CHAPTER XXI
FALLEN
§ 1
ON the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, Catherine sat with her hat and coat as yet unremoved in the front sitting-room of No. 5, Cubitt Lane. She had taken a drastic step, and had only just begun to realize its full significance. Her lips, tense in a manner suggestive of troubled perplexity, began to droop slowly into an attitude of poignant depression. Accustomed as she was to lofty and spacious rooms, this front sitting-room seemed ridiculously small and box-like. The wallpaper was a heavy chocolate brown with a periodic design which from a distance of a few feet looked like a succession of fat caterpillars. A heavy carved overmantel over the fireplace and a sideboard with a mirror on the opposite wall multiplied the room indefinitely into one long vista of caterpillars. Catherine sat disconsolately at a small wicker table by the window. The outlook was disappointing. On the opposite side of the road, children were converging from all directions into the entrance to the Infants’ Department of the Cubitt Lane Council School. It was that season of the year devoted to the trundling of iron hoops, and the concrete pavements on both sides of the road rang with them.
Catherine had chosen No. 5, Cubitt Lane because it combined the cheapness of some of the lower-class districts with the respectability of a class several degrees higher than that to which it belonged. Cubitt Lane was a very long road leading from the slums of Bockley to the edge of the Forest, and that portion of it nearest the Forest was in the parish of Upton Rising, and comparatively plutocratic. Only near its junction with Duke Street and round about the Council Schools was it anything but an eminently high-class residential road. It was curious that, now that fame and affluence had left her, Catherine clung to “respectability” as something that she could not bear to part with. In the old days she had scorned it, regarded it as fit only for dull, prosaic and middle-aged people: now she saw it as the only social superiority she could afford. The days of her youth and irresponsibility were gone. She was a woman—no, more than that, she was a “lady.” And she must insist upon recognition of that quality in her with constant reiteration. She must live in a “respectable neighbourhood” in “respectable lodgings.” And, until such time as her arm allowed her to regain her fame and reputation as a pianist, she must find some kind of “respectable work.”
No. 5, Cubitt Lane was undoubtedly respectable. Yet Catherine, even as she recognized this, was profoundly stirred at the realization of what this red-letter event meant to her. From the wreckage of her dreams and ideals only one remained intact, and that was her ambition as a pianist. That was her one link with the past, and also, she hoped, her one link with the future. She looked at the trumpery little eighteen-guinea piano she had brought with her and saw in it the embodiment of her one cherished ambition. Now that all the others were gone, this solitary survivor was more precious than ever before. Her hand was slowly improving, and soon she would start the long struggle again. Her determination was quieter, more dogged, more tenacious than ever, but the old fiery enthusiasm was gone. It was something that had belonged to her youth, and now that her youth had vanished it had vanished also.
Mrs. Lazenby was a woman of unimpeachable respectability. Widowed and with one daughter, she led a life of pious struggling to keep her precarious footing on the edge of the lower middle classes. Every Sunday she attended the Duke Street Methodist Chapel and sang in a curious shrivelled voice every word of the hymns, chants and anthems. Her crown of glory was to be appointed superintendent of the fancy-work stall at the annual bazaar. She had not attended the chapel long enough to have known either Catherine’s father or mother, and nobody apparently had ever acquainted her with the one exciting event in the annals of the Literary and Debating Society. But she was “known by sight” and “well-respected” of all the leading Methodist luminaries, and once, when she was ill with lumbago, the Rev. Samuel Sparrow prayed for “our dear sister in severe pain and affliction.” Her daughter Amelia, a lank, unlovely creature of nineteen, was on week-days a shopgirl at one of the large West-end multiple stores, and on the Sabbath a somewhat jaded and uninspired teacher at the Methodist Sunday Schools. For the latter post she was in all respects singularly unfitted, but her mother’s pressure and her own inability to drift out of it as effortlessly as she had seemed to drift in kept her there. She was not a bad girl, but she was weak and fond of pleasure: this latter desire she had to gratify by stealth, and she was in a perpetual state of smothered revolt against the tyranny of home.
Into the ways and habits of this curious household, Catherine slipped with an ease that surprised herself. Mrs. Lazenby treated her with careful respect, for the few personal possessions that Catherine had brought with her were of a style and quality that afforded ample proof of her social eligibility. Then, also, her conversation passed with honours the standard of refinement imposed mentally by Mrs. Lazenby on every stranger she met. Amelia, too, was impressed by Catherine’s solitariness and independence, by her secretiveness on all matters touching her past life and future ambitions. All she knew was that Catherine had been a successful professional pianist and had been forced into reduced circumstances by an attack of neuritis. Amelia thought that some day Catherine might become an ally against the pious tyranny of her mother. She cultivated an intimacy with Catherine, told her of many personal matters, and related with much glee scores of her clandestine adventures with “boys.” She developed a habit of coming into Catherine’s bedroom at night to talk. Catherine was apathetic. At times Amelia’s conversation was a welcome relief from dullness: at other times it was an unmitigated nuisance. But on the whole Catherine’s attitude towards Amelia was one of contemptuous tolerance.
§ 2
It was on a sleepy Sunday afternoon in June, whilst Amelia was teaching at the Sunday School and Mrs. Lazenby out visiting a spinster lady of her acquaintance, that Catherine had the sudden impulse to commence the long struggle uphill again whence she had come. The last of Madame Varegny’s electric massage treatments had been given and paid for: her arm was practically well again: in every other respect than the financial one the outlook was distinctly hopeful. Outside in Cubitt Lane the ice-cream seller and whelk vendor were going their rounds; a few gramophones and pianos had begun their Sabbath inanities. But as yet the atmosphere was somnolent: you could almost hear (in your imagination, at any rate) the snorings and breathings of all the hundreds of tired folks in Cubitt Lane and Duke Street, in placid contentment sleeping off the effects of a massive Sunday dinner....
Catherine sat down in front of the eighteen-guinea English masterpiece. Mrs. Lazenby had put a covering of red plush on the top of the instrument and crowned that with a number of shells with black spikes, and a lithograph of New Brighton Tower and Promenade in a plush frame of an aggressively green hue. Catherine removed these impedimenta and opened the lid. She decided to practise for exactly one hour. Later on she might have to do two, three, four, five or even more hours per day, but for a start one hour would be ample. She would learn now the extent to which her technique had suffered during her long period of enforced idleness. She would be able to compute the time it would take to recover her lost skill, and could put new hope into her soul by thinking that at last—at last—the tide of her destiny was on the turn....