Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 22

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Christopher, with three pounds ten shillings in his pocket, hesitated before an outfitter’s shop window. The hour was twenty minutes to nine, and he was due to attend a lecture on Pathology at nine, and his need was a new hat.

In this Holborn window he saw top-hats and bowler hats and Trilby hats priced at various figures, and also a cap or two. The caps were of a red and white or black and white check pattern and suggested “horsiness.” But they suggested to Christopher other considerations, possible economies and an insurance against horse-play.

He entered the shop and inquired for caps. A young man who had the appearance of having slept badly, gave Christopher a moment’s sleepy consideration before pulling out a drawer and displaying a multitude of caps of the chessboard pattern.

“Nice style, sir.”

“I’d prefer something quieter.”

The shopman closed the drawer and opened another in which were caps of various shades of depressed greyness. Each had a grey button on the crown. They were headgear of an inferior order.

“How do you fancy these, sir?”

Hazzard tried on one, and it sat on his big head rather like a muffin.

“Something larger.”

“What sized hat, sir?”

“Seven and a half.”

The shopman rummaged among the caps, and finding one of sufficient largeness offered it to Hazzard.

“There is a mirror behind you, sir.”

Hazzard, having pulled the peak well down and felt that the thing covered his obstreperous hair, shirked the mirror.

“This fits. How much?”

“Two and elevenpence, sir.”

“I’ll take it.”

But in turning to walk out of the shop he saw himself reflected in the mirror, and that grey cap pulled down tightly over an excrescence that was known in those days as a tuft. He looked like a schoolboy. He was aware of the insignificance of his own reflection, of its grotesqueness. The outfitter’s mirror was like the face of “Bennet’s,” throwing back at him an ironical grin.

He walked out of the shop the victim of a sudden, horrible self-consciousness. He felt a sinking of the stomach, and all because of an absurd cloth cap. But the cap was symbolical. It was the lid of his unfortunate physical fate, or a kind of grotesque button perched upon the pate of his destiny. It provoked memories, and a particular memory of a grey, soft hat that his mother had bought him in Salisbury, and had, with a misdirected tenderness, sent him wearing it to Melfont Sunday school. That hat had ended the Sabbath with contumely and tears in the waters of the Wiltshire Avon.

Hazzard found himself walking up Holborn in the direction of New Oxford Street. His legs were taking him towards “Bennet’s,” and an ordeal that suddenly enlarged itself, and took to itself the faces of Bullard and of Soames. He knew that half the hospital would be agog. Even the nurses would have heard of that magnificent rag, of that adventure purpled with plums. Sometimes he had met half a dozen of these young women walking arm in arm along a corridor, full of suppressed laughter and feminine whisperings, and always he had felt that to them he was not quite a man. His soul burned. He walked on, but more slowly. Again he was the sensitive, shrinking child, inwardly afraid, shaking at the knees, dreading loud voices and the little savage shouts. “There he is! There’s Dotty!” He burned. The humiliations and persecutions of years seemed to descend upon him in the London sunlight. The morning was all glare. He became a creature of sudden, pitiable childishness.

Almost he was moved to utter that old, instinctive cry, “Mother, mother!”

But only once or twice in his life had Christopher suffered that cry to escape from his lips. Even as a child he had divined its cowardice, its power to hurt and to wound the one creature to whom his little legs had carried him. Often he had raced home, white and breathless but silent, small hands clenched, that wailing cry bitten through and smothered.

On the broad pavement at the end of Tottenham Court Road a flower-seller sat behind her basket of flowers, and Hazzard’s courage carried him just as far as the basket of flowers. Anger and bitterness and the hatred that reacts to hate will carry a man far, and a part of his inspiration is the confounding of his enemies. Hazzard could hate, but on this morning the force of his hatred failed him. He felt so utterly alone, so weak, so obscure.