Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 17

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But Karl’s mother was to fear the war more than she was to fear strange women.

In August, 1914, she shrugged her shoulders at the monster. It was over there beyond the narrow sea, and the life of the Essex Road went on as usual. There were—of course—the patriotic posters, Lord Kitchener’s blue eyes and pointing finger, an occasional brass band pumping up martial ardour. The brown stain in the streets increased. But Rebecca shrugged her shoulders. The war might last six months, a year, perhaps two years, and Karl was sixteen. Her Karl could not possibly be involved in it.

But as the monster began to grow, demanding more and more blood and flesh and the youth of the world, Rebecca would pause like a woman who had felt herself secure upon a hilltop and turn to look down into the valley. Young Smart from the fruit-shop next door had been killed in the Salient, and old Smart, grey and bitter and withered, would keep asking Rebecca that unpleasant question.

“Gus and George gone yet?”

Rebecca could not answer for her sons, but old Smart appeared to be unpleasantly interested in the young men’s movements.

“Better for ’em to go before they’re fetched. Conscription’s coming. And don’t you forget it.”

“I’m minding my business, Mr. Smart.”

“Business as usual, what! Not now, my dear.—It’s everybody’s bloody business, and don’t you forget that—either.”

Each day the war seemed to come a little nearer to her doorstep. Other women brought it to her, women who had gone grey and came to sell her their absent husband’s clothes, or women who looked hard eyed and pinched.—“Your boys gone yet, Mrs. Slopp?” She began to be aware of people looking at Karl. Karl stood five feet ten inches and looked older than his age.—Karl and his toy soldiers? Somewhere upstairs the remnant of that army lay forgotten in a cupboard.—Would Karl?—How was Karl feeling?—What did Karl think about the war? For Rebecca had tried to keep the war out of her home. She refused to read the papers. She behaved as though this absurd horror did not exist. There had been a strange silence between mother and son, as though each felt the shadow of the thing between them. The routine of their little world continued, and in its attic Karl sat and read and scribbled. Sometimes, when the boy was out, Rebecca would go up, steal into the room, and look at those white pages. She read all that he wrote, and he did not know it.—Almost she searched his manuscripts for indications, hints, warnings. Karl was living in a quiet phase, and sometimes his air of young moodiness frightened her.

She had cause to remember that particular Sunday morning. Karl had gone out; Sunday was his walking day, and he would cover twelve miles in the morning. Rebecca was making Karl’s bed when she heard the street door open. The bracket clock in the parlour had just struck ten.

Rebecca went out on to the landing.

“That you, Karl?”

“Yes.”

She was sensitive to the inflections of her son’s voice. It sounded tense and strained. Something had upset him.

“You’re back early.”

He did not answer her, and his silence brought her down the stairs. She found him in the parlour, standing by the window, and looking out into the backyard.

“Anything wrong, Karl?”

He kept his back to her.

“Yes—that name.—I hadn’t thought of it before.—I met a fellow I used to know—with some other chaps. He lost a leg out there.”

Rebecca held her breath.

“What’s wrong with the name, dear?”

She saw his head give a jerk.

“O, well—they said things.—They asked about Gus and George.—You had better call me Charles, mother.”

“What did they say about your brothers?”

“O, just called them—what they are.—There are three of us—and not one has had the guts to go out there and help.”

And suddenly Rebecca looked fierce.

“Quite right.—They ought to go.”