Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 40

Table of Contents

Mary Hazzard saw little of the sights of London. She asked to be taken to Westminster, and she saw the Abbey and Whitehall, and the Life Guards in scarlet and silver on their black horses, and the window of the Inigo Jones Banqueting Hall from which the Martyr King stepped to his death. Charles I was one of Mary Hazzard’s great men, a figure passionately loved and passionately hated, extolled and lied about, a gentleman dragged down and trampled upon by brewers and tradesmen. Kit’s mother was all for the gentleman, and that was why she fell to Julian Moorhouse. Gentle is as gentle does, and much is allowed to a lad with manners and good looks.

Christopher saw his mother off from Paddington on a serene autumn evening. She stood in the doorway of the third-class carriage, tall and dark and with that dignity which is discovered in some peasant women and great ladies. The adventure was at an end; she had more than a feeling that she and London would not meet again; the sun would be setting behind Sisbury Hill.

She looked at her son.

“I have had two good days, Christopher.”

Hazzard saw her almost as a figure in a picture, a woman—dear and splendid—looking down out of memory, and memorable in mien and manner. The guard came to close the door, and Mary Hazzard drew back, and then moved forward again to rest her hands on the lowered window.

“Good-bye, my son.”

She bent down to kiss him. It was a benediction in which compassion and pride were mingled.

“You will be coming down soon.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t leave it too long. The winter’s coming, and I’m not so young as I was.”

His face was the face of a child.

“I’ll have you with me years yet. Remember what Moorhouse said.”

The whistle blew, and as the train moved off she stretched out a hand and touched his shoulder.

Hazzard was both sad and happy. He had worn the face of a child during the parting with his mother, and his mood was that of a child when he set out to walk back to Roper’s Row. He had the sunset behind him, and its strange evanescent brilliance filling the mundane streets with an illusion of softness and beauty. Sooty bricks made patterns of gold. And Hazzard’s youth looked upwards out of that world of ordered confusion, that dark pool in which all that was unhopeful in man spurned as it pleased. To him on that October evening the streets were not the “bitter streets” of Euripides, but threads in a great web, mysterious, tremulous with life’s effort. He walked towards the impending night, and limped into its great cave with its loops and ladders of light, and saw dim faces float past, and was conscious of an urge and a restlessness. His child’s mood broadened into the man’s. He asked questions, but as a man asks them. How much of life was blind impulse? Were not most of these mannerless people like the cells of the body, dimly fulfilling a function, carrying with them a little vague consciousness, but no knowledge of the why and whither? How many of these cell-souls could look a week or a month or a year ahead? The riddle of the Sphinx! Sex cell crying out for sex cell, stomach cell flushing with its juice the muscle fibres of a sheep, nerve cell jarred and reacting. London seemed to him to be just a mass of human cells, a mosaic of protoplasmic happenings, while he—— Yes, the thing was to be a brain, a purpose, a plan. Consciousness was the thing, consciousness and yet more consciousness.

When he reached Red Lion Square darkness had been drawn across the tops of the plane trees. Entering Roper’s Row he became aware of a group of figures outside No. 7, bunched about the helmet of a police constable, and from this group a voluble voice emerged. It was the voice of Mrs. Bunce, angry and protesting. “I don’t call it fun. No, sir, it’s not my idea of fun. Charging into a respectable ’ouse like a lot of cattle, and breakin’ furniture. If you’d bin ’ere, Officer, I’d ’ave given the young blighters in charge. Ragging, what——! I’d teach ’em somethink.” Hazzard, with a feeling that the soft veil of the night’s mystery had been torn, and that things vulgar and violent had happened, pushed gently towards the door of No. 7.

Mrs. Bunce discovered him.

“Oh, ’ere’s Mr. ’Azzard. Nice goings-on. A lot of those young gents from the ’ospital——”

But Hazzard did not wait upon her grievances and her indignation, or to pay his respects to the policeman and his notebook; he went up the stairs as fast as his lame leg would allow him to go, afraid with the fear of a poor devil to whom guffaws and smashings may mean—not disaster—but semi-starvation. The gas was burning on the landing, and the door of his room stood open. He saw a pile of broken furniture, and perched on the top of the pile a figure contrived out of his second-hand dress suit stuffed with a pillow and sheets. The head of the figure was represented by a teapot arranged upside down, the spout to the rear, and on this white china head some wag had stuck Hazzard’s two-and-eleven-penny cap.

But it was not the comic insult that made the soul of him wince. He was looking at the smashed furniture, and especially at those pieces that had been hired for the occasion. He would have to pay for them; a part of that precious prize money would have to be sacrificed.

Still wearing his bowler hat he entered Ruth’s room, where his mother had slept, and sat down upon the bed. And he remembered his mother’s words. Indifference. Give the world indifference, and you will conquer it.