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.