Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 11

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I MUST have been about five years old when I began to deliver Mother’s finished work. At first she took me to the different houses of her clients to show me the way, and after that I went alone. It was a great help to her because now she had more time in which to go on with more work. Some of the clients left me standing outside their doors, and then sent word through their maids that they would settle the bill the next time they passed our street. They were not unkind, but simply rich and unable to understand that it meant I would not take home any bread that day.

The small shop people always paid at once, perhaps because they understood why I was so thin and pale. When I came home with money, though it was sometimes only thirty kronen, I felt as proud as though I had been the one to earn it. And when I was disappointed and was told that the bill would be paid later, it took me a long time to get up the stairs and face Mother with my report.

Before all Mother’s customers to whom I delivered finished articles I kept an instinctive reserve. I never bowed too deeply and never accepted an invitation to prolong a conversation. I knew I must be polite, because these people gave us the means of living, but I could never like them because we depended upon their favors.

As soon as I brought some money home I was sent at once to the grocer on the corner, and most often what I bought was coffee. I still remember that I paid twelve kreutzers for the amount I bought each time. In our room, there was always a pot of coffee on the stove, and I began to drink it earlier than I can remember. The rest of our food was bread, sausages and cakes. Mother could afford no time to cook and Grandmother would never touch a thing in the kitchen. So I was sent to the pastry shop and the sausage shop to buy something we could eat quickly without cooking. I never once remember eating fresh fruit, fresh vegetables (there were no canned foods in those days), or freshly cooked meat in all those years.

I loved the grocery shop on the corner. It seemed fantastically large to me, and the few clerks behind the counters so many. One day as usual I lingered at the window outside to stare at the nuts and prunes and garlands of artificial lemons. The coffee I had just bought was in one of my pockets and I was intent upon the sweets before my eyes. I didn’t even turn around when I was jostled by another boy who stood beside me looking in the window. After he had left, I knew that my coffee was gone.

Mother had never scolded me or spanked me in my life, but still I was afraid to face her and tell her what had happened. When I didn’t come home she became desperate, and though she seldom left our room any more, she went out to hunt for me. I was still sitting on the stone steps of the grocery shop, crying quietly in my desolation. She hugged me and took me home and we went without coffee until another piece of work had been paid for. But from that day to this I have never lost anything, even to mislaying something unimportant.

It was the same way with the glasses. Mother had six water glasses which she thought the most beautiful in the world. Since she was for me all authority, I was convinced that not even the Kaiser had better ones. And then one day when I was about five I broke one of them. The glass splintered to the floor and I was stunned. Mother simply looked at me.

I dropped down on the floor beside the broken pieces and began to sob and beg her to forgive me. Immediately she was down on her knees beside me, begging me not to cry.

When I was much older Mother still had the five remaining tumblers. I was skeptical of their value then, and often laughed at her for holding them so dear. It was only after she died that I found them carefully put away. By that time I knew nearly everything there was to know about glass, and I saw that they were old Waterford and almost priceless. I have never since broken another piece of glass. One has to learn a reason for being careful, inside when quite young, if care in small matters is to seem important later on.