Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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Karl was playing at soldiers. The parade ground was the strip of floor under the landing window, and since the beds had been made, and his father’s dinner carried up and down, the child could assume that he would not be disturbed. Moreover, Karl was setting out a new company, English grenadiers in red coats and busbies, with bayonets at the charge. Karl had been watching this particular box in the window of a toy and fancy shop six doors down the street. A month ago he had gone in and asked the price, and a pretty woman with tired blue eyes had served him. She had worn a bandage round her throat.

“One and sixpence.”

Her voice was a sweet husky voice, and in spite of her bandage small Karl had fallen in love with her. She was so like a pale, tired flower, and he had wanted to kiss her. Four weeks’ pocket money carefully hoarded and added to the sixpence in his money-box had given him the price of the soldiers. He had revisited the shop. The young woman still wore her bandage, and her eyes were like blue flowers set in white wax.

“Can I have the soldiers, please?”

He had put his one and sixpence on the counter, and the young woman had bent over and reached for the box in the window. Karl had seen the nape of her neck below the bandage, and it had looked yellow.

Her face had expressed nothing but weariness, a white apathy. Pale lips, tired eyes. Perhaps Karl was precocious, but he had wanted to kiss light into those eyes.

“Thank you.”

He had waited a moment, but she had turned away towards the door at the back of the shop. She had a sick baby in there, and Karl’s romance had not yet risen to babies. He had gone out with his white cardboard box, feeling vaguely disappointed.

But the grenadiers were splendid. He had arranged them in a charging line to attack a column of German infantry in spiked helmets and blue coats, when he heard the side door open and close. Someone was coming up the stairs just when the battle was to be joined.

One of these shabby, sinister figures in black! The treads of the stairs creaked under old, deliberate feet, and the thing rose like a ghost to frighten the child. Karl had seen the old gentleman many times, and had flinched from his starved, parchment face with its creases, its bitter mouth and mocking eyes. The old gentleman was just like Satan in the picture books, and had a tail thumped the stairs after him as he ascended, Karl would not have been surprised. His name was Henom; he kept a small second-hand bookshop in the Pentonville Road. Mr. Henom had a couple of books under his arm, and his black hat and coat and little goatee beard were wet, for the November afternoon had turned to rain.

Karl put out his hands.

“Mind,—please.”

Mr. Henom looked at the kneeling child, and the array of soldiers. He had a tongue that should have been forked.

“Soldiers in red coats.”

“Yes,” said Karl, “grenadiers. Please mind where you step.”

Mr. Henom was a very bitter old man. Anything in a red coat roused him to frenzy. The thing was a symbol, suggestive of gold coaches, and flunkeydom and privilege. Many years ago a man in a red coat had caused Mr. Henom to be jilted.

“Soldiers!—Do they let you play with soldiers?”

“Yes,” said Karl.

“Slaves in red coats,—murderers,” and with a kind of maniacal smirk Mr. Henom put a foot deliberately on the row of lead grenadiers. The child uttered a little cry, and clutched Mr. Henom’s black trouser leg.

“Oh, don’t.—You’ve killed some of them.”

Mr. Henom put a hand on Karl’s head and pushed him to one side.

“Hired butchers—butchers in red coats.—I must speak to your father about it.”

And Old Henom creaked on up the stairs, leaving the child in tears.

Karl did not run to his mother. It was a Saturday afternoon, and on Saturday afternoon the shop was always busy. Karl counted eleven grenadiers who would never stand again unless their legs were inserted into holes in the linoleum. Horrid, cruel old man! And why should Mr. Henom object to his playing with soldiers? They were his soldiers; he had bought them. Karl looked out of the window and saw the rain coming down. Solemnly and sadly he put his army back into its boxes, and carried them up to his attic bedroom. In the future he would parade his men on the bedroom floor, where old he-goats could not trample. The house was very silent, but from somewhere came the sound of voices, the voices of Mr. Henom and his father in full cry. Karl crept to the door of his father’s bedroom and stood listening.

His father’s voice was harsh and petulant.

“The army. Yes,—we shall have to get hold of the army, teach them to turn their guns on their officers. The police don’t matter so much.—Get hold of the fools in red coats.”

Karl was puzzled. Soldiers shooting their officers! His men never behaved so treacherously, but gallantly followed the hero with the upraised sword. He squatted down to listen. Mr. Henom was inveighing against the sin of allowing a child to play with soldiers and Karl heard his father say that he would have the toys taken away. No child of his should grow up in an atmosphere of organized butchery and capitalistic oppression. And then his father and Mr. Henom fell to speaking of other matters, his father in short, fierce gasps, Mr. Henom with a voice like acid trickling out of a jar. There appeared to be a strange thing in the world called Surplus Value. It seemed to associate itself with insult and robbery, and to cause his father great indignation. Karl heard the bed creaking. His father was describing to old Henom how a suit of clothes was sweated together in a back room by a wretch who worked fourteen hours a day. And how much was the wretch paid? The wholesaler bled the worker, and passed the clothes on to the retailer, who bled the public.

“Surplus value,” shouted his father,—“surplus value is—the—world’s great swindle.”

Karl heard a chair moved, and fearing discovery, he fled. He ran downstairs to his mother, and found her alone for a moment in the shop. She was putting bundles of underclothing back on a shelf.

“Mum,—what is surplus value?”

His mother looked fondly at her beloved. Who had been putting ideas into the child’s head? Had Karl been listening outside his father’s door? He had. Mr. Henom was upstairs with his father. His mother did not like Mr. Henom.

“He trod on some of my new soldiers, mum.”

“Not on purpose, my dear?”

“Yes, mum. He said I shouldn’t play at soldiers. And I heard father say that he is going to take my soldiers away.”

“Oh, is he!” said his mother, who for years had heard her husband preparing to abolish everything;—“your father can’t get out of bed, my dear. Go and listen in the passage and tell me when you hear old Henom coming down.”

The shop bell rang, and Rebecca turned to attend to a sheepish-looking man who was accompanied by a brisk and suspicious little wife. A second-hand overcoat was required, one with a velvet collar. The wife did the talking; her man stood there like an overgrown and flabby child. On the pavement his wife had said—“The old Yid will sell you a pup, Bert,—somethin’ with the moth in it. You leave it to me.” Karl, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, listened to the voices of the two women in the shop, his mother’s bland, round and persuasive, the other woman’s dry and thin. Rebecca’s reputation was somewhat Oriental. The wife carried the coat to the doorway and held it up to the light before she would allow her man to try it on. Did not the old Yid try things on?

A part of Rebecca was proposing to dispose of an overcoat, while another and more intimate part of her was concerned with her small son and her husband. Take the child’s toys away, would he? Not bloody likely. Sam was the sort of man who would discover even in the world’s toyshop the scandal of private property. A woman might have to suffer many things, such as husbands who attended to any business but their own, and ladies who suspected moth and corruption, but Rebecca was not going to allow a dying demagogue to bully a live son.

She had no illusions about the man upstairs. Sam had always jawed and scribbled about the woes of the worker, the fellow who laboured with his hands, and yet—beyond passing gloves and stockings and ladies’ underlinen over a counter, Samuel had never used his hands. Manually he was a fumbler, a botcher. Set him to hang a picture, and he would hit the plaster or his fingers, and even were the picture hung, it would be crooked. But such activities belonged to the past, though Rebecca did tell herself that a bed-ridden man might have made himself useful with a needle in helping to recondition his wife’s purchases in the way of stock. He could have taught himself to patch, turn, and rebutton coats and trousers, but S.S. did nothing but scribble and talk. The Class War, Economic Materialism, the Tool Age, Wage Slavery,—Rebecca had had them all ad nauseam. Not that Karl’s mother, with generations of the ghetto behind her, had a love for Occidental society—as such. She was an ambitious woman, a strong animal, who, while struggling in her slop-world, remembered the deprivations and humiliations of the scuffle. She might be in revolt while persuading shabby people to buy her shoddy, but as a passionate realist she despised her husband. He was both bitter and futile, a fellow born with a grievance and an inefficient alimentary apparatus, avidly vain, and bitter against life because it had not flattered him. Sam was always frothing about serving humanity, but the understanding was that humanity should also serve Sam.

Rebecca sold her overcoat, and the careful housewife and the hobbledehoy husband departed with a brown-paper parcel. Both paper and string had seen service before. Then Karl fluttered in. Mr. Henom was coming downstairs. Rebecca appeared to inflate her large bosom; she had something to say to Mr. Henom.

She filled the passage, with Karl behind her petticoats. Mr. Henom had his hat on, a hard, high bowler hat. He was that sort of man.

“Did you tread on my boy’s soldiers?”

Mr. Henom, showing his teeth like a rat in a corner, accepted the challenge.

“I—did. Bringing up your husband’s son to like butchers in red coats.—Disgraceful.”

“Flatfish,” said Rebecca—“you’ll apologize to the child.”

Mr. Henom was always ready to argue. Did the sage who kept a bookshop apologize to babes? But Rebecca had a fiery temper and a quick tongue.

“Then—you’ll buy the child a new box of soldiers.”

“Better let me give him a book.”

“Some of your old rubbish! Not likely. And if you were a gentleman you’d take your hat off in my house.”

Mr. Henom made the grave mistake of using irony.

“I have always understood, ma’am, that in synagogues——”

Rebecca quashed both his sarcasm and his hat. She brought a large and solid hand down upon it so decisively that it did not merely crumple. It was a spoilt and split hat, and old Henom, being miserly in spite of social ideals, was careful about such things as hats.

“That’s an assault, Mrs. Slopp.”

“Get out,” said she; “don’t you wag your billy-goat at me.”

Mr. Henom got to the door and opened it, and to Karl he looked just like Satan.

“What an example for the child.—Disgraceful.”

Rebecca laughed. She could come out of her blazes like a sun through a thunder-cloud.

“So’s your hat, Mr. Henom. Better leave it with me. I might get tuppence for it, or give it to some kids for their guy.”

She quaked. Karl, close to her skirts, felt his mother’s tremors. When his mother laughed—everything seemed to shake with her. Meanwhile, Mr. Henom closed the door, and reopened it to squirt a few last words from his half-moon mouth.

“How do you expect a child to learn from such a mother?”

Said small Karl suddenly—“I don’t believe you ever had a mother.”

“That’s right,” laughed Rebecca; “he was got by Clothes Horse out of Soapsuds, and he never ran.”

It sounded a wonderful saying to Karl, and though its esoteric meaning was beyond him, it appeared to put Mr. Henom out into the street, and after all—that was what mattered.