Married? ... Heavens, no! ... You’re only nineteen! Why, I never even
_met_ your mother until I was twenty-four! Don’t you worry your
head about marriage. Let it alone until the right feller comes along. I
expect you’ve been reading too many trashy novels lately, that’s what
it is.”

An angry light leapt into her eyes.

“Well, if you think I’m going to scrub floors and wash dishes until the
right feller comes along, as you call it, you’re jolly well mistaken.
I wouldn’t do it even if I was sure the right feller _would_ come
along. I’m not made that way. I want a bit of liberty. I want to live.”

“My dear Catherine, you have everything you need. I can’t see what
you’re making all this fuss about. Really I can’t.... You’re a good
deal better off than some girls, I can tell you. What about poor Nellie
Selborne and----”

“Oh, what on _earth_ have they got to do with it?”

“Well, if you won’t listen to me, I suppose ...” He waved his hand
deprecatingly. “Suppose we stop arguing. Let’s hold the matter over.
I’m certain that with a few days’ thought you’ll----”

“But I can’t hold the matter over.”

“Why not?”

“Because the situation’s been offered me. I’ve either got to accept it
or reject it on the spot.”

“Well, Catherine, I’m sorry to go against you, but it will have to
be so, in this case. Understand, I mean it. I mean to have my own
way in this matter. I won’t have you strumming away every night in a
third-rate picture house. I’m going to put my foot down firmly in this
matter. You must reject the offer.”

He made a gallant but not entirely successful attempt to appear
dignified by resuming the perusal of his newspaper. Catherine bit her
lip and went a little pale.

“That’s a pity,” she said quietly.

“Why is it a pity?”

“Because I’ve decided to accept it.” Her lips were tight, and there was
the suggestion of restrained emotion in her voice.

Something happened to his eyes. They opened terrifically wide and gazed
at her expressionlessly for several seconds.

“What’s that?” he said.

His eyes unnerved her somewhat. But she steeled herself to repeat her
ultimatum.

“Because--I’ve--decided to--to accept.”

Pause. “That’s all,” she added, irrelevantly, as if by way of clinching
the matter.

Another pause. The clock tactfully struck in with the announcement of
six o’clock. That seemed to break the spell. He rose and made for his
hat.

“H’m,” he ejaculated, sharply. “I see. That’s what it amounts to, is
it.... Well, you’ll have time to think it over. I’m off to school now.”

He took a sheaf of night-school exercises from his desk and stuffed
them in his pocket. Not another word came from him. Catherine was
almost hypnotized by his quick, startling movements, so unlike his
usual apathy. He strode firmly down the lobby and shut the door after
him more noisily than usual. She could hear his footsteps along the
street, and he was walking at a pace that was for him unprecedentedly
rapid. When he was quite out of hearing she sank down into the chair
he had just vacated. The tension of the argument had given her a sense
of physical exhaustion. Yet spiritually she was thrilled by a strange
feeling of exhilaration: it seemed to her that after an interval of
drudgery she was once again being drawn into the vortex of momentous
happenings. She was absolutely certain of one thing: she would not give
way. If he chose to make her disobedience a “test-case” of the father’s
right to inflict his will upon the daughter she would await whatever
steps he took with calmness and determination. But she would never give
way. She was nineteen, and to her nineteen seemed old age. Things he
had said in the course of the argument had annoyed her inexpressibly.
They were little things, mostly. Bringing in the case of Nellie
Selborne, for instance, was silly and entirely irrelevant. Nellie had
paralysis down one side, and existed apparently for the purpose of
proving to all other girls how lucky they were. Then again, Catherine
disliked intensely his massive declaration that “a girl’s place is in
the home.” He had talked about “waiting for the right feller to come
along,” and this passive method of getting through life roused all
the scorn and contempt in her nature. Also he had talked about her
“strumming in a third-rate picture house.” It was typical of him to
assume that it was third-rate before he had heard even the name of it.
He had been ridiculously unfair....

She went over to the writing-desk where he marked his school exercise
books. Something within her said: You are angry and excited now, but
you will soon cool down and then probably you will give in to him....
To this she replied passionately: I _won’t_ give in to him....
But, continued the part of her which always told the truth, you
_will_ give in to him if you wait till your temper has cooled
down.... Better write now accepting the situation, and post it before
he comes back from night-school. Then the matter will be really
settled. Then you can say to him when he comes in: “It’s no use arguing
about it any more. I’ve written to accept the job. The thing’s done now
and can’t be undone.”

She wrote the letter as quickly as she could, for the feeling
of supreme depression, the feeling that she was doing something
regrettable and irretrievably silly, was becoming heavier upon her
every second. She was just addressing the envelope after fastening it
when she heard the key fumbling at the front door. For the moment a
kind of panic fear seized her. He was coming back. He must have turned
back before reaching the school. His footsteps down the lobby sounded
brutal and unnecessarily noisy. She swung round in her chair and sat
awaiting his entrance with the penholder stuck between her teeth. The
half-addressed envelope lay on the desk invisible behind her back....
He flung down his hat and coat on the table.

The moment was so tense that Catherine spoke merely to interrupt the
horrible silence of it.

“Was there no school to-night?” she asked, with an effort to appear
perfectly casual.

“I’m not going,” he snapped curtly, and took down the red-ink bottle
from the corner of the mantelpiece. That meant he was going to spend
the evening marking exercise books.

She was thoroughly frightened. Her mother’s tempers and tirades had
never frightened her, because she was used to them and knew them
intimately, as a doctor knows the illness of a familiar patient. But
her father was normally so quiet and placid and mild-mannered: she had
never seen him in a temper, although when she was a little girl, boys
who were in his class at school had told her that on rare occasions he
got “ratty.” But she had never known him in such a condition. In this
phase he was a complete stranger to her. And she was apprehensive, as
she would have been if a stranger had entered the house when she was
alone.

He came to the desk to get his exercise books. She thought at first he
was going to strike her. But he merely leaned over her and lifted the
lid. As he did so he must have seen the half-addressed envelope lying
on the top. But he did not say a word. His silence was unnerving.

Always he used the desk for marking exercise books. But this time he
arranged the pile of books and the pen and ink on the dining-table.

“You can use the desk,” he said curiously, “if you’re wanting to.”
His politeness, his unusual solicitude for her comfort, was horrible!
Normally, if she had been at his desk, he would have said: “Now look
here, Cathie, it’s too bad of you to want to use my desk when I want
it. After all, it’s _my_ desk. You’ve got all the day to use it
when I’m out. Can’t you use the table?”

She would have understood a speech like that. But for him to say so
thoughtfully, so obsequiously, “You can use the desk if you’re wanting
to,” was charged with all the nameless horror of the unprecedented.

It was half-past six. The clock struck. He was assiduously and
seemingly quite normally putting red-ink ticks and crosses on algebra
sums. Yet she knew that the atmosphere was very far from being normal.
She took a book from the shelf and sat down in the chair by the fire,
but it was difficult to read. She could hear the ticking of the clock
and the steady scratching of his pen, and flipping of pages. He went
on for hours. When he had finished one pile of books he went to his
desk and fetched out another. Then again, if he had not done so the
first time, he must have seen the envelope with its incomplete address.
But he went on with his work at the table. Supper time came, but he
made no sign of clearing away his books. And then his surliness and
sulkiness, whichever it was, ceased to frighten her, but began to annoy
her acutely.... The last post went at eleven-thirty. Come what might
she would post that letter. At five minutes past eleven she went over
to the desk with the intention of finishing the address. She had got
as far as the “p” in “Upton” when she saw that he was regarding her
intently. As soon as he saw that she had noticed his glance he put down
his pen and swung back on his chair.

“Now then, Cathie,” he began brusquely, “this matter’s got to be
settled.... You understand. No nonsense. What’re you going to do?”

She bit the end of the penholder.

“I’m going to accept the thing,” she said firmly, though she had
difficulty in restraining her apprehension and excitement.

“You’re not!” he cried, advancing menacingly. “Understand, I forbid
it! I’m going to be firm in this business. You’re not to accept that
situation. D’you hear?”

He picked up the envelope she had been engaged upon. She knew that he
had seen it before. But he pretended not to have done. She despised him
for that little perfidy.

“What’s this?” he cried, snatching it up vehemently. Then he pretended
to realize. “You’ve been writing to accept it?”

“Yes.”

For a moment she thought he was going to do her physical violence. Then
he tore the envelope across and flung the two pieces into the fire.

“Oh, _that_ doesn’t matter,” she said contemptuously, “that’s
merely childish. I can easily write another.” (In her anger she did not
remember an occasion when she had been smitten with the same kind of
childishness).

It was then that he cried: “My God, Cathie, I won’t stand that! ... Out
you go!”

§ 3

At the corner of the Bockley High Street her only feeling was one of
nervous jubilation. The clock chimed the quarter. She remembered with a
little thrill of ecstasy how on all other occasions at night when she
had heard the clock chime a quarter past eleven she had been anxiously
wondering what sort of a row there would be when she reached home. Now
she was free. She was not returning home. She was leaving. She was free
to go where she liked and do what she liked....

If it were summer time, she thought, I would walk to the Forest and
sleep out under the stars....

But it was November.... She decided to travel up to the City and spend
the night in one of the waiting-rooms at the big terminals. The next
day she would look out for lodgings.... Money was a difficulty. In her
pocket was a purse containing the residue of the week’s house-keeping
money. It amounted to five and sevenpence half-penny. There were also a
couple of penny stamps....

The ideal time for this enterprise would have been a Monday evening in
June or July.

Still, she would have to make the best of it. With light step she
passed along the wide expanse of the High Street in the direction of
Bockley Station. As she went on little groups of returning revellers
passed her by. Most of them had just come in by train from the City
after an evening at the theatre. Some of them stared at her curiously
as she hurried by. So did the policeman at the corner of the Station
Road.

Outside the booking-office she met, of all people in the world, Helen
Trant.... Since the episode between herself and George, Catherine had
not seen much of Helen.

Catherine nodded casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the
world for her to be catching the 11.37 p.m. to the City.

“Where’re you off to?” said Helen.

“City,” replied Catherine, curtly.

“Whatever for at this time of night?”

“Oh ... business ... that’s all. ... Excuse me, I shall miss my
train....”

“No, you won’t. You’ve eleven minutes to wait. Come here.”

There was a queer undefinable something in Helen’s voice that commanded
and usually obtained implicit obedience. Catherine came.

“Well? ... What do you want?”

Helen put her arm in Catherine’s.

“It’s not my business,” she said, “but I should like you to tell me
what’s been happening to you.”

“Happening? What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean ... Cathie!”

“Yes?”

“Something’s happened. I can see it in your eyes. Tell me.”

Catherine clicked her heels nonchalantly.

“Well, if you’re so keen, I don’t suppose there’s much harm in letting
you know. I’ve run away from home.... That’s all....”

“Run away?”

“Yes, run away. Oh, for God’s sake, don’t look so surprised. I suppose
it isn’t respectable to run away, is it?”

“Don’t be silly.... What were you going to the City for?”

“To get a shake-down in a railway waiting-room.”

“I see.... Well, you needn’t do that. You can come home with me for
to-night.”

“Really, Helen, I can’t. It’s awfully good of you, but----”

“You _must_.”

“But your mother----”

“Mother and father are away for the week-end.”

“Really, I’d much rather not.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ve got to. You can easily sleep with me.
We’ll talk the whole question over to-night before going to sleep. You
can’t do a big thing like this all on your own.”

“That’s just what I can. I’m going to, anyway....”

“Well, you’re coming home with me to-night, anyway....”

“If you insist----”

“I do.”

A man came striding up the stairs three at a time from the platform. It
was George Trant.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “The luggage-office was shut, and I had to
waken somebody up....” Then he saw Catherine. “... Er ... I say ... I
didn’t see you, Miss Weston! Or shall I call you Catherine, as I used?
And how are you? I haven’t heard of you for ages.”

He held out his hand, but Catherine made no movement.

“I’m quite well,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry I can’t stop here
talking; I’ve a train to catch. Good-night!”

“Cathie!” cried Helen, but Catherine was too far down the steps to be
recalled. Helen followed her on to the platform and overtook her near
to the further end.

“You’re coming back, Cathie. Don’t be silly.... You must ...”

Catherine held herself passionately erect. The signal lights winked
from red to green.

“It’s no good your trying to persuade me, Helen.... I’m not coming. I
wouldn’t enter the same house with that man.... No, no, no, no, I’m not
coming.”

The train came in to the platform.

“Cathie!”

“No, no! ... I’m not coming, I tell you....” She opened the door of a
third-class compartment and entered.

“You’ll wish you hadn’t done this, Cathie.”

“Never.”

The train slid away into the night and Helen was left standing on the
platform. She had a swift impulse to jump into the tail-end of the
now quickly-moving train and go with Cathie to the next station. But
the train was moving too rapidly for her to attempt this manœuvre
in safety. And behind her stood George a little bewildered (he had
followed her slowly down the steps).

“What’s all the fuss about?” he queried suspiciously.

“Nothing,” replied Helen. Then, as they walked together along the
platform, “You’ll have to tell the man we gave up our tickets before.”

As they hurried along the Bockley High Street the clock on the Carnegie
library chimed the three-quarters....

At Liverpool Street, Catherine discovered that the waiting-room did
not keep open throughout the night for the benefit of girls who have
run away from home. There was a man at the door inspecting tickets.
Catherine was struck by a brilliant notion. There is an all-night
hourly service of trains from Liverpool Street to Bockley, the same
train proceeding backwards and forwards. She went to the booking-office
and purchased a return ticket to Bockley (sixpence). She had a good
sixpennyworth, for the next five hours she spent in the corner seat of
a third-class compartment. About two a.m. she fell asleep, and when
she awoke the train was jerking to a standstill at Upton Rising. The
clock said twenty minutes past six. Evidently the train had undergone
a change while she had slept. All those dark hours it had paraded the
inner suburbs, but now it had become a thing of greater consequence:
it was the first early morning train to Chingford. At the tiny Forest
town Catherine left it, paying excess fare on the journey from Bockley.
Dawn came as she was tramping the muddy paths of Epping Forest. She had
no idea where she was going. The main thing was to get the time over.
About eight o’clock she returned to Chingford, purchased some notepaper
and envelopes, and went into the post-office. On the desk provided
for composing telegrams she wrote a letter accepting the situation of
pianist at the Royal Cinema, Upton Rising. That done, and the letter
stamped and posted, she felt calmer than she had been for some time.
Then came hunger. She had a glass of milk (threepence) at a dairy and
two of yesterday’s buns (a penny each) from a confectioner’s. Out of
five and sevenpence half-penny and two penny stamps she had now left
four shillings and a half-penny and one penny stamp, plus a third-class
return half from Bockley to Liverpool Street.

She persisted in being joyous. This was to be an adventure, and she
was to enter into the spirit of it. She took her buns to the top of
Yardley Hill in order that she might imagine herself picnicking. She
lay down on the damp grass eating, and told herself she was enjoying
herself immensely. She admired the loveliness of the view with all the
consciousness of a well-trained tourist. She refused to be melancholy.
She discovered hundreds of excuses for feeling happy which would
never have occurred to her if she had been feeling happy. As she was
descending the hill after her meal it commenced to rain. She tried to
see beauty in the rain. The grey sky and the sodden leaves, the squelch
of her heels in the mud, the bare trees swathed in slanting rain,
these, she decided, were infinitely preferable to Kitchener Road....
Nevertheless she would have to find lodgings.

She decided to seek them in Upton Rising.

CHAPTER V

DISILLUSIONMENTS

§ 1

GIFFORD ROAD, Upton Rising, seemed to be composed of various
architectural remnants which had been left over from other streets.
No. 14 was a dour, gloomy-looking edifice built of a stone-work that
showed up in lurid prominence the particular form of eczema from which
it suffered. The front garden was large, with evidences of decayed
respectability, including a broken-down five-barred gate and the
remains of a lawn. The wooden erection at the side of the house may
once have been a coach-shed.... A flight of stone steps, much chipped
and scarred, led up to a massive front door, but the usual entrance
was clearly the small door underneath the steps, which generally stood
ajar.... In the basement window appeared the “apartments” card and
the ubiquitously respectable aspidistra plant. Cats of all sizes and
colours haunted the long, lank grass of the front garden, and at the
back there was a noisy, unkempt chicken-run.

Inside the tiny basement sitting-room Catherine tried to feel at
home. The dried grasses and bric-à-brac on the mantelpiece did remind
her somewhat of the front room at Kitchener Road, but the old faded
photographs of the landlady’s relatives, most of them mercifully
obscure, made her feel strange and foreign. A stuffed canary under a
glass shroud surmounted the sideboard, and Catherine decided mentally
that after she had been here awhile she would remove it to a less
conspicuous position. A dull piety brooded over the room: there were
floridly decorated texts on the walls, “I am the Bread of Life” over
the doorway, and “Trust in the Lord” by the fireplace. The small
bookshelf contained bound volumes of _The Quiver_ and various
missionary society reports, as well as several antiquated volumes, of
which _Jessica’s First Prayer_ was one, presented to the landlady,
as the flyleaf showed, by a certain Sunday school in South London. A
couple of pictures above the mantelpiece represented the Resurrection
and the Ascension, and in these there was a prolific display of
white-winged angels and stone slabs and halos like dinner-plates. On a
November afternoon the effect of all this was distinctly chilly.

And under the cushions of the sofa there were many, many copies of
Sunday newspapers, both ancient and modern.

Mrs. Carbass was a woman of cheerful respectability. She accepted
Catherine as a lodger without any payment in advance. At first she
was doubtful, but the production of the letter offering Catherine the
situation at the Upton Rising Royal Cinema overruled her misgivings.
She was apparently an occasional patron of this place of amusement.

“Sometimes I goes,” she remarked. “Of a Sat’d’y night, gener’ly.... In
the ninepennies,” she added, as if excusing herself.

Catherine lived very quietly and economically during her first few
weeks at Gifford Road. She had to. Her earnings did not allow her much
margin after she had paid Mrs. Carbass. Out of this margin she had
to buy all kinds of things she had not counted on--chiefly changes
of clothing, and ranging down to small but by no means negligible
articles such as wool for darning and a toothbrush. She decided to have
no communication whatever with her father, though at first she had
considered whether she would not write to him to ask him to send her
all the property that was her own. Finally she decided against this,
thinking that she would not care to let him imagine she was in need of
anything. Sometimes the fear came to her that he would find her out:
he could easily discover her address by enquiring at the Cinema. At
times the fear became a definite expectation, and on rare occasions
the expectation developed into what was perilously near to a hope.
Often in the streets she met people who knew her, and to these she
never mentioned either her father or her attitude towards him. Most
people in Kitchener Road knew or guessed what had happened: it did
not cause much of a sensation, for worse things were common enough in
Kitchener Road.... Kitchener Road was quite _blasé_ of domestic
estrangements. Whenever Catherine was asked how she was getting on she
replied, “Oh, quite nicely, thanks,” and would not pursue the subject.

At the Cinema she found work easy but not particularly interesting.
She was annoyed to find herself agreeing with her father that the
Upton Rising Royal Cinema was “third-rate.” It was a tawdry building
with an exterior of white stucco (now peeling off in great scabs),
and an interior into which the light of day never penetrated. A huge
commissionaire with tremendously large feet, attired in the sort of
uniform Rupert of Hentzau wears on the stage, paced up and down in
front of the entrance, calling unmelodiously: “Nah showin’ gran’ star
progrem two, four, six, nine an’ a shillin’ this way children a penny
the side daw ...” all in a single breath. For this trying performance
he was paid the sum of sixteen shillings a week. Inside the building
a couple of heavily powdered, heavily rouged, heavily scented girls
fluttered about with electric torches. There was no orchestra, save on
Saturday nights, when a violinist appeared in a shabby dress suit and
played the Barcarolle from “Tales of Hoffman,” and similar selections.
The rest of the time Catherine was free to play what she pleased, with
but a general reservation that the music should be appropriate to the
pictures shown.

On Saturday mornings there was a children’s matinée, and that
was nothing but pandemonium let loose. Screams, hooting, cheers,
whistlings, yells and cries of all kinds.... On Saturday evenings the
audience was select, save in the front seats near the piano. In the
pale glare of the film all faces were white and tense. The flutter of
the cinematograph went on, hour after hour. The piano tinkled feebly
through the haze of cigarette smoke. Here and there the beam of an
electric torch pierced the gloom like a searchlight. The sudden
lighting of a match was like a pause of semi-consciousness in the
middle of a dream....

And at eleven, when bedroom lights were blinking in all the residential
roads of Upton Rising, Catherine passed out into the cool night air.
Her fingers were tired; sometimes her head was aching.

To pass along the Ridgeway now did not always mean thinking of things
that had happened there....

§ 2

For three months she played the piano at the Upton Rising Royal Cinema;
then she applied for and was appointed to a similar position at the
Victoria Theatre, Bockley. The salary was better and the hours were
not so arduous.... And yet she was becoming strangely restless and
dissatisfied. All through her life she had had a craving for incident,
for excitements, for things to happen to her. The feeling that she was
doing something almost epically magnificent in living on her own whilst
not yet out of her teens gave her an enthusiasm which made bearable the
dull monotony of life in Gifford Road. It was this enthusiasm which
enabled her joyously to do domestic things such as making her bed every
morning, darning stockings, cleaning boots, etc., things that normally
she loathed. For the first few months of her independence everything
was transfigured by the drama of her position. The thought would occur
to her constantly in trams and omnibuses when she noticed someone
looking at her: “How little you know of me by looking at me! You cannot
see into my mind and know how firm and inflexible I am. You don’t know
what a big thing I am doing.”

Reaction came.

It interested Catherine to picture various meetings with her father
and to invent conversations between them in which she should be
unquestionably the winner. The ideal dialogue, she had decided after
much reflection, would be:

 HER FATHER (_stopping her in the street_). Catherine!

 SHE (_haughtily_). I beg your pardon!

 HER FATHER (_tearfully_). Oh, don’t be so cruel,
 Cathie--why don’t you come back?

 SHE. I am not aware that I am being cruel.

 HER FATHER. You are being horribly cruel
 (_passionately_). Oh, Cathie, Cathie, come back! I give in about
 your going out to work, I give in about anything you like, only do
 come back, do, do come!

 SHE (_coldly_). Please don’t make a scene.... I am
 perfectly comfortable where I am and have no desire to make any
 alteration in my arrangements.

 HER FATHER. Oh, Cathie, Cathie, you’re breaking my heart!
 I’ve been lonely, oh, so lonely ever since----

 SHE (_kindly but firmly_). I’m sorry, but I cannot
 stay to carry on a conversation like this. You turned me out of your
 house when you chose: it is for me to come back when I choose, if I
 choose.... I bear you no ill-will.... I must be going. Please leave go
 of my arm....

That would be magnificent. She was sure she was not in the least
callous or hard-hearted, yet it pleased her to think that her father
was lonely without her. One of her dreams was to be passionately loved
by a great man, and to have to explain to him “kindly but firmly” that
she desired only friendship....

One day she did meet her father.

She walked into a third-class compartment at Bockley Station and
there he was, sitting in the far corner! Worse still, the compartment
was full, saving the seat immediately opposite to him. There is
a tunnel soon after leaving the station and the trains are not
lighted. In the sheltering darkness Catherine felt herself growing
hot and uncomfortable. What was she to do? She thought of her ideal
conversation, and remembered that in it he was supposed to lead off.
But if he did not lead off? She wished she had devised a dialogue in
which she had given herself the lead. Yet it would be absurd to sit
there opposite to him without a word. She decided she would pretend not
to see him. She was carrying a music-case, and as the train was nearing
the end of the tunnel she fished out a piece of music and placed it
in front of her face like a newspaper. When the train emerged into
daylight she discovered that it was a volume of scales and arpeggios,
and that she was holding it the wrong way up. The situation was
absurd. Yet she decided to keep up the semblance of being engrossed in
harmonic and melodic minors. After a while she stole a glance over the
top of her music. It was risky, but her curiosity was too strong for
her.

She saw nothing but the back page of the _Daily Telegraph_. It
was strange, because he never read in trains. It was one of his fads.
He believed it injurious to the eyes. (Many and many a time he had
lectured her on the subject.)

Obviously then he was trying to avoid seeing her, just as she was
trying to avoid seeing him. The situation was almost farcical.... There
seemed to be little opening for that ideal dialogue of hers. She wished
he would lean forward and tap her knee and say: “Catherine!”

Then she could drop her music, look startled, and follow up with: “I
beg your pardon!”

Unfortunately he appeared to have no artistic sense of what was
required of him.

It was by the merest chance that at a certain moment when she looked
over the top of the scales and arpeggios he also looked up from his
_Daily Telegraph_. Their eyes met. Catherine blushed, but it was
not visible behind her music. He just stared. If they had both been
quick enough they might have looked away and let the crisis pass.
Unfortunately each second as it passed made them regard each other more
unflinchingly. The train ground round the curve into Bethnal Green
Station. Catherine was waiting for him to say something. At last the
pause was becoming so tense that she had to break it. She said the very
first thing that entered her head. It was: “Hullo!”

Then ensued the following conversation.

“Good-morning, Catherine ... going up to the City, I suppose?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes. I’m going to see some friends at Ealing. Bus from Liverpool
Street.”

“Oh, I go by tube to Oxford Circus. I’m seeing if they’ve got some
music I ordered.”

“Don’t suppose they’ll have it ... very slack, these big London
firms....”

Pause.

“Getting on all right?”

“Oh, fine, thanks.”

“I heard you’d got a place at the Royal Cinema.”

“Oh, I soon left that ... I’m on at the Victoria Theatre now. Much
better job.”

“Good ... like the work, I suppose?”

“Rather!”

Pause.

“Nasty weather we’re having.”

“Yes--for April.”

Pause again. At Liverpool Street they were the first to leave the
compartment.

“You’ll excuse my rushing off,” she said, “but I must be quick. The
shop closes at one on a Saturday.”

“Certainly,” he murmured. Then he offered his hand. She took it and
said “Good-bye” charmingly. A minute later and she was leaning up
against the wall of the tube subway in a state bordering upon physical
exhaustion. The interview had been so unlike anything she had in her
wildest dreams anticipated. Its casualness, its sheer uneventfulness
almost took away her breath. She had pictured him pleading,
expostulating, remonstrating, blustering, perhaps making a scene. She
had been prepared for agonized entreaties, tearful supplications.
Instead of which he had said: “Nasty weather we’re having.”

And she had replied: “Yes--for April.”

As for the ideal dialogue----

§ 3

There was another surprise in store for Catherine.

In the front row of the stalls at the Bockley Victoria Theatre she saw
George Trant. She was only a few feet away from him in the orchestra,
and it was inevitable that he should notice her.

Now if Catherine had been asked if she would ever have anything to do
with George Trant again, she would have said “No” very decisively. She
had made up her mind about that long ago. If he ever spoke to her she
had decided to snub him unmercifully.

But George Trant stood up and waved to her.

“I say, Cathie!” he said.

And Catherine looked up and said, quite naturally, “Hullo, George.”

It was a revelation to her. What had she said it for? What was the
matter with her? A fit of self-disgust made her decide that at any rate
she would not continue a conversation with him. But curiously enough
George did not address her again that evening. She wished he would. She
wanted to snub him. She wanted to let him see how firm and inflexible
she was. She wanted to let herself see it also.

§ 4

At Gifford Road, in the little bedroom, Catherine’s dissatisfaction
reached culminating point. Life was monotonous. The humdrum passage
of day after day mocked her in a way she could not exactly define.
She wanted to be swept into the maelstrom of big events. Nothing had
yet come her way that was big enough to satisfy her soul’s craving.
Things that might have developed dramatically insisted on being merely
common-place. Even the fire of her musical ambition was beginning to
burn low. Things in her life which had at first seemed tremendous were
even now in the short perspective of a few months beginning to lose
glamour. She thought of those dark days, not a year back, when the
idea of saying “hullo” to George Trant would have seemed blasphemy.
She thought of those June evenings when she had paced up and down
the Ridgeway in the spattered moonlight, revelling in the morbid
ecstasy of calling to mind what had happened there. All along she had
been an epicure in emotions. She loved to picture herself placed in
circumstances of intense drama. She almost enjoyed the disappointment
and passion that George Trant had roused in her, because such feelings
were at the time new to her. Yet even in her deepest gloom something
within herself whispered: “This is nothing. You are not really in love
with George Trant. You are just vaguely sentimental, that’s all. You’re
just testing and collecting emotions as a philatelist collects stamps.
It’s a sort of scientific curiosity. Wait till the real thing comes and
you’ll lose the nerve for experimenting....” Yet the episode of George
Trant had stirred just sufficient feeling in Catherine to make her
apprehensive of similar situations in the future....

Now, as she undressed in the attic-bedroom in Gifford Road, life seemed
colourless. The idea of refusing to speak to George Trant because of
what had happened less than a year ago struck her as childish. She was
glad she had spoken to him. It would have been silly to dignify their
absurd encounter by attempting magnificence. Catherine decided that
she had acted very sensibly. Yet she was dissatisfied. She had built
up ideals--the ideals of the melodrama--and now they were crumbling at
the first touch of cold sense. She had imagined herself being pitifully
knocked about by fate and destiny and other things she believed in,
and now she was beginning to realize with some disappointment that
she had scarcely been knocked about at all. It was a very vague
dissatisfaction, but a very intense one for all that.

“Oh, Lord, I want something, and I’m hanged if I know what it is....
Only I’m tired of living in a groove. I want to try the big risks. I’m
not a stick-in-the-mud....”

She herself could not have said whether this ran through her mind
in the guise of a prayer or an exclamation. But perhaps it did not
especially matter. “I guess when you want a thing,” she had once
enunciated, “you pray for it without intending to. In fact you can’t
want anything without praying for it every minute of the time you feel
you’re wanting it.... As for putting it into words and kneeling down at
bedtime, I should say that makes no difference....”

But she did not know what she wanted, except that it was to be exciting
and full of interest....

She fell asleep gazing vacantly at a framed lithograph on the opposite
wall which a shaft of moonlight capriciously illumined. It was a
picture of Tennyson reading his _In Memoriam_ to Queen Victoria,
the poet, long-haired and impassioned, in an appropriately humble
position before his sovereign....

§ 5

The following morning a typewritten letter waited her arrival in the
basement sitting-room. It bore on the flap the seal of a business firm
in London, and Catherine opened it without in the least guessing its
contents.

It began:

 MY DEAR CATHIE,

 You will excuse my writing to you, but this is really nothing but
 a business letter. I found your address by enquiry at the theatre
 box-office: the method is somewhat irregular, but I hope you will
 forgive me.

 What I want to say is this----

Catherine glanced down the typewritten script and saw the signature at
the bottom. It was George Trant. Her face a little flushed, she read on:

 The Upton Rising Conservative Club, of which I am a member, is giving
 a concert on May 2nd, in aid of the local hospitals. A friend of mine
 (and a fellow-member) was so impressed by your playing this evening
 that he suggested I should ask you to play a pianoforte solo at our
 projected concert. I cordially agree with his idea, and hope you will
 be able to accept. I enclose a draft of the musical programme so that
 you may realize that we are having some really “star” artists down.
 Bernard Hollins, for instance, has sung at the Queen’s Hall. Please
 write back immediately in acceptance and let me know the name of the
 piece you propose to play, so that the programmes can go to press
 immediately. Excuse haste, as I must catch the 11.30 post.

 Yours sincerely,

                                                 GEORGE TRANT.

Catherine re-read the letter twice before she commenced to criticize
it keenly. Her keen criticism resulted in the following deductions. To
begin with:

This was some subtle cunning of his to entrap her. He was clever
enough to devise it.... What had she played last evening at the Bockley
Victoria Theatre that could have “impressed” anybody so much? The show
had been a third-rate revue, the music of which was both mediocre and
childishly simple. The piano was bad. She had played, if anything, not
so well as usual. The piano was, for the most part, drowned in the
orchestra. Moreover, there were scores of pianoforte players in the
district who would have been eager to appear on such a distinguished
programme as the one he had sent. It was absurd to pick her out. She
had no musical degree, had never played at a big concert in her life.
The other artists might even object to her inclusion if they knew who
she was. In any case, no astute concert-organizer would risk putting
her in. She was well-known, and scores of people would say, as soon
as they saw her on the platform: “Why, that’s the red-haired girl who
plays the piano at the theatre.”

Catherine came to the definite conclusion that the letter was
thoroughly “fishy.”

Yet she wrote back saying:

 DEAR GEORGE,

 Thanks for letter and invitation, which I am pleased to accept. My
 piece will be Liszt’s Concert Study in A flat, unless you think it too
 classical, in which case I can play a Polischinelle by Rachmaninov.

 Yours sincerely,

                                             CATHERINE WESTON.

Catherine thought: If I can make use of George Trant to further my
ambitions, why shouldn’t I? If this leads to anything in the way of
bettering my earnings or getting engagements to play at concerts, it
will be no more than what George Trant owes me. And if this is merely
a trap laid for me, we’ll see who’s the more astute this time. In any
case it should lead to some interesting situations, and it will at
least vary the monotony of life....

It suddenly struck her that perhaps her father would come and hear
her play. The possibility opened up wild speculations. Her dramatic
interest pictured him rising from his seat in the middle of the
Concert Study in A flat, and crying with arm uplifted--“God!--My
daughter!”

Or perhaps he would sob loudly and bury his head in his hands.

Yet, remembering their meeting in the railway carriage, she knew he
would do nothing of the sort....

... The audience would sit spell-bound as the Concert Study rang out
its concluding chords. As the last whispered echo died on the air the
whole building would ring with shouts of tumultuous applause. Those
nearest the front would swarm on to the platform, seizing her hand
in congratulation. A buzz of conversation would go round, startled,
awe-stricken conversation: “Who is that red-haired girl?--Who is
she?--Plays at the theatre?--Oh, surely not. Impossible!”

They would demand an encore. She would play Chopin’s Study, “Poland is
Lost.”

And the _Bockley and District Advertiser_ would foam at the
headline with: “Musical Discovery at Upton Rising. Masterful playing by
local pianiste....”

No, no, all that was absurd....

The audience would listen in bored silence punctuated only by the
“scrooping” of chairs. She would probably tie her hands up in some
of the arpeggios. There would be desultory, unenthusiastic clapping
of hands at the finish. She would be asked for no encore. Somebody
might say: “I fancy I’ve seen that girl at the theatre. She leads
the orchestra.” And the _Bockley and District Advertiser_ would
say with frigid politeness: “Miss Catherine Weston gave a tasteful
rendering of Liszt’s Concert Study in A flat....” Or, if they had
used the word “tasteful” previously, they would say “excellent” or
“spirited” or “vivid.”

“I suppose I’m getting cynical,” she thought, as she mercilessly tore
to pieces her ideal imaginations.

Yet she was very joyous that morning.

Life was going to begin for her. If events didn’t carry her with
them she was just going to stand in their way and make them. If not
followed, she would pursue. Life, life, her soul cried, and life was
mightily interesting. There came a silver April shower, and in her
ecstasy she took off her hat and braved both the slanting rain and the
conventional respectability of Upton Rising. Then came the sun, warm
and drying, and her hair shone like a halo of pure flame.... She made
herself rather foolishly conspicuous....

CHAPTER VI

CRESCENDO

§ 1

LONG hours she practised on the Chappell grand in the room over
Burlington’s Music Emporium. The Concert Study in A flat began to take
shape and cohesion. April swept out of its teens into its twenties,
and posters appeared on the hoardings outside the Upton Rising Public
Hall announcing a “Grand Evening Concert.” Her name was in small blue
type immediately above the ticket prices. The rest of the programme
was not quite the same as the rough draft that George had sent her. It
was curious, but the best-known people had been cut out.... Bernard
Hollins, for instance, who had sung at the Queen’s Hall. Those who
remained to fill the caste were all people of merely local repute,
and Catherine ceased to have misgivings that her performance would be
mediocre compared with theirs.

One unfortunate coincidence seemed likely to disturb the success of the
evening. In the very afternoon of the same day Razounov, the famous
Russian pianist, was playing at the Hippodrome. Razounov did not often
come to Bockley, and when he did he drew a large audience. It seemed
probable that many who went to hear him in the afternoon would not care
for a Grand Evening Concert on top of it....

Already the bills outside the Hippodrome were advertising Razounov in
letters two feet high.

§ 2

The “Grand Evening Concert” was a tame, spiritless affair. Catherine’s
pianoforte solo was introduced at the commencement to tide over that
difficult period during which the local élite (feeling it somewhat
beneath their status to appear punctually at the advertised time) were
shuffling and fussing into the reserved front seats. Her appearance on
the platform was greeted with a few desultory claps. The piano (grand
only architecturally) was placed wrongly; the sound-board was not
raised, and it appeared to be nobody’s business to raise it for her.
She played amidst a jangle of discordant noises: the rustle of paper
bags and silk dresses, the clatter of an overturned chair, the sibilant
murmur of several score incandescent gas lamps. All through there was
the buzz of conversation, and if she looked up from the keyboard she
could see the gangways full of late-comers streaming to their seats,
standing up to take off their cloaks, making frantic signals to others
for whom they had kept seats vacant, passing round bags of sweets,
bending down to put their hats under the seat, diving acrobatically
into obscure pockets to find coppers for the programme girls, doing
anything, in fact, except listen to her playing. Somehow this careless,
good-humoured indifference gave her vast confidence. She felt not the
least trace of nervousness, and she played perhaps better than she had
ever done before. She had even time to think of subsidiary matters. A
naked incandescent light lit up the keyboard from the side nearest the
rear of the platform, and she deliberately tossed her head at such an
angle that the red cloud of her hair should lie in the direct line of
vision between a large part of the audience and the incandescent light.
She knew the effect of that. At intervals, too, she bent her head low
to the keyboard for intricate treble eccentricities. She crossed her
hands whenever possible, and flung them about with wild abandon. It
would be absurd to say she forgot her audience; on the contrary, she
was remembering her audience the whole time that she was playing. And
during the six or seven minutes that Liszt’s Concert Study in A flat
lasted, her mind was registering vague regrets. She regretted that
nobody had thought to raise the sound-board for her. She regretted
the omission of all those little stylish affectations which in the
first thrill of appearing on the platform she had forgotten all about.
She had not polished her hands with her handkerchief before starting.
She had not adjusted the music-stool. She had not pushed back the
music-rest as far as it would go. She had not played the chord and
arpeggio inversions of A flat major and paused dramatically before
beginning the composition of Liszt. All these things she had forgotten.
People would think she was an inexperienced player. Anyhow, she made up
as well as she could for her initial deficiencies during the progress
of the piece. She “swanked,” according to the popular expression.
She was very conscious of the effect her hair was or ought to be
producing....

As a matter of fact, nobody was either looking at her or listening to
her with any particular interest or eagerness.

She was awakened from her egoistic dreams by the half-hearted applause
of those people who by divine instinct know when a piece is coming to
an end several bars ahead, and start their applause at the last bar but
one.... She bowed graciously in front of the piano, and tripped lightly
behind the scenes. The applause did not justify an encore.... She had
made up her mind as she played the concluding chords of the Concert
Study: If I am given an encore, I will do all those things I omitted
to do before: I will polish my hands, adjust the stool, push back the
music-rest, have the sound-board lifted, run up with arpeggios on the
tonic....

But she was not given an encore.

In the artists’ room behind the scenes nobody took much notice of her.
Fred Hitchcock, a local tenor with baritone leanings, was giving final
frenzied directions to his accompanist, a large-featured female with an
excessively low and powdered neck.

“Go slow over that twiddly bit,” he whispered, catching hold of her to
lead her on to the platform. “And don’t forget to give me the leading
note in the adagio.” His hoarse voice merged into the buzz of sound
that came down the corridor leading to the platform.

She overheard a conversation.

“What was that thing that girl played?”

“What girl?”

“The girl with the red hair.”

“Oh, I don’t know--some Liszt thing, I think.”

“Classical?”

“S’pose so ... of course, nobody listens to pianoforte solos
nowadays....”

“They’re too common, that’s what it is. Everybody strums on the piano,
more or less.”

“I suppose you went to hear Razounov?”

“No, I couldn’t get a seat. The Hippodrome was full of people who went
to see him do something eccentric.”

“Did he?”

“No, as it happened. A friend told me he just came on the platform,
played like an angel for two hours, and went off again. Of course
everybody was greatly disappointed.”

“Naturally....”

“Bockley isn’t a musical suburb. It doesn’t even think it is. Whereas
Upton Rising thinks it is and isn’t.... I wish that pianoforte player
of ours wouldn’t show so much of her red hair and try to look like a
female Beethoven....”

“Oh, shut up--she’s probably somewhere about, she’ll hear you....”

Catherine put on her hat and cloak and went out by the side door. She
was not angry, but she was suffering from one of those periodical fits
of disillusionment which were the aftermath of her dreaming. She walked
out into the Ridgeway, where the gas lamps glowed amongst the sprouting
trees. Far away she could hear the clang of trams along the High Road.
She passed the corner house where, it seemed now an age ago, she had
discovered her soul in the murmur of a grand piano. Swiftly she walked
along the tarred asphalt, thinking to reach Gifford Road and have
supper. She felt disappointed. The evening had been lacking in that
species of adventure it had seemed to promise. She had not seen George
Trant. That, she told herself, had nothing to do with it.

Down the Ridgeway a newsboy came running bearing a placard-sheet in
front of him.

“Suicide of a Bockley Schoolmaster,” it said. An awful excitement
seized her. Eagerly she bought a paper and searched the front page.

It took some moments to discover the announcement. It was only a small
paragraph on an inside page: the placard had evidently been printed to
stimulate local circulation.

“Mr. Weston,” she read, “of 24, Kitchener Road, Bockley, an elementary
school teacher at the Downsland Road Council School ... throat cut....”

She leaned up against the iron railing round a tree. Then, discovering
that she was attracting the attention of passers-by, she walked on more
swiftly than before. In her excitement she took the opposite direction,
towards the Bockley High Street....

§ 3

Half-way down the Ridgeway she met George Trant. They were both walking
excessively fast and in opposite directions: they almost cannoned into
each other.

“Just looking for you,” he said, stopping her. He wore evening dress
beneath an overcoat. It was peculiar that her eyes should glue
themselves upon an ivory solitaire that he wore. She was half dazed.

“Looking for me?” she echoed, vaguely.

“Yes. Thought you’d gone back to your digs. I was coming to fetch you.
What I want to say is----” (That was one of his mannerisms of speech.
In his letters he had constantly written, “What I want to say is----”)
“we’re having a little supper at the Forest Hotel after the concert’s
over. Just ourselves--the performers, I mean. Of course you’ll join
us.... I didn’t think you’d be running off so early, or I should have
mentioned it before....”

She was still staring monotonously at that ivory solitaire of his.

“Well--er--you see ... er....”

“Of course if you’re engaged for somewhere else----”