Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 33
II
ОглавлениеAfterwards they sat at Ruth’s window and talked, for Miss Bunce would arrive to clear away the tea-things, and Ophelia’s presence in a room was as obvious as her breathing. It suggested a stuffy, flurried, voluble upbringing, things done haphazard and in a hurry, tonsils and adenoids unattended to. So much of life is like that.
Roper’s Row had arrived at that blessed hour when the work of the day was either finished or about to be finished, and when it became jocund and garrulous at doorways and windows. The young husband across the way had returned, and there were little squeals and giggles behind the red geraniums. Christopher had noticed how glum and silent the Row was between six and eight o’clock in the morning, heavily oppressed by the business of going to work, and how between six and eight in the evening it became debonair and loquacious and often argumentative.
“Just like a lot of starlings,” said his mother.
Kit reminded her that birds sang at daybreak, but that you never heard Roper’s Row arising and saluting the dawn with song. And she looked wise, and had her answer ready.
“Man’s a lazy creature in the main, my dear. He has to have hunger and a woman and children at the back of him.”
“Always?”
Her eyes met his, and Kit’s eyes were teasing.
“Oh, not you. There are the exceptions. Your father was one of them. When he had a job to do he always went to it whistling. He was just as inquisitive as a child, always contriving to do things differently. Work was his play, and you’re like him.”
“It’s the same at the hospital. Most of the men are casual. And they don’t like you to be too keen.”
Mary Hazzard gave her son one of her deep glances. So—he had found that out, just as his father had discovered it before the white death had claimed him. And there was another thing that—doubtless—Kit would discover: the amazing self-complacency of the crowd, and the way the crowd man stands with his stupid hands in his pockets and allows his opinions to be heard on this fellow and that, for in casually praising or criticizing some man who does some particular thing supremely well the crowd man feels that he has put the expert fellow in his proper place. The doing of the supremely difficult things is for the devoted few.
“Jealousy,” said Mary Hazzard. “They used to call their god a jealous god. Pull that flower, my dear, and put it in your buttonhole.”
Her eyes looked at the red geraniums in the window-box across the way, but her inward gaze went far beyond the window and those flowers. Again she was visualizing the afterwards, Kit’s quest of the Red Flower which all men covet, that flower of bitter sweetness. For Mary Hazzard had read her Pilgrim’s Progress many times, and in considering Kit’s pilgrimage she beheld Giant Prejudice in place of Giant Despair, and the Slough of the Conventions where the burning hearts of little beggar-boys are cooled and smothered. She saw her son passing all the tests, collecting prizes and qualifications, becoming wholly and completely Dr. Hazzard,—but how much doctoring would the world allow him?
She asked Christopher a question.
“When you are qualified, my dear, what then?”
He did not answer her at once.
“That may depend. I want to go on. I want to go on exploring. I don’t want to be one of the fellows who just swallow what other men tell them.”
Her deep eyes lit up.
“You’re just like your father. Don’t be frightened of faces, my dear.”
From that other window along the Row came the voice of the gaillard soul who sang
“Nothing to do but die, nothing to do but die.
When you’ve come to the end of your days
There’s nothing to do but die.”