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....