POST-MORTEM
§ 1
IT seemed to Catherine the most curious thing in the world that she
should be sitting with George Trant inside a taxi. There was no light
inside, and only the distant glimmer of London came in through the
window. All was dim and dark and shadowy. Yet somewhere amongst these
shadows sat George Trant. Perhaps he was thinking that somewhere
amongst those shadows sat she, Catherine Weston.
A voice said out of the shadows: “We shan’t be long now.”
Catherine said: “How far are we going?”
“You’re going home ... to your lodgings, that is.... You fainted, I
suppose you know....”
“Did I?” And she thought: “He killed himself out of loneliness. He
couldn’t live without me. I am the cause, I am the reason.”
“Feeling all right now?”
“Oh yes ... must have been the excitement.”
“Probably.” His voice was cold, unsympathetic. She felt that he was
deliberately looking away from where he thought she was.
“You needn’t take me all the way, you know. I can walk from the
Ridgeway corner.”
“I shall take you all the way,” he said crisply.
With strange instinct she sensed his antagonism.
“I believe you’re angry with me,” she said. Yet all the while she was
thinking: “I suppose there’ll be an inquest and a big fuss and all
that. And the furniture and stuff will have to be sold.”
No answer.
“You are,” she repeated, and was surprised by her own persistence.
After all, she didn’t care twopence whether he was angry with her or
not. Only she would have been gratified if he _were_ angry with
her. It was something to come into a man’s life enough to make him
angry. And it was rather an amusing pastime, this flirting with George
Trant.
“Perhaps I am,” he said coldly.
“Why?” It would interest her to know why. At any rate she might as well
know why.
“You’ve disappointed me.”
That was all. It satisfied her. He had evidently been building ideals
around her. He had dreamed dreams in which she had been epic and
splendid and magnificent. He had thought of her sufficiently for her
to have the power of disappointing him. She was gratified. After all,
she did not like him, so there was no reason why she should mind
disappointing him. And he had paid her the subtle compliment of being
disappointed with her.
She did not particularly want to know how she had disappointed him. Yet
the conversation seemed incomplete without the question: “In what way?”
She could feel him turning round to face her.
“Various ways,” he said vaguely, but his tone seemed to invite her to
pursue the subject. For that very reason she kept silent. It was not a
matter of sufficient importance for her to ask the same question twice
over. And if he _did_ want her to repeat her question, that was
all the more reason for her not doing so.
After a moment’s silence he said: “You’ve changed a good deal since I
last knew you.”
“Yes, haven’t I?” There was an almost triumphant jauntiness in her
voice.
“And you haven’t changed for the better, either,” he went on.
“That’s what _you_ say.”
“Precisely. That’s what _I_ say.” He was trying to be sarcastic,
yet she knew that he was feeling acutely miserable. There was
something in his voice that told her he was feeling acutely miserable.
And she had no pity. She was even exhilarated. He was miserable
about her. In some way she was invested with the power of making him
miserable.
“Oh, I can’t tell you----” he began bitterly, and stopped.
A queer thrill went down her spine. For the first time in her life she
was conscious of the presence of passion in another person. It was
quite a novel experience, yet it called to mind that scene in the Duke
Street Methodist Schoolroom when she and Freddie McKellar had come to
blows.... A flash of realization swept over her. He was in love with
her. He was _really_ in love with her. She had so often wondered
and thought and speculated, and now she knew. His voice had become
transfigured, so to speak, out of passion for her. What a pity he could
not see her hair! She did not care for him one little bit. She knew
that now. She had not been quite certain before, but now, in the very
moment of realizing his love of her, she thought: “How funny, I believe
I really dislike him.... I don’t even want to flirt with him again.”
Yet she was immensely gratified that he had paid her the terrific
compliment of falling in love with her.
A sort of instinct warned her that she should deflect the conversation
into other channels. She was immensely interested in this curious
phenomenon, yet she feared anti-climax. He might try to kiss her and
grope round in the dark searching for her. That would be anti-climax.
And also (this came as a sudden shaft of realization) she did not want
him to kiss her. Many a time of late she had thought: “What shall I
do if he kisses me?” She had resigned herself to the possibility that
one day he might kiss her. She had been annoyed at his dalliance. “I
wish to goodness he’d do it, if he’s going to,” had been her frequent
thought, and she had provoked him subtly, cunningly, deliberately....
Now it came to her as an unwelcome possibility. She did not in the
least desire him to kiss her. She knew she would actively dislike it if
he did.
“Getting chilly,” she remarked nonchalantly, and she knew how such
an observation would grate upon him. She was fascinated by this new
miraculous power of hers to help or to hurt or to torture. Every word
she said was full of meaning to him: talking to him was infinitely more
subtle than ordinary conversation. It was this subtlety that partly
fascinated her. For instance, when she said, “Getting chilly,” she
meant, “We’ll change the subject. I know what you’re driving at, and I
don’t like it. It doesn’t please me a bit.” And what was more, she knew
that he would interpret it like that, and that he would feel all those
feelings which the expansion of her remark would have aroused.
“I’ll shut the window,” he said, and did so.
It was so subtle, this business, that his remarks, too, could be
interpreted. For instance, his words, “I’ll shut the window,” meant
really, “Is that so? Well, I guessed as much. You’re utterly heartless.
I shall have to resign myself to it, anyway. So, as you suggest, we’ll
change the subject.”
The taxi turned into the Bockley High Street.
Catherine was like a child with a new toy. And this toy was the most
intricate, complicated, and absorbingly interesting toy that had ever
brought ecstasy to its possessor. How strange that he should be in love
with her! How marvellous that there should be something strange and
indefinable in her that had attracted something strange and indefinable
in him!
And she thought, in spasms amidst her exhilaration: “Probably Ransomes
will sell the furniture for me.... He killed himself for me. I’m the
reason....”
It tickled her egoism that he should have done so. He must have done
so. It could only have been that.
Here was George Trant, head over heels in love with her. And here was
her father, stupid, narrow-minded, uncompromising bigot, yet committing
suicide because she had run away from home. She preferred to regard
herself as a runaway rather than as a castaway.
Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable
personage!...
§ 2
As she entered the side door of No. 14, Gifford Road at the improper
hour of three a.m., the thin voice of Mrs. Carbass called down the
stairs: “That you, Miss Weston?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a telegraph for you on the table....”
“Righto!” How jaunty! How delightfully nonchalant! As if one were used
to receiving telegrams! As if one were even used to arriving home at
three a.m.!
Catherine turned the tap of the gas, which had been left burning at
a pin-point in the basement sitting-room. Her hand must have been
unsteady, for she turned it out. That necessitated fumbling for
matches....
The telegram was addressed to the Upton Rising Cinema, and had been
handed in at Bockley Post Office some twelve hours before. It ran:
Father had accident. Come at once.--MAY.
Now who was May?
After much cogitation Catherine remembered an Aunt May, her mother’s
sister, who lived at Muswell Hill. Catherine had seen her but once,
and that was on the occasion of her mother’s funeral. She had a vague
recollection of a prim little woman about fifty, with a high-necked
blouse and hair done up in a knob at the back.
Catherine decided to go as soon as possible the following day. She went
quietly to bed, but found it impossible to sleep. She was strangely
exhilarated. She felt like a public-school boy on the eve of the
breaking-up morning. New emotions were in store for her, and she,
the epicure, delighted in new and subtle emotions. Yet even with her
exhilaration there was a feeling of doubt, of misgiving, of uneasiness
as to the nature of her own soul. Was she really heartless? How was
it she had never grieved at her mother’s death? Try as she would, she
could not detect in her feelings for her father anything much more than
excitement, curiosity, amazement, even in a kind of way admiration, at
what he had done. She felt he had done something infinitely bigger
than himself. For the first time in her life she felt towards him
impersonally, as she might have done towards any stranger: “I should
like to have known that man.”
The exact significance of her attitude towards George Trant came
upon her. She was playing with him. She knew that. It was not so
much in revenge for what had happened long before; it was from sheer
uncontrollable ecstasy at wielding a new and incomprehensible power.
She would have played ruthlessly with any man who had been so weak and
misguided as to fall in love with her. She knew that perfectly well.
Therefore it was a good thing the man was George Trant, for at least in
his case she might conceivably justify herself. And yet she knew that
justifying herself had really nothing at all to do with the matter; she
knew that there was in her some mysterious impulse that prompted her to
do and to say things quite apart from any considerations of justice or
justification. Cruel? Yes, possibly.
She pondered.
No. She was _not_ cruel. If she heard a cat mewing in the street
she would scarcely ever pass it by. A child crying filled her with
vague depression. She was _not_ cruel. But she was immensely,
voraciously curious, a frantic explorer of her own and other people’s
emotions, a ruthless exploiter of dramatic possibilities. She had not
developed these traits by reading novels or seeing plays or any such
exterior means. They were inherent in herself.
Suddenly she remembered the note that had been given her that evening.
By the light of a candle she sat up in bed and tore open the thin,
purple-lined envelope.
She read:
DEAR MADAM,
Will you come and see me to-morrow (Sunday) at three p.m.,
“Claremont,” the Ridgeway, Upton Rising?--Yrs., etc.,
EMIL RAZOUNOV.
Razounov!
She actually laughed, a little silver ripple which she immediately
stifled on reflecting that Mrs. Carbass slept in the room below.
Razounov!
Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable
personage! ...
§ 3
The door of No. 24, Kitchener Road was opened by Mrs. Jopson.
“Do come in,” she began effusively. “I’ve jest bin clearin’ up a
bit....” Then she added mysteriously: “Of course, they’ve took ’im
away....”
Nothing had seemingly changed in the interior aspect of the house. Her
father’s overcoat and bowler hat hung sedately as ever upon the bamboo
hall-stand. The Collard and Collard piano presented its usual yellow
grin as she looked in through the parlour door. Catherine could not
explain this yellow grin: there had been something in the instrument’s
fretwork front with the faded yellow silk behind that had always
suggested to her a demoniac leer. Now it seemed to be leering worse
than ever.... The morning sunlight struck in through the drawn Venetian
blinds and threw oblique shadows over the grin. Every article in that
room Catherine knew almost personally. Even the unhorticultural flowers
on the carpet were something more to her than a mere pattern: they
were geographical, they held memories, they marked the topography of
her earliest days. And the mantelpiece was full of memories of seaside
holidays. A present from Southend, from Margate, from Felixstowe, a
photograph of Blackpool Tower framed in red plush, an ash-tray with the
Folkestone coat-of-arms upon it....
Mrs. Jopson related the story of the tragedy in careful detail. She
revelled in it as a boy may revel in a blood-and-thunder story. She
emphasized the mystery that surrounded the motives of the tragedy. He
had been getting livelier again. Everybody was noticing that. He had
been seen smoking his pipe in the Forest on a Sunday morning with the
complacency of one to whom life is an everlasting richness. He had
started taking out library books from the Carnegie library. He had even
had friends in his house--presumably colleagues from the Downsland Road
Council School. And he had bought a gramophone. That was the strangest
thing of all, perhaps. What on earth did he want with a gramophone?
At one time the gramophone had been his pet aversion. All music bored
him, but the sound of a gramophone used to call forth diatribes against
the degeneracy of the modern world.... And yet it was there, in the
tiny front parlour, with its absurdly painted tin horn sticking up in
the air and a record lying flat on the circular platform. The record
was one of a recent and not particularly brilliant ragtime. Catherine,
accustomed professionally to such things, knew it well. And Mrs.
Jopson said they had heard that ragtime night after night since he had
bought the gramophone. Sometimes it was played over and over again.
Really, Mr. Jopson had thought of complaining, only he did not wish to
interfere with Mr. Weston’s efforts to liven himself up....
When Mrs. Jopson departed and left Catherine alone in the familiar
house, the atmosphere changed. The very furniture seemed charged
with secrets--secrets concerning the manner in which Mr. Weston had
spent his evenings. Whether he had gone out much, or read books or
merely moped about. Only the gramophone seemed anxious to betray its
information, and the tin horn, cocked up at an absurdly self-confident
angle, had the appearance of declaring: “Judge from me what sort of a
man he was. I was nearly the last thing he troubled about. I am the
answer to one at least of his cravings.” From the gramophone Catherine
turned to the writing-desk. That at any rate guarded what it knew with
some show of modesty. It was full of papers belonging to Mr. Weston,
but they all seemed to emphasize the perfect normality of his life.
Algebra papers marked and unmarked, catalogues of educational book
publishers, odd cuttings from newspapers, notes from parents asking
that children should be allowed to go home early, printed lists of
scholarship candidates, and so forth. Everything to show that Mr.
Weston had gone on living pretty much as he had been accustomed.
Everything to make it more mysterious than ever why he should suddenly
cut his throat while shaving. Catherine was puzzled. She had been
constructing a grand tragedy round this pitifully insignificant man;
under the stimulating influence of her own imagination she had already
begun to sympathize; doubtless if her imagination had discovered
anything substantial to feed on she might have ended by passionate
affection for her own dead father. Several times recently she had
been on the verge of tears, not for him personally, but out of vague
sympathy with the victim of a poignant tragedy. For to her it did
indeed seem a poignant tragedy that a man so weak, so fatuous as he
was should be left entirely alone at a time when he most needed the
companionship of someone stronger. She did not in the least regret
leaving him. That was inevitable. He wanted to boss the show. He was so
pitifully weak, so conscious of weakness that he manufactured a crisis
rather than yield on what he regarded as a crucial point. Afterwards,
no doubt, he had regretted his hastiness. Yet that strange interview on
the train to Liverpool Street seemed incapable of being fitted in....
Catherine had often thought of him sorrowing, regretting, mourning. She
had regarded his suicide as a tragic confirmation of his misery. And
now the interior of his writing-desk seemed to say: “Oh, he was much
the same--you’d scarcely have noticed any difference in him.” And the
gramophone chuckled and declared: “As a matter of fact the old chap was
beginning to have rather a good time....”
In a drawer beneath the desk she discovered his pocket diaries. Every
night before retiring it had been his custom to fill a space an inch
deep and two inches across with a closely written pencilled commentary
on the day’s events. For ten, twelve, fifteen--perhaps twenty years
he had done this. Catherine turned over the pages of one of them at
random. They contained such items as: “Sweet peas coming up well. Shall
buy some more wire-netting for them.... Clotters away at a funeral. Did
his registers for him.... Gave paper on ‘Tennyson’ to Mutual Impr.
Soc. Have been asked to speak at Annual Temperance Social....” Nearly
all the entries were domestic, or connected with Mr. Weston’s labours
in the school, the chapel or the garden. Catherine searched anxiously
for any mention of herself. There were not many. Sometimes a chance
remark such as: “C. came with me to chapel ...” or “C. out to tea.” And
once the strange entry: “C. been misbehaving. But I think L. knows the
right way to manage her.” (L. was, of course, Laura, his wife.) ...
Catherine looked up the entry for November 17th, the day on which she
had left Kitchener Road. It ran: “Clotters away again this morning. Had
to take IVA in mensuration. Feel very tired. Cold wind. Did
not go to night-school.”
That was all! No mention of her!
And on the day he met her in the train to Liverpool Street he wrote:
“Warm spring sort of day. Went to Ealing to see Rogers. Rogers
got a job under the L.C.C. Two boys and a girl. Mrs. R. rather
theatrical....” And in the corner, all cramped up, as if he had stuck
it in as a doubtful after-thought: “Met C. in train to L’pool St. Seems
well enough.”
Grudging, diffident, self-reproachful, sardonic, that remark--“Seems
well enough.” With the emphasis no doubt on the “seems.”
Lately the entries had been getting more sprightly.
“Met Miss Picksley to-day. Promised her a paper on W. Shakespeare for
the Mut. Impr. Soc....” “Walked to High Wood after chapel. Beautiful
moonlight. Saw motor-bus collision in B. High St. coming back....”
“Bought gramophone sec. hand off Clayton. £2 10. Like a bit of music.
No piano now, of course....”
“Of course.”
Catherine was immensely puzzled by that entry. She realized its pathos,
its tragic reticence, its wealth of innuendo, yet she could not
conceive his feelings when setting it down. For he had never taken any
pleasure in her “strumming,” as he called it. He had accused her of
interrupting his work. He had said: “Not quite so much noise, please.
Shut both doors....” And sometimes he had hinted darkly: “I don’t know
whether it’s you or the piano, but----” And yet he had missed those
piano noises. Vaguely, perhaps almost unconsciously, yet sufficiently
to make him conquer a carefully nurtured hatred of the gramophone.
The gramophone, viewed in the light of this new discovery, was the
tangible, incontrovertible evidence of his sense of loss. He had missed
her. He had been lonely. He had wanted her to come back. And because of
that he had bought a gramophone.
Catherine felt the presence of tragedy. Yet the ingredients
were all wrong. Gramophone buying, even in the most extravagant
circumstances, does not lend itself to sophistication. And yet, that
gramophone--absurd, insignificant, farcical though its presence
was--was the evidence of tragedy. Once more Catherine’s melodramatic
ideals crumbled. Her artistic sense was hurt by the deep significance
of that gramophone. She felt a gramophone had no right to be the only
clue she had to the tragedy of her own father. She felt humiliated.
And then for a swift moment a passion swept over her. The false ideals
collapsed into ruins, the sham sentiment, no less a sham because it
was not the sham sentiment of other people, the morbid seeking after
emotional effect, the glittering pursuit of dramatic situations,
tumbled into dust and were no longer worth while. Nothing was left in
her save a sympathy that was different from anything she had previously
called sympathy, something that overwhelmed her like a flood. It was
a pleasurable sensation, this sympathy, and afterwards she tried to
analyse the sweet agony it had wrought in her. But at the time she
did not realize either its pleasure or its pain, and that is the
truest testimony that it was something more real and sincere than she
had felt before. Tears welled up in her eyes--tears that she did not
strive either to summon or to repress, tears that were the natural,
spontaneous outpouring of something in her that she knew nothing
about. She did not think in her egoistical, self-analysing way: “What
a strange emotion I am experiencing!” She thought kaleidoscopically of
her childhood and girlhood, and of one particular evening when her
father had crept into her room at night and asked her to kiss him.
It was terrible to remember that she had replied: “Oh, go away! ...”
Terrible! All her life it seemed to her that her attitude towards him
had been--“Oh, go away! ...” And now he had gone away out of her reach
for ever. She sat down in front of the writing-desk with the diary
in front of her and cried. She cried passionately, as a child who is
crying because by his own irrevocable act something has been denied
him. She bowed her head in her hands and gave herself up to an orgy of
remorse. She was truly heartbroken.
For a little while.
The transience of her brokenheartedness may be gauged by the fact that
on her way home she was strangely elated by a single thought. That
thought--occurring to her some half-way down the Ridgeway--was begotten
of her old ruthless habit of self-analysis. “I’m not heartless,” she
told herself. “I can’t be. Nobody could have acted as I did who hadn’t
got a heart. I believe I’ve got as much heart as anybody, really....”
She was rather proud of the tears she had shed.... Delicious to have
such proof that she was a human being! Reassuring to find in herself
the essential humanities she had at times doubted. Comforting to think
that tragedy could move her to sympathy that was more than merely
æsthetic.... Splendid to know that deep down in her somewhere there was
a fount of feeling which she could not turn off and on at will like a
water-main....