STILL FALLING
§ 1
IT was in the first week of April that Catherine began to look about
for suitable lodgings. By this time the cottage at High Wood was
half-naked of floor coverings: patches on the wallpaper showed where
pictures had been wont to hang, and only essential furniture remained.
The place was very dreary and inhospitable, and Catherine had many
fits of depression during the last two weeks of March, which were
bitterly cold and rainy. She was looking forward eagerly to the coming
of the warm weather, and with the first of April, which was warm and
spring-like, her spirits rose. Rose, that is, merely by comparison with
her previous state: ever since her illness a melancholy had settled
on her soul which, though it occasionally darkened into deep despair,
never broke into even passing radiance.
The sale of her household effects had given her a credit balance of
a hundred and ten pounds, and there was still a few pounds’ worth of
furniture which she was keeping right until the last. Of late her arm
had begun to improve somewhat, which made her unwilling to discontinue
the massage treatment, though Madame Varegny was very costly. That and
the incidental expenses of living would soon eat into her hundred and
ten pounds.
Yet on the morning of the first of April she was quite cheerful,
relatively. It was as if a tiny ray of sunshine were shyly showing up
behind the piles of clouds that had settled shiftless on her soul.
The forest trees were just bursting into green leafage; the air warm
and comforting; of all seasons this was the most hopeful and the most
inspiring. She took a penny tram down to the Ridgeway Corner, and
enjoyed the wind blowing in her face as she sat on the top deck. At
the Ridgeway she turned down Hatchet Grove and into the haunts of her
earliest days.
The painful memories of her life were associated much more with “Elm
Cottage” than with Kitchener Road. Kitchener Road, teeming with
memories though it was, could bring her no pain and but mild regrets:
the magnitude of more recent happenings took away from it whatever
bitterness its memories possessed. She was walking down its concrete
sidewalks before she realized where she was, and a certain vague
familiarity with the landscape brought her to a standstill in front
of the Co-operative Society branch depot. Everything was very little
altered. A recent tree-planting crusade had given the road a double
row of small and withered-looking copper beeches, each supported by a
pole and encased in wire-netting. The Co-operative Society had extended
its premises to include what had formerly been a disused workshop, but
which now, renovated and changed almost beyond recognition, proclaimed
itself to be a “licensed abattoir.” Catherine did not know what an
abattoir was, but the name sounded curiously inhospitable. She passed
by No. 24, and was interested to see that the present occupier,
according to a tablet affixed to the side of the porch, was
H. Thicknesse, Plumber and Glazier. Repairs promptly attended to.
The front garden was ambitiously planted with laurels, and the entire
exterior of the house showed Mr. Thicknesse to be a man of enterprise.
In the sunshine of an April day Kitchener Road seemed not so tawdry as
she had expected, and then she suddenly realized that during the years
that she had been away a subtle but incalculably real change had been
taking place. Kitchener Road had been slowly and imperceptibly becoming
respectable. There was a distinct cæsura where the respectability
began: you could tell by the curtains in the windows, the condition
of the front gardens, and the occasional tablet on the front gate:
“No Hawkers; No Circulars; No Canvassers.” What precisely determined
the position of the cæsura was not clear: maybe it was the licensed
abattoir, or most probably the cæsura was constantly and uniformly
shifting in a given direction. At any rate, the road was immeasurably
loftier in the social scale than it had been when she and her parents
had occupied No. 24.
Turning into Duke Street, she discovered the Methodist Chapel under
process of renovation: scaffolding was up round the walls and the
railings in front were already a violent crimson. A notice declared
that:
During the redecorating of the Chapel, services, both morning and
evening, will be held in the schoolroom.
It was the schoolroom in which her father had given Band of Hope
demonstrations and evenings with the poets; it was the schoolroom
in which she had flung a tea-cup at the head of Freddie McKellar.
Curiously vivid was the recollection of that early incident. If she
had gone inside she could have identified the exact spot on the floor
on which she stood to aim the missile.... One thing was plain: if
Kitchener Road had risen in the social scale its rise had been more
than compensated for by a downward movement on the part of Duke Street.
Duke Street was, if such were possible, frowsier than ever. Many of
the houses had converted their bay-window parlours into shops, and on
the window-frame of one of these Catherine noticed the “Apartments”
card. She wondered if she would ever have to live in a place like that.
It was a greengrocer’s shop, and the gutter in front was clogged with
cabbage leaves and the outer peelings of onions. The open front door
showed a lobby devoid of floor covering, and walls scratched into great
fissures of plaster. As she passed by a woman emerged from the shop,
with a man’s cap adjusted with hat pins, and a dirty grey apron. In her
hand she held a gaudily decorated jug, and Catherine saw her cross the
road and enter the off-license belonging to the “Duke of Wellington.”
§ 2
The summit of disaster was reached when Catherine received one morning
in April a bill of eighty-five pounds from a London furniture company!
At first she thought it must be a mistake, until she read the list of
the specified articles sold to her and identified them as things that
had been included amongst a lot that the second-hand dealers had bought
from her for twenty-five guineas. It showed the chaotic state of her
finances, as well as her complete carelessness in money matters, that
she had not the slightest recollection of having incurred the bill.
Nor did she recollect having paid for the articles: she had merely
overlooked the transaction entirely. And now she must pay eighty-five
pounds for a bedroom suite she no longer possessed! The way she had
swindled herself irritated her beyond measure. And this time she became
seriously alarmed for the future. Twenty-five pounds does not last
for long, particularly with electric massage treatment costing three
guineas a week. Her excursion to Duke Street had impressed her with
the horror of what she might have to come to some day, and now this
furniture bill had cut away the few intervening steps that had yet to
be descended. She must fall with a bump. It was quite inevitable.
But at first she could not reconcile herself to the new conditions
that must be hers for the future. Her dreams of fame as a pianist were
still undiminished, and they helped her considerably by suggesting:
This débâcle is but a swift excursion: it cannot last for more than
a few weeks at the most. Before long I shall be back again, maybe at
“Elm Cottage.” This adventure is really quite romantic. It should be
interesting while it lasts. Nay, it even enhances the strangeness of me
that such adventures should come my way.... Egoism for once helped her
to submit to what, viewed in a sane light, would have been intolerable.
Yet in her darker moments the thought would come over her: perhaps I
shall never come back. Perhaps I shall never regain the heights I have
surrendered. Perhaps this is the end of me....
Only once at this time did she give way to uttermost despair. And
that was when a second-hand bookseller bought all her library for
five pounds. There were shelves stocked with Wells and Shaw and Ibsen
and Galsworthy and Bennett and Hardy and Granville Barker. The whole
was worth at least twice what she received for it. But it was not
that that made her unhappy. It was the realization that this was her
tacit withdrawal from the long struggle to lift herself on to a higher
plane. She had tried to educate herself, to stock her mind with wisdom
beyond her comprehension, to reconstitute herself in a mould that
nature had never intended for her. And there had been times when the
struggle, vain and fruitless though it ever was, was a thing of joy
to her, of joy even when she was most conscious of failure. But now
these books held all her dead dreams, and she cared for them with an
aching tenderness. All the things she had tried hard to understand
and had never more than half understood were doubly precious now that
she was beginning to forget them all.... One book alone she kept, and
justified her action in so doing on the ground that the dealer would
only give her sixpence for it. It was Ray Verreker’s _Growth of
the Village Community_. It had a good binding, she argued, and it
would be a shame to let it go for sixpence. But after all, it was a
mere piece of sentimentality that she should keep it. It was no use
to her at all. Even in the old days, when a strange enthusiasm had
prompted her to seek to make herself mistress of its contents, it had
been woefully beyond her understanding. And now, when she tried to
re-read its opening chapter, every word seemed cruel. All the technical
jargon about virgates and demesnelands and manorial courts inflicted
on her a sense of despair deeper than she had ever felt before.
Finally, when she came to a quotation from a mediæval trade charter
in Latin, she cried, for no very distinct reason save that she could
not help it. After all the issue was plain, and in a certain sense
comforting. However low she might descend in the social scale, she was
not sacrificing intellectual distinction, for that had never been more
than a dream and a mirage. If ever anyone by taking thought could have
added one cubit to her intellectual stature that person must have been
she. Time and effort and her heart’s blood had gone into the struggle.
And nought had availed....
But she put _Growth of the Village Community_ amongst the little
pile of personal articles that she intended to take with her when she
moved into lodgings....