Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 39

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There were certain things that Mary Hazzard felt moved to say to her son. She sat at his window, and watched the sunlight on the flickering leaves of the poplar tree, and thought of all the proud and patient years that were behind her, and all the pride and the patience that must needs be his. She clasped her dignity. She was able to see the dignity in her son, that “horrid little outsider,” the unusual child of an unusual mother. She had watched her world and pondered it, and always she had been posed by the problem of the Somehow Good and the Somehow Greedy. Her feeling was that virtue, virtue as the Greeks understood it, was there in the germ, and to that extent she was a fatalist. Seed is good, bad, and indifferent, and human seed is like other seed. The oaf, the fool, and the bully are foredoomed in the womb. She had realized the immense inertia of ignorance, and that prejudice and persecution are vociferous brats born of that very inertia. Men—as a rule—do not think cruelly, or plan brutishness; on the contrary they do not think, and brutishness plans itself. The human animal may like to lie in the straw, and let the saliva dribble and its eyes stare roundly at nothing; it resents the goad, the prick of the unusual, the impertinence of an inspiration. Inertia would set its hoof upon progress.

She had seen the feet of cattle stodging the mire in Melfont.

She drew a breath and held it.

“Show it me again, Kit.”

He was sitting with his crossed arms on the table, looking at the sky above all those chimney-stacks and cubes of brick. His face wore an expression that she had seen on it often when he was a child, something questioning, and a little plaintive. “Why do they hate me? What am I, or what is it that I do? Why——?” He had never asked her that question, but all her life she had been answering it.

He came out of his stare.

“The medal?”

“Yes.”

He had the leather case in his breast-pocket, and he drew it out and opened it and showed her the gold disc lying in its crimson bed. The medal bore an inscription, and Mary, taking the case from the hand of her son, read the words, “Victoria et pro victoria vita.” She pondered them, and asked Christopher their meaning.

“Victory, Mother, and for victory—life.”

She smiled to herself momentarily.

“Does it mean that a man should give his life?”

“Perhaps. Your life for your work, if people will let you.”

“Ah,” she said, “that’s for you to say, my dear. In the burden and the heat of the day cattle take to the shade of the trees or go down to laze in the water. But the reaper takes his scythe.”

She placed the case and the medal upon the table.

“That’s the provocation. It always has been and always will be. It isn’t always hate, my dear, and it isn’t always jealousy. The man in the sun with the scythe shames those who lie under the hedges. And I don’t suppose they call it or feel it shame. They invent other words and things to save their faces.”

Hazzard pushed his chair back, and rising, stood looking at the medal. Then he bent down and kissed his mother on the forehead.

“You’re the one soul I want to please. People chuck stones, and stones hurt, but they needn’t stop you. I’m not a dog.”

Her arm went round him.

“My dear, I know how difficult it is, not to feel bitter. Let the stones lie. There was a time when I used to pick them up and throw back. But that’s not worth while. I’ve learnt better. Indifference is the thing, making them feel what they are, jackals. You see, you and I, my dear, like to walk with ourselves, and ignorant people feel lost if they aren’t smelling each other’s sweat.”

Christopher’s head went up, for he heard footsteps on the stairs, and picking up the case he snapped the lid to and slipped it into his pocket. But the climber was Moorhouse come to ask them to go round to Bernard Street and have supper with him. He tweaked Hazzard’s ear, playfully and without patronage, and spoke to the mother.

“This young fellow has all our noses out of joint. How does Sir Christopher Hazzard sound? Rather well.”

Mrs. Mary looked deep.

“It might sound, Mr. Moorhouse, like Sir Dighton Fanshawe.”

And Moorhouse laughed.

“No, never. A lion stuffed with small talk. I can see myself down in the country, a conscientious sort of duffer, sending up people to see Sir Christopher Hazzard. And mind you stick them, my lad.”

Said the mother, “I do think money’s about the last thing Kit would remember.”

Moorhouse nodded at her.

“Yes, for the love of the thing. But then, Mrs. Hazzard, that’s the queerest part of it, people don’t seem to value the things they get for love.”