Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 27

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There were evenings when Mary Hazzard locked her cottage door, and following the path or sheep-track that left the lane where a spring emptied itself into a stone trough, she would climb Sisbury Hill. Time was when she had mounted the turf slope like a girl, without a pause, and almost without the hurrying of her breath, but those days were long ago. Now she would pause three or four times during the ascent, and stand and gaze above the valley where all her life had been passed—day in—day out—like the river itself flowing past the poplars, the willows and the orchards. The scene had a beautiful sameness. She could look at things that were near and at things that were far. She could tell where there had been the yellowness of buttercups, or the young gold of the Lombardy poplars in the spring, or the lushing up of the grasses, and the fleckings of colour—the flowers in the cottage gardens. She did not hasten, for life was growing short. Reaching the green crown of Sisbury where the wind came swiftly out of the west, and the sky had a clouded spaciousness, she would take her stand by the solitary stone set upright in the turf.

She called it Kit’s stone. For it had been a favourite haunt of Christopher’s where he could lie in the grass with a book, solitary and secure, like a hill-man able to look down upon possible enemies. Often and often from the western window of her cottage she had watched that little lone figure ascending or descending the great green hill. It was a heritage still sacred to the solitary and the few, and to those uncommon people who do not mix with the crowd, and who escape instinctively to a wood or a hill-top.

Usually it was about the hour of sunset when Mary Hazzard climbed Sisbury. With the setting sun behind her, if the evening happened to be clear, and with the menhir throwing a long shadow, she would lean against the stone and look towards the east. That is to say, she looked towards London and her son. Standing on that high hill she had a feeling that distance was obliterated, and that she was with Christopher and he with her.

For she was a woman of one love and no illusions. In her long and rather solitary life she had become rather like a mirror in which life and its affairs were reflected just as they were. She reflected both mystery and make-believe, for the things as they are are only the things as we see them, and most of man’s struttings are against a surface that is cracked and joggled. Ever as a tall, dark, grave-eyed girl Mary Hazzard had accepted solitude, finding that which seemed to be herself reflected in it.

But on Sisbury Hill she pondered other matters while feeling conscious of the yonderness of her son. To begin with there was the strangeness of growing old, while Sisbury Hill and Kit’s Stone and the Avon and the beech woods across the valley remained strangely the same. And you yourself were the same, yet different. You were girl and mother, child and old woman. Finding nature so changeless and eternally renewed, you were surprised at your own wrinkles and your faltering heart, for your window of the senses seemed the same window. Also there were days when you felt like a child of seven or a girl of seventeen, and your years were sixty. Or you warmed your hands at the fire and wondered at death.

Yet there comes that season of acceptance, and it had come to Kit’s mother. She had her secret, even as he had his. She knew that she had not very long to live, and yet she would climb slowly to the top of Sisbury because Sisbury was her hill of acceptance, a high place from which she could look upon what had been and what was and what might be. She had been spared that phase of old age in which life is nothing but a stream of irritations, of frettings against the failings of the flesh, of anger against all change—because change is youth. She had never been an irritable woman.

So, the last phase was to her like Sisbury. She liked it sun-steeped, with a soft breeze blowing, but when two days out of three were grey and green and sad she accepted them, for life is like that, especially in northern lands. Little bursts of sunlight breaking through the wet, green, clouded sadness, and playing for a moment, and disappearing. She had done what she could, and now she was an old woman on a hill-top watching youth in the valley.

Yet, she knew her son as she knew the valley.

Almost she could follow his path in its past and in its future.

He had had so many obstacles to surmount, and with that lame leg of his.

She had watched him climbing.

She knew that she wanted to go on living until it was known in this Wiltshire valley that her son had done that which he had set out to do.

Dr. Christopher Hazzard.

But after that——? There was always an afterwards, even perhaps when you died. She had Christopher’s afterwards very much before her, for on Sisbury she was like a woman who was fey, and the afterwards—as she saw it for her son—filled her with peculiar compassion. Always he would be very much alone, for he was flesh of her flesh, and spirit of her spirit. He would have the world more against him than with him, for the world was but Melfont village enlarged. His passion was work, and the world is prejudiced against the aloof and passionate worker.

He would have such struggles, and no longer would she be a live presence in his life, and yet in a strange way she was glad.

She was one of those women who foresaw old age and decrepitude as a burden to others, a burden that might tenderly be borne, but which remained a burden. She would leave her son a hundred odd pounds and that little old cottage, and a memory.

Moreover she saw in Kit more than a mere country practitioner, a little, kindly, pottering, conventional creature going a daily round. She saw him as the searcher and the creator, and a searcher is not made for the bearing of burdens. She saw him very much alone, absorbed, gazing intently at the infinite significance of the very little, using those clever hands of his. She believed—somehow—that her son would be a great man, but she doubted whether he would be a very happy one.

But what was happiness, especially to a man? Surely it lay in striving, searching, and accomplishing?