Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 5

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That was on a Friday in March of 1912, when Chris was twelve years old. The next day Mrs. Wyke was in a ferment of what she called fettling. She yellow-stoned the doorstep. She polished the linoleum in the passage. She black-leaded grates, cleaned windows, and “turned out” Dick Hudson’s bedroom. Dick Hudson was Chris’s father. He was not often at home, but this week he was playing in Leeds. He would come here to his home in Bradford by an early train to-morrow, Sunday. He wouldn’t have needed a home and the expense of keeping Mrs. Wyke had it not been for Chris. He would have been happy enough in theatrical digs. Even now he wouldn’t want anything very stylish. Certainly not the sort of hotel where some of his fellow-players stayed, blueing their money and so laying up a future which, at best, would mean running a pub or sweating out their guts on some other such job. He could not yet believe his luck: after so many years of effort to be earning a hundred pounds a week! “The Great Hudson.” Top of the bill.

He arrived early the next morning, before Chris was out of bed. The boy came down to find his father in the kitchen, eating his breakfast. He was a man of six feet, well made and handsome, with black hair that would have rioted into curls if it had not been close-cropped. Wigs played a large part in the life of the Great Hudson, and so his native furnishing was subdued. He was wearing a suit of brown tweeds that increased his bulk and this deepened the sense of something formidable with which Chris, a wizened shrimp, always regarded his father.

Dick got up and kissed the boy, and looked at him with the mingling of disappointment and compassion that he always felt for him. They met so rarely, and there was the never extinguished hope that Chris some day would spring a surprise, appear miraculously rosy-cheeked, confident and debonair. Well, here he was, home again, and the boy the same as ever. A transient look of pain shadowed Dick’s features, and he did not know that the boy was subtle enough to be at once aware of it, to resent it as an unspoken and unfavourable comment.

There were kippers for breakfast, and tea and toast and marmalade. Dick ate as heartily as a hungry pike, while the boy nibbled like a minnow. Mrs. Wyke was out of the room.

“Shall we go on living here now?” Chris asked.

“What do you mean—now?” But he knew well enough that Mrs. Wyke had been talking and would probably expect another pound a week.

“I mean now that you’re rich. And could I go to another school?”

“This is a nice little house, Chris. We’re out on the edge of the town, and you can be up on Baildon Moor in no time. The air would do you good. Do you often get up there?”

“No. I don’t like walking.”

“You ought to try it, you know. We’ll go up there this morning. I don’t think it would be a good idea to give up this house. I expect Mrs. Wyke has been telling you that I earn a lot of money nowadays.”

Chris nodded, nibbling a bit of toast.

“Well, that has only just begun, you know. It’s no reason for lashing money about. You see, there’s the future, Chris. I’m all right. I could get along somehow, however little I earned. But I don’t want you to get along somehow. I want you to get along like a house on fire. The thing to do with money is not to dribble it away on every little thing that takes your fancy, but to save it till there’s a big thing. That’s the time to let fly. And you’re the big thing, Chris. I don’t amount to much. But you do, and you’re going to amount to something more. Don’t forget that.”

He did not often let himself go, but now he had said it, and he hoped the boy understood it. “Why do you want to go to another school?”

“I haven’t got any friends.”

“Why, Chris, that’s not a matter of a new school, you know. Still, it’s something to be considered. And I have considered it. Between you and me, there wasn’t much schooling in my life, and I’ve been thinking about putting it right in yours. You leave it to me. And now let’s get up on to Baildon Moor and have a breath of fresh air.”

They walked to Shipley, the out-sized man and the undersized boy, and climbed up through the glen on to the moor. It was a place Dick Hudson loved. To-day it wasn’t at its best, though a few skylarks were trying to weave strains of joy into the glum air. But it was a reminiscent place. There were other days than this to think of. There were the days when he was a gangling lad working in a wool-merchant’s warehouse, amusing his mates in the dinner-hour by taking-off the boss and the manager and his mates themselves. “You ought to be on the stage, Dick,” they used to say. “Come on. Do the boss again.” And with no props, with nothing but the lift of an eyebrow, the twist of a lip, a trick with the hands, Dick would do the boss again. And one day, unknown to any of them, the boss, who was thought to be safely out at lunch, observed the performance through his window, and opened it, and said: “You—yon lanky chap—come here.”

It wasn’t the sack, as Dick had feared it might be. Sir William was a card, a character, in days when such things still existed, a bit of a humourist himself.

“What’s your name?”

“Hudson, sir.”

“Well, Hudson, you take me off very well. Do you want to earn a guinea?”

“I could do with it, sir.” Twice his weekly pay!

There was a banquet that night at the Great Northern Hotel, and banquets were banquets then—eight or nine courses, and wines galore, and cigars, to say nothing of speeches that were only endurable because singers and comedians interspersed them with nonsense and sentiment. Sir William was to be the chief speaker, and the pleasant thought had come suddenly to him that if young Dick Hudson followed him, guying his famous and calculated mannerisms, that would put him even more emphatically on the map. He was thinking of himself, not of Dick, as a public figure loves to be the butt of a cartoonist.

It was an unforgettable night for Dick Hudson. For the first time he heard the sweet music of applause, and ate a grand dinner in the artists’ room, and met Molly who sang sloppy songs in a voice of treacle. It had all gone on so swiftly from there. His services were sought for other banquets. He used to come up here to Baildon Moor and think out his repertory and speak his cracks, and sometimes Molly would be with him and would sing to him, and he didn’t need the larks on those days. And up here he proposed to her, and one day told her the news: that he had been signed on as a music-hall performer. He was bottom of the bill on a third-rate circuit, but all the same it was the most wonderful news in the world. They married, and he left her in the little house from which he and Chris had walked that morning. He came back there between tours, but he was far away—in Middlesborough—when he learned that his son was born and that his wife was dead. There was nothing for it then but work, and there were times when he didn’t give a damn whether he succeeded or not. But such times became fewer and fewer: Molly was not the sort of woman whose ghost would have durable qualities: and now, at thirty-two, to change from Dick Hudson into The Great Hudson gave him feelings of more than financial satisfaction. Not that he was unduly set up. He had never considered his sort of work to be of much importance; but, after all, it was his work, and to have got to the top of it was something. He took the “Great” with a pinch of salt; but it looked well on a bill. A sound chap, Dick Hudson. He would never want the Riviera. Baildon Moor suited him well enough.