Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

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Karl’s feeling about life was that there was always something wonderful round the corner. Even a street had its fascination, and the mysterious way it glided beyond your ken to disappear like a river between tall trees. The City Road was like that. Then there was the place where the Canonbury Road crossed the New River. When Karl put his face to the railings at one particular point and looked west he could see the water, green banks, gardens, a thorn, two or three ash trees, houses, and a stretch of green grass rising like a little hill. The water disappeared, and so did that stretch of grass, winding upwards to the right, to be cut off suddenly by the wall of a house. But Karl was sure that the river and the green slope went on and on. They were just the beginnings of some wonderful other world, and his child’s fancy followed them. Bricks and mortar became a dark forest in which strange things happened. Karl had read about forests, but he had never seen one.

“I want to see a forest, mum.”

His mother, caught in one of those moments when a woman recoils from drudgery and disillusionment, looked into the child’s eyes, and saw her own dead youth in them.

“A forest, my dear.”

“Yes, mum.”

Rebecca could think of nothing but Epping. It was the spring of the year, and Rebecca packed a basket, left old Mrs. Mutter in charge and went with the child to where the white thorns were in flower. Karl, holding his mother’s hand, or sometimes running on ahead as though to discover where this illimitable green world ended, was like a child entranced. Birds sang, and his knowledge of birds was confined to sparrows and canaries. And what was it that smelled so sweet? He asked his mother, but Rebecca was no wiser than her Karl, until she happened to brush against a may bough.

“It’s the white flower, Karl.”

Karl had to be lifted so that he could put his nose to it.

“What’s it called, mum?”

His mother did not know. She had a wonderful eye for summing up a suit of clothes or a piece of fur, but she did not know one tree from another. To her city eyes, all of them looked alike.

They sat on the grass by a thorn and unpacked the basket. Sausage-rolls, and jam tarts, and two bottles of stone ginger. Karl ate his sausage-roll like a child in a dream, but his dark eyes were bright. They saw much more than his mother saw. He gazed and gazed into an infinitude of greenness and blue sky. Why didn’t men make houses green?—The day was warm and still, and Rebecca took off her hat, and reclined. The toes of her boots stuck up; her body line swelled into two curves of cushiony fat. Karl looked at his mother. Her eyes were closed, and he stole away and wandered. Here were old thorn trees whose interiors were like caves. And then, suddenly, he felt lost; a delicious, terrifying feeling. Indians were after him. He ran this way, and he ran that, and then stumbled on the place where his mother lay.

“Asleep, mum?”

“No,—my pretty.”

She lay looking at the sky, and Karl, prone on his tummy beside her, bit at the grass.

“What are you thinking about, mum?”

“Oh, nothing,” said his mother.

Yet, how was Karl to know that even a fat woman of five and forty can be a child, and dream impossible dreams of love and adventure, or that there is a secret world in every woman in which she sometimes plays princess. Rebecca was in a Cinderella mood. But her prince had been a poor thing, a fellow who had sneered at all princeliness, and would have pulled down all beanstalks instead of climbing them. What—in the name of Jehovah—had made her marry Sam? Sex was a strange thing,—yet sex had given her Karl.

She stole a look at the boy.

Would some she-Sam get hold of her Karl? Not if she could help it.