Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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Karl heard noises in the night. He got out of bed because he thought he had heard his mother’s voice, and going out on to the landing he looked over the banisters and saw a gas-jet burning. The door of his father’s room opened, and his mother came out, a large, white, voluminous figure in a pink bed-jacket. His mother was weeping.

Karl ran down the stairs.

“O, mum,—what is it?”

The child’s hands went out to her. Rebecca, looking down into that little, upturned face, caught him to her. He was pressed firmly to that warm, fat, beloved body, and, thanks to one of those human mysteries, Rebecca was never to be old and fat and ugly to her son.

“Your father’s gone, Karl.”

“Father’s dead?”

“Yes, dear.”

She gathered him up and took him with her to her bed, and Karl lay close to his mother, and because she wept, he wept with her. He put his arms round her neck, and his cheek against hers, and was part of the tumult of her grief and her remorse. She fondled him, she kissed him. No words passed between them, only those clingings and caresses in the warm darkness.

But Rebecca did breathe a strange confessional.

“I’ve been a bad woman,—little Karl.—I haven’t done all that I ought to have done.—But he’ll never know, poor thing, and now—there’s nothing between you and me.”

Karl was quite sure that his mother was not a bad woman. He hugged her hard.

“Mum’s never bad.—I’m mum’s——”

He wondered why her grief became suddenly so passionate. Almost, her embraces hurt.

“My little Karl, my love child.”

Smothered between her two breasts he could feel and hear his mother’s heart beating. What happened when you died? Did that thing inside you cease going lub-dup? Would his mother die some day? He clung to the warm, large body.

There followed three days of strange silence and of gloom. The shop was shut up. Seedy and solemn looking men carried a long, narrow box up the stairs. His mother sat and sewed. Everything was black. Blinds were down. Karl was kept at home; but Augustus went to his work and George to school. Both of them had an air of smug but suppressed curiosity.

Mrs. Mutter was always in black, and she needed no transfiguration. She sniffed and produced savoury smells in the kitchen. Then came that last morning when his mother took Karl by the hand and went with him up the stairs into that silent room. Karl saw his father lying in a narrow box supported on trestles. His father’s face looked strange, eyes closed, forehead somehow serene. His hands were folded over his chest. Karl held his mother’s hand and looked. His mother was weeping.

He saw his mother bend down and put her lips to the white, round forehead.

“Forgive me, Sam.”

Karl was moved to say something.

“Father looks happy,—now, mum.”

Rebecca caught her breath as though some spasm of pain had clutched her heart.

Later in the day men went upstairs into his father’s room. Rebecca was in the shop, dressed as though to go out. His brothers were in the sitting-room, self-consciously mum on shiny chairs. His mother called Karl. She had a jacket in her hands, and she held it and slipped his arms into the sleeves, and put a round sailor’s cap with black ribbons on his head. She was very white and silent, and in the silence Karl heard something being carried down the stairs. He saw his mother glance suddenly at the door. Her eyes were large and strange. She gave a kind of shudder.

They were out on the pavement. A small crowd had gathered. Karl, holding his mother’s hand, saw the yellow box in a kind of glass carriage. A cab was waiting behind it. Rebecca and her three sons got into the cab. The wheels began to go round.

Of that atrocious ceremony in the cemetery he brought away impressions of a grey sky, and of the yellow box being carried on men’s shoulders up a sticky gravel path between hundreds of gravestones. They came to a place where there were no stones, only sodden mounds, some of them with rotting flowers on them. On the edge of this waste was a slit in the ground, with a mass of yellow clay beside it, and a few planks laid down. The men placed the yellow box on the planks. A clergyman with a red nose began to declaim in a high, unreal voice. Karl saw the priest’s surpliced figure against the red bulk of a distant gasometer. Augustus was sniffing. George stood and stared like a young ox.

The yellow box and his father were lowered into the hole in the ground. One of the men threw a handful of soil on the coffin. Karl looked up at his mother. She was weeping, and as he edged close to her he found that his feet were stuck in a squdge of clay. He was wearing new boots, and they made a wet, squeaking sound.

The clergyman blew his red nose, and came to say a few words to Rebecca. She too blew her nose.

“Had your husband been ill long?”

“Five years, sir.”

“Dear, dear.—He is at rest with God—now. Your boys?”

His glance passed perfunctorily over the faces of Augustus and George, but he smiled at Karl.

“I hope they’ll be a comfort to you.”

They drove home, Karl sitting beside his mother and holding her hand. George’s bulging blue eyes looked out of the window. Augustus sat with his bony knees together with an air of secret smugness. But Karl was thinking that if his father was at rest with God, how strange it was to leave him in that horrid slimy hole. And did all that yellow clay go back on the top of the yellow box?

That night Rebecca took him to bed with her, and in the darkness she was aware of his fingers feeling her face.

“What is it,—Karl?”

“I wanted to feel you, mum.”

She understood. She clasped him. He, too, was warm and alive and real.

“Mum, when we die—does all of us die?”

“No, dear. They say something goes on living.”

“Then—why do they put dead people in horrid holes in the ground?”

His mother could not answer that question completely.

“It isn’t the body, Karl, that matters. The something else stays outside.”

“Can you see the something else?”

“No, dear.”

“Then how do they know?”

“Wise men tell us it is so.”

The boy lay close to his mother.

“I don’t want you put—ever—in a hole like that, mum.”

His mother held his head against her bosom.

“We won’t think of that, Karl. You and I are going to have years and years together.”