Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 11

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On one of the “scientific shelves” of Snape’s bookshop in the Charing Cross Road Hazzard discovered a treasure—a second-hand copy of Schiller’s Bacteriology priced at fifteen and sixpence. When new the book cost thirty shillings, and Hazzard, holding it in his hands, and looking faintly flushed, turned over the plates and pages.

A little Hebrew salesman edged towards him, for the Jew had known an enthusiast to smuggle a book out under his coat, and Hazzard’s eyes were like the eyes of a man gazing upon his beloved.

“Latest edition, twelve new plates——”

Hazzard was considering ways and means.

“Fifteen and six.”

“Cheap at that.”

“Will you take twelve bob?”

“We’re not in business to lose money.”

Hazzard put the book down on the shelf, and felt for his purse. He knew just how much there was in that purse—a half-sovereign, two florins, two shillings and a threepenny bit. He could pay for Schiller’s Bacteriology, but it would be at the expense of a week’s semi-starvation; it would mean a diet of bread and margarine and water, but he had three of his mother’s Wiltshire eggs left.

“I’ll take it.”

“Wrap it up for you, sir?”

“No, don’t bother.”

Hazzard walked out of the shop and up Charing Cross Road to Oxford Street. It was a hot day in July, and over that space where Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street meet industry had diffused a perfume of hot pickles. There were other perfumes that associated themselves in Hazzard’s mind with London and heat and horses and flower-sellers and Italian restaurants. He smelt one of these appetizing perfumes in Tottenham Court Road, a breath of hot steak and onions, and to a young man who was almost always hungry such an aroma made a pungent appeal. His nostrils quivered, but under his arm he had that book, and in his pocket sixpence and a threepenny bit, and before him days of asceticism, and nights when he would get up and drink water in order to appease the wistful emptiness of his stomach.

Bennet’s Hospital stood at the end of Bennet Street. A grey building powdered with soot, its ground plan the shape of an H, it displayed to people walking up Bennet Street a paved forecourt with high iron railings and double gates. A black and white clock high up in the pediment stared like the eye of a Cyclops. The rows of sash windows emphasized the Georgian symmetry of the building, and its greyness was the greyness of an English sky.

The hospital could be entered by students either through the main doorway where the porter’s lodge projected into the forecourt, or by way of the college entrance in Groom Street, and these two methods of entry offered Hazzard a daily choice. The little, sensitive, shrinking boy in him felt tempted to sneak in by the college door, especially after the luncheon hour when house-surgeons and house-physicians, dressers, clinical clerks and students would mass themselves in the main corridor just inside the entrance, waiting for the great men to go round their wards. Hazzard had to compel himself to face that young crowd. It was a hostile crowd, ironical, irresponsible, cruel without realizing its cruelty. He would make himself face it. He would limp across the bare and empty forecourt, feeling very much alone in that grey space, and aware of all those waiting faces. He was conscious of being watched, and of forcing himself to advance against the pressure of an intangible hostility. A cold draught of unfriendliness seemed to blow upon him out of that doorway with its big glazed doors, persuading him to pull his rather threadbare pride across his chest as though covering himself on a bitter day with the collar of his coat.

For this London hospital was Melfont over again, with young men instead of children forming the conventional crowd. It expressed the hatred of the many for the unusual and the peculiar, the derisive and mocking hostility that is instant in its pillorying of enthusiasm, especially shabby enthusiasm. It exemplified that English middle-class mistrust of the artist, and of anything that does not express itself in action and in the physical language of games. It disliked that which puzzled it, and that which inspired a sense of discomfort, an irrational keenness that was bad form, an efficiency that was an offence. To most of these young men Hazzard was “The Squit,” and Hazzard knew it. That doorway framed faces of derision.

With Schiller’s Bacteriology under his arm he passed from the sunlight of the forecourt to the shadow of the vestibule. All the familiar faces were there, familiar but unfriendly. Young men lounged against the red walls of the corridor or stood in groups. As a rule they took no notice of Hazzard; no one spoke to him. Someone might say—“Hallo, here comes the ‘Squit,’ ” and they would leave him to worm his way through the crowd towards the door of the cloak-room.

The faces of his fellow-students were blurred to him, perhaps because he did not wish to focus them clearly, but hastened to get through the crowd and away from it. Usually he would take refuge beside Julian Moorhouse, who stood a little apart against the wall beside the mahogany door of the Board Room, looking aloof and a little bored. Moorhouse was about the only man at Bennet’s who treated Hazzard as a human being. Big and brown and fair, with old country stock and Winchester and Trinity behind him, he had not much in common with these rather raw young men who were so full of a cocksure physical complacency and to whom nothing was sacred, woman least of all. It is probable that Moorhouse despised most of them, and especially so for their despising of Hazzard. But to Christopher there were faces in the crowd that he both hated and feared: Bullard’s brick-red jowl with its little fiery eyes, and its nose like the trunk of an elephant, Parker Steel’s strenuous pallor and merciless green-grey eyes, and the goat-like and ironic head of Ardron, old Sir Dighton Fanshawe’s house-physician.

Hazzard pushed through, but on this particular day someone grabbed his arm.

“What about that sub., my lad?”

He found himself looking into Bullard’s eyes.

“You’re the only fellow who hasn’t paid up. What about it?”

That was Bullard’s way. A debonair and flashy animal, with the gross vitality of him showing in his mutton-fat black hair and glowing skin, he set a standard. He captained the hospital football team, and was the Bennet’s Club Secretary. He had haunches, and a mat of swarthy hair on his chest. A dominant young blackguard.

Hazzard, held by the arm, refused to flinch.

“I don’t play games. You know that, Bullard.”

“No reason why you shouldn’t fork out half a guinea though. We’re all Bennet’s men. What’s that?”

He tweaked the book from under Hazzard’s arm, and holding it as a man holds an offensive and purulent dressing, made the occasion public.

“A Bug Book. If you can buy books and walk about with ’em. I say—you chaps—don’t you agree——?”

Said Hazzard very quietly, “My book, please, Bullard.”

There was a moment of tension. They were in the arena together with youth looking on. And then Bullard began to laugh. Christopher was wearing that big bowler hat that added to his grotesqueness in the eyes of the conventional, and with one heavy downward squelch of his footballer’s hand Bullard crushed the hat over Hazzard’s eyes.

“You squit.”

Schiller’s Bacteriology, sent whirling over men’s heads, fell crumpled and with covers spread like a bird brought down, close to where Moorhouse was standing. And Moorhouse bent down and picked it up.

“Easy, you fellows.”

For quite a number of enthusiasts were refusing to allow Hazzard to emerge from his crushed hat. Half a dozen hands were busy, thrusting it down over his eyebrows, and Moorhouse intervened in his big, deliberate, rather loose-limbed way.

“Easy,—time. Here’s old Dighton coming.”

Removing Christopher’s hat for him he was aware of the stark humiliations of that sensitive face. Meanwhile Sir Dighton Fanshawe striding in, top-hatted and frock-coated, and looking like a self-conscious and sleek old eagle, found a suddenly decorous crowd and Ardron—the goat-like—waiting for him and very much his house-physician.