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....