“What’s all the fuss about?” he queried suspiciously.
“Nothing,” replied Helen. Then, as they walked together along the platform, “You’ll have to tell the man we gave up our tickets before.”
As they hurried along the Bockley High Street the clock on the Carnegie library chimed the three-quarters....
At Liverpool Street, Catherine discovered that the waiting-room did not keep open throughout the night for the benefit of girls who have run away from home. There was a man at the door inspecting tickets. Catherine was struck by a brilliant notion. There is an all-night hourly service of trains from Liverpool Street to Bockley, the same train proceeding backwards and forwards. She went to the booking-office and purchased a return ticket to Bockley (sixpence). She had a good sixpennyworth, for the next five hours she spent in the corner seat of a third-class compartment. About two a.m. she fell asleep, and when she awoke the train was jerking to a standstill at Upton Rising. The clock said twenty minutes past six. Evidently the train had undergone a change while she had slept. All those dark hours it had paraded the inner suburbs, but now it had become a thing of greater consequence: it was the first early morning train to Chingford. At the tiny Forest town Catherine left it, paying excess fare on the journey from Bockley. Dawn came as she was tramping the muddy paths of Epping Forest. She had no idea where she was going. The main thing was to get the time over. About eight o’clock she returned to Chingford, purchased some notepaper and envelopes, and went into the post-office. On the desk provided for composing telegrams she wrote a letter accepting the situation of pianist at the Royal Cinema, Upton Rising. That done, and the letter stamped and posted, she felt calmer than she had been for some time. Then came hunger. She had a glass of milk (threepence) at a dairy and two of yesterday’s buns (a penny each) from a confectioner’s. Out of five and sevenpence half-penny and two penny stamps she had now left four shillings and a half-penny and one penny stamp, plus a third-class return half from Bockley to Liverpool Street.
She persisted in being joyous. This was to be an adventure, and she was to enter into the spirit of it. She took her buns to the top of Yardley Hill in order that she might imagine herself picnicking. She lay down on the damp grass eating, and told herself she was enjoying herself immensely. She admired the loveliness of the view with all the consciousness of a well-trained tourist. She refused to be melancholy. She discovered hundreds of excuses for feeling happy which would never have occurred to her if she had been feeling happy. As she was descending the hill after her meal it commenced to rain. She tried to see beauty in the rain. The grey sky and the sodden leaves, the squelch of her heels in the mud, the bare trees swathed in slanting rain, these, she decided, were infinitely preferable to Kitchener Road.... Nevertheless she would have to find lodgings.
She decided to seek them in Upton Rising.
CHAPTER V
DISILLUSIONMENTS
§ 1
GIFFORD ROAD, Upton Rising, seemed to be composed of various architectural remnants which had been left over from other streets. No. 14 was a dour, gloomy-looking edifice built of a stone-work that showed up in lurid prominence the particular form of eczema from which it suffered. The front garden was large, with evidences of decayed respectability, including a broken-down five-barred gate and the remains of a lawn. The wooden erection at the side of the house may once have been a coach-shed.... A flight of stone steps, much chipped and scarred, led up to a massive front door, but the usual entrance was clearly the small door underneath the steps, which generally stood ajar.... In the basement window appeared the “apartments” card and the ubiquitously respectable aspidistra plant. Cats of all sizes and colours haunted the long, lank grass of the front garden, and at the back there was a noisy, unkempt chicken-run.
Inside the tiny basement sitting-room Catherine tried to feel at home. The dried grasses and bric-à-brac on the mantelpiece did remind her somewhat of the front room at Kitchener Road, but the old faded photographs of the landlady’s relatives, most of them mercifully obscure, made her feel strange and foreign. A stuffed canary under a glass shroud surmounted the sideboard, and Catherine decided mentally that after she had been here awhile she would remove it to a less conspicuous position. A dull piety brooded over the room: there were floridly decorated texts on the walls, “I am the Bread of Life” over the doorway, and “Trust in the Lord” by the fireplace. The small bookshelf contained bound volumes of The Quiver and various missionary society reports, as well as several antiquated volumes, of which Jessica’s First Prayer was one, presented to the landlady, as the flyleaf showed, by a certain Sunday school in South London. A couple of pictures above the mantelpiece represented the Resurrection and the Ascension, and in these there was a prolific display of white-winged angels and stone slabs and halos like dinner-plates. On a November afternoon the effect of all this was distinctly chilly.