Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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In fine weather Rebecca’s shop spread itself under an awning across the pavement in an ordered confusion of underclothing, shirts, socks, boots, and trousers. A gangway led through to the shop door, and here Rebecca sat rather like a black spider in the centre of her web, watching the world and her property. Business was prospering, so much so that she was thinking of joining the new to the old, and of engaging an assistant. Saturday afternoons were becoming too crowded.

“ ’Ow much for the pants, mother?”

The Essex Road needed watching when you had the shop to attend to, and those bargain counters on the pavement were being explored by ladies with light fingers and capacious shopping-bags. When his mother had suggested to Augustus that he should sacrifice his Saturday afternoon and play the part of casual assistant, Augustus had demurred. He was following in the footsteps of his father—he had a creed and an urge. Augustus could be superior and facetious. He was not going to waste his time in helping an old woman to plant cheap pants upon the proletariat when the world’s problem was to put an unbreeched democracy into the seats of the mighty. Augustus wore a red tie. As the son of his father he should have been seen more often in the sick room up above, but though Augustus and his father were full of the same windiness, they were not in sympathy. Both of them wanted to talk, and neither to listen.

George—of course—was impossible. George had discovered girls, and for the moment nothing else interested him.

Moreover, a paternal society refused Rebecca the services of her third son. He was of tender years. He was not yet of age for the market. But the Law could not deny Rebecca the quickness of a child’s eyes.

“Do you want to help your mother, Karl?”

Karl was more than willing.

“Yes, mum.”

She gave him a stool in the doorway. He was allowed his book, but his business was to observe the hands of the loiterers. His mother explained that honesty was only the best policy when it was watched. If Karl had any cause for suspicion, and his mother happened to be within, he was to shout—“Shop.”

So, on Saturday afternoons and evenings the child sat patiently on his stool and watched his mother’s property. By nature an observant child, this attention to business made him more so. He became very quick, in his studying and summing up of faces. Almost, he was like a sensitive plant placed in the doorway. Even as a child he had a flair for faces and for the quality of the human stuff behind them, the mean, the surreptitious, the sly, the brazen. The business became a game with him, in which his wits were pitted against those of the plunderer.

“Shop, mum.”

One Saturday he did accuse a large and alcoholic lady of having slipped a vest into her bag. The woman blustered. Shop-lifting?—Not she!

Rebecca looked at Karl, and Karl nodded.

“I’ll take a look inside your bag, ma’am.”

The woman tossed a frowsy head.

“Ho,—will you?—I don’t think.—If your bloody little kid——”

Rebecca was vastly calm. A Policeman was patrolling the opposite pavement.

“Two and six, please, or I’ll call the copper across.”

The woman paid.

“Thought I was a sneak-thief, did you? Can’t one ’ave a bloody joke with a Yid?”

She blustered off, and Rebecca, smiling and looking at her son, dropped the half-crown into his hand. She said nothing, but her smile was sufficient. Her beloved had bright eyes.

They were the bright eyes of the little separatist who watched life go by, and who was learning to see things for himself. Karl was not a bookish child, and so was to be saved from the dreadful fate of being stuffed with information that was second-hand. London was to be his book, and what he knew he knew, and it was like the knowledge of the shepherd or the ploughman, personal and pure. Sitting there on his stool and watching faces he learnt, even as a child, to differentiate them into types: the fox, bull, pig, lion, snake. His standard of values was very simple. “It pleases me.—It does not please.”

His mother, in her dark shop like some sybil in a cave, would watch the little figure. The Essex Road might accuse her of being a wilful obscurantist, but gas cost money, and Rebecca’s margin was small.

Karl’s future? When he left school, what then? Her beloved had for her a tender glamour; he was the only glamorous thing in her life. Augustus—George? Her maternal spirit did not vex itself unduly about those two. She saw Augustus as a clerk and was content. George was the sort of creature who would get his trotters into some trough.

But Karl, little Karl? Would he join her in the shop? Solemnly she would caress with a slow rotatory movement the bulge of her black skirt as though Karl’s future still lay in her womb. A shop-assistant, or even a shopkeeper? The vision did not satisfy her.

Did she want him to do what he pleased, or that which would please her?

Rebecca was more honest with herself than are most mothers. If there is such a thing as inherited memory, then she had not long escaped from the walls and gates of the ghetto. The crowd was to be feared, and propitiated to a point. It might get you down in the shambles. Rebecca was both realist and mystic, and though in a sense she had been cast out by her people, she retained an arcana of her own. A woman may worship her own god in secret, and behold from some individual peak the promised Canaan. Like her people she may have been moved to be revenged upon an alien civilization by using it, and using it so cunningly that the money-changer became master. She did not set up the Golden Calf in her sanctuary, but like all women her imagination and her emotions were warmed by success. To transcend the crowd. Her husband had talked all his life of making the crowd god and master, but Rebecca had not been deceived. Someone would take care to plant his feet on the shoulders of the crowd. Samuel, starved of power, and bitter behind his counter, had dreamed of himself as colossus. Rebecca was shrewd. She was never fooled by the sentimental humbug of socialism. Little Karl—as man—was to put the pith of it in one of his mischievous phrases—“Yes, you want to delete all Shakespeares while retaining an adequate supply of Bernard Shaws.”

Success? Escape in the winged chariot of victory? To soar above the million pin-point heads? That was what she wished for her Karl. And by what sorcery could it be contrived? Rebecca, had she been able, would have used black magic to assist her son, but the only magic that she knew was yellow.

Sitting alone with the child in front of the fire one January night, she asked him that question.

“What would you like to be, Karl?”

Karl, with his knees drawn up, stared at the fire.

“I don’t know yet, mum.”

“Rich and famous?”

He was a most unmercenary child.

“I don’t know yet, mum. I just like watching things.”