Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 30

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Hazzard brought his mother from Paddington Station in a cab.

Always he had known his mother to be a very wonderful woman, but her uniqueness had belonged to Wiltshire and the greenness and solitudes of downland, woods and meadows, and in London she was a stranger, a tall, dark-eyed barbarian from the west. Christopher may have wondered how she and London would meet, but for the moment of her getting into the four-wheeler he felt her to be what she was, a notable and natural gentlewoman who took to the “growler” as to a state coach, and to whom London was nothing more than a conglomeration of houses and people. She wore black, and a black low-crowned hat instead of a bonnet, and in her lap lay a sheaf of purple autumn asters and white and yellow dahlias. She sat erect, but without any suggestion of stiffness, and looked at her leisure out of the cab’s windows.

There was nothing in her dark, still eyes that exclaimed, “So—this is London.” She was as much herself as on the crown of Sisbury Hill, gravely regarding life, and thinking it over, well poised within herself, and not hurrying to pay homage to circumstance. So might Boadicea have driven through Camulodunum in her chariot.

She said, “Did it not strike you, Kit, at first—as being very strange?”

“What, Mother?”

“All these houses. And people choosing to be like a swarm of bees.”

He admitted that in the beginning he had found London rather amazing, marvellous, and not a little terrifying. He was aware of her gazing at the shops and the people and the traffic with an impartial interest, as though she had arrived from Mars. Her handsome face, with its fine white skin, seemed—somehow—to make London look dim and smeary.

“The marvel to me, Kit, is that people should choose all this.”

He let his hand rest on one of her knees as he had done when he was a very small boy being read to.

“You spoke of swarming bees, Mother. There’s the queen bee.”

She smiled.

“The Golden Bee, my dear. Oh, yes, I understand. Most insects and men love crowds. But to me——”

He divined her meaning, that to her London was a vast foolishness, though she grasped the blind urges of its necessity. It was a huge and urbanized Mrs. Prosser. And he sat and absorbed this new impression of his mother as a woman who had stepped down off Sisbury Hill, but who, retaining the attitude of Sisbury, could find London no higher than her knees. She overlooked St. Paul’s. She remained as notable a woman to Christopher the man as she had been to Christopher the child.

He said, “You’ll find Roper’s Row rather small and narrow, Mother.”

She turned to him suddenly with her particular smile.

“It’s the inside of things, my dear. It’s what you’ve done there—for both of us.”

Vehicles could not traverse Roper’s Row, and the cab stopped in Lamb’s Conduit Street, and Christopher got out and paid and tipped the cabman, and laid hold of his mother’s black bag.

She smiled at him.

“Eggs, my dear.”

“I’ll be careful.”

She descended, carrying her flowers, and together they walked up Roper’s Row, and to Christopher the Row became both narrower and yet more spacious. His mother was half a head taller than most London women; she held herself very straight; she moved with an air of quiet and gentle loftiness. She did not stare, but was stared at and was not troubled by it. And in walking up Roper’s Row he realized his mother as his mother, a woman of many memories, a notable and beloved figure. He was as proud of her as a child.

Some instinct made Mary Hazzard enter No. 7 by way of the shop. She had a peculiar flair for the rightness of things. She found Mrs. Bunce behind the counter.

“Good morning. You are Mrs. Bunce. I am Mrs. Hazzard.”

With the flowers against the bosom of her black dress she held out a hand, and Mrs. Bunce’s spectacles glimmered. Unconsciously she wiped her hand on her apron.

“Glad to see you, ma’am. I’m sure I hope you’ll be comfortable. Anything we can do—we will do.”

As Mrs. Bunce said later to Phelia, “Bless me—if she didn’t give me a kind of shock. If the Queen had walked in I couldn’t ’ave felt more so-so. You wouldn’t ’ave expected a little chap to ’ave a mother like that. Now, would you? I ask you?”