She shed no tear in sympathy with the wild grief of the heroine when the hero, as is the way of screen and opera heroes, jumped to the worst conclusion immediately on finding her in a mildly compromising situation and departed in (presumed) sound and fury. The beautiful impassive face in the flickering light showed no softening when the accident happened, and the heroine, taking it for granted without attempting anything so mundane as first-aid that the hero was dead, forgave him beautifully for the injustice she had suffered. Kif forgot the shadows entirely in watching her. He had played so long with shadows, and she was so wonderful, this intoxicating reality beside him; the fine small nose, the tilted chin, the turned-back mouth like a flower. Her eyes he could not see; her hat hid them. But he could picture them. And he pictured wonders for himself more miraculous even than those being told on the screen. But when the hero, recovering with a celerity which in any other world would have laid him open to a charge of malingering, had enclosed the heroine in a last apologetic embrace, and a farce—intentional—followed, Kif resolutely wrenched his attention back to the film; and since it was funny he was soon laughing unselfconsciously.
And then when the fun was at its height he suddenly became aware of Baba as he had not been aware of her before. The laughter fell from him like a garment. He was conscious of her presence as something so potent as to be intimidating, and he was defenceless and half afraid. He could not turn his head to look at her. He wanted to take her violently in his hands and shake the magic out of her and the fright out of himself at the same time. The jigging four-four time of the piano and the pale haze of the tobacco smoke fused suddenly to make the air suffocating. He wanted to call out; to break something; or to say something reassuringly casual. With a deliberate effort he took out the case which held his last two cigarettes. His hands shook slightly, but the feel of the cigarette between his lips—standby in many tight corners—was somehow comforting. His eyes watched the pails of whitewash and the custard pies missing their destination. He would not think of her. And he would not sit next to her again until—until—
The lights went up. She turned to him with a cool small smile. 'Funny, wasn't it?' she said casually, and to her brother: 'There are the Higgs, two seats down.'
'God!' he thought, 'God! is it just me?'
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At the beginning of the year Kif found work as traveller for a small firm of soap manufacturers in North London, his beat being in outer London and the suburbs. The work was exhausting and the recompense meagre in the extreme. His salary was sufficient to pay for his room and board with the Carrolls, and no more. And if chemists and grocers found Messrs. Vidor & Pratt's representative irresistibly persuasive it was because of Kif's urgent need of a margin which would make life tolerable. But it was rarely that his commission on sales was sufficient to warrant his having an evening out with Baba; and his ambition in life had narrowed down to simply that. He became more and more obsessed by the thought of her. Everything he did was done in relation to her. And yet he saw very little of her. After the six o'clock tea she went out usually with one or another of the 'crowd' who were always willing to act cavalier at the slightest hint of her willingness. When she stayed at home there was the probability of Mr Carroll being present too. Unless Kif took her out there was little chance of their acquaintance progressing as Kif ached to have it progress. And so he badgered and cajoled and bluffed unwilling customers into making trial of Crimson Rambler soaps, bending his stiff tongue into slickness, and subduing the loathing the work roused in him, for the sake of the few extra coins that made the difference between Heaven and Hell.
And he never ceased to sift the papers for a more congenial way of making a living; and clerks or cashiers or office-boys would be mildly astonished when, just as they were preparing to shut up shop for the night, a tallish man, very carefully brushed and rather tired about the eyes, would present himself as candidate for the vacancy which had been filled six hours ago. Occasionally in desperation Kif filched an hour from his legitimate business so that he might come somewhere at the head of the queue. But his luck was no better.
And then three months later he stepped over the border line without a backward glance. His first essay in crime was not a particularly difficult one. He stood for an hour one night in the shrubbery of a suburban villa while the laurels rattled suspiciously and the rain dripped down the back of his neck, until the constable on the beat had passed. When that had happened—and the officer had hesitated at the gate long enough to give Kif a thrill which cancelled the discomforts of the wait and made his mind leap to find excuses for his presence were it discovered—Kif, according to plan, walked down the street loudly whistling a music-hall tune. When he reached the end of the street he came back without melody, and, the street being reassuringly dark and empty, gave vent to a long low whistle on one note. The lack of variation in pitch made the sound, in spite of its carrying quality, quite unarresting to one who was not waiting for it. In a moment or two Carroll père stepped out of the gate carrying an attaché case, and Kif without looking at him and without greeting walked away in the opposite direction. He crept to bed in the dark house and was asleep before his partner returned. Three days later Mr Carroll handed him ten pounds in treasury notes. 'Slept well?' Mr Carroll had said at breakfast on the morning after their adventure, and Kif, taking his cue, had said 'Yes, and you?' and had asked no questions. He was not going to spoil his chances of further enlightenment by an ill-timed curiosity as to the ways and means. It was enough that Carroll was pleased with him.
With this windfall he redeemed his watch—the one that Tim had given him—which had been the last article to go to the pawnshop, and took Baba to dinner and theatre in the West End. He had never seen Baba in what she called war-paint before, but it did not need the tribute of turning heads and murmuring to tell him that his estimate of her beauty was a true one. Her frock had been her father's present to her, and Baba had chosen it with an intuition which would have made her fortune in the dress-making world. It was incredible that any other woman, by paying the price of it, could have worn it. It was as if a piece of exquisite cloth had been draped on her half-casually by a master; and she wore no ornaments except the jewelled clasp at her hip which was part of her frock. She was running over with happiness and the love of life. She jested and mocked and criticised the world of their inhabiting until Kif could have sought her for her tongue alone, and not for her arms and her hair and her eyes. He had long forgotten his spasm of nerves in the picture-house, and to-night he was nearer happiness than he had been since he had walked into the Charing Cross office that foggy morning and found it empty. He never thought about that if he could possibly help it. In his dreams—those post-war dreams of confused nightmare struggle—it was always Collins he was killing; but in his waking moments he had a queer feeling of emancipation, a queer conviction that nothing he would ever meet in life again would hurt him as that had hurt; he would never suffer like that again. If he ever met Collins he would beat him up, of course; that went without saying. In the meantime he did his best to forget about it. No one at Northey Terrace had ever heard him talk about his bad luck—partly because Kif was no talker, partly because it did not bear talking about.
'Can you dance?' she asked as they stood on the steps of the theatre after the show.
'Yes,' said Kif, a sudden light in his face.
'Well, let's go somewhere to supper where we can dance.'
They went to a semi-suburban dance-hall and Kif spent the time in the taxi trying to keep his emotions in decent check. In ten minutes—five minutes—he would have Baba in his arms.
'I didn't know you could dance like this,' she said when the orchestra stopped for the first time.
'Well, you know now,' said Kif, uttering words but having no knowledge of or interest in their meaning. The music started again and his arms went out for her.
Shortly after two o'clock they came home. Baba, who had been quiet and half-asleep in the taxi, we
nt upstairs first, and Kif put out the light which had been left for them in the lobby and came up in the dark. She was waiting for him on the landing and he took her in his arms without warning and kissed her again and again while she stood acquiescent.
'Good night, Baba, good night,' he said huskily and dropped his arms. Her hand slid lingeringly from his as he moved away, but he went without pause up the last flight to his room. He sank on the edge of his bed breathing quickly as if he had been running, his head propped in his hands.
Baba in the room below turned on the light, flung her bag on to the bed and said in a fierce whisper 'Hell and Damn!' She moved over to the mirror scowling. Slowly the scowl faded. Gradually she smiled, one corner of her mouth higher than the other. Her reflection smiled back at her knowingly. Rapt in contemplation of herself she stood there, breathing gently, her head propped on her hands.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kif learned that Angel and Danny habitually worked together, and that the unfortunate Sammy had been the partner of the elder Carroll, except on the occasion on which he was pulled, when he had elected in the face of much good advice to do a job alone. Mr Carroll seemed quite willing to use Kif if Kif were usable, and Kif did his best to qualify. Twice he was entrusted with the task of obtaining the layout of a house. The results of these were so good—Kif had included in his report the habits of every member of the respective households—that Mr Carroll beamed on him and signified his approval by introducing Kif to his most precious possession—his tools. These were, amazing as it may seem, kept in the house, and though ultimately Kif learned to his intense admiration and amusement their hiding-place it is not to be recorded here. Carroll is still in business, and I have no doubt is using the same tools. Kif handled them curiously and reverently as another might have examined the emblems of priestcraft, and Carroll lectured on them—jemmies and bits, nitroglycerine, oxy-acetylene, torches, cylinders, queer contraptions of wire—explaining their uses, peculiarities, and some of their history with the enthusiasm of the specialist. And Kif listened and admired.
He spent no time in examining the morality of the situation. He was not even possessed of as positive a thing as a grudge against society. A way had opened for him and he liked the look of it; that was all. The way led to comfort—which he had had stolen from him and to which he felt vaguely that he had a right—and to what was much dearer, adventure. He accepted the chance as unquestioningly as he had joined the army at fifteen, ignoring the main issue since the incidentals were what he wanted. There was no one to keep him back; he had shed his acquaintances as he went along—his family (he knew the whereabouts of one brother who had heard from a sister three years ago but had lost the letter), the folk at Tarn, the Barclays, his army friends, Marcelle, Hough and his crowd—they had all melted into nothingness behind him; he was as unattached now as he had been at fifteen. Only Carroll remained—Carroll and Baba. There was nothing to deter him.
So Kif, who would never have dreamed of taking possession of an object which was not his merely because he wanted it—with the exception of that 'winning' which all his fellows practised in France—became a professional at the job with no more self-examination than he would have had on entering the secret service. He kept his job with the soap manufacturers since, financial considerations apart, Mr Carroll explained, it was as well to have a perfectly good occupation to point to as the means of one's existence. So Kif sold just as many cakes of Crimson Rambler as satisfied Messrs. Vidor & Pratt and, remembering the days when he had sweated in agony in case the order he had fought for was not forthcoming, smiled smoothly at the manager when he said how kind of the firm it was to employ useless ex-service men, and devoted his interest and his energies to things nearer his liking.
For six months all that came his way was a succession of odd-jobs for Mr Carroll, all of them what he had known in the army as 'intelligence'. Mr Carroll found no fault with the results—indeed it would not be too much to say that Kif had done the work with love—and Kif found no fault with the payment. In that time he took his place in the queue of Baba's recognised retainers, with a slight lead of the others because he was her favourite dancing partner. His promotion paradoxically lessened the urgency of his passion for her; made it a more reasonable, a less devouring thing. Her treatment of him remained what it had been to begin with, silent and talkative by spasms, superficially frank, but always enigmatical. Now and then in their intercourse he was reminded forcibly of Angel as he had known him first. Mentally she was as difficult to 'get hold of' as her brother had been; she afflicted him with the same sense of impenetrability.
And then in August Mr Carroll looked up one morning from the patent food of a burnt sawdust appearance which was his breakfast—he was full of theories on diet and for six or eight weeks at a time would begin the day enthusiastically with the latest discovery, only to supersede it at a moment's notice—and said to Kif: 'Are you doing anything to-morrow night?'
Kif had been going to ask Baba to dance because it was pay-day, but he said immediately, 'No,' and waited.
'Well, I'm going to be busy. You could come along with me if you would care to.' Tableau: a benevolent old gentleman asking a young one to spend an evening at his club.
Kif nodded and turned over hastily in his mind the various commissions with which he had been entrusted lately. Which was it?
Mr Carroll went on: 'It's an easy business, and you might as well start easily,' and it dawned on Kif that he was on the threshold of his initiation. He felt as if a hand squeezed his heart. For a moment it seemed that Heaton had warned him for a wiring party or something of that sort. He was on the point of saying 'Very good, sir,' when he met Carroll's mild blue eyes, realised the placid, lower-middle-class breakfast table at which he was seated, and nodded again. There was silence for a little; Angel was not down yet and they were alone. He became aware that Carroll, carefully masticating his unappetising granules at the other end of the table, was still regarding him with a dreamy gaze, and it occurred to him with a sense of shock that any 'dumb insolence' would be as impossible under these gentle blue orbs as in the presence of Heaton's cold grey eyes.
When he told Baba the next morning of the projected promotion she nodded indifferently. Neither the fact that he was going on a 'job' nor the necessity of missing the dancing which she must have expected made apparently any difference to her. He had hoped for either a smile of encouragement or an expression of regret, and when neither materialised was left wondering, as he so often was. After tea he watched her depart with Danny to the cinema.
'So long, you two. Good luck. Don't forget to leave the key.'
At half past ten—it was the end of the month and the days were short—they set out, Carroll carrying an attaché case and an umbrella. The umbrella was known in the family as Delilah—Danny had been responsible for the christening—because it led honest men astray. Carroll said that nothing soothed and impressed a doubtful constable like the presence of an umbrella. 'Sir' came to their lips as soon as their bull's-eye lighted on it. And since it was unmarked and of a pattern with ten thousand replicas it could be discarded, if in the way, without providing evidence of any value to the Law.
They went a short way by bus and then alighted and remained at the bus stop for nearly ten minutes, ostensibly waiting for a special number but in reality, as Kif knew very well, making sure that no one had followed them. Having strolled fifty yards in both directions they resumed their journey to a south-western suburb, and at half past eleven—an hour still not too late to make their presence in any way remarkable—they were walking down a retired road bordered by the railings of large gardens which rendered the houses invisible. Half way down Carroll paused, lit a match, and looked at his watch.
'Come, not so late!' he said in a cheerful well-fed-citizen voice. But the pause showed that they were alone on the road. Far away a late bus droned and a thick damp silence possessed the world. It had been raining in the afternoon, and the sharp smell of sweetbriar came cle
anly through the mugginess from some invisible hedge. Kif drew in an abrupt breath.
'The gate is locked,' Carroll said, 'but it's quite easy to get over. I'll go first.' His citizen voice had gone and he was talking quietly though still not surreptitiously.
In the faint light from the nearest lamp they climbed over the gate and walked into the dripping blackness of the avenue.
'The house is shut up. Everyone away in Scotland until the end of September. Keep hold of me.' Carroll walked through the dark with the assured step of one who knew his way. They coasted the house to the back premises, where Carroll stopped. 'Scullery window,' he said. Nine-tenths of the scullery windows in London are open invitations.' He produced a pocket-knife and slid back the catch. With surprisingly little scraping or fumbling he climbed over the lowered sash and helped Kif after him. Kif felt his ankle held and his boot guided to a level resting-place. 'The edge of the sink,' explained Carroll. 'Don't go backwards. It's a drop behind.' Kif came safely to floor level and Carroll closed and bolted the window.
'Now in half an hour the policeman on the beat will arrive.' Mr Carroll never referred to a 'bobby', still less to a flatty, or any of the other more descriptive nicknames used by his kind. 'Until then we make ourselves as comfortable as circumstances will permit. No lights and no smoking.'
Kif grinned in the dark at the familiar prohibition and followed Carroll up a narrow passage, his hand on Carroll's shoulder and his feet moving as Carroll directed—'Three steps up' or 'Don't fall over the rug.' So familiar was the proceeding that he found himself waiting for the star-shell that would bring them to a halt. But the kitchen smell of water and stale food and dried clothes gave way to the smell of floor polish and varnish, and they moved unchallenged into a wider space and across it to a door which, as it was opened, emitted the stuffy warm chintzy smell of a living-room.