Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 8

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Meanwhile, the ringing of a bell was to associate itself in his mind with the long, meagre figure of his father pottering along on stove-pipe legs, or rather with that same figure propped up in bed and snarling at the person who opened the door.

“I’m forgotten—I suppose.”

His father had a handbell on the table beside his bed, and he was for ever ringing it and bringing someone up the stairs. His petulant exactions suggested a last effort to impress himself upon people, but the urge was more simple, for Karl’s father was dreadfully afraid. The dark waters were near his chin. He would not confess to this fear, but the horror and the inevitableness of it were in his eyes.

“Yes,—I expect I’m a nuisance.”

Rebecca was bulky, and Mrs. Mutter had no legs, or rather she had varicose veins in them, and Karl was sent to answer that petulant bell. The cold fug of his father’s room hung on the child’s lips. His father, propped up in bed with an old black coat over his shoulders, seemed to lie with head retracted as though keeping his mouth above the death palsy that was rising like dark water. There was the usual litter of paper on the grey bed-cover, but his father’s hands lay inert amid all those fallen leaves. He was ceasing to scribble, but he could still talk.

That little woolly black beard moved.

“What’s your mother doing?”

“She’s in the shop, dad.”

“Tell her I want her.”

“She’s busy, dad. Can I fetch you anything?”

His father’s eyes showed the red of their retinæ.

“I—will—be—obeyed.—Tell your mother I want her.”

Karl, frightened, closed the door and ran down to his mother.

“Father’s upset, mum, about something.”

Rebecca climbed the stairs. She showed to that poor, frightened, scolding creature a quiet patience, for he was so weak, so pathetically weak. She was a woman of quick temper, and often he had exasperated her. Talk, talk, talk! He was one of the world’s talkers who had never managed to get on the platform. His eyes reproached her directly she entered the room. She was out of breath, but Samuel had never noticed when people were out of breath, or when he bored them.

He said with a kind of icy bitterness—“I suppose the kid is good enough for me?”

His petulance appeared to have no effect upon her. She went to the bed, shook up his pillows, and felt his hands.

“You do make it hard for yourself, Sam.”

“Hard?”

“Yes, you always did.—Put your hands inside; they’re cold.”

And suddenly he became emotional.

“I suppose you tell everybody I’ve made it hard for you?—Yes, that’s right.—I’m a miserable failure. The swine never let me have a chance.—And all you think about——”

She said sharply yet kindly—“Sam!”

But the flood was not to be stayed. There had been occasions when he had let loose the same emotional squealing at street corners.

“Don’t you Sam me.—All you care about is money and that kid. You’re just like the rest of them. I’m a bloody incubus.—It will be easier when I’m gone.—I shan’t be here long.”

He screamed at her, and then he burst into tears. They ran down his weak little beard.

“Left to rot.—I wanted to help people, and what do they care? Fools.—I could have shown them the way——”

She bent over him, her large figure pressing against the bed. She was maternal, and if she had any love left for this thing that was her husband, it was for the whimpering child in him.

“There there, my dear; don’t make it so hard for yourself. What’s the use of tearing up yesterday’s paper?”

His head rolled to one side. It fell against her shoulder.

“You’ve been a good wife to me, Becky. If I’d had my rights——”

“We never do, dear, do we?”

“Fools—who won’t listen. Fools who ask you where you bought your hat. But when I’m dead——”

She found a handkerchief—it was not a very clean one and wiped his face.

“You’ve always wasted yourself on other people, Sam.—There, put your head back.—I’ll send Karl up with a cup of tea.”

He lay back with empty eyes.

“Oh,—I’m tired. The child——”

“Why don’t you look at him, Sam, and try and feel——”

His head twisted on the pillow.

“Feel? That’s the silly sin, feeling. I’ve always felt too much.—I’d bring him up hard, Becky; teach him not to feel; then—fools don’t matter.”

She gave his face a final dab with the handkerchief, and then put it away.

“No, they shouldn’t matter, Sam. I’ll try and teach the boy that.”

Sam Slopp’s spasms of self-pity ceased to be capable of raising storms. The cadaverous, raucous idealist was very near his end, and Karl noticed that those sinister and shabby figures no longer ascended to the seer’s chamber. His father’s face was like white wax, his eyes glassy and strange, his breathing scarcely perceptible. Sometimes his head would loll back on the pillow and he would make strange noises in his throat, or fall asleep and wake with a sudden groan. His father had expressed a wish that his small son should sit with him sometimes by the fire that was now kept burning, but Karl was afraid of that grim room. He crept in and sat between the bed and the fire, because his mother had asked him to do so. He listened to his father’s mutterings, and the rustling of those skeleton hands among the papers on the bed.

His father talked to himself.

“Finished—deserted.—And I was a friend of the people.”

In years to come, when Karl was moved to explore the scribblings of this dreamer and demagogue, he could understand how bitter waters had submerged the dying man.—One cold and frosty evening he heard his father’s voice whispering behind him.

“Karl!”

“Yes, father.”

“Come here.”

The child stood by the bed. One of those skeleton hands groped their way towards him and fastened like a bony claw on the boy’s arm. His father’s eyes stared.

“Have you heard of God, child?”

Karl looked frightened.

“Yes, father.”

“What is God?”

Karl hesitated, as though searching his small soul for an answer.

“God is love.”

He felt his father’s fingers grip his arm.

“There is no God.—And if there were a god he would be the God of Hate. Do you know what hate is?”

“Yes, father.”

The pressure of those fingers seemed to increase.

“Hate,—hate,—hate the rich, hate the tyrants, hate—even the poor fools. Hate—lasts,—hate is not—not fooled.—Hate, my son.”

Then, suddenly, his father’s bony grip relaxed. His head fell back, and he lay with closed eyes, muttering.