'Drawing-room,' said Carroll. 'Make yourself at home.'
Kif groped his way to a chair, cretonne-covered and very springy, took his hat off—yes, he wore a hat; Carroll insisted on that; caps, he said, were an object of suspicion to the force—and wiped his forehead.
'Why couldn't you use your presser?' he asked. 'That wouldn't show, surely?'
'Well, Sammy is "abroad" now because of his torchlight reflected from a brass door-knob shining through a key-hole. It does not sound very credible, does it? But it is always the incredible things that happen; don't forget that. I know a man who forgot as obvious a thing as a skylight. And a reflection did for him too. Don't use a light until you come to business and it's absolutely necessary.'
'You've been here before, of course?'
'Oh yes, I was here in daylight. Daylight's all right for reconnoitring, but no use for serious work. You are liable to be interrupted at any moment and that cramps your style. Don't talk any more.'
The stuffy quiet lapped them round and the quick prickings of excitement in Kif had died to a sleepy acquiescence when a round light flashed straight in his eyes. It took three heart-stopped seconds for him to realise that it was a light on the drawing-room blind. He watched it crawl over the fastenings, slide along the lower sashes, swerve back to the fastenings and disappear. From outside came the faint sound of movement and then silence. Kif remembered that the lawn at the side of the house grew close up to the drawing-room windows, and that even a policeman's steps would be inaudible on it. The quiet was so complete that it was difficult to realise that Carroll was within a few feet of him. He could not even hear him breathing. He resisted a desire to find out if he were really there, and sat still. And then, inside the house apparently and thunder-loud in the silence, came a shot-like sound. Kif sat still, his heart thumping, determined to make no move without a sign from Carroll. But the silence flowed back and nothing happened. He realised that the man had tried the kitchen door, and as it dutifully resisted had let the bolt fall back with a crash. And presently he heard, faint but unmistakable, the tread of footsteps on gravel. The front door shook. Several loud crunches on the gravel outside and the light moved over the front windows of the drawing-room, hesitated and went out. The footsteps died away. A small gurgle began above the window; it was raining again. Carroll made no movement and Kif waited. Endlessly he waited, motionless and determined. It was Carroll's move. At last Carroll said: 'That's all right,' and got to his feet. Something in the tone conveyed to Kif more than the words said, and he felt happy. 'There are old shutters on the windows,' Carroll said, and Kif heard him moving them. There was a click and the green light of a reading-lamp broke the darkness.
Kif looked round him curiously—he had seen the interiors of so few homes that he had still a child's curiosity about other people's belongings—but Carroll was bent on business. He lifted the lamp from the low table on which it rested and placed it on a neighbouring secretaire, which stood against the wall between the fireplace and the large side-window.
'It took me a good hour to find the safe,' he said, 'and even then I would have missed it if it had not been for a fingermark on the wall. Mrs Neuman was hot and flurried last time she put her jewels away. That is what makes me think they are here, and not in the bank where they ought to be. But I suppose having made a cache like this she is rather proud of it.' He was standing on a chair now, and, reaching up to the electric-light bracket on the wall, he detached a bulb and a length of cord, which he allowed to hang from where it entered the room immediately above the bracket, and swung the whole bracket sideways on an invisible hinge. 'See!' he said 'That is exceedingly neat work. Observe that hinge. Observe the catch. Observe the way the cord lies in the groove. Nothing so crude as dummy lights. Delightful work!' He sighed with a craftsman's delight and came to earth, literally and metaphorically. 'You get another chair'—Kif had been standing on the edge of his—'and hold the light.'
Kif lifted another chair forward, unconsciously choosing the one which would be least damaged by his boots, and while he held the lamp watched steel and flame bite into the barrier between them and what they wanted. When Carroll at last stretched his hand into the hollow and drew forth a flat morocco box he uttered a gently deprecatory, 'Oh, women, women!' As they looked at the double string of pearls Kif said. 'Are they real?'
'We shall know in a moment,' said Carroll, burrowing again.
The two boxes which he brought to light contained respectively an emerald pendant—six large stones set in diamonds—and a bracelet of alternate diamonds and sapphires. At the back of the safe, thrown casually in, were an uncrossed cheque for twenty pounds six shillings and twopence and a roll of notes which amounted to seventy-three pounds ten shillings.
'Women,' whispered Carroll again. He closed the safe, swung back the bracket, and replaced the cord painstakingly. Then he climbed down, removed the lamp to the floor and said: 'While I pack up these go upstairs to the first room on the right and bring me the ivory crucifix you'll find hanging above the bed. It is the only thing of value to us in the house. Don't use a torch more than you can help.'
Kif stepped from the lighted room, warm now with familiarity and habitation, into the chilly hall. He found the room without trouble, and swept it with a cautious but curious eye of light. It looked like a girl's room, somehow. There was a single bed, stripped now, but with pale mauve and pink hangings on the silver-grey wood. A large wardrobe of the same wood ran the whole length of one side of the room. Kif pushed back the sliding door and surveyed the contents. Frocks mostly, soft shining things that seemed queerly alive in the white light. He ran his big supple hand along them, lifting the folds of now one and then another consideringly. A faint sweet scent came out from them. 'Girl's things,' he thought. 'Queer!' It did not occur to him to think 'Less than a year ago when I was at starvation point this girl was buying frocks she had no need of.' It simply had nothing to do with him. He pulled the door to again, made a casual examination of the pictures—Medici reproductions of early Italian religious paintings—and took the crucifix from the wall. It was nearly eighteen inches long and beautifully carved. He considered the writhing figure dispassionately. He had seen many calvaries in France, but this one was more alive than any he had seen. 'Well,' he thought, 'lots of our chaps took far longer to die, and were a much nastier mess while they were doing it. And for far less reason.' His head went up at the sound of a drip-drip outside. It was still raining, damn it. Carroll would have some use for Delilah. Good old Delilah.
Carroll saw his teeth in the half-light as he came back to the drawing-room and asked what the joke was. He had packed away his tools and their reward, and was waiting for the crucifix. As he stood up from disposing of it he faced Kif and said:
'Have you taken anything on your own account?'
For a moment Kif felt as he would have felt six months ago if someone had accused him of stealing. His right hand was already clenched and lifting when he realised that he was about to be ridiculous.
'Not I,' he said.
'That's all right, then,' Carroll said. 'There isn't anything else in the house that is worth the risk its disposal would entail. We already have a destination for the crucifix in America. Otherwise it would be valueless. My agent,' he never said fence, 'would not touch it. And to try to get rid of an article through the pawnshops would mean disaster for all of us. Forgive my asking, but you will realise that it was important.'
They left the room as they had found it, and made their exit by the scullery window again. After a long pause in which there was no sound but the drip of the rain, Carroll put the case and umbrella into Kif's hand and said: 'Take these and wait for me near the gate. If you hear me call out get away as quickly as possible.' Surprised but obedient Kif went, the whole of the night's haul and all Carroll's tools in his possession. He marvelled, alone in the wet, until he heard the suck of footsteps growing gradually nearer and slower and Carroll's voice said his name.
It was nearly
two o'clock as they went briskly down the gurgling street under Delilah's chaperonage. 'We have a considerable walk in front of us,' Carroll announced; and presently: 'You are no doubt wondering why I stayed behind. If that window were not fastened our little night's amusement would be discovered to-morrow by the constable on the beat. But if the screw I put in remains unnoticed, nothing will be found until the lady looks for her belongings a month hence.'
When they had walked for more than twenty minutes, judging by the quarter hours boomed from many steeples, Kif decided that they were not making for home. He revolved this a while and came to a conclusion. 'Going to get rid of it'—and he wondered what the agent would be like. But the method of getting rid of it was not his least surprise that night.
They were walking down a back street which, Carroll said, was a popular short cut between two great highways of traffic. On one side were high buildings—stores and garages—and on the other the back-garden walls of a series of smallish houses, each back gate marked on its right by the oblong iron covering of the coal chute. As he passed one of these, Carroll lifted the lid, and without pausing let his case drop into it. They had gone several steps past it before Kif realised what had happened and then he made no comment; he was still on probation.
They walked for another ten minutes until they came to a halt on a wide corner where there were shops—a local Piccadilly circus, black now and silent. They had not been there two minutes before a taxi slid up to them.
'Taxi, sir?' said the man, but Kif saw the grin under his drooping moustache.
The speed, the warmth, and the safety all conduced to make Kif sleepy, but it was a still wide-awake Carroll who pushed him out into the damp again when the taxi dropped them at the end of Northey Terrace. As they went up the street, the clocks of all the world, it seemed, ringing three, they met a tall slowly-moving figure.
'Good night, officer,' said Carroll cheerfully.
'Good night, Mr Carroll. Out late, aren't you?' said the tall man.
'Oh, a little, but one must keep young. Have you ever seen'—he mentioned a popular musical comedy of the moment. 'Well, don't miss it. Only if you go to the upper circle, don't take the third seat from the right in the third row. There's a pillar directly in front of it. Miserable!'
And Kif, ten minutes later, was ravenously devouring cold ham which Carroll carved with delicacy and precision, and being silently grateful for that coal shute in a back street and for Delilah.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Carroll's screw remained undiscovered, and no reports of a suburban burglary enlivened the press of the succeeding days. Kif received his portion of the night's takings a week afterwards, and at Baba's instigation bought himself some much-needed clothes. She had come into his room one evening in the process of distributing the contents of the laundry basket, and holding up a shirt for his inspection had said: 'The first thing you do with your next pay is to get yourself some new things. I don't mind sewing on a button for you occasionally, but I draw the line at trying to make this hold together.' So Kif refitted; and had his first serious difference with Baba over the choosing of his suits.
She came upon Angel and himself, their elbows on the table and the tea-things pushed back, contemplating samples of cloth in the large content born of well-fedness and a congenial occupation. They were turning over the patterns in a monastic calm, with none of the twitterings and head-leanings and eye-narrowing and advances and retreats which are part of a woman's method of conducting the business. Baba, on seeing their occupation, immediately became authoritative. She took possession of the situation and became the self-elected oracle on the subject of shade, texture, suitability and wearing capabilities. A slow surprise dawned in Kif at some of her pronouncements, but though Angel made what she called crushing remarks occasionally he said nothing, and she did not appeal to him. It became clear to him presently that she was seriously engaged in choosing a cloth for him. At last she said: 'That's the best,' and turning back to where a white forefinger was inserted, 'and that's the next. Have this for everyday and that for meetings.' She put down the book and began to clear away the things.
Kif disapproved so wholeheartedly of her choice that he found it difficult to believe she was in earnest. Baba! who dressed her own lovely body with such an exquisite suitability. Angel was whistling softly to himself while he turned over a second book, and Baba evidently considered the subject closed.
'Well,' Kif said, 'here's my choice.' And held it out to her. She did not take the book, but stood looking at him, her expression that of one who reads a direction-sign in a railway station. Then her glance came down to the pattern he was exhibiting, and the faint rare colour showed in her face.
'Much too dull for me to go out with,' she said, and lifting the tray carried it through the doorway he opened for her.
Angel lifted his head for the first time and grinned broadly.
When Baba came back from spending the evening with her only girl-friend—one Sally Myers, whose Jewish good looks were an excellent foil for her own—she found her brother alone with the last edition of the evening paper. He was occupying her own armchair, a fact which emphasised a feeling she had that their usual positions were reversed. There was amusement and malice in his eyes as he greeted her.
'You should take an interest in racing,' he said, waving the paper at her.
'So that more good money could be thrown away.'
'Ah, but think of the valuable lessons to be learned. The folly of betting on certainties. Miss Confidence lost to-day at Derby by five lengths. Terrible shock to all concerned.'
She was taking off her fur at the mirror over the fireplace and she looked sharply at her brother's reflection.
'You look all right in that coat,' he went on, in the understatement which is fraternal commendation. 'Pity you don't approve of Kif's new suits. Saw them in the piece when we were being measured. They're going to look a whole heap better than your horrors would have done.'
She turned to him incredulously.
'Well, I'm glad I didn't take the odds on Miss Confidence.' He picked up the paper and met her glance over the top of it.
'Blast you,' she whispered, 'blast you!' and slashed him across the face with her fur. But he laughed delightedly from behind his upflung arm, and frustrated and beside herself she fled from the room.
So Kif was cast into outer darkness, and instead of spending what remained of his money on Baba found himself to his own amazement with a banking account. Since he had every intention of marrying Baba at the first opportunity he considered the sum in the bank as so much deferred bliss, and bore his exile from her good graces with an equanimity that disconcerted her not a little.
The direct result of his temporary loss of Baba was his discovery of Danny. As soon as it was apparent that Kif was in disgrace the little man had become unobtrusively friendly. Kif was unimpressed, until he one day used a phrase which Danny replied to with astonishing aptness. It was a minute or two before he realised that his phrase had been a quotation from a Kipling short story and that Danny had capped it. For the first time then he really considered the desperate-looking little fellow who was Angel's partner. Angel was at this time enamoured of a resting chorus-lady and was not available as a companion in the evenings, and so when Danny suggested that he should come round to his rooms for a book he went not unwillingly, and that was the beginning of many nights together.
Danny had two rooms at the top of a boarding-house, and he had furnished them himself with a success which was astonishing in an effort so wholly instinctive. The colour scheme was a warm purple combined with shades ranging from buff to amber; it was almost as if he had longed unconsciously for the moors and burns of his heritage which he had never seen, and which he would probably have hailed with opprobrium in reality. There were but three wooden pieces of furniture in the flat—a bed, a dressing-table, and a table which was half desk, half chest-of-drawers—and they were all of walnut, dark and beautiful. The books he had invited Kif
to come and choose from filled the open wood shelves that ran round the room, and over-flowed on to the chairs and the floor; books of all sorts, from the little red pre-war sevenpenny's to expensive volumes of travel and biography, thrown together without order or arrangement. No library this, but the bare bones of things on which Danny had feasted. And Kif who had come to borrow a book stayed to find out about Danny.
And through the rest of that winter Kif was to be found at least two nights a week buried in an armchair at one side of Danny's hearth, his long legs stretched to the fire and his nose in a book, while Danny, almost invisible in the cigarette smoke, sat curled gnome-like opposite him and drew music from the fiddle tucked under his chin. Or Danny would argue passionately some entirely unimportant theory—against himself perforce, since Kif would lie, interested but wordless, contentedly smoking. The atmosphere of the place fed a part of him which was starved to atrophy at Northey Terrace. The warm beautiful colouring of the room, the music, the books, Danny's husky voice in its unexpected cockney—one always expected Danny to talk broken English—playing with abstractions, Kif lapped it eagerly. When he had a home of his own it would be something like this—a place to come back to after adventure.
The thought of Baba was a discord at Danny's, but Kif, unintrospective as always, did not pursue the thought to its logical conclusion.
'What do you believe in?' Danny asked one night, dropping the fiddle in the middle of a phrase.
Kif: An Unvarnished History Page 19
