Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 28

Table of Contents

A quarter of a mile up the lane lay Prosser’s Farm. It was marked on the estate maps as “Beech Farm,” but it had come to be known as Prosser’s Farm because it was so full of Prosser; and the Prossers were pushing people. Mrs. Prosser had had a family of eleven, and all doing well—thank you, and Prosserish, as was to be expected. Their ages ranged from four-and-twenty to eight, and the first three Prossers, red, blue-eyed and truculent, had been the most merciless of Christopher’s persecutors.

Mrs. Prosser, large and pink and fat, with a snout, and a general air of infallibility and good-humoured insolence, would waddle past Mary Hazzard’s cottage most days of the week, and as a rule with a few small Prossers grunting and galloping near her like young porkers following the sow. She was a woman who sagged and bulged and quaked. She perspired, and seemed to enjoy it. She had a loud voice and used it generously, on her husband and her children and her neighbours. An open gate tempted her just as it tempted her animal prototype.

If the young Prossers had persecuted the son, Mrs. Prosser had been equally molestive to the mother.

“Well, Mary, how’s that boy of yours? I must say I’m sorry for a woman that has a child that’s sickly.”

Mrs. Prosser, leaning over a gate or filling a doorway, showed neighbourliness. She disliked Mary Hazzard, and the dislike was mutual, for it was common knowledge that Sam Prosser at the age of five-and-twenty had very much wanted Mary.

Sarah Prosser had not forgotten the romance, and all through the years she had—as it were—thrown a dish-clout at that tall, dark, silent woman. Also, she had thrown her children at Mary Hazzard, and her children’s healthiness, and their looks, and their vigour, and the oozing, prodigal and happy fecundity of her own fat person. What Prosser thought of it was another matter.

During these later years Mrs. Sarah had changed her chant.

“Well, Mary, is that boy of yours a doctor yet? It does seem a long business, don’t it? But—I do suppose it will be all right in the end—if his health holds out. London be such a—terrible—place, and he always was sickly.”

If Mary Hazzard had any original sin left in her, it was provoked by the Prosser woman. She wanted to see her life’s purpose planted securely and triumphantly above the wallowings of her neighbour. She asked to be spared the ordeal of being made to appear a fool before fools.

And Christopher had won the Angus Sandeman Prize, and she was going up to London to see him take it, and Mrs. Prosser knew. Sisbury Hill had the light of a smile on its green, still face.