§ 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....