Читать книгу Kitty - Warwick Deeping - Страница 26
V
ОглавлениеAbout half-past six Mrs St. George heard the ringing of the front-door bell. She was sitting in front of the fire reading the English Review; she rose, made a movement towards the door, turned and resumed her seat.
Cummins let Mr Alex in.
“Hallo, Cummins.”
His face had what Cummins described as “A funny hazy look”. He smiled both at her and beyond her.
“Mother in?”
“Upstairs, sir. You’ll be in to dinner, sir?”
“Of course.”
He left his cap and cane and gloves on the hall table, and went very slowly up the stairs. It had been a day of emotion, and he was in an emotional mood, and very ready to be touched by things, and moved by a sudden impulse. He loitered on the stairs. It became more obvious to him that he had left his mother alone all day, and on his last day. Poor old mater!
And suddenly he decided to tell her. It would be ungenerous not to tell her, and perhaps she would take it better on this last evening. He would blurt it out and get it over. He wanted her to share his emotion. For his impulse was largely unselfish, a sudden turning to his mother, a feeling for her and with her.
He opened the drawing-room door, and saw her sitting in front of the fire with that blue-covered magazine in her hands.
“Sorry, mater; I’m afraid I’m rather late.”
She appeared to finish the paragraph that she was reading, before she turned her head. She had meant to reproach him. She had reproached and chided the unseen son, but when he appeared before her in the flesh she suffered from one of those sudden and wilful congealings. She froze. She did not say any of the things she had intended to say. She became a woman of cold and perverse constraints and inept yet withering silences.
“Yes,—you are a little late.”
He moved to the hearthrug, and stood there with the confession faltering self-consciously.
“Been seeing friends. They kept me.”
She was coldly furious with him and his friends, but all that she said was—“The fire’s rather low. Will you put some more coal on? Not too much. We have to be careful.”
She did not see his face go blank—and then become stubborn, for she was not looking at him, and he turned and bent down, and with a pair of small tongs transferred half a dozen lumps of coal from the copper coal-pot to the fire. His back expressed a negative blankness. His eyes had a closed-up look.
“The week has gone very quickly. I’ve ordered a taxi from Prout’s place.”
His mother’s nostrils quivered.
“Yes, very quickly. Cummins knows about breakfast.”
He replaced the tongs and stood up, but kept his back towards her.
“No need for you to bother, mater, unless—.”
She said very decisively—“I shall be down to breakfast.”
“I meant—the station.”
“I shall not come to the station.”
“Yes,—much better.”
“I think one can leave that.”
She did not say to whom Victoria Station should be left, but her tone implied it, and her son caught the implication. One left Victoria Station to the crowd, to common women, to the crudely emotional, to people who were not ashamed of kissing and hugging, to poor little snivelling girls. And he felt both hot and cold, for to him that place full of the wide-eyed woe of women and the cheerfulness of stiff-faced men meant Kitty, Kitty who could clasp your head in her arms, and make you feel prayed over and protected.
“O,—damn,” he thought, “I wish—.”
But what did he wish? That his mother was the kind of woman who could be left on that station platform holding Kitty’s hand? How simple and human and right that would seem. But Kitty, Mrs Sarah’s daughter, Mrs Sarah who kept a tobacco shop in Vernor Street, though she was a doctor’s widow! How right that shop might appear to him, and how wrong it might appear to his mother!
“I think I would rather you saw me off here, mater.”
She answered with a slight and consenting movement of the head. She had gone back to consider that other possibility. Could there be a girl?
“Men prefer it,—our men.”
“O, quite so,” he said; “makes one feel rather a fool. I asked Cummins to pack for me. There is only my valise. I expect she has done it.”
“Ring and see.”
“No,—I’ll go and look.”
Left alone for five minutes she sat and stared at the fire. Should she go to the station? Did he wish to keep her from going to the station? For if he did she would go. Yet she could not believe in the existence of a love affair, for she was sure that he would have told her about it. She believed that he had always told her everything. It was a mother’s right to know everything.
He came back, more at ease.
“Quite all right. I shall only have to put my slacks in and roll it up last thing.”
He stood looking down at the fire.
“I’ll write directly I get across, mater.”
