Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 10

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LIKE concentric rings unfolded in water when a pebble is dropped, the boundaries of my world gradually increased beyond the confines of the room. I became aware of other people who also lived in the same house. And to us, now and then, came someone to see Mother on business.

Slowly Mother’s clientele grew, but so slowly during those early years that little perceptible change was made in our way of living. She worked so steadily that she never seemed to stop. One of the most persistent memories of my life is the sight of her sitting beside the big table in the middle of the room laboring over her designs or embroidering the linens to which she transferred them.

Since she was the only meaning of my existence, the one who solved all problems through the bottomless nature of her love, I was unable to think what she was like. Once I overheard a man in a shop on the corner speak about her beauty, mentioning her hair and shoulders and deep-set dark eyes, but I had no way of gauging the terms. To me she was authority and sanctuary and wisdom and supply. She was also the strongest person I could imagine, and the most wonderful.

On the whole, I thought more about her hands than I did about any of her other features. They were closer to my line of vision, for one thing. From the tension or relaxation of her small fingers I could guess her mood before her face had given her away. If I fell, her hands picked me up; if I was cold, they warmed me; when I was ill they brought me coolness and healing. Had I ever lost her in a crowd, it would have been for her hands that I should have searched, for I would have known them more surely among thousands of other pairs than I knew my own face in a glass.

How many nights did I lie in bed when she thought I was asleep and watch their quick movements? Sometimes they would be washing the floor at two in the morning in order to have the room clean for the next day. If I woke up and saw her still sitting in the light of the kerosene lamp at the table, I knew there would be finished work in the morning, and after it was delivered there would be more food. Once in awhile, but rarely, if I saw her sitting close to the windows, using the light from the gas lamp on the street below, I knew she had finished a much larger order than usual. She was celebrating by stealing this hour in the middle of the night to do something she loved more than anything else, writing poetry which no one ever saw.

All Mother’s designs were made on the big walnut table in the middle of the room, first with needles and later with wheels. They passed through paper onto the linen and even through the linen onto the wood, and there they all stayed. Long afterward, when Mother had become an authority on design, and gave out her work to be completed by needleworkers in Moravia, she would caress the table top and say, “So much work, so much happiness, so many tears.”

I think it was the door in the wall that started her telling me stories. It had no doorknob and the keyhole had been covered with a piece of metal on the other side. In our room, it was just part of the wall. My cot stood against it and covered the lower half. But smells and noises came through the door to us, and sometimes when I lay in bed with my ear not far from the cracks, I could hear voices and cries of pain on the other side. It frightened and fascinated me at once, and no amount of explaining from Mother could make me understand what really went on in this strange hinterland. Nor could I be made to realize that the rest of the second floor of the house, which was occupied by the widow who owned it and her son, had an entrance separate from ours. I never saw the people who made the sounds and smells behind the door, and so I believed them to be inhuman, quite unlike the men and women who passed on the street below our windows, because I couldn’t solve the architectural problems of a separate entrance to their apartment.

When I was awakened in the middle of the night it was easy to hear what went on behind the door, though I never distinguished words, only tones of voice and cries of pain. There was an endless variety of whining, complaining voices, but their counterpart was always the same unpleasant, rough voice which broke into shouts both in Czech and in German. It was this second voice which haunted my dreams for years, long after we no longer lived in that room.

Whenever I was awakened like this Mother would take me in her arms and begin a fairy story, and when I was quieted she would put me back and go on with her work, letting the story flow through her imagination until I was once more asleep. Though the tales might begin with elves in the woods who could be seen only by those with a good heart, or fairy princesses riding through moonlit skies on a cloud, they never ended without an application to my practical experience.

When I was older I understood what the noises on the other side of the door meant, but they continued to dog my dreams. The son of the widow who owned the house was a doctor, employed by the Ringhoffer Works and other industrial firms in Smichov. It was his office which lay beyond the door beside my bed. The smells which came through were carbolic acid and other disinfectants, perhaps formaldehyde, too. And the cries were those of working men and women who had injured their hands or feet or eyes at one of the plants. Since the company paid for their treatment, they had to take themselves to the doctor’s office. And also, since the company paid, the doctor wasted no time with polite manners when he treated them.

That was why, too, Mother always became anxious whenever I raised my voice or laughed as I played during certain hours of the day. These were the doctor’s office hours. If I forgot and spoke too loudly there would come a beating at the door and Mother would whisper that I must remember to be very quiet or we would surely lose our home.

After awhile a few people began to come to our room. They were girls, mostly, and the beggars. Some of the shopgirls in our neighborhood began to come to Mother to have her make a design of embroidery on a collar or a handkerchief for a gift. Whenever they asked anxiously what it would cost, Mother avoided answering. And then when the girls came to fetch their little gifts, they were invariably worried because the embroidery had turned out to be so much prettier than they had expected and they were sure the cost would be too dear. But Mother would give them a price which made their faces light with surprise and relief. Always after one of these encounters Mother sang while she worked. More than once she pointed out to me that even for poor people such as ourselves there could still be moments when we might feel rich.

With the beggars it was like that, too. Every Friday, by permission of the town authorities, beggars were allowed to ring doorbells in Prague and ask for money. Most of the ones who rang bells in Smichov were glad enough to be given food, for many doors there were shut in their faces. But always Mother took whatever provisions we happened to have in the house on Friday and gave a part to whoever rang our bell. I never knew her to turn a single beggar away without something.

One Friday afternoon one of the girls was waiting for Mother to finish her order when the work had to be interrupted to attend to one of these men. After he had gone the girl scolded Mother soundly for being so generous when well-to-do people were chasing the beggars away. It was one of the periods when a story gained credence, among those who wanted to believe it, about a beggar woman who had been found dead in a shack with thousands of gulden in a sack under her bed. The story came easily to the tongues of those who wanted an excuse to shut the door in the face of a beggar.

Mother said quietly to the girl, “If I knew I had given the very last food we had, a hundred times over, to men who didn’t need it, while one alone had been in want, it would be worth the ninety-nine disappointments to know I had not passed that single one by.”