Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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It was Saturday, and Christopher had packed a bag that was black and rather shapeless, like a mother-bag that had produced many families. One of the white metal clips was missing. When lifted by the handle it sagged at either end; placed upon a flat surface it allowed itself to relax and to bulge.

Hazzard met Ruth Avery on the stairs. She had been running up them and was out of breath, and in standing aside to let her pass he was aware of her quick breathing and her colour. They had not spoken to each other since the incident of the roses and the marmalade pot.

She looked at his face and then at the black bag. Her eyes were shy.

“Going away?”

The question was as obvious as her smile, and yet her smile was not as obvious as it seemed. She was a dusky thing, far darker than he was, suggesting a damask rose or a purple pansy, quick to change colour, slim, sensitive. This smile of hers came and went as quickly as her colour, and when she was not smiling her face had a mute, apprehensive sadness. Always when in movement she would appear a little out of breath, or fluttering like a bird, her face suddenly aglow and as suddenly pale and serious.

Hazzard was as shy of her as she was of him, but it showed in him differently. He would just stare at a person with those still and watchful eyes of his and say nothing, or with a lift of the head utter a few curt, casual words. He had learnt how to protect himself with silence, or to use silence as a weapon, a menace that warned people off.

“Country—till Sunday night. Must get out of London sometimes.”

She seemed to shrink against the handrail. He puzzled her.

“I wish I could. Regent’s Park—is my limit.”

“Might do worse.”

He gave her a glance that was neither friendly nor hostile. It was steady and impartial; it offered nothing and it asked for nothing. He went on down the stairs, while she remained leaning against the rail, watching him descend, one hand laid along her cheek. She had the quick reactions of a sensitive child. Reserve, coldness, an unfriendly reticence hurt her.

Before leaving No. 7 Roper’s Row Hazzard opened the glazed door that gave access from the passage to Mrs. Bunce’s shop. Mrs. Bunce in a red shawl was checking the copies of an evening paper. She wore spectacles; she had an amorphous roundness of face and figure; hair and skin were so alike in their bleached deadness that they seemed to melt into each other. She was never without a shawl, even in the height of summer, though the colour of the shawl might vary.

Said Hazzard, “I shall be back to-morrow night, last train. You might leave the door unlocked.”

Mrs. Bunce turned her spectacles upon him. She had one of those confidential whispering voices that go on and on like a perpetual draught through a keyhole.

“That’s all right, dearie. Hope you’ll find your mother well. It will do you good—it will—a whole day in the country. Drat that paper boy. He’s short on me again with the Globes. I’ll have to count ’em a second time—to be sure. Yes,—I’ll leave the door unlocked. You’ll come up quiet, won’t you? Old Rammell’s so touchy about noises—after ten o’clock. I must count these papers over again. One, two, three——”

Hazzard left her counting, for in Roper’s Row simple arithmetic was of more importance than reading or writing. Necessity sat at the master’s desk and made you figure everything out without any help from a chalked example on the blackboard. If you had a supreme purpose planted like a pot of musk upon your window-sill, you cultivated a divine miserliness in order to cherish that one plant. You were suspicious of all other plants, especially that particular flower that had the face of woman.

Hazzard’s eyes were on the green trees in Red Lion Square. He carried a whole philosophy in that deplorable black bag, but on this June day his limping walk had a little lilt of exultation. He did not see the London figures, those human cyphers, or the rolling cabs and the thundering vans. He was thinking of his mother, and of the things he had to tell her, and of the way her eyes would light up when she heard his news.