Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4
ОглавлениеIII
Naturally, Christopher Hazzard had no sense of the romantic, but he was very much alive to beauty. A Wiltshire boy from one of those green valleys where the Avon winds among the chalk hills, he had come to know as a child the wildness and the loneliness and the mystery of great spaces. For he had been a lonely child, and a persecuted child, a cripple, one of those sensitive creatures who are designed to be hunted by little round-headed savages.
Mary Hazzard—his mother—had kept a small general shop at Melfont, and to Christopher his mother was all that the rest of the world was not. She was very old now, and the shop had passed into other hands, and Mary Hazzard had retired into a little white cottage with a thatched roof at the southern end of Melfont village, with the feet of its garden in the Avon, and its western windows looking up towards the high pastures. One of those dark, grave, silent women, her very black hair still retained its colour, and her skin had a fine whiteness. The mother of a lame and a delicate child she had been more than a mother to him in the flesh. She had known him to come back to her with anguish and shame, breathing fast and hard, afraid but fighting to conceal his fear.
She had heard the voices of other children hounding him to the very gate of his home.
“Cowardy—cowardy custard——”
“Hobbledy—hobbledy—— Look at his boot.”
For Christopher was unusual, and to be unusual is to arouse the mistrust and the dislike of the crowd, be the members of it men or children. Also, Mary Hazzard was unusual, and that is perhaps why she understood her son. Her pride—with flashing eyes—had taken its stand behind his. Very early she had realized him as something unusual, partly because of his lame leg, but chiefly because of his unlame mind. He had not been made for the plough-lands or the smithy or the carpenter’s bench, nor had she seen him behind the counter of a village shop. There was more in Christopher than that, and so she put penny to penny, and sent him to school, while earning for herself the reputation of being a skinflint. She was unpopular, because she had a dark reserve, and did not gossip, and was above herself according to her neighbours.
“Them Hazzards.”
Yes, them Hazzards, mother and son, were peculiar people, but Mary knew her world, and how few people there are in it who really matter to you, and that the great mistake is to think that everyone matters. Christopher went to school; he carried off prizes; his mother kept them on a shelf in her bedroom. He was a dark child, reserved and silent and watchful in the face of the world, but to his mother he was otherwise. He was solitary, but not with her. On his holidays it had been his pleasure to go up to the hills with the shepherds, or to watch birds, or to take a book and lie in the shade of one of the old grey stones of the Melfont cromlech. Always, those days, he had been reading or watching things. He had curious, deep eyes, both very still and very bright.
There had been a very frank understanding between mother and son.
“Kit, what I’m asking is that you’ll never make me look a fool.”
“That’s a promise, mother.”
Their two prides held hands. Each inspired and rallied the other. His mother had defied the world in defying the littleness of Melfont. “She thinks she’s going to make a gentleman of him, does she!”—“I do hear he’s for being a doctor?” Cluckings, and grimaces, and rustic irony, but Christopher, who had been persecuted in his younger days, understood his mother’s pride. She did not wish to be made to look a fool, and to have her neighbours kindly grinning in her shop. And Christopher, with the teeth of his soul well set, had promised himself and her that failure should not come back to roost in Melfont.
IV
Mary Hazzard’s effort had culminated in the paying of her son’s hospital fees, and not only had she paid these fees, but she had managed to allow him ten shillings a week. Ten dear, bitter, blood-stained shillings, but she was an old woman now and could do no more. For it takes five years to make the very beginnings of a doctor, and the boy had to eat and sleep, and text-books cost money, and the world expects a clean collar.
Christopher would think of these things as he sat at his window. During the last year he had become aware of his mother as a woman grown suddenly very old and white of skin; her eyes were the same as ever, but when he looked at her face he felt strange pangs and the stirrings of a fierce compassion. It seemed to him that like the mythical pelican she had fed him upon her life blood. He did not know, but he may have suspected that she had gone short of food for years, and now that the shop and its goodwill were sold she had both less and more to give. If it was a case of Christopher against the world, it was also the case of a young man inspired by a double purpose. He could say to himself, “When I’m qualified, when I can make money, it will be my turn.”
