Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 32

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Christopher preceded his mother up the stairs like a chamberlain conducting a great lady to her lodging. He took the last flight quickly, with a swifter beat of heart, for Ophelia had closed both doors, and the landing was very dark when the doors were shut. Hazzard threw open both doors, and met his mother as she reached the last few steps.

She paused there, one hand on the rail. She was unused to such stairs, and her heart was not what it had been, and these London stairs were more severe than Sisbury Hill. She was feeling distressed, but she managed to hide her distress, and her pallor was a smiling mask.

“I’m not quite so young as I was, Kit.”

She completed the climbing of her calvary, and crossing to the open doorway of her son’s room, stood there gazing. She had not missed his look of expectancy, and she understood it, though she did not know that Christopher had dressed his stage to satisfy a mutual pride. She saw the room, neat and well furnished, and the wide and open window and, framed by it, a pleasant space enclosed by walls of brown-black brick, and the various and quaint chimneys, and a stretch of blue sky. The big and solitary poplar was fluttering its leaves and making a cool grey green flickering.

She said, “Why—how good, my dear. That window. And the air.”

His sensitive face was flushed.

“Yes, it’s a fine window. I sit there and work. The light is just right.”

She seemed to touch and stroke the room and its objects with the calm gentleness of her glances.

“You’ve got such nice furniture. I’ve often sat and dreamed, my dear.”

He was happy.

“Now, I’ll show you your room. Perhaps you would like to rest a little.”

In Ruth’s room Mary Hazzard found the flowers that Christopher had bought that morning in Covent Garden, arranged in a china vase borrowed from the Bunces. He had placed her bag on a chair by the bed, and she sat down on the bed and removed her hat and saw herself reflected in Ruth’s mirror. The room was hers for the occasion, and she felt it to be hers and wholly hers until she got up to unpack her bag, and opened the cupboard behind the door.

A dress hung there, the plain black frock which Ruth wore on her working days, and some impulse made Mary Hazzard take it from the hook and hold it in her hands. It was a simple thing with blouse and skirt all in one piece and rather like a smock, the cuffs slightly frayed and whitened. An ink stain showed on one sleeve. And while holding the dress in her hands Mary Hazzard was clairvoyant. The dress belonged to a young woman, for she seemed to feel the thread of youth in it, and to react to some emanation that was like the faint perfume of a dark flower.

She returned the dress to its place and closed the cupboard door. She knew that she did not wish to use the cupboard, for it suggested the presence of that other woman—whoever she might be. But even when Mary Hazzard closed the door the room had ceased to be impersonal. It was both hers and not hers, and while she moved about it, unpacking and putting away her few simple belongings, she would keep glancing about her as though expecting to find other signs of Ruth Avery.

It was not suspicion, but a something far more subtle. It resembled the workings of an additional sense, a vague awareness of other presences and happenings. It would come and go. She had experienced it often as a child. It was very strongly with her at times on Sisbury Hill and when she was thinking of her son. Almost it was prophetic. She felt Kit’s future. She felt—in the same way—that she had not very long to live.

When she had put her belongings in order she drew Ruth’s chair to the window, and with the curtains half drawn sat in the very place where Ruth was accustomed to sit. Her tiredness had passed. The room had a gentleness. She seemed to feel that black dress hanging in the cupboard like a soft and innocent shadow. She heard the voices in the Row, and the murmur of the traffic, even her son’s movements in the room across the landing. Always he had been a child of strange and sensitive understanding, spirit of her spirit and flesh of her flesh; he had left her alone for a while, for he understood that aloneness, and its necessity, even in the midst of life’s intimacies.

Presently she heard his door open. He came across the landing and knocked.

“Mother.”

She called him in.

“I’m quite rested now.”

“Have you everything you want?”

“Everything. I hope I’m not turning anybody out—Mrs. Bunce’s girl?”

“Oh, no. Miss Avery is away on holiday. It was rather lucky. Mrs. Bunce let me have the room.”

“And who is Miss Avery?”

“Oh, Miss Avery. She works in an office somewhere in the City. A typist. Quite a nice little girl, and quiet, though her machine is rather a nuisance when she is working late.”

“Interferes with your reading?”

“Sometimes. But it might be much worse.”

Obviously, Miss Avery was just Miss Avery to Christopher, and his mother gathered that his casualness was not assumed. He was not interested in the owner of the black frock. He was still very much of a child in his attitude towards women, and it was possible that he might remain so, and Mary Hazzard was not sorry, for no mother welcomes the coming of the other woman, and to Mary her son was so much more than the young male thing. Believing—as she did—that she had not very long to live, she had no wish to share her son with some young girl. All that might happen afterwards, when her eyes were closed in the great sleep, though her feeling about it was that Kit might be one of those workers who are best left untrammelled by marriage.

For she was wise as to his nature. She saw in him a man-child who would need the mother in woman more than the sex-mate, some gentle and sensitive creature whose egotism would not resent his preoccupations, a woman who could watch and wait and listen, and such women are exceptional. In fact his proper mate, if he had one, would be a being somewhat like himself, shy and sensitive, unshaken by sex storms, sharing him without making a passion of his possessiveness.

For there would be the afterwards. Some other woman—if she appeared upon his earth—would be the afterwards, and yet to Mary Hazzard’s inspired love her son’s afterwards implied so much more than sex. She believed that he would attain to fame, the fame that is worth while. He would do things, beautiful, helpful, healing things, not the things that bring notoriety and riches.

Meanwhile, he was waiting for her to go into that other room, his room, and a little cheerful clinking of crockery made itself heard from the stairs. Miss Ophelia Bunce was ascending with the tea-tray, wearing her Sabbath blouse, and her curls unpapered.

“Tea, Mother.”

They crossed to Christopher’s room where Phelia was all eyes and heavy breathing. She stared at Christopher’s mother as at something strange and unexpected from the country.

“Will you be pouring out?”

Mary Hazzard smiled at her, and appeared to absorb the whole of Ophelia at one glance.

“Yes, I shall be pouring out.”