Читать книгу The Raft - Coningsby Dawson - Страница 15

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She filled all his thoughts; the world had become new to him. Picture-books were no longer amusing; just to be Peter with a little strange sister was the most fascinating story imaginable.

It was easy to keep him good; Grace had only to threaten that he should not see her. See her! He lived for that. Early in the morning he was at the bedroom door, waiting for the nurse to look out and beckon. As he followed her in on tiptoe, his golden little motherkins would turn on her pillow, holding out her hand. She was prettier than ever now. If Peter had known the word, he would have said she looked sacred: that was what he felt. And she seemed to have grown younger. She appeared immature as a girl, so slim and pale, stretched out in the broad white bed. Her hair lay in shining pools between the counterpane mountains.

“Pepperminta, you’re no older than Peter,” he had heard his father tell her; “you’re a kiddy playing with dollies—not a mother. It’s absurd.”

He knew from watching his father that, if they had loved her before, they must love her ten thousand times better now. When he went for his walks with Grace, he spent his pennies to bring her home flowers.

Everything in that room had been brightened to welcome the little sister. It had a sense of whiteness and a soft, sweet fragrance. They had to make the little sister feel that they were glad she had come and wanted her to stay. So a fire was kept burning in the grate. They spoke in whispers and walked on their toes, the way one does in church.

Climbing on a chair, he would seat himself at the foot of the bed while his mother’s eyes laughed at him from the pillow, “We’ve managed it this time, little Peter.”

Presently the nurse would turn back the sheet and show him the stranger, cuddled in his mother’s breast; he would see a shining head, like fine gold scattered on white satin.

“The same as yours, mummy.”

“And the same as yours, darling.”

When anyone found him in any way like her, Peter was glad.—If he waited patiently, the blue eyes would open and stare straight past him, seeing visions of another world.

“She sees something, mummy.”

“God, perhaps.”

Peter thought he knew better, for he heard quite near, yet so softly that it might have been far away, the violinlike whisper of one who whistled beneath her breath.

“Dearest, was Peter like that?”

“Peter and everybody.”

There were times when he was allowed to slip his finger between those of the tiny fisted hand. When he felt their pressure, they seemed to say, “I’m yours, Peter-kins. Take care of me, won’t you?”

He was sure she knew that he had seen God make her.

He did not want to speak; he was perfectly content to sit in the sheltered quiet, watching. He would listen outside the door for hours on the chance of being admitted. If Grace missed him, she always knew where he might be found.

As the little sister grew, he was permitted to see her bathed and dressed. One by one the soft wrappings were removed and folded, and the perfect little body revealed itself. No wonder God had taken so long; he had put such love into his work. By and by she learnt how to crow and splash. Her first recorded smile was given to Peter. But long before that a name had to be chosen.

She was christened Kathleen Nancy and was called Kay, because that made her sound dearer.

Peter was nearly seven at the time of her coming. Of all people, he and his mother seemed to know her best. They had secrets about her; before she could talk, they told one another what her baby language meant. During her first summer on earth, they would sit beside her cradle in the garden, believing that birds and flowers stooped to watch her.

“You’re no older than Peter,” his father had said. But, when he came home from the city, he would join them and seemed perfectly happy to gaze on Kay, with Peter on his knee, holding Nan’s free hand.

Even in those early days, it was strange the power that Peter had over her. If she were crying, she would stop and laugh for Peter. She would sleep for Peter, if he hummed and rocked her. When she began to speak, it was Peter who taught her and interpreted what she said; that was during her second summer, when leaves in the garden were tapping. They grew to trust Peter where Kay was concerned. “He’s so gentle with her,” they said.

“Might be ‘er father, the care ‘e takes of ‘er. It’s uncanny,” Grace told her sweetheart.

Her sweetheart was a policeman at this moment; his profession did not make for sentiment. “Father, by gum! Fat lot o’ care your father took o’ you, I’ll bet.”

Grace’s father was a cabby and was known to the Barrington household as Mr. Grace—a name of Peter’s bestowing. He drove a four-wheeler and had a red face. His stand was at the bottom of Topbury Crescent, which formed the blade to the sickle of which the Terrace was the handle.

When Kay was beginning to toddle, her cot was transferred from her parents’ to Peter’s bedroom. Nan was none too strong and Barrington could not afford to be roused at five in the morning—he worked too hard and required all his rest. Had Peter’s wishes been consulted, this was just how he would have arranged matters. From the moment when the light went out to the moment when his eyelids reluctantly lowered, he had Kay all to himself. Throwing off the clothes, he would slip out and kneel beside her cot, softying her with his face and hands. He had to do this carefully lest he should be heard. Sometimes, in stepping out, the mattress squeaked and a voice would call up the tall dim stairs, “Peter, are you in bed?” An interval would elapse while he hurried back; then he would answer truthfully, “Yes.” Often the voice would say knowingly, “You are now.”

But the temptation was too great. It was so wonderful to touch her in the darkness, to hear her stir, to feel her hand brush his cheek and the warm sleepy lips turned toward his mouth.

“It’s only Peter,” he would whisper; and, perhaps, he would add, “Little Kay, aren’t you glad I borned you?”

Oh yes, it was he who had contrived her birth. There, as a proof, was the big dim cupboard where it had all commenced.

In the shadowy darkness of the room, before Grace came up to undress, he lived in a world of fancy. Through the oblong of the doorway the faint gold glimmered, made by the lowered gas. In the square of the window, as in a magic mirror, all kinds of strange things happened. Great soft clouds moved across it, like mountains marching. Presently they would stand aside, giving him glimpses of deep lagoons and floating lands. Stars would dance out, like children holding hands, and wink and twinkle at him. The moon would let down her silver ladder, smiling to him to ascend. He laughed back and shook his head. Oh, no thank you; Kay needed his attention.

Beneath the sky was a muffled world, like a Whistler nocturne, of house-tops and drowsy murmurs. It was a vague field of seething shadows in which the blur of street-lamps was a daffodil forest. Dwellings which were blind all day, in streets he had never traversed, now peered stealthily from behind their curtains with the unblinking eyes of cats. What did they do down there? Church bells in the Vale of Holloway would try to tell him. Sometimes strains of a barrel-organ would drift up merrily and he would picture how ragged children danced, beating time with rapid feet upon the muddy pavement. Sometimes in the distance, like a scarlet fear, a train would shoot across the murk and vanish.

But always from these wanderings his imagination would return to the cot where the little sister nestled. Who was it put the thought into his head? Was it some strange confusion between winking stars and the Bethlehem story? Or was it Grace in one of her flights of poetry? Long ago, he told himself, like this the Boy Jesus must have sat keeping guard over a baby sister, while at the bottom of a tall steep house Mary helped Joseph, making chairs and tables.

Once Peter gave things away completely by trusting too much to his wakefulness; he was found asleep on the floor beside Kay’s cot when Grace came up to undress.

If the nights had their spice of adventure because such doings were forbidden, the mornings were not to be sneered at. He would be wakened by a small hand stroking his face and she would snuggle into bed beside him. Years after, when he was a man, he remembered the sensation of her cold feet when she had found him difficult to rouse.

But the greatest treat of all came rarely. When his father went away on a journey, his mother could cast aside her habits. She would make her home in the nursery and hirelings would be driven out. Grace would be given an evening with her policeman, and Peter, and Kay, and Nan would have each other to themselves. If it were winter, they would have supper by firelight, after which they would sit and toast themselves while Nan told stories of her girlhood. Kay would be taken into her lap and Peter would sit on the rug, cuddling against her skirt.

“How did Daddy find you, Mummy?”

And when that had been told in a simplified version, “Mummy, should I be your little boy, if you’d married someone else?”

Since there seemed some doubt, Peter made haste to assure her, “Dearest, I’m so, so glad.”

In the dancing flames and shadows, Kay would be undressed and popped into the tin-bath while Peter helped. Then, all warm and snuggly, she would be carried to her mother’s bed. In a short time Peter would follow and fall asleep with his arms about her.

Toward midnight he would rouse; the gas was lit and someone was rustling. Looking down the bed, he would see his mother with her gold hair loose about her shoulders. “Hush,” she would whisper, placing her finger against her mouth. So he would lie still, watching her shadow on the walls and ceiling. Again the room was in darkness; his face was hidden in her breast as she clasped him to her. He was thinking how lucky it was that his father had found her.

In the morning Kay would wake them, climbing across their legs or losing herself beneath the bed-clothes. Just to be different from all other mornings, they would have their breakfast before they dressed. What an adventure they made of it and what good times they had!

In after years, looking back, Peter realized what children he had had for parents; they seemed anything but children then. His father was not too old to be a lion on hands and knees beneath the table, trying to catch him as he ran round. At last his mother would cry out, “Billy, dearest, do stop it. You’ll get the boy excited.”

And then there were those empty rooms at the top of the house to be furnished. Peter’s father led him all over London, visiting beery old women and dingy old men, whose shops to the unpracticed eye were stocked with rubbish. Oak paneling, bronzes, French clocks, canvases dim with dirt, were discovered and carried home in triumph. For the canvases frames had to be hunted out; the pursuit was endless. These treasures were driven home in cabs, taking up so much room that Peter had to make himself smaller. Nan would fly to the door as the wheels halted on the Terrace.

“Peter, why did you let him? Oh, Billy, how extravagant!”

“But, my dear, it’s an investment. I paid next to nothing and wouldn’t sell it for a thousand pounds.”

“Couldn’t,” she corrected; but, as was proved later, she was wrong in that.

When the empty rooms were furnished—the oak bedroom and the Italian—the modern furnishings in other parts of the house were gradually supplanted; even the staircase was hung with paintings which Barrington restored himself. There was one little drawback to these prowlings through London which Peter was too proud to mention: his father as he walked would pinch his hand to show his affection—but it hurt. He knew why his father did it, so he did not tell him. He bit his lips instead to keep back the tears.

Four other people stole across his childish horizon like wisps of cloud—the Misses Jacobite. They lived in an old-fashioned house in Topbury and kept no servants. Peter got to know them because they smiled at him coming in and going out of church. There was Miss Florence, who was tall and reserved; and Miss Effie, who was little and talkative; and Miss Madge, who was fat and jolly; and Miss Leah, a shadow-woman, who sat always in a darkened room with pale hands folded, crooning to herself.

People said “Poor thing! Oh well, there’s no good blaming her now. She wouldn’t thank us for our pity; after all, she brought it on herself.”

Or they said. “You know, they were quite proud once—the belles of Topbury. Two of them were engaged to be married. Their father was alive then—the Squire we called him. But after Miss Leah——” They dropped their voices till they came to the last sentence, “And the disgrace of it killed the old chap.”

Even Grace, when she took Kay and Peter to visit them, left them if she could on the doorstep. Her righteous mood asserted itself; she flounced her skirt in departing, shaking off the dust from her feet for a testimony against them. “Scand’lous, I calls it. If I wuz to do like ‘er, yer ma wouldn’t let me touch yer. But o’ course, it’s different; I’m only a sarvant-gal. And they ‘olds their ‘eads so ‘ighl Brazen, I calls it. Before I walked the streets where a thing like that ‘ad ‘appened in my family, I’d sink into my grave fust—that I would. I ‘ate the thought of their kissing yer, my precious lambs.”

Peter was always wondering what it was that Miss Leah had brought upon herself. Whatever it was, it stayed with her in the room with the lowered blinds at the back of the house. She never went out; callers never saw her. Her eyes were vague, as though she had wept away their color. She spoke in a hoarse whisper, as in a dream; and her attention had to be drawn to anything before she saw it. But it was her singing that shocked and thrilled Peter, making him both pitiful and frightened. Her song never varied and never quite came to an end; she repeated it over and over. You could hear it in the hall, the moment you entered; it went on at intervals until you left. She sang it with empty hands, sitting without motion:

“On the other side of Jordan

In the sweet fields of Eden

Where the Tree of Life is growing

There is rest for me.”

Where were the “sweet fields of Eden”? Peter liked the sound of them and would have asked her, had not something held him back. She must be very tired, he thought, to be singing always about rest. Yet he never saw her work.

He had been there many times and had only heard her, until one day, as he was scampering down the passage with Miss Madge pursuing, the door opened and a woman with dim eyes and hair as white as snow looked out. She gazed at him without interest; but when Kay toddled up to her fearlessly, she stooped and caught her to her breast.

Several things about the Misses Jacobite struck Peter as funny. They divided the visit up, so that each might have a child for part of it entirely to herself. Each would behave during that time as though she were a mother famished for affection, returned from a long journey, and would invent secrets which were to be shared by nobody but the child and herself. Kay and Peter were carried off into separate rooms, and there played with and cuddled by a solitary Miss Jacobite. Though the Misses Jacobite were obviously poor, the children always went home with a present; often enough it was a toy from the dusty, disused nursery. When they met Kay and Peter on Sundays and people were watching, they pretended to forget the other things that had happened.

“I wonder you let your children go there,” people said.

Nan smiled slowly and answered softly, gathering Kay and Peter to her. “Poor things! They were robbed of everything. I have so much I don’t deserve. I can spare them a little of my gladness.”

“But, Mrs. Barrington, that’s mere sentiment. How does your husband allow it?”

One day Nan’s husband spoke up for himself. “Did you ever hear of the raft? I thought not. Well, Nan and I have.”