Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

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Ruth Avery’s window confronted other windows, and above them a stucco cornice, slates and a variety of chimney-pots, but in the window immediately opposite hers a young couple had a bright green window-box full of scarlet geraniums, and muslin curtains with pink bands. That the colours were all very wrong was as obvious to Ruth as the clashing of most things in life, but then the sounds that came from lovers’ windows could be intimate and disturbing. Lying in bed at night, or sitting at her open window wrapped in solitude behind a blue serge curtain, she would seem to feel the heart of Roper’s Row surging in at her window. She was very solitary, but she was not made for solitude, with her quick colour and her dusky eyes; but then she suffered from a bird’s wildness and timidity. And she was fastidious.

Roper’s Row sang and shouted and gossiped. The geraniums in the window-box opposite fired red shots at her as she sat alone with herself. Sometimes she could feel the little red blurs on the dark target of her consciousness, yearnings, restlessnesses, wounds. There would be little scufflings and laughter between those two lovers in the room over the way. A merry fellow, who sometimes played the banjo in a house along the Row, would burst into sudden song. She heard him now.

“When you’ve been all day in the street

There’s nothing to feel but feet,

Nothing to feel but feet.

When you’ve been all day in the street

You’re standing on plates of meat.”

Her eyelids flickered. She shuddered so easily at certain things, while understanding the inwardness of them. She knew what it was to have tired feet and an aching back. The office closed at one o’clock on Saturdays, and she—to amuse herself—had nothing to do but walk, up streets and down streets, round squares and into and out of parks. She walked because she felt pursued by restlessness, or to escape from the sense of her solitude in moving among other people.

The voice was singing another stanza.

“When you have got to the end of your life

There’s nothing to do but die,

Nothing to do but die,

When you come to the end of your life,

There’s nothing to do but die.”

What a philosophy!—and she had no philosophy, but only her youth and a feeling that she was coming to the end of life even before she had begun to begin it. She was an orphan; she had no relatives left to her save an aunt in Devon, and two cousins whom she had never seen. She had no margin, no prospects, and no adventure in view save the woman’s adventure with a man and a child. But she was shy of men; she was as shy of them as Christopher Hazzard was of women, but for different reasons. It was as though she divined the adventurous cad in the average man, his sex savagery, his tendernesses and pawings that were no more than an animal hunger that disappeared when it had gorged itself.

Men stared at her in the street. She was a comely thing, and she knew that a man would easily be come by, but there was that something in her that hung back. She was very sensitive to being stared at; she would flinch and hurry by with flickering eyelids, and a rush of blood to her cheeks. Once or twice in half-lit streets she had known panic and had fled.

Hurrying in on one of these occasions she had met Mrs. Bunce under the gas-jet in the passage.

“My, dearie, you do look flustered.”

“Someone followed me.”

“A gal has to get used to that, dearie. You learn to put a hard face on, and they’ll let you alone.”

Leaning out for a moment to look at life she saw Hazzard coming down Roper’s Row from the direction of Red Lion Square. She watched him. She found a touch of appeal in his limping walk; he worked so very hard; he seemed as lonely as she was. Withdrawing she stood up, and then going to her door, opened it an inch or so, and listened. She heard the lub-dup of his footsteps on the stairs.

She felt herself flushing. She heard him coming up the last flight, and opening her door wide she went out on to the landing. His head appeared, crowned by the felt hat, which, in spite of ironings and coaxings, showed the scars of persecution. She pretended to be surprised, but the pretence was very innocent.

“Oh, it’s you——”

He looked at her as he looked at all women, seeing in them strange, perilous creatures, forbidden to him by the celibacy of his unfailing purpose. He was the working ascetic. It is probable that—vaguely yet instinctively—he feared woman as he feared any hindrance or interference.

He said “Good evening” and turned towards his door.

Her eyelids flickered.

“I’m sorry. I expected someone about some typing. I thought——”

He had his hand on the door handle.

“I see.”

“You haven’t a book you could lend me, could you? I’ve nothing to read, and to-morrow’s Sunday.”

He looked surprised. He considered her a moment, and then went into his room, and scanned his bookshelf. He saw nothing but medical text-books. The only live book was the Bible his mother had given him.

He took it from the shelf and offered it to her.

“Nothing but this. After all—there are some good stories in it. You see—I haven’t time.”

With a queer little wincing smile she accepted Mary Hazzard’s Bible, and leaving him rather like a child that has been told to go and sit down and be good, she returned to her room and closed the door.

She resumed her seat by the window, and let the book open on her knees. It opened at the Book of Ruth. She read:

“And Ruth said—‘Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge—— ’ ”

At another window the gay fellow was singing his song:

“Nothing to do but die,

Nothing to do but die.

When you come to the end of your days

There’s nothing to do but die.”