Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 22

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On four successive Saturday nights they kept the shop open till ten. Islington, Highbury, the Holloway Road, Marylebone, Clerkenwell had heard of the Fur Shop.

“There’s an old Yid in the Essex Road——”

Karl, pale as a young priest consumed by a secret sense of sin, stood and helped sex to try on its coney skin. There was no need for his mother to tell him that they had sold more than a hundred coats in the month. There had been frequent calls upon the contents of Mr. Isenstein’s warehouse. But on this particular night, with frost in the air, and the lights throbbing, he was concerned with a young woman with bobbed hair. Goldilocks! He had helped her to try on six coats; his hands had touched her hair; she had smiled at him. Nice lad. Afterwards, she had paraded in the coat she had chosen and paid for, and he had kept seeing her passing and repassing the door of the shop. Glances crossed, hers oblique, jocund and inviting. She had smiled her challenge at him—“You’re to my taste. Come out and walk.”

The blinds fell at ten. The shop door was locked, the lights lowered. Supper waited on the parlour table. Rebecca had the kettle boiling on the gas stove.

“Karl.”

But even as she called him she heard the side door close. Karl was out on the pavement. He met the face of the girl under the street lamp, eyes mischievous and inviting, lips parted dewy. “Hallo, darling,” and suddenly her face grew sullen and dim. Karl went by her, head in air, with a strange, fierce young countenance. She turned to see the light of the lamp on the heels of his shoes. She sneered.

His mother turned out the gas stove and sat down heavily in her chair. She had been on her feet for hours, but it was not her legs that failed her. She would wait. She knew in her heart why he had rushed out into the night. Her face looked all creases; her breasts seemed to bulge. In a month she had made more money than the shop took in a normal year, and the new world’s fury for furs was a crescendo. She had success at last in her large, and laborious lap, and it was like a dead child.

She did not touch any food. The clock had struck eleven when she heard youth and its tragedy at the door. It seemed to come in so quietly and deliberately. It had no hat to hang up in the passage.

She managed to smile at her son.

“Supper’s been waiting, my dear.—Put a match to the gas stove.”

Karl closed the passage door.

“You shouldn’t have waited.”

“My dear, I didn’t feel like eating with this thing hanging over me.”

“What thing, mother?”

“You know.”

He gave her a deep, still glance. Then he crossed to the kitchen doorway and passed through it. She heard the scraping of a match.

“I’ve got to go, mother.”

“Must you, Karl?”

“I’m a fool, but I’m going.”

She sat very still, waiting for him to come back into the parlour. Had he been other than Karl she might have boxed his ears and with passionate reasonableness sent him to bed. But Karl was not like those other two, and his very otherness was hers. Had she not come to her cliff edge some nineteen years ago, and walked over it? As a woman of large emotions and a temperament, she could understand the supreme folly of loving, the delirium of sacrifice. Her own madness had given her Karl. And on this winter night she was to be articulate for both of them, and that was her salvation. A woman of frailer fibre might have whimpered or scolded or dressed up sentiment in tears. She would neither scold nor reproach; she could be wise in her great moments.

“Tell me, dear?”

“It’s the meanness—of hanging back.”

“Just that?”

And suddenly he was on his knees with his head in her lap. She covered his head with her hands.

“I don’t want to go, mother.”

“You’re so young, my Karl, not yet—of age.”

“I know.—But there is something old enough in me. It hurts.”

She nodded tragically.

“Yes,—I know. Sometimes—women—have to give to men, and sometimes men have to give—to something.”

He was silent. She could feel his hands lying on her fat thighs. Almost she was like some living altar upon which his youth lay prostrate. She could have stormed, accused, ridiculed her crisis, solaced him with easy cynicism, and she did nothing of the kind. She stroked his head. Life had given her this secret love child, and life seemed to demand him of her again. On that night she was greater than she knew.

“Karl.”

“Yes, mother?”

“Do you know what it means to me?”

“Yes, mother.”

She swallowed the passionate anguish in her throat.

“And I’m letting you go.—I’m not saying stay. Isn’t that——? O, well, other women have had things torn from them.—If I had the—silliness to be selfish.—Such waste,—such——”

He raised himself, and drawing his fingers along her thighs, he clasped her hands.

“I know,—waste.—Men being shot to pieces.—It must seem such waste to a mother.—It seems so to me. But I’m a sensitive fool.—I want to give—like the others.”

His mother kissed his forehead.

“Karl,—when one’s a fool in that way—it may be the only time in one’s life when one’s right.—I was a fool once, my dear, in that way, and I did not regret it.”

Suddenly, she was weeping. Her tears ran unashamedly down her creased and sacrificial face.

“There’s a sort of justice in things, Karl. I don’t understand, and I do.—You’ve got to go. You and I are alike that way. We’re the fools who give, and that’s a thing the real fools might not understand.”