Roper's Row E-Book

Deeping Warwick

• Herausgeber: Raanan Editeur
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Roper's Row | The girl was tempted by the open door. It was unusual for Hazzard to leave his door open. His habit was to shut it quietly and carefully, for like many other doors in Roper's Row it had seen better days, and was suffering from decrepitude, strained hinges and a stammering lock. Hazzard knew the habits of that door. Unless you were firm with it and made sure that the catch had caught, the door would swing slowly back into the room, uttering a little creaking moan. It was a faithless, treasonable door. It was ready to betray you and your secrets, and Hazzard had many reasons for wishing to keep the door closed...|

Leseprobe

SOMMMAIRE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

WARWICK DEEPING

ROPER'S ROW

1929

Raanan Editeur

Digital book999| Publishing 1

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

CHAPTER I

1

The girl was tempted by the open door. It was unusual for Hazzard to leave his door open. His habit was to shut it quietly and carefully, for like many other doors in Roper's Row it had seen better days, and was suffering from decrepitude, strained hinges and a stammering lock. Hazzard knew the habits of that door. Unless you were firm with it and made sure that the catch had caught, the door would swing slowly back into the room, uttering a little creaking moan. It was a faithless, treasonable door. It was ready to betray you and your secrets, and Hazzard had many reasons for wishing to keep the door closed.

Ruth Avery was tempted. She had occupied the upper floor front of No. 7 Roper's Row for less than a month, but the occupant of the back room was as secretive as his door. She heard him go up and down the stairs; he had a lame leg and a walk that, with its broken rhythm, resembled the sounds of the human heart as heard by the doctor's ear--"Lub-dup, lub-dup." She had met him once on the stairs, a little, dark, pale young man with a big head and defiant hair, and a something in his eyes. He had stood aside to let her pass. He had neither looked at her nor spoken to her. He had that air of unfriendliness which is a man's defence against the unfriendliness of other people.

She thought--"I oughtn't to--but I want to," and being a woman she tiptoed across the worn linoleum and looked in, for the room was empty. It had furniture of a sort, but furniture that seemed to emphasize the room's air of emptiness. There was an iron bedstead covered with a pink cotton quilt, a table by the window that had once been painted black, and a wash-hand-stand against a wall that had once been a liverish yellow. She saw a strip of red matting, two sugar-boxes, one on top of the other, with their lids converted into doors. She saw a deal shelf hung by a cradle of string, and lined with shabby books. She saw two bedroom chairs, and the cane seat of one of them suggested that a foot had been thrust through it. There was a hanging cupboard behind the door, but the door hid it from her eyes.

Two objects in the room arrested her attention: a white marmalade pot full of red roses on the black table, and a violin hanging from a nail driven into the wall. She was surprised to see the roses, for roses cost money in London. Also she had not expected to see a violin. She had never heard a violin being played in that back room, and she would have preferred the sound of it to the chattering music of her typewriter. But the roses enchanted her; she saw them against the blue-grey murk of a slate roof; she had been born and bred in the country, but she had not loved flowers then as she loved them now. She went quickly into the room, and taking the white jar in her two hands, put her mouth to one of the flowers, and inhaled the perfume.

Memories rushed to her. Surely these were cottage roses, country flowers, not city madames? Roses, and hay, and the smell of bean fields, and lilac and white May, and the scent of the bluebells in the beechwoods! And then she nearly dropped the jar, realizing that someone was standing behind her.

"Oh,--I'm so sorry; your door was open, and I happened to see the roses."

She replaced the pot on the table, and with tremulous, sensitive lips, and a flickering of her lashes, made her confession.

"It was awfully wrong of me, but I couldn't resist."

He was looking at her with those curious, still, dark eyes of his. She noticed that he was in his socks, grey socks. She wondered why.

"All right. I had gone down to get the Bunce girl to take my boots to be mended. You can have the flowers--if you like--"

He was abrupt, casual. His very confession concerning his boots was wilful and challenging. He had only one pair of boots, and she might just as well know it. But she, a little frightened, and very conscious of his dour, fixed stare, felt that life--somehow--was piteous and deplorable.

"Really, I couldn't."

He limped round her and across the room, picked up the white pot, and held it out with a thrust of the arm. It was as though he pushed the flowers at her, while saying--"Take them, get out and go. I'm busy."

"All right. My mother sent them. They'll last a day or two. But you might return the pot."

She took the white jar in her hands, and with a half-protesting look at him, got herself out on to the narrow landing. She was still standing there when he closed his door.

2

Christopher Hazzard took off his coat. It was a warm June evening, but he removed his coat because clothes were precious, and because he was about to prepare the meal that contrived to be both tea and supper. Opening the deal doors of the two sugar-boxes he took out an oil-stove, a kettle, half a loaf of bread and a wedge of Dutch cheese, a white milk-jug, two blue plates, a brown teapot, and a spoon and a knife with a black handle. He arranged them on the table. The paraffin stove was kept scrupulously clean, otherwise the smell of those Wiltshire roses would not have lingered. His arranging of the meal was deft, precise, almost meticulous, as though it was part of his self-discipline to make the most of the little that he had.

There were footsteps on the stairs, and someone knocked.

"Hallo!"

"Ol' Bibs saith he wanth sixpunth more."

"Why? Last time."

"A patch or suthing."

"All right."

The Bunce girl opened the door. She was seventeen, sallow, colourless as to hair and lips, with the open mouth and pinched nostrils of a child whose throat had never been attended to. Hazzard was filling the tin kettle, and the girl watched him with pale, slate-coloured eyes that seemed to droop from under the flaccid upper lids. Hazzard's dark and aggressive head was outlined against the sky. His head and his dexterous, strong hands were the only impressive things about him. He was a little fellow, narrow shouldered, fragile, and lame.

"Want sixpence, do you?"

"Yeth, Mr. Hathard."

Putting the tin kettle on the stove, and returning the ewer to its basin, he felt in a trouser pocket and produced some coppers.

"Can't get on without boots, Phelia."

She blinked her heavy eyes at him.

"The kettle's boilin' downthstairs. If you like--"

He was counting out pennies and halfpennies, and he did not look at her when he answered.

"Thanks, Phelia. I'm an independent little brute. Got to be somehow. There you are. Better get a receipt from Old Bibs. Don't trust a soul in this world."

"Lor', Mr. Hathard--we ain't all thieves."

He gave her a quick and half-ironic stare.

"That's so. Thank you."

He was lighting the oil-stove when the Bunce girl closed the door, and her closing of it was gradual, the lingering effacement of a figure that provoked her young curiosity. For Hazzard was an oddity in Roper's Row, though there were other oddities, clean and unclean, obscure, shabby, secret people. They might have been divided into those who had not quite enough to eat, and those who drank too much. In Roper's Row the penny was a coin of some significance. Hazzard paid three and sixpence a week for that top-floor back room, and Ophelia Bunce happened to know that he "paid reg'lar." The room had no fireplace, or rather the fireplace had been boarded up, but then Hazzard never indulged in a fire. In winter he sat and read in his overcoat. His feet got stone cold, but that was to be expected when you were using your brain.

His view from the upper window of No. 7 had a circumscribed variousness, and a bizarre beauty of its own, perhaps because there was so much curious detail in it, and Hazzard the medical student was learning to let no details elude him. He looked out on the backs of three other rows of houses all of the same soft sootiness, and upon a collection of chimney-stacks and chimney-pots, back-yards, and spaces that were called gardens. In one of these gardens a black poplar had grown and flourished; its restless, flickering leaves gave a sense of green movement in the midst of all that blackened brickwork, and Hazzard liked to watch the flicker of the leaves. It was a change from looking at crooked chimney-stacks and comparing them to strumous children with curvature of the spine.

When the meal was over he washed up, using an old white slop-pail as a sink. He dried everything and put it away, gave the stove a wipe with a rag, and closed the doors of his sugar-box cupboards. He did not smoke, because he could not afford tobacco, nor was he to be pitied because there is no pain in doing without that which you have never enjoyed. Hazzard's joy was his work; he lived for it and starved for it, and was despised and disliked for it by those middle-class young men who loved their own bodies. For, in his own way, and at that time of his life, Hazzard had all the climber's happiness.

Getting down a book from the shelf and taking a notebook from the table drawer he set to work. He could read for hours on end. He had an extraordinary memory, probably because he remembered with passion. At "Bennets" he was loathed, because he was such a scrub and so abominably efficient, and played no games and was so obviously a child of the people. He knew that he was loathed.

His work was soundless. Not so the work on the other side of the landing. The click-click of Ruth Avery's typewriter obtruded itself upon his consciousness. She was a typist somewhere in the City, and added to her income by doing odd work in the evenings when it happened to come her way. Hazzard had noticed the card hung up in the window of Mrs. Bunce's newspaper shop: "Miss Avery. Typing done."

He sat and listened. The sound did not disturb him either mentally or emotionally. And presently the clicking of the keys and the ping of the bell ceased. He heard her door open. She went down the stairs; she was going out.

He did not trouble to wonder whether she had any object. He went on reading. He could not go out on that particular evening because his boots were being repaired.

3

Naturally, Christopher Hazzard had no sense of the romantic, but he was very much alive to beauty. A Wiltshire boy from one of those green valleys where the Avon winds among the chalk hills, he had come to know as a child the wildness and the loneliness and the mystery of great spaces. For he had been a lonely child, and a persecuted child, a cripple, one of those sensitive creatures who are designed to be hunted by little round-headed savages.

Mary Hazzard--his mother--had kept a small general shop at Melfont, and to Christopher his mother was all that the rest of the world was not. She was very old now, and the shop had passed into other hands, and Mary Hazzard had retired into a little white cottage with a thatched roof at the southern end of Melfont village, with the feet of its garden in the Avon, and its western windows looking up towards the high pastures. One of those dark, grave, silent women, her very black hair still retained its colour, and her skin had a fine whiteness. The mother of a lame and a delicate child, she had been more than a mother to him in the flesh. She had known him to come back to her with anguish and shame, breathing fast and hard, afraid but fighting to conceal his fear.

She had heard the voices of other children hounding him to the very gate of his home.

"Cowardy--cowardy custard--"

"Hobbledy--hobbledy--Look at his boot."

For Christopher was unusual, and to be unusual is to arouse the mistrust and the dislike of the crowd, be the members of it men or children. Also, Mary Hazzard was unusual, and that is perhaps why she understood her son. Her pride--with flashing eyes--had taken its stand behind his. Very early she had realized him as something unusual, partly because of his lame leg, but chiefly because of his unlame mind. He had not been made for the plough-lands or the smithy or the carpenter's bench, nor had she seen him behind the counter of a village shop. There was more in Christopher than that, and so she put penny to penny, and sent him to school, while earning for herself the reputation of being a skinflint. She was unpopular, because she had a dark reserve, and did not gossip, and was above herself according to her neighbours.

"Them Hazzards."

Yes, them Hazzards, mother and son, were peculiar people, but Mary knew her world, and how few people there are in it who really matter to you, and that the great mistake is to think that everyone matters. Christopher went to school; he carried off prizes; his mother kept them on a shelf in her bedroom. He was a dark child, reserved and silent and watchful in the face of the world, but to his mother he was otherwise. He was solitary, but not with her. On his holidays it had been his pleasure to go up to the hills with the shepherds, or to watch birds, or to take a book and lie in the shade of one of the old grey stones of the Melfont cromlech. Always, those days, he had been reading or watching things. He had curious, deep eyes, both very still and very bright.

There had been a very frank understanding between mother and son.

"Kit, what I'm asking is that you'll never make me look a fool."

"That's a promise, mother."

Their two prides held hands. Each inspired and rallied the other. His mother had defied the world in defying the littleness of Melfont. "She thinks she's going to make a gentleman of him, does she!"--"I do hear he's for being a doctor?" Cluckings, and grimaces, and rustic irony; but Christopher, who had been persecuted in his younger days, understood his mother's pride. She did not wish to be made to look a fool, and to have her neighbours kindly grinning in her shop. And Christopher, with the teeth of his soul well set, had promised himself and her that failure should not come back to roost in Melfont.

4

Mary Hazzard's effort had culminated in the paying of her son's hospital fees, and not only had she paid these fees, but she had managed to allow him ten shillings a week. Ten dear, bitter, blood-stained shillings, but she was an old woman now and could do no more. For it takes five years to make the very beginnings of a doctor, and the boy had to eat and sleep, and textbooks cost money, and the world expects a clean collar.

Christopher would think of these things as he sat at his window. During the last year he had become aware of his mother as a woman grown suddenly very old and white of skin; her eyes were the same as ever, but when he looked at her face he felt strange pangs and the stirrings of a fierce compassion. It seemed to him that like the mythical pelican she had fed him upon her life-blood. He did not know, but he may have suspected that she had gone short of food for years, and now that the shop and its goodwill were sold she had both less and more to give. If it was a case of Christopher against the world, it was also the case of a young man inspired by a double purpose. He could say to himself, "When I'm qualified, when I can make money, it will be my turn."

CHAPTER II

1

At six o'clock Hazzard took down the violin and bow, and wrapping them in a piece of black cloth such as working tailors use, put on his hat, locked his door and descended the stairs.

Ruth Avery, idle at her window, heard him go down the stairs, and leaning out saw him appear in Roper's Row. Already she had come to associate the hour of six with the emerging of that little black limping figure into the passage below. There were the evenings when he carried that black affair under his arm, and the evenings when he wore an overcoat and a white scarf. She supposed that the overcoat concealed something, which it did, a second-hand dress suit bought at a second-hand clothes shop in Red Lion Street. Challenged to imagine what the piece of black cloth might hide, she remembered the violin that she had seen hanging on the wall, and so allowed herself to wonder whether he gave a part of his evenings to playing in some orchestra.

Roper's Row had no roadway. It was a broad, paved passage lined with shabby little shops that sold fruit and groceries, and fish, and old clocks and prints and oddments, and newspapers, stationery, and second-hand books. At six o'clock it was full of children playing and shouting, and getting in the way of their elders, but Hazzard took no notice of these youngsters. Shouting children roused in him unhappy memories. He walked fast, keeping his eyes upon a distant greenness that were the trees in Gray's Inn, for Roper's Row was fortunate in having an open space and trees both east and west of it. The planes of Gray's Inn balanced the plane trees of Red Lion Square.

Hazzard varied his route. Sometimes he used the Clerkenwell Road; on other evenings he followed Gray's Inn Road, and working his way across to Myddelton Square, turned down into St. John Street. In St. John Street stood a public-house, "The Bunch of Grapes," and Hazzard, entering by a side door painted in brown to imitate grained wood, and walking along a dark passage, emerged into a big bare room behind the bar. Here, on a little raised platform, he joined a red-faced man with a banjo, and a hunch-backed little fellow who played the flute. The three of them formed the "Bunch of Grapes" orchestra, hired by an enterprising proprietor for the benefit of his clients.

The banjoist was in charge. He had a succulent, red face, and a voice that rolled oleaginously from under a fair, drooping moustache. He sang music-hall songs, and sentimental songs, and dirty ditties when the room and the audience had grown warm and well oiled. He always led off with three taps of the right foot, a clearing of the throat, and a "Now then--gentlemen." The flutist was never seen to smile. He sat there rather like a little wizened monkey, blowing at his flute with an air of dark melancholy. Hazzard, with the smell of beer and sawdust and hot humanity in his nostrils, and his violin tucked under his chin, observed life with a kind of ironic gravity. The banjoist's name was Bangs; he had glutinous movements, an eternal smile, and an exuberant good humour. He was very popular with the men and the women who sat at the wooden tables covered with American cloth. Always he was addressed as Mr. Bangs.

"Tell us a tale, Mr. Bangs."

And Mr. Bangs would tell a tale, pulling the ends of his big and drooping moustache, and winking one blue eye, and striking occasional and dramatic or suggestive notes on the banjo. He had an arch way of plucking at the strings when producing an innuendo.

"That's where they pulled down the blind"--or "So--I ordered a bathin' machine--for two."

The laughter in the room was like a hot breath laden with alcohol. Hazzard would sit with his violin across his knees and watch those gargoyle faces. Little Lardner the flutist would close his eyes and rock gently on his chair. He appeared to withdraw himself into abstracted meditation; but at the end of one of Mr. Bangs's stories, and in the midst of the splurge of laughter, he would come to himself with a hissing sound, a breath drawn in sharply through closed teeth.

"Silly swine--"

Sometimes there was dancing. A man and a woman would get up and face each other, and looking each other in the eyes with a kind of smeary and set smile, go through movements that were like Bangs's voice, glutinous and strangely deliberate. To Hazzard they suggested people trying to move their feet in a medium that had the consistency of treacle.

For his share in the evening's entertainment he received half a crown and a glass of beer. He would return to Roper's Row, wash out his mouth, put his head in cold water, and sit down to read till midnight.

Other evenings that were more civic and decorous took him to Dando's Hotel in Fleet Street, and at Dando's Hazzard handed round tomato soup, roast and vegetables, apple tart and custard, to the middle classes instead of providing music for the masses. Dando's was much used by clubs and fraternities for their weekly, monthly, or yearly dinners. They were very hearty occasions, with much oratory, and Hazzard, who had cultivated an ascetic stomach, used to wonder how such well-fleshed people could manage to eat so much. Also, having a rather fantastic fancy, he would see in the diners so many rounds of beef or roast legs of mutton dressed up in white collars. But he was kept very busy on such evenings. It was "Waiter" here--and "Waiter" there, and the room was badly ventilated. He sweated. Often he would go back to Roper's Row with a wet shirt and an aching head, but with a few shillings in his pocket.

A fellow "occasional" at Dando's, who was a packer of books during the day, had put Christopher up to the happy method of extracting tips.

"Don't be in a 'urry, my lad. Wait till they're warm. If they're whiskyish, wait till the whisky's got 'em. Then--you go and lean over confidential like and whisper ''Ope I've looked after you to your satisfaction, sir.'"

Hazzard had a purpose and a passion that were stronger than mere superficial pride. He would bend and utter those words, "I hope I have looked after you, sir, to your satisfaction." In nine cases out of ten the tip was produced, and Hazzard would pocket it with a little ironic and grave smile. Probably no diner-out ever suspected him of irony, or of being what he was or what he would be.

2

It was Saturday, and Christopher had packed a bag that was black and rather shapeless, like a mother-bag that had produced many families. One of the white metal clips was missing. When lifted by the handle it sagged at either end; placed upon a flat surface it allowed itself to relax and to bulge.

Hazzard met Ruth Avery on the stairs. She had been running up them and was out of breath, and in standing aside to let her pass he was aware of her quick breathing and her colour. They had not spoken to each other since the incident of the roses and the marmalade pot.

She looked at his face and then at the black bag. Her eyes were shy.

"Going away?"

The question was as obvious as her smile, and yet her smile was not as obvious as it seemed. She was a dusky thing, far darker than he was, suggesting a damask rose or a purple pansy, quick to change colour, slim, sensitive. This smile of hers came and went as quickly as her colour, and when she was not smiling her face had a mute, apprehensive sadness. Always when in movement she would appear a little out of breath, or fluttering like a bird, her face suddenly aglow and as suddenly pale and serious.

Hazzard was as shy of her as she was of him, but it showed in him differently. He would just stare at a person with those still and watchful eyes of his and say nothing, or with a lift of the head utter a few curt, casual words. He had learnt how to protect himself with silence, or to use silence as a weapon, a menace that warned people off.

"Country--till Sunday night. Must get out of London sometimes."

She seemed to shrink against the handrail. He puzzled her.

"I wish I could. Regent's Park--is my limit."

"Might do worse."

He gave her a glance that was neither friendly nor hostile. It was steady and impartial; it offered nothing and it asked for nothing. He went on down the stairs, while she remained leaning against the rail, watching him descend, one hand laid along her cheek. She had the quick reactions of a sensitive child. Reserve, coldness, an unfriendly reticence hurt her.

Before leaving No. 7 Roper's Row Hazzard opened the glazed door that gave access from the passage to Mrs. Bunce's shop. Mrs. Bunce in a red shawl was checking the copies of an evening paper. She wore spectacles; she had an amorphous roundness of face and figure; hair and skin were so alike in their bleached deadness that they seemed to melt into each other. She was never without a shawl, even in the height of summer, though the colour of the shawl might vary.

Said Hazzard, "I shall be back to-morrow night, last train. You might leave the door unlocked."

Mrs. Bunce turned her spectacles upon him. She had one of those confidential whispering voices that go on and on like a perpetual draught through a keyhole.

"That's all right, dearie. Hope you'll find your mother well. It will do you good--it will--a whole day in the country. Drat that paper boy. He's short on me again with the Globes. I'll have to count 'em a second time--to be sure. Yes,--I'll leave the door unlocked. You'll come up quiet, won't you. Old Rammell's so touchy about noises--after ten o'clock. I must count these papers over again. One, two, three--"

Hazzard left her counting, for in Roper's Row simple arithmetic was of more importance than reading or writing. Necessity sat at the master's desk and made you figure everything out without any help from a chalked example on the blackboard. If you had a supreme purpose planted like a pot of musk upon your window-sill, you cultivated a divine miserliness in order to cherish that one plant. You were suspicious of all other plants, especially that particular flower that had the face of woman.

Hazzard's eyes were on the green trees in Red Lion Square. He carried a whole philosophy in that deplorable black bag, but on this June day his limping walk had a little lilt of exultation. He did not see the London figures, those human ciphers, or the rolling cabs and the thundering vans. He was thinking of his mother, and of the things he had to tell her, and of the way her eyes would light up when she heard his news.

3

Christopher wrote to his mother once a week, but his weekends at Melfont were far less frequent because of the cost of a third-class railway ticket. It had to be saved for penny by penny. It was as precious as the second-hand text-books that were bought in Charing Cross Road.

To Christopher that Wiltshire country had a strangeness, a mysterious austerity that somehow was associated with the memories of his solitary childhood, and memories of his mother, and of starlight nights and of blue days upon those upland fields and wild pastures. It was a country that was so open and yet so secret. Its skies seemed vaster than other skies, its valleys more green for contrast. Always it formed a kind of background to his consciousness, shepherd's country, open to the wind, with those green barrows and grey stones scattered about it. It had landscapes that suggested ghosts, dim figures standing at gaze upon green and lonely hill-tops, the spirits of wild men looking down upon the shadows of cloud and of tree. It seemed to associate itself in Christopher's mind with the isolations of his own asceticism, with an apple eaten under a tree, or a glass of clear water, the clean floor of his mother's cottage, flowers in an old brown jug, red pæonies or roses or dahlias, his mother's fresh white skin.

Directly he saw those rolling chalk hills he was conscious of a difference in himself and in them. The steaming stew-pan that was London was left to simmer under its smoky sky, while these great rolling spaces sunned themselves as they had sunned themselves in the days of the Barrow men. Silbury--Avebury--Stonehenge. And the silvery light, and the blueness before rain, and the fields of buttercups, and the great, glooming beechwoods. It was all so old, yet so new. Ages ago men had watched the sun top the horizon, a red or a gold sun. In London there were no sunrises. A window blind grew grey and you got up.

Lying amid the grasses on those uplands as a child, and listening to the wind making a murmuring about some old sarsen stone, Christopher had seemed to feel those other men lying in the grass beside him. He had pictured them as smallish, wild, dark men, rather like himself. And why not? Was it not possible that he was of the same blood as those Barrow men who had gone free upon these uplands when the place that was London had been a swamp?

He, too, was one of those indefatigable little men pounding away with a stone, or pecking at the chalk with a reindeer pick, or toiling with those others to raise the great sarsens. He loved the spacious sky and the wind in his face, and the flowers of that sweet, short turf, and the river valleys with green lips dripping with moisture.

4

Mary Hazzard wore her black silk dress and the gold brooch with the amethyst set in it.

She came down the path through the vegetable plot at the back of her cottage carrying a rush basket in which were two brown eggs. A yew tree threw a patch of shadow on the white wall beside the green door which when open showed the well-washed red bricks of the kitchen floor. On the dresser stood a yellow bowl half full of eggs, and Kit's mother added these other two to the hoard. For a week before one of Christopher's visits she would collect and save every egg that her hens laid so that he could take them back with him to London, together with a plum-cake, and a bunch of roses or sweet-scented stocks or purple and rose asters.

Passing through the cottage into what was both flower-garden and orchard, a little green place dabbling its hands in the river, she sat down in a Windsor chair under an apple tree to wait for the great occasion. Christopher's train reached Barrowbourne at three minutes past five. He had to walk the three miles from Barrowbourne to Melfont, for the carrier's cart was as slow as a funeral, and you saved sixpence at the expense of shoe leather. The day of the motor was not yet.

Mary Hazzard loved these minutes of waiting, though the expectant tumult of them was inward. She was one of those silent, deliberate, tall women, with an air of passive dignity She was black and white. Her dark eyes were steady and large. The lesser, fidgety, garrulous, crudely egotistical fry did not understand her silences or her reserves. Her heart was a dark flower, fragrant but hidden.

Always in summer she waited for her son in that patch of garden, with the river going by, and the light playing in the willows. In winter she had her chair by the window where she could watch the gate. A path led down from the lane over a slope of grass. There was a damson tree by the gate.

Suddenly she saw Christopher at the gate. It never ceased to be a thing of wonder to her that he should return out of that other world which she never knew into this little world that was hers. She rose from her chair, but remained standing under the apple tree. She had that dignity that is seen in some country women, but is very rare in cities.

"Well--Kit--my dear--"

Both their faces were alight. He came to her with something of the air of a child, for she was taller than he was. The man disappeared in the boy.

"I have some news for you."

He kissed her, and not as most sons kiss their mothers. His kiss was meant, and in kissing her he seemed to kiss the hills and the trees and that gently flowing water, the very mother earth of his world.

"You've never brought me bad news yet, my dear."

She had her hands on his shoulders. His grave face had ceased to be a London face, watchful, and shut up behind shutters of sensitiveness.

"It's the Angus Sandeman Prize. I've won it. Fifty pounds and a medal."

"O--my dear--that's grand."

"You'll have to come and see me take it, Mother, in the autumn on Bennet's Day."

"I'll come," said she. "And to think, Kit, that I have been to London only once in my life."

He looked down through the greenness towards the river.

"London and you--don't belong."

For he was thinking how old and shabby and wrinkled London looked, and how young his mother seemed with her clear eyes and her white skin. He knew that she was sixty-five years old, but her black and whiteness were like the black and whiteness of a stately house. To him she was unique.

CHAPTER III

1

On one of the "scientific shelves" of Snape's bookshop in the Charing Cross Road Hazzard discovered a treasure--a second-hand copy of Schiller's Bacteriology priced at fifteen and sixpence. When new the book cost thirty shillings, and Hazzard, holding it in his hands, and looking faintly flushed, turned over the plates and pages.

A little Hebrew salesman edged towards him, for the Jew had known an enthusiast to smuggle a book out under his coat, and Hazzard's eyes were like the eyes of a man gazing upon his beloved.

"Latest edition, twelve new plates--"

Hazzard was considering ways and means.

"Fifteen and six."

"Cheap at that."

"Will you take twelve bob?"

"We're not in business to lose money."

Hazzard put the book down on the shelf, and felt for his purse. He knew just how much there was in that purse--a half-sovereign, two florins, two shillings and a threepenny bit. He could pay for Schiller's Bacteriology, but it would be at the expense of a week's semi-starvation; it would mean a diet of bread and margarine and water, but he had three of his mother's Wiltshire eggs left.

"I'll take it."

"Wrap it up for you, sir?"

"No, don't bother."

Hazzard walked out of the shop and up Charing Cross Road to Oxford Street. It was a hot day in July, and over that space where Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street meet, industry had diffused a perfume of hot pickles. There were other perfumes that associated themselves in Hazzard's mind with London and heat and horses and flower-sellers and Italian restaurants. He smelt one of these appetizing perfumes in Tottenham Court Road, a breath of hot steak and onions, and to a young man who was almost always hungry such an aroma made a pungent appeal. His nostrils quivered, but under his arm he had that book, and in his pocket a sixpence and a threepenny bit, and before him days of asceticism, and nights when he would get up and drink water in order to appease the wistful emptiness of his stomach.

Bennet's Hospital stood at the end of Bennet Street. A grey building powdered with soot, its ground plan the shape of an H, it displayed to people walking up Bennet Street a paved forecourt with high iron railings and double gates. A black and white clock high up in the pediment stared like the eye of a Cyclops. The rows of sash windows emphasized the Georgian symmetry of the building, and its greyness was the greyness of an English sky.

The hospital could be entered by students either through the main doorway where the porter's lodge projected into the forecourt, or by way of the college entrance in Groom Street, and these two methods of entry offered Hazzard a daily choice. The little, sensitive, shrinking boy in him felt tempted to sneak in by the college door, especially after the luncheon hour when house-surgeons and house-physicians, dressers, clinical clerks and students would mass themselves in the main corridor just inside the entrance, waiting for the great men to go round their wards. Hazzard had to compel himself to face that young crowd. It was a hostile crowd, ironical, irresponsible, cruel without realizing its cruelty. He would make himself face it. He would limp across the bare and empty forecourt, feeling very much alone in that grey space, and aware of all those waiting faces. He was conscious of being watched, and of forcing himself to advance against the pressure of an intangible hostility. A cold draught of unfriendliness seemed to blow upon him out of that doorway with its big glazed doors, persuading him to pull his rather threadbare pride across his chest as though covering himself on a bitter day with the collar of his coat.

For this London hospital was Melfont over again, with young men instead of children forming the conventional crowd. It expressed the hatred of the many for the unusual and the peculiar, the derisive and mocking hostility that is instant in its pillorying of enthusiasm, especially shabby enthusiasm. It exemplified that English middle-class mistrust of the artist, and of anything that does not express itself in action and in the physical language of games. It disliked that which puzzled it, and that which inspired a sense of discomfort, an irrational keenness that was bad form, an efficiency that was an offence. To most of these young men Hazzard was "The Squit," and Hazzard knew it. That doorway framed faces of derision.

With Schiller's Bacteriology under his arm he passed from the sunlight of the forecourt to the shadow of the vestibule. All the familiar faces were there, familiar but unfriendly. Young men lounged against the red walls of the corridor or stood in groups. As a rule they took no notice of Hazzard; no one spoke to him. Someone might say--"Hallo, here comes the 'Squit,'" and they would leave him to worm his way through the crowd towards the door of the cloak-room.

The faces of his fellow-students were blurred to him, perhaps because he did not wish to focus them clearly, but hastened to get through the crowd and away from it. Usually he would take refuge beside Julian Moorhouse, who stood a little apart against the wall beside the mahogany door of the Board Room, looking aloof and a little bored. Moorhouse was about the only man at Bennet's who treated Hazzard as a human being. Big and brown and fair, with old country stock and Winchester and Trinity behind him, he had not much in common with these rather raw young men who were so full of a cocksure physical complacency and to whom nothing was sacred, woman least of all. It is probable that Moorhouse despised most of them, and especially so for their despising of Hazzard. But to Christopher there were faces in the crowd that he both hated and feared: Bullard's brick-red jowl with its little fiery eyes, and its nose like the trunk of an elephant; Parker Steel's strenuous pallor and merciless green-grey eyes; and the goatlike and ironic head of Ardron, old Sir Dighton Fanshawe's house-physician.

Hazzard pushed through, but on this particular day someone grabbed his arm.

"What about that sub., my lad?"

He found himself looking into Bullard's eyes.

"You're the only fellow who hasn't paid up. What about it?"

That was Bullard's way. A debonair and flashy animal, with the gross vitality of him showing in his mutton-fat black hair and glowing skin, he set a standard. He captained the hospital football team, and was the Bennet's Club Secretary. He had haunches, and a mat of swarthy hair on his chest. A dominant young blackguard.

Hazzard, held by the arm, refused to flinch.

"I don't play games. You know that, Bullard."

"No reason why you shouldn't fork out half a guinea though. We're all Bennet's men. What's that?"

He tweaked the book from under Hazzard's arm, and holding it as a man holds an offensive and purulent dressing, made the occasion public.

"A Bug Book. If you can buy books and walk about with 'em. I say--you chaps--don't you agree--?"

Said Hazzard very quietly, "My book, please, Bullard."

There was a moment of tension. They were in the arena together with youth looking on. And then Bullard began to laugh. Christopher was wearing that big bowler hat that added to his grotesqueness in the eyes of the conventional, and with one heavy downward squelch of his footballer's hand Bullard crushed the hat over Hazzard's eyes.

"You squit."

Schiller's Bacteriology, sent whirling over men's heads, fell crumpled and with covers spread like a bird brought down, close to where Moorhouse was standing. And Moorhouse bent down and picked it up.

"Easy, you fellows."

For quite a number of enthusiasts were refusing to allow Hazzard to emerge from his crushed hat. Half a dozen hands were busy, thrusting it down over his eyebrows, and Moorhouse intervened in his big, deliberate, rather loose-limbed way. "Easy,--time. Here's old Dighton coming." Removing Christopher's hat for him he was aware of the stark humiliations of that sensitive face. Meanwhile Sir Dighton Fanshawe striding in, top-hatted and frock-coated, and looking like a self-conscious and sleek old eagle, found a suddenly decorous crowd and Ardron--the goat-like--waiting for him and very much his house-physician.

2

That was the tragic element in Hazzard's career, the dislike that he inspired, and the persecutions it produced.

He loved his work, and he loved his hospital--almost with that most pathetic love which is despised and flouted by the beloved. Life had the eyes of a beautiful and hostile woman. He asked for nothing but to be let alone, and to be allowed to exercise the passionate devotion of a little man with a big head and a genius for taking trouble. There was not a corner of "Bennet's" that was not precious and singular to him. He had loved the corner in the physiology lab where he had sat in a patch of sunlight with his microscope before him, and his bottles of stains and box of slides and coverslips. Hæmatoxylin, fuchsin, methylene blue, they were more than mere colours. The smell of Canada Balsam was a precious perfume. Even the dissecting-room had had a bizarre homeliness, and those trussed-up or prone corpses a mystic significance. He had had qualms, especially over the fishing of a leg or arm out of a locker that reeked of preserved flesh and alcohol.

He loved the wards and the out-patient departments, the smell of humanity and of sick humanity, and all that sense of striving and learning and disentangling, of things done and doing, the adventures into diagnosis, and all the problems of the greatest of the professions. There a something in him went out to the maimed and the halt and the blind, but especially did his heart go out to sick and crippled children. For he had been a crippled child; he knew what a lame foot or a diseased spine or a tuberculous hip-joint meant. If there was one post that he coveted and saw himself filling in the future, it was that of physician to the Children's Out-patient Department. A sick child moved him, stirred the bowels of his compassion.

Just that! But because of his very keenness and his genius, and because these virtues were displayed in an ugly and rather grotesque little body, he was disliked and actively disliked. Youth is apt to be both crude and cruel. These rather raw young men, who, in some quite marvellous way, would mellow and become general practitioners, and husbands and fathers, saw in Hazzard nothing but a little chopping-block, a swat, a horrid little sedulous ape. He was shabby. They doubted his physical cleanness, whereas he was cleaner than any of them. His hair grew in an unfortunate way. His black boots were very much boots. He always seemed to wear the same suit or the same sort of suit, cloth of a dingy blackness peppered with grey. He was not a social creature, and he was not allowed to be sociable. The telling of a dirty, sexual tale left his face blank. Life and his craft meant for him a patient asceticism which none of these full blooded young males understood or troubled to understand.

Also, there are forms of persecution which, though passive, are as potent in discouraging enthusiasm as the more aggressive methods. To ignore may mean the depression and the discouragement of the person ignored.

When Ardron and his four clinical clerks set out to accompany and to follow Sir Dighton Fanshawe round his wards, Christopher was at the tail of the little procession, but on the day of the crushing of his hat, Moorhouse, who was one of the four clerks, hung back to keep Christopher company. Climbing the stone stairs side by side, with Moorhouse's long legs in sympathy with Hazzard's short ones, they suggested the big and the little dog. Moorhouse was all that Hazzard was not: slow of speech, comely in a man's way, with a sleepy, blue-eyed dignity that took life in its stride. He came of old stock. He made you think of a field of wheat gold in the ear, oak trees, dogs, horses, a chair in the sun, the brown throat and arms of a cricketer at the wicket in the heat of a July day.

They said nothing to each other on the stairs. Moorhouse was not a man who said things. With his easy, deliberate poise he put himself in a certain position, and the picture needed no label.

Sir Dighton had paused to look at some specimens on the table between the glazed doors of the wards and the first red coverleted bed. He had made his little, debonair bow to the Sister. Two nurses stood like mutes. A ray of sunlight touched old Fanshawe's white head.

"Number seventeen's?"

Ardron, jerkily polite, held up the glass.

"Yes, sir."

Sir Dighton, doing everything with that air of distinction, and with a faint smile of profound sagacity, turned to his four clerks.

"Gentlemen, you see that urine."

He had a velvet touch. His voice and manner transmuted even the most indelicate substance into refined gold. It was his custom to address his clerks as "Gentlemen," and they too--in a sense--were transmuted from mere conglomerations of crude young tissues and secretions into something that many of them were not. Often he would address a favourite with an air of fatherly intimacy. "Moorhouse, will you listen to that heart." Moorhouse was Moorhouse to him. To Ardron he gave the Mr. because Ardron was a Mr. and nothing of the Esquire. When picking out one of the others he would indicate him with his eyes, and if the youth was to his liking, honour him by remembering his name.

"What do you see there, Moorhouse?"

Moorhouse hesitated and smiled.

"Urates, sir."

Old Dighton gave Moorhouse one of those tolerant and half-humorous glances which said, "My dear boy, take your time; think again," but Moorhouse remained serenely mute, though Hazzard who stood next him, felt moved to pinch his arm and to whisper "Pus, Moorhouse, pus." One of the other clerks, Soames, had the beginnings of a simper on his soapy face. Milord Moorhouse might be the best-dressed and the best looking fellow in the hospital, but he was a bit slow in his reactions and in the superficial smartness of the game of bedside ragging. You felt that you had shot your cuffs and scored a point when you wiped Moorhouse's stately eye.

Sir Dighton's glance travelled and fell on Hazzard. He did not address Hazzard, but looked at him challengingly.

"Urates, sir."

Sir Dighton glared faintly, and passed to Soames, and Soames the soapy concluded that if that little beast Hazzard had said "Urates," that cloud of sediment must consist of urates.

"Urates, sir."

Sir Dighton went no further

"Pus, gentlemen, pus."

His glance rested for a moment on Hazzard as though there was some purulence in that small person. He spoke to Ardron.

"Your clerks ought to know that, Mr. Ardron."

Ardron, too, glanced at Christopher. Little Snob! Backing up Moorhouse. No. 17 was Hazzard's case, Ardron was sure of that, and Hazzard knew quite well what was in the test glass.

The progress continued. Leading the way, and followed by his house-physician and the Sister, his four clinical clerks, and sundry students who had gathered to listen to his words of wisdom, Sir Dighton Fanshawe went round the ward. He would pause at the foot of each bed, and combining the airs of the beau with the dignity of the sage, repeat the same question, "Well, how are we to-day?" He did not listen to the patient's answer. Time was precious and clinical facts are of more importance than feelings, and the case sheet and the temperature chart and his house-physician's report were the realities that mattered. If the ward happened to be a female one Sir Dighton was more of the beau; in a male ward he was the benign autocrat. When a case was new to him he would sit down on the edge of the bed, ask a few questions, and then call upon the clerk who was responsible.

"Whose case is this?"

"Mine, sir."

The first new case happened to be Soames's. It was that of a woman of forty or so, with very red lips and a patch of bright colour on either cheek, who lay propped against three pillows, and looked at Sir Dighton with anxious, cow-like eyes. The diagnosis was almost obvious to the experienced eye.

"Have you examined this case, Mr. Soames?"

"Not yet, sir. She was only admitted--"

"Very good. Begin."

Soames, who was apt to get flustered in spite of the soapiness of soul and skin, lugged at the stethoscope in his pocket, dropped it on the bed, and with his eyes invited the Sister to deal with the patient's night-dress. Sir Dighton put up a hand.

"Mr. Soames, too much hurry. Eyes, man, eyes. Observe, observe."

Soames, smirking faintly, stared at the woman, whose eyes were fixed like those of a sick animal on old Dighton.

"What do you observe, Mr. Soames?"

Soames was mute, and Sir Dighton turned to Hazzard, who happened to be next him.

"You?"

The word had a curtness, and there was a slight tremor of Hazzard's upper lip. But he had no compunction about putting Soames in his place, for Soames was not Moorhouse.

"The colour of the lips, sir; the redness of the cheeks; the position of the patient."

Old Dighton's eyes narrowed.

"Well, what would you be led to suspect?"

"Heart, sir, mitral disease."

Fanshawe gave Hazzard a nod of the head, and a glance of cold and curious dislike. Probably he was not conscious of the glance's temper. There was too much cleverness in this little fellow; like a monkey he was rather irrepressible.

"Never jump at conclusions, Mr. Hazzard. Distrust your inner consciousness."

Hazzard's lips moved as though he were about to answer, but old Dighton's face was turned again to the patient, and the snub spread like a smoke ring to be sensed by the other young men about the bed. Hazzard stood very still, with his eyes on the woman's face. She had a something that reminded him of his mother.

3

Ruth Avery's window confronted other windows, and above them a stucco cornice, slates and a variety of chimney-pots, but in the window immediately opposite hers a young couple had a bright green window-box full of scarlet geraniums, and muslin curtains with pink bands. That the colours were all very wrong was as obvious to Ruth as the clashing of most things in life, but then the sounds that came from lovers' windows could be intimate and disturbing. Lying in bed at night, or sitting at her open window wrapped in solitude behind a blue serge curtain, she would seem to feel the heart of Roper's Row surging in at her window. She was very solitary, but she was not made for solitude, with her quick colour and her dusky eyes; but then she suffered from a bird's wildness and timidity. And she was fastidious.

Roper's Row sang and shouted and gossiped. The geraniums in the window-box opposite fired red shots at her as she sat alone with herself. Sometimes she could feel the little red blurs on the dark target of her consciousness, yearnings, restlessnesses, wounds. There would be little scufflings and laughter between those two lovers in the room over the way. A merry fellow, who sometimes played the banjo in a house along the Row, would burst into sudden song. She heard him now.

"When you've been all day in the street There's nothing to feel but feet, Nothing to feel but feet. When you've been all day in the street You're standing on plates of meat."

Her eyelids flickered. She shuddered so easily at certain things, while understanding the inwardness of them. She knew what it was to have tired feet and an aching back. The office closed at one o'clock on Saturdays, and she--to amuse herself--had nothing to do but walk, up streets and down streets, round squares and into and out of parks. She walked because she felt pursued by restlessness, or to escape from the sense of her solitude in moving among other people.

The voice was singing another stanza.

"When you have got to the end of your life There's nothing to do but die, Nothing to do but die. When you come to the end of your life, There's nothing to do but die."

What a philosophy!--and she had no philosophy, but only her youth and a feeling that she was coming to the end of life even before she had begun to begin it. She was an orphan; she had no relatives left to her save an aunt in Devon, and two cousins whom she had never seen. She had no margin, no prospects, and no adventure in view save the woman's adventure with a man and a child. But she was shy of men; she was as shy of them as Christopher Hazzard was of women, but for different reasons. It was as though she divined the adventurous cad in the average man, his sex savagery, his tendernesses and pawings that were no more than an animal hunger that disappeared when it had gorged itself.

Men stared at her in the street. She was a comely thing, and she knew that a man would easily be come by, but there was that something in her that hung back. She was very sensitive to being stared at; she would flinch and hurry by with flickering eyelids, and a rush of blood to her cheeks. Once or twice in half-lit streets she had known panic and had fled.

Hurrying in on one of these occasions she had met Mrs. Bunce under the gas-jet in the passage.

"My, dearie, you do look flustered."

"Someone followed me."

"A gal has to get used to that, dearie. You learn to put a hard face on, and they'll let you alone."

Leaning out for a moment to look at life she saw Hazzard coming down Roper's Row from the direction of Red Lion Square. She watched him. She found a touch of appeal in his limping walk; he worked so very hard; he seemed as lonely as she was. Withdrawing she stood up, and then going to her door, opened it an inch or so, and listened. She heard the lub-dup of his footsteps on the stairs.

She felt herself flushing. She heard him coming up the last flight, and opening her door wide she went out on to the landing. His head appeared, crowned by the felt hat, which, in spite of ironings and coaxings, showed the scars of persecution. She pretended to be surprised, but the pretence was very innocent.

"Oh, it's you--"

He looked at her as he looked at all women, seeing in them strange, perilous creatures, forbidden to him by the celibacy of his unfailing purpose. He was the working ascetic. It is probable that--vaguely yet instinctively--he feared woman as he feared any hindrance or interference.

He said "Good evening" and turned towards his door.

Her eyelids flickered.

"I'm sorry. I expected someone about some typing. I thought--"

He had his hand on the door handle.

"I see."

"You haven't a book you could lend me, have you? I've nothing to read, and to-morrow's Sunday."

He looked surprised. He considered her a moment, and then went into his room, and scanned his bookshelf. He saw nothing but medical text-books. The only live book was the Bible his mother had given him.

He took it from the shelf and offered it to her.

"Nothing but this. After all--there are some good stories in it. You see--I haven't time."

With a queer little wincing smile she accepted Mary Hazzard's Bible, and leaving him rather like a child that has been told to go and sit down and be good, she returned to her room and closed the door.

She resumed her seat by the window, and let the book open on her knees. It opened at the Book of Ruth. She read:

"And Ruth said--'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge--'"

At another window the gay fellow was singing his song:

"Nothing to do but die, Nothing to do but die. When you come to the end of your days There's nothing to do but die."