Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 3
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The girl was tempted by the open door. It was unusual for Hazzard to leave his door open. His habit was to shut it quietly and carefully, for like many other doors in Roper’s Row it had seen better days, and was suffering from decrepitude, strained hinges and a stammering lock. Hazzard knew the habits of that door. Unless you were firm with it and made sure that the catch had caught, the door would swing slowly back into the room, uttering a little creaking moan. It was a faithless, treasonable door. It was ready to betray you and your secrets, and Hazzard had many reasons for wishing to keep the door closed.
Ruth Avery was tempted. She had occupied the upper floor front of No. 7 Roper’s Row for less than a month, but the occupant of the back room was as secretive as his door. She heard him go up and down the stairs; he had a lame leg and a walk that, with its broken rhythm, resembled the sounds of the human heart as heard by the doctor’s ear—“Lub-dup, lub-dup.” She had met him once on the stairs, a little, dark, pale young man with a big head and defiant hair, and a something in his eyes. He had stood aside to let her pass. He had neither looked at her nor spoken to her. He had that air of unfriendliness which is a man’s defence against the unfriendliness of other people.
She thought—“I oughtn’t to—but I want to,” and being a woman she tiptoed across the worn linoleum and looked in, for the room was empty. It had furniture of a sort, but furniture that seemed to emphasize the room’s air of emptiness. There was an iron bedstead covered with a pink cotton quilt, a table by the window that had once been painted black, and a wash-hand-stand against a wall that had once been a liverish yellow. She saw a strip of red matting, two sugar-boxes, one on top of the other, with their lids converted into doors. She saw a deal shelf hung by a cradle of string, and lined with shabby books. She saw two bedroom chairs, and the cane seat of one of them suggested that a foot had been thrust through it. There was a hanging cupboard behind the door, but the door hid it from her eyes.
Two objects in the room arrested her attention: a white marmalade pot full of red roses on the black table, and a violin hanging from a nail driven into the wall. She was surprised to see the roses, for roses cost money in London. Also she had not expected to see a violin. She had never heard a violin being played in that back room, and she would have preferred the sound of it to the chattering music of her typewriter. But the roses enchanted her; she saw them against the blue-grey murk of a slate roof; she had been born and bred in the country, but she had not loved flowers then as she loved them now. She went quickly into the room, and taking the white jar in her two hands, put her mouth to one of the flowers, and inhaled the perfume.
Memories rushed to her. Surely these were cottage roses, country flowers, not city madames? Roses, and hay, and the smell of bean fields, and lilac and white May, and the scent of the bluebells in the beechwoods! And then she nearly dropped the jar, realizing that someone was standing behind her.
“Oh,—I’m so sorry, your door was open, and I happened to see the roses.”
She replaced the pot on the table, and with tremulous, sensitive lips, and a flickering of her lashes, made her confession.
“It was awfully wrong of me, but I couldn’t resist.”
He was looking at her with those curious, still, dark eyes of his. She noticed that he was in his socks, grey socks. She wondered why.
“All right. I had gone down to get the Bunce girl to take my boots to be mended. You can have the flowers—if you like——”
He was abrupt, casual. His very confession concerning his boots was wilful and challenging. He had only one pair of boots, and she might just as well know it. But she, a little frightened, and very conscious of his dour, fixed stare, felt that life—somehow—was piteous and deplorable.
“Really, I couldn’t.”
He limped round her and across the room, picked up the white pot, and held it out with a thrust of the arm. It was as though he pushed the flowers at her, while saying—“Take them, get out and go. I’m busy.”
“All right. My mother sent them. They’ll last a day or two. But you might return the pot.”
She took the white jar in her hands, and with a half-protesting look at him, got herself out on to the narrow landing. She was still standing there when he closed his door.
II
Christopher Hazzard took off his coat. It was a warm June evening, but he removed his coat because clothes were precious, and because he was about to prepare the meal that contrived to be both tea and supper. Opening the deal doors of the two sugar-boxes he took out an oil-stove, a kettle, half a loaf of bread and a wedge of Dutch cheese, a white milk-jug, two blue plates, a brown teapot, and a spoon and a knife with a black handle. He arranged them on the table. The paraffin stove was kept scrupulously clean, otherwise the smell of those Wiltshire roses would not have lingered. His arranging of the meal was deft, precise, almost meticulous, as though it was part of his self-discipline to make the most of the little that he had.
There were footsteps on the stairs, and someone knocked.
“Hallo.”
“Ol’ Bibs saith he wanth sixpunth more.”
“Why? Last time.”
“A patch or suthing.”
“All right.”
The Bunce girl opened the door. She was seventeen, sallow, colourless as to hair and lips, with the open mouth and pinched nostrils of a child whose throat had never been attended to. Hazzard was filling the tin kettle, and the girl watched him with pale, slate-coloured eyes that seemed to droop from under the flaccid upper lids. Hazzard’s dark and aggressive head was outlined against the sky. His head and his dexterous, strong hands were the only impressive things about him. He was a little fellow, narrow shouldered, fragile, and lame.
“Want sixpence, do you?”
“Yeth, Mr. Hathard.”
Putting the tin kettle on the stove, and returning the ewer to its basin, he felt in a trouser pocket and produced some coppers.
“Can’t get on without boots, Phelia.”
She blinked her heavy eyes at him.
“The kettle’s boilin’ downthstairs. If you like——”
He was counting out pennies and halfpennies, and he did not look at her when he answered.
“Thanks, Phelia. I’m an independent little brute. Got to be somehow. There you are. Better get a receipt from Old Bibs. Don’t trust a soul in this world.”
“Lor’, Mr. Hathard—we ain’t all thieves.”
He gave her a quick and half-ironic stare.
“That’s so. Thank you.”
He was lighting the oil-stove when the Bunce girl closed the door, and her closing of it was gradual, the lingering effacement of a figure that provoked her young curiosity. For Hazzard was an oddity in Roper’s Row, though there were other oddities, clean and unclean, obscure, shabby, secret people. They might have been divided into those who had not quite enough to eat, and those who drank too much. In Roper’s Row the penny was a coin of some significance. Hazzard paid three and sixpence a week for that top-floor back room, and Ophelia Bunce happened to know that he “paid reg’lar.” The room had no fireplace, or rather the fireplace had been boarded up, but then Hazzard never indulged in a fire. In winter he sat and read in his overcoat. His feet got stone cold, but that was to be expected when you were using your brain.
His view from the upper window of No. 7 had a circumscribed variousness, and a bizarre beauty of its own, perhaps because there was so much curious detail in it, and Hazzard the medical student was learning to let no details elude him. He looked out on the backs of three other rows of houses all of the same soft sootiness, and upon a collection of chimney-stacks and chimney-pots, back-yards, and spaces that were called gardens. In one of these gardens a black poplar had grown and flourished; its restless, flickering leaves gave a sense of green movement in the midst of all that blackened brickwork, and Hazzard liked to watch the flicker of the leaves. It was a change from looking at crooked chimney-stacks and comparing them to strumous children with curvature of the spine.
When the meal was over he washed up, using an old white slop-pail as a sink. He dried everything and put it away, gave the stove a wipe with a rag, and closed the doors of his sugar-box cupboards. He did not smoke, because he could not afford tobacco, nor was he to be pitied because there is no pain in doing without that which you have never enjoyed. Hazzard’s joy was his work; he lived for it and starved for it, and was despised and disliked for it by those middle-class young men who loved their own bodies. For, in his own way, and at that time of his life, Hazzard had all the climber’s happiness.
Getting down a book from the shelf and taking a notebook from the table drawer he set to work. He could read for hours on end. He had an extraordinary memory, probably because he remembered with passion. At “Bennet’s” he was loathed, because he was such a scrub and so abominably efficient, and played no games and was so obviously a child of the people. He knew that he was loathed.
His work was soundless. Not so the work on the other side of the landing. The click-click of Ruth Avery’s typewriter obtruded itself upon his consciousness. She was a typist somewhere in the City, and added to her income by doing odd work in the evenings when it happened to come her way. Hazzard had noticed the card hung up in the window of Mrs. Bunce’s newspaper shop: “Miss Avery. Typing done.”
He sat and listened. The sound did not disturb him either mentally or emotionally. And presently the clicking of the keys and the ping of the bell ceased. He heard her door open. She went down the stairs; she was going out.
He did not trouble to wonder whether she had any object. He went on reading. He could not go out on that particular evening because his boots were being repaired.
