Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/41

 minus the apron. His pride allowed itself this little satisfaction.

They would stand together for five minutes beside one of the white Ionic pillars supporting the bow window of the dining-room, the boy looking up into his father's face. He was an observant child, and his love for Sorrell had undergone a transfiguration. Christopher noticed changes in his father's face; it looked more waxy; there were little wrinkles as of a troublesome knot of effort lying between the eyebrows. Sorrell was thinner; he stooped more.

But Sorrell's eyes smiled.

"How's she feeding you, son?"

Christopher had no complaint to make of the food that Mrs. Barter gave him at No. 13 Fletcher's Lane. She was a good woman.

"She's been mending my shirts, pater."

"Ha," said Sorrell, "has she!"—and glanced at the boy's suit. Yes, that fresh face contrasted with the shabby clothes.

"Time I took you to the tailor, my lad. I think I can manage it next week."

Christopher could not analyse all that lay behind his father's eyes, but he felt the warmth of the love in them. He noticed that his father's eyes had a filminess, a veiled and secret delight, a moment of deep dreaming. They were the eyes of a man who was thirsty, and to whom the boy brought pure, clean water. Christopher refreshed him. His candid eyes and the brown warmth of his clear skin were unblemished fruit after the rottenness of those squashed and purple souls, those men who made Sorrell think of faces trodden on by an ever-passing crowd of sordid and unclean thoughts. His boy had youth, a future, possibilities; he was the sun in the east.

And poor Palfrey!

"My God!" Sorrell thought; "one must hold on to something, even if it is nothing but a clean shirt and a piece of soap."

Christopher never asked questions, awkward and embarrassing questions. He accepted his father's job, and he understood the significance of it far more subtly than Sorrell knew. It reacted on the boy, and deepened his sensitive seriousness.