Barclay, defending his demand for cliffs, said: 'I have a constitutional aversion to a seaside place where the land and sea seem to have met by accident, as it were. You're walking along a perfectly ordinary bit of turf when a wave comes wollop at you and you say rather surprisedly, "Oh, yes, the sea of course. I knew it was round here somewhere." I like a place where the sea comes up against more than it bargained for and makes a song about it.'
When Kif, the car being parked on the cliff top, descended the chalk-hewn steps of the gap to the white shore and beheld the Sisters smiling their siren loveliest in the afternoon sun he agreed with Tim. Shining, aloof, and incredibly fair they stood along the lonely coast. The sea, no assailing force to-day but a prostrate lover, kissed their white feet in an ecstasy of abasement.
Tim put down the tea-basket and said: 'I once took a cousin, a girl, here for an afternoon, and all she said was, "Gosh, isn't it just like a postcard?"'
Said Ann, busy unpacking: 'Sylvia never said "Gosh" in her life.'
'Am I to conclude by that remark that you admit the major indictment?' asked her brother.
'Oh, well, I wouldn't put it past her, as Alison says; she never did show symptoms of soul, but she most emphatically had chronic lady likeness.'
'Hospital work has had the most disastrous effect on Ann's metaphor,' said her mother. 'When first she started motoring it was the same, You may remember. Everything was described in terms of cranks and spanners. Tim dear, would you get me the other cushion from the car if no one is just pining for it?'
They spread tea on a patch of tawny sand below the white boulders that the cliffs had cast as sops to an importunate sea, and ate in the unequalled content of people who are living wholly for the present and who find that present good. There was no wind to make a murmuring in their ears when the talk died; only the sleep-inducing repetition of the sea filled the silence. Now and then a gull swooped, or a pebble slid from the cliff in a little rattle of scudding fragments. A ship, hull down, made the only human finger-mark on a shining elemental world.
When they had lit cigarettes Mrs Barclay and Tim strolled away along the beach while Ann and Kif stayed where they were, given up to the lassitude that invades the most active on a spring afternoon. Ann lay on her side watching the gulls that swooped and eddied apparently meaninglessly about the cliff face. Kif sat propped against a boulder, his service cap tilted forward, his eyes, shut to black slits, on the dreaming sea. Presently Ann said:
'Tim says you know all about farms. I am thinking of taking up that kind of work when the war is over.'
She was not. It is true that she had decided to have a career of her own when her country no longer had any need of her. But she had not considered the medium. At the moment she merely thought that it would be nice to show an interest in something this quiet boy might be supposed to be familiar with.
To her surprise the quiet boy twinkled down at her and said unimpressedly: 'I think you'd better think again.'
'Why?'
'I don't know,' he said, not because he did not know, but because he was searching for words that would explain. 'How would you like a day like this?' he said at last, and began an account of the farm-worker's average day. As he talked, some of the bitterness of his life on the farm came back to him, and through his matter-of-fact phrases there emerged some of the futility, the barrenness, the endless expending of oneself on the thankless earth that will be there unchanged and unchangeable when the labourer is as if he had not been.
'And you don't get anywhere,' he finished. You just go round in circles. If you don't want to get anywhere it might be all right. But I should think you'd want to get somewhere. And anyhow it's awful work.'
'But don't you love animals?' she asked, rather taken aback.
'I like horses, yes. And dogs. But you wouldn't go to work in an engineering shop just because you liked the smell of oil. Animals are only a little bit of a farm—at least the kind of farm I worked on. If you're fond of animals a stable would be the place to go to. Have you ever been at a race-meeting?' And on hearing that she had not, 'You'd like it,' he assured her, and proceeded to give her an account of the day he and Travenna had spent at Kempton, while she lay and watched him, her rather small merry blue eyes unwontedly grave. She had met many men of many varieties and all classes in the last two years and had learned to judge them fairly accurately. Her opinions were habitually clear-cut and she usually knew the reasons for them. And now she was wondering why she liked this boy. His physical attractions cancelled each other out, she decided. He had a pleasant voice but a bad accent; his body was good to look at, but his face was plain; good teeth but an ugly mouth; and nice eyes if only the lids didn't give them that reckless look. Was it only his quiet manner that attracted one? But Tim had liked him; and Tim, though easy-going, had his standards. Perhaps she had liked him by proxy.
'Yes, I'd rather like to work in a stable,' she said. 'I learned to ride when I was at school, but it was only the trot-out-one-canter-and-trot-back type of thing. I must do something in the open air. If I had a job indoors I'd regret every fine morning to such an agonising extent.
'But if you had an outside job you'd probably be sorrier still on every bad one. And there are about five bad ones to every good one.'
She had a moment's spasm of annoyance that the conversation was not running quite as she had unconsciously planned it; but her by no means scanty humour came to her aid. She laughed and said: 'You're not being very encouraging, are you? What would you suggest that I should do with my abounding energies?'
This direct appeal rather turned his flank. He smiled at her, but in a moment he said quite simply: 'I expect you'll get married.'
She had not expected that, so she merely shook her head and asked: 'What about you, Kif? What do you want to do after?'
It was Kif's turn to shake his head. He did it quite gravely, but in a moment the imp in his eye was laughing at her when he said: 'What would you suggest for me?'
'I don't know. I don't even know your requirements.'
'I want something that makes no two days the same. Something so that you never know what's going to happen next.'
'Great heavens!' said Ann unaffectedly.
'Do you want to make money at this queer business?' she asked after a short pause. 'I mean must we consider that an indispensable part in choosing?'
'I don't want a lot of money, if that's what you mean. I'd want enough to go to a show or a boxing match or a race-meeting once a week perhaps.'
'Better go racing every day and be a bookmaker. They say that it's the unexpected that happens there, though judging from my friends' experiences the failure of the favourite seems to be common enough to be monotonous. But you wouldn't mind that if you were a bookie. The only alternative seems to be picking pockets in the Strand. You'd have the double excitement of not knowing what you were going to take out of a pocket and never knowing the minute you were going to be pinched.' She took a cigarette from the case he offered her and considered. 'I don't know, Kif,' she said seriously at last, 'you stump me. I don't think there is such a job. Not unless you made a few millions first and then proceeded to juggle with them. That would meet the case.'
They smoked in silence. The almost brimming tide gave little exhausted pants of achievement, the gulls swooped and cried. Into the girl's mind came the good things her brother had told of this boy at one time or another: his courage, his good humour, his unselfishness. 'It is strange,' she remembered his writing, 'he has any amount of initiative, but no capacity for leadership.' What kind of work could his good qualities be harnessed to in peace time? With the greater part of the earth's surface as well explored as the downs the day after the Derby there was little scope for physical courage and endurance in these days, it seemed. But then—this hypothetical future?
As if he read her thought he said: 'Well, we needn't be bothering our heads!'
His remark being delicately vague enough for her to ignore its probable meaning she said: 'It'
s a good enough game for a sunny afternoon. I don't expect you'll discover the ideal profession—'
'I don't expect so.
'—any more than I shall get a job out of doors with every day a fine one.'
They smiled at each other.
'But it is something to know what you want, Kif.'
When Mrs Barclay returned with Tim she found her charming but difficult daughter playing five-stones with two pebbles and three shells under the expert tuition of the ex-farmer's boy. They were both completely unselfconscious and entirely happy.
Kif helped to pack the tea-basket with the neat-handed efficiency that was always so astonishing coming from his loose, big-jointed hands, and carried it up the cliff while Tim assisted his mother. As she came to the car Mrs Barclay said:
'I think Kif will come behind with me this time if it would not bore him dreadfully, and you, my dear boy, can change places with Ann if she gets tired of driving.'
So Kif, nothing loth, climbed in beside his hostess, and as they rolled through East Dean—a dreaming hollow filled with warm sunlight—Ann could hear the boy's low voice answering the musical one more and more readily. The mothering process in full swing, she thought; but it was more in amusement than contempt to-day, for she was happy. There was sun and spring air and Sussex, and beside her sat the being she cared most for on earth, reprieved for a little from the horror over there. And a little mothering probably wouldn't do the present subject any harm. He didn't appear to have had much of it so far. Perhaps her mother would find his ideal job for him. But no! It would be much more likely that she would gently dissuade him from so primrose a path with careful and unanswerable arguments about the advisability of a safe profession, a stable income. The Orthodox and the Expedient were the gods of her mother's idolatry—though she would have been sorrowfully forgiving if the suggestion had been made to her.
'What are you smiling at, Ann?'
'I'm smiling because I can't help it. It's such a refreshing sensation to have one's muscles do it of their own accord instead of having to do it for them that I'm just letting them carry on.'
Her brother patted her knee, but said nothing. He, too, appeared to be listening, though probably with different emotions, to the voices behind.
'How did you two get on?' he asked presently.
'I like him. He's not so shy as you said he was.'
'He isn't so much shy as quiet. He evidently found you not too terrifying.'
'Oh, no; he wasn't in the least blate. (Alison asked if you would like almonds in the toffee, by the way, and I forgot to ask you!) He vetoed farming as a career for me after the war in no uncertain manner.'
'I expect he would!…I'm almost frightened for him sometimes, and I don't in the least know why. I think perhaps because he is so tremendously in love with life. People who are that are simply asking to get hurt. Life's a rotten spec. at best.'
'But, Tim! you found it good enough once!'
'Yes, good enough. And I was perfectly happy. But with a difference. Kif—I can't explain; I just have the feeling.'
It was dark by the time they reached Croydon. Kif, who had been calmly happy in the sunlight and the companionship at the Gap, was roused to something more than content by the glamour of the evening streets: topaz and ruby spilled on the purple of the earth and strung across the blue-dark of the night; narrow streets full of light and sound where tram, bus, dray and barrow nudged each other in expostulating impatience; wide dark boulevards where the surface gleamed and reflected as if wet. The diamond light of a searchlight, unearthly and chill, swept a cool finger over the bustle of the town. Kif watched it for a moment and then tried not to see it. They were running into London, London in the evening; surely that was joy sufficient to blot out the cold reason of a thousand searchlights. For the rest of the way his independent spirit soared from the toils of his companion's sympathy and was away again on the horizon. And Mrs Barclay, who was growing a little sleepy, shrank further into her fur coat and thought of dinner.
Mr Barclay, whom Kif met at dinner, was the leader and Grand Master of his wife's admiring train. He was a little pink man with upturned grey moustache which in Lombard Street gave an uncompromising briskness to his appearance, but in his wife's presence made him look still more like a faithful small terrier. He welcomed Kif with a heartiness which was a queer blend of shyness and pomposity. Ann and Tim seemed to have inherited little from their father except their smallish bright eyes. Both children had their mother's wide humorous mouth and curving chin, though even in Tim's case the lips had a fuller curve than hers.
If Mrs Barclay was subtle there was nothing suave about her spouse. He fired questions point blank at Kif until Tim, noticing what he called his father's prosecuting counsel manner in full blast, obtained Kif's release from the witness box by beginning a story about MacIntyre. Mrs Barclay had made war talk taboo, but even her edict was not sufficient to achieve such a miracle where the central thought and major experience of everyone present was war. Mr Barclay laughed appreciatively over the MacIntyre tale, and turned immediately to Kif with another question. This was merely what he would call 'showing an interest in the boy'.
'And what has been your most thrilling experience at the front?' He belonged to the brigade who liked the sound of 'at the front', and stuck to the phrase long after it had passed into dis-use outside the illustrated press.
Kif, rather at a loss, grinned. 'I think it was the time Fatty Roberts put the brazier on top of the box of Verey lights and the dug-out went up,' he said.
This was so unexpected from Mr Barclay's point of view that he was momentarily speechless. Kif caught a doubtful look in Ann's eye and said to Tim: 'Back me up. Miss Barclay doesn't believe me.'
'Oh, rather!' said Barclay, who had been smiling at the memory. 'Old Kif Is quite truthful. You wouldn't have thought that anything as wet as that dug-out was would have even smouldered, but it blazed like a match factory. There was more than one entrance to it, of course, so there was a fine draught. We started making a barrier with sandbags, but with the Verey lights popping all over the place you never knew the minute they were going to set fire to the boxes of bombs or something like that. And when Murray Heaton came along to superintend Jimmy nearly had a fit and told him to get out of it because it was no place for him. I don't suppose Murray ever had that said to him in his life before.'
'What did he do?' asked Ann.
'Well, the moment was too hectic for anyone to observe much. He didn't take any notice with his face. His face, in any case, is about as noticing as a Red Indian's. But I think he was amused.'
'Amused!' said Ann. 'I thought he was an awful stickler for discipline!'
'He is. But he stickles in the right places, if you know what I mean. There are no flies on Heaton.'
'That is the Heaton who rode a lot before the war, isn't it?' Mr Barclay asked, though Tim had told them in letters and in person all about his captain, and all the family knew that he knew. It gave him a childish delight to trot out a piece of information, however tattered. 'He seems to have done well?'
That word loosened the bonds of their self-containedness. If Murray Heaton, playing poker at a kitchen table in a blue haze of cigarette smoke that dimmed the candlelight, felt an ear burn at the moment it was the right one.
'I am going to send you straight off to bed, my children,' said Mrs Barclay as they finished their coffee. 'You have all arrears to make up.'
She herded Kif and Ann upstairs and allowed Tim half an hour for a talk with his father. Kif was in bed, his nose in a Kipling that Ann had provided, when Mrs Barclay came in with a tin in her hand and laughter in her eye. She laid the tin on the bedside table.
'Alison's offering,' she said. 'Her most luscious "Taiblet". Don't eat it all to-night or the rest of your leave will be of no account. Have you everything you want? I really think Tim has the most deplorable taste in pyjamas,' she added as her eye came to rest on Kif's sleeve.
Kif laughed at her. 'They look all ri
ght to me,' he said. 'I certainly never wore anything silk before.'
She patted his arm lightly. 'Good night, my dear,' she said, and left him.
He lay for a full minute with his eyes on the door. Then he humped the bedclothes over his shoulders and returned to Kipling. A moment later he remembered the tin. He sat up and peered into it, selected a piece of the sugary brown sweetmeat and popped it whole into his mouth. He lay down and pulled the clothes up again. As he crunched the mouthful his gaze wandered absently round the piece of room visible between the pillow and the sheet. Then he propped the book once more into a convenient position and, still chewing, fell to its perusal, utterly content with the world.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It would not be true to say that Kif did not enjoy his leave with the Barclays as much as his first one with Travenna. It is not possible to compare them; it would be as possible to say that one preferred chalk to cheese, their properties being in no wise the same. From the orthodox point of view his week with Tim's people was packed fuller of entertainment and well-being than anything his life had so far contained. For the first time he ate daintily, slept soft, moved in an atmosphere of leisure, and was wrapped round with consideration and kindness. And he liked it. He was sybarite enough to appreciate the softness, and the consideration appealed to his unaccustomed naturally egotistical soul. He enjoyed to the top of his bent the theatre parties; the supper dances in the carpetless drawing-room at Golder's Green when he fox-trotted expertly with charming beings who seemed to take him entirely for granted since he was a soldier, a friend of Tim Barclay's, and could dance; the motor drives through an England sweet with spring; the games of badminton on a lawn too small for tennis. But if he had analysed his sentiments—and he did not, for he was happy—he would have discovered that the day on which Tim, Ann, and Mrs Barclay went to the country to visit a grandmother and which he spent mooning round his beloved London by himself held, as well as happiness, a quality that the others had lacked. It was the quality which had made his leave with Travenna the unforgettable thing it was. It had something to do with the freedom to go and do and see at the bidding of no one and without consultation with any but his own spirit. When he was alone—and Travenna had been so perfectly his complement that they had moved as one—he was lord of the earth.
Kif Page 7
