Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Some of the child’s memories of the house were strange and capricious. They might have been described as infantile memories, save that they remained with him like sinister studies in black and white. The house was narrow, and dark and starved. From the side door and passage beside the shop the stairs ascended, carrying with them a warm fug and a smell of old clothes. Shabby people climbed these stairs and went into his father’s room.

Sometimes, he would listen to their voices.

Even as a child, obsessed with a sensitive child’s fancies, these voices suggested strange angers. They made a kind of bitter buzzing in that back room. Almost they were like the voices of the cloaked, masked and murderous people in his tales of adventure, the voices of men huddling their heads about a lantern and murmuring of blood.

An imaginative child, a sensitive, dark, mercurial little creature, he had a fondness for the window on the first landing, and the strip of linoleum-covered floor. He used to pretend there. He was in his castle, or he was the captain of the ship, though the window showed him nothing but a back yard, and piles of old packing-cases, and the shed in which his father’s bicycle lived, and the backs of other houses. They were dastardly in their ugliness. Possibly, it was their destiny to teach him that ugliness can be as provocative as beauty, and perhaps more potent in its inspiration. As an artist he was never to forget its significance.

He used to wonder about things. Even about his Christian names and surname: Karl Aloysius Slopp. How did a person come to be called Slopp?

He used to wonder at his father’s face, white and still, like the face of death, but with eyes that were infinitely sullen, or smouldering with sudden fury. His father had a high, bald forehead, and a little black, woolly beard. There had been a time when his father had gone regularly to work from that previous house in Camomile Street. Karl had understood that his father had worked in a shop. Then, something had happened to his father’s legs. His father’s walk had become strange, a kind of careful and deliberate shuffle.

His father had ceased to go to work.

His father had sat about, sallow and silent and gloomy. Always he had been reading a book by a man named Marx.

His father could not walk now. He sat propped up in the bed in that back room, with a black coat over his shoulders when the weather was cold. The window was never opened. The atmosphere was like a clammy hand that had been held in front of a fire.

Something was happening to his father’s hands. They were becoming like his feet. They looked like claws,—but his father was always scribbling with a kind of venomous haste, holding the pencil pressed between forefinger and thumb. There were old exercise books on the bed.

At the bottom of the stairs lived his mother and the shop. Karl was too young to appreciate the appositeness of the name upon the fascia board. Rebecca Slopp. His mother sold second-hand clothes, clothes that had been bought in, mended and pressed. One of the most familiar smells associated itself with the pressing-board and the tailor’s iron in the back room, and an odour of hot cloth. The shoddy stuff might have become impregnated with human secretions, and it surrendered them under the hot iron. His mother’s shop was an improvisation, and yet as a Jewess who had married a Gentile she had reverted to a world that was characteristic and familiar in supporting a sick husband and three boys. Rebecca had been in the trade. She had ghetto generations behind her. There were Goldsteins in Warsaw, Prague, Heidelberg. A Goldstein had sold clothes to a tragic Heine.

The child was a little afraid of both his parents, but less afraid of his big, black-eyed and sometimes tempestuous mother than he was of that cold candle of a father, whose bitterness was burning itself out. His mother had bright, black eyes, a high colour, and splendid hair. She was a woman of large emotions and a deep voice. She used her voice on all and sundry. She was, in the vulgar parlance, bossy, which was strange when it is remembered that her husband had spent his life in raving against the privileged tyranny of the Boss. Rebecca could never close a door gently. She was active in the house and shop like some large and dominant animal. Karl had come to associate his mother with an increasingly corpulent figure in black, and a faint odour of perspiration.

His mother was a passionate woman who shouted up the stairs and would not suffer contradiction. In fact, as shopkeeper, cook, nurse, and domestic autocrat she had no time for argument.

“Karl——”

“Yes, mum.”

“Take up your father’s supper.”

The child would leave his window and run down the stairs into the kitchen, and take from the table the old black tin tray with some savoury mess upon it. He would carry it slowly and solemnly upstairs, being careful not to spill the gravy. His father was touchy about such details.

“Pah,—this fork’s greasy. Wash it.”

The man never thanked the child, or smiled at him.

Undoubtedly, Karl was his mother’s favourite. She never struck him, though her hands tingled the ears of Brother Augustus and Brother George. Augustus was growing like his father, long, lanky, sallow and farouche, a soapy and rather sly lad who presently would take to spectacles. George was of different quality, a red Jew-Gentile, Judas, stocky, arrogant, to be known by some of his later intimates as Bacon & Eggs. Augustus had left school, and his mother had contrived to insert him as a boy-clerk in the firm of Benskin & Brown, carters, haulage contractors and undertakers. Augustus, sheathed in black, might develop into an admirable furnisher of funerals. George was still at the Council school. Little Karl trotted off with him along the Essex Road each morning. George bullied his small brother.

“Come on, kid,—leg it.”

It cannot be said that Karl grew up in an atmosphere of brotherly love. Augustus was too much Esau. Karl was the beloved. Rebecca was not a woman who weighed out her passions and her prejudices. She was apt to be tumultuous and open-handed in her dispensations. Karl had his hair brushed by his mother; Karl was never given second-hand suits; Karl had a little attic bedroom of his own, whereas Gus and George shared secret physical antipathies in one room. Gus and George were always quarrelling, but since the truculent George had proved himself top dog in sundry roughs and tumbles, Augustus’s assaults took the form of sneering. But Karl was the dark and favoured flower in the stuffy house, and his brothers knew it.

Also, the boy carried in his hand the dark flower of beauty. Even as a small child he was very sensitive to beauty, strangely and impersonally so, and with the pure passion of the craftsman. The young animal may be piqued by some bright and highly-coloured object, and be moved to clutch and to possess, but Karl did not clutch. He could stand and stare.

His world began with the shops and pavements of the Essex Road. The Slopp shop stood compressed between a fruiterer’s and a baker’s, and to the eyes of the child both windows were wonderful. As neighbours, Mr. Smart of the fruit shop and Rebecca were not in sympathy. Brother George was greedy, and a thief. In summer time cases and boxes of fruit were spread under the awning on to the pavement, and the temptation was obvious. George would open the side door of his mother’s house, and with an old walking-stick tip an apple or a pomegranate on to the pavement and rake it in.

Mr. Smart caught him fishing. The Essex Road was in those days a world of horses, and Mr. Smart believed in horse sense and the privileges of property. He dragged George out by the collar and cuffed him.

“I’ll teach you to be a sneak-thief.”

George’s bellowings brought out his mother.

“How dare you touch my child?”

Mr. Smart was a cockney and proud of it, and he had a tongue. What price the new Jerusalem? He wasn’t going to have any little Yid sighting Canaan next door. Mr. Smart was more of a prophet than he knew. The world was to grow Slopp-minded, and spy out the world of its neighbours as Canaan to be plundered.

George was dragged into the house, and from that day Slopp and Smart were not on speaking terms.

Karl was the exception. Those mounds and cascades of colour fascinated him, red apples, pale pomegranates, golden oranges, strawberries, cherries like polished stones, purple plums, grapes. He just stood and looked, and Mr. Smart came one day to look at the child.

“Well,—what do—you—want, my lad?”

“Nothing,” said Karl.

“Nuffin’!” said Mr. Smart humorously.

“No,—I just like to look.”

Mr. Smart guffawed.

“Bad business for me, my dear, if all bally old Islington was like you. Take your choice.”

Karl shook a small head.

“I only want to look.”

“ ’Ere, ’ave an apple.”

Mr. Smart chose a red one, polished it on his apron and gave it to the child.

“You put your teeth into that.”

But that is just what Karl did not do. He took his apple out with him for a walk, and looked at it, and held it against his cheek, and smelt it. He carried it back with him untouched to his dream window on the back landing. And there, George, stodging up the stairs, sighted the plunder and filched it from him. The beautiful thing was soon in George’s belly, but Karl did not bawl. He sat and watched the apple disappearing, and his brother’s large mouth masticating.

George held his red knuckles under the child’s nose.

“Don’t you go and sneak, kid.”

Karl said a strange thing for a child.

“I had the apple—before you bit it. I had all I wanted.”

“Sucks,” said George,—“Sucks!”

Karl did not sneak. He remained silent upon another occasion when Augustus played the unheroic hero. Beyond Highbury Fields a great old house and its garden were going the way of all flesh. Death and the speculative builder were in possession. A great hole had been knocked in the high brick wall, and cart tracks led to piles of bricks and a builder’s shed. On the Saturday afternoon the place was a wilderness of rough grass and tangled shrubs. Karl rambled far for a small child. He had discovered this fascinating ruin, and being sent out with Augustus he whispered to his elder brother:

“I know a wonderful place.”

The workmen had gone. Karl had found a queer old straggling ilex tree up which you could swarm and sit on a perch. Augustus, long and lanky, swung to and fro like an ape. But this wilderness happened to be the resort of certain young savages from a back street near the Holloway Road. Half a dozen of them arrived and found the Slopp boys in possession.

An urchin of twelve with a brutal little face grabbed Karl by the leg.

“Come art of our tree.”

Karl, looking down at that hard and hideous little countenance with its depressed nose and cut-throat mouth, grew very white.

“It’s not your tree.”

“None of your bloody lip,” said the child.

There was one lad nearly of Augustus’s age, but Augustus was a craven. When that little slum crowd showed itself truculent, Augustus, after waving his long arms wildly, turned and fled. He abandoned his small brother. Karl, set upon by three of the little savages, fought like a small fury, and had he been older he would have known—as he came to know in later years—that there are occasions when the crowd can only be confronted with truncheons or machine guns. He was mauled. Collarless, and weeping with sensitive rage, he was driven out of his Eden.

A voice gloated.

“ ’E’s blubbin’. Give ’im another one on the mug with your knuckles, Alf.”

Karl made no confession. He did not even reproach Augustus. He ran home and crept into the house and up the stairs, and washed his face and found another tie and collar. When his mother asked him how he had come by a particular bruise, he said that he had fallen out of a tree. Augustus was mum. Gus was to develop into an eloquent liar, but on this occasion there was nothing to be said and Rebecca applied a pad of cold cotton-wool to her Karl’s face.

“Don’t you go climbing any more trees.”

“No, mum.”

The child had a fastidious pride. Those filthy little fists had filled him with disgust. Evil faces! He concealed these incidents, but he did not forget them. The elemental reactions of his two brothers were like knots in a white handkerchief. He remembered the greed of George, and the cowardice of Augustus, and those knots remained in the handkerchief, ineffaceable characteristics. Karl never saw his particular wilderness with the old ilex tree again. Rows of ugly red villas sprang up there. But the memory of that dark and mysterious tree remained. It seemed to suggest that one should climb higher, high above filthy fists and little brutal faces.

Karl was destined to climb higher.