Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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But Karl was still the white flower.

His brothers agreed that their mother spoilt the kid. Gus and George were subject to domestic discipline: they made their own beds, emptied their slops, and cleaned their shoes. Karl was a child apart, allowed to wander out of school hours and to play as he pleased. The whole neighbourhood was his, Canonbury Square, and Highbury Terrace, and the Fields, and the solemnity of Aberdeen Park. He liked to wander back along the high pavement of Upper Street and look in the many windows of Mr. Roberts’ shop. He noticed the names over shops, and on one fascia board he saw one day the name of Silver Flowerdew.

Silver Flowerdew! He went along the street repeating the name to himself. It was so musical, so rhythmic. He contrasted it with his own name,—Karl Slopp, and wondered at the ugliness of the one and the beauty of the other. Why was one man Flowerdew, another Slopp? And, if one so desired it, could not one substitute Flowerdew for Slopp?

At home it was washing day, and Mrs. Mutter had come in to deal with the household linen. Hung out to dry in the back-yard it was not exactly country linen, and smuts descended on it. Karl, inspired by the name of Silver Flowerdew, was moved to reflect upon the name of Mutter, for that was what she did. The help was a rather grim old woman with a Roman nose and a bob of grey hair at the back of her head. Morose in her dealings with her fellows, she was much more conversational toward inanimate things and in the frankness with which she addressed them.

“You would—would you?”—as the soap eluded her, slid along the table and prepared to leap for the floor. Mrs. Mutter grabbed it just as it reached the edge.—“You would, would you,—you slippery bit o’ mischief.” She muttered all the time, so much so that Karl, standing in the scullery doorway, was convinced that he had made a great discovery. Mutter was Mutter because she mumbled all the time; Slopp was Slopp—because it had once slopped about in slippers like his father. He watched the old lady sousing some garment before wringing it. Her forearms were like brown sticks.

“Are you Mrs. Mutter because you do it?”

Bless the child! Do what? Like the rest of her sex she was kind to Karl.

“Mutter.”

“Don’t you be rude, my lad.”

Karl had no intention of being rude. He was just pushing his researches.

“But, you do,—Mrs. Mutter.”

“Oh, do I!”

She went out to hang a garment on the line, one of Rebecca’s large pink petticoats.

“Drat them smuts.”

Karl had followed her.

“Have you ever heard anyone called Smut?”

The old lady looked hard at him. Had that young beast of a George been debauching the child?

“No, my dear, excepting a black cat.—I had a black cat called Smut.”

She did not know that Master George’s synonym at school was Smutty, and Karl was white linen. It was George who inveigled the child one Sunday into the shed at the end of the yard.—“Come on, kid. I’ve got something to tell you.” George sat on an old sugar-box, and proceeded to explain to Karl how he—Karl—had come into the world. The child stood quite still, his small face looking very white in the dark shed. He was shocked, and incredulous.

“Please, George, it’s not true.—I came in the doctor’s bag.”

George guffawed.

“I’ll show you something——”

But from the dark cave of initiation the child fled into the house and up the stairs to his attic.—It wasn’t true. His brother’s grinning face seemed to follow him into his sanctuary. And there his mother found him prone upon the bed, and hiding a shocked face. He had been in tears.

“What’s the matter, little one?”

“Nothing,” said Karl, almost sullenly.

But Rebecca had her suspicions.

“What’s George been doing to you?”

“Telling me things,—beastly things.”

For a hard-bitten seller of old clothes his mother behaved with strange sensitiveness. Her large face looked flushed, its eyes suffused. She just bent over the child, and let her hand rest for a moment on his head.

“I couldn’t help it, Karl.—You were not like the others.”

She slipped quietly out of the attic, and closing the door gently, she took her large self down the creaking stairs. She caught her second son in the passage preparing to slip out. The guilty George had forefelt trouble. His mother neither questioned nor accused. Holding Master George by the collar she locked the street door, and then she smote him mercilessly on mouth and ears until the lout was blubbering. She did not utter a word, and when the business was over she thrust him from her with a kind of loathing.