Touch and Go (31 page)

Anyone not completely immersed in imbecility would have turned about and proceeded in the right direction, but Mr. Darnac, after calling heaven and earth to witness that he was a fool, continued along Randall Street and into Casson's Row.

Casson's Row leads into the top end of Portingale Square, and Millington's Hotel is about six houses down on the left-hand side. He was just about to turn into the square—and if anyone wishes to know why, I would refer them to the uncounted number of young men who in similar circumstances have gazed passionately, gloomily, or ecstatically at a parcel of bricks, mortar and window-glass behind which some lady is believed to be sleeping—he was just about to enter the square, when someone passed him, walking in the same direction, but on the other side of the street. A lover may be crazy enough to walk half across London in the middle of the night in order to stare at the unresponsive wall of an hotel, but he may retain enough sanity to desire a decent privacy for his madness. This was Bertrand's case. He therefore hung back a little and hoped that the other gentleman, whoever he might be, would get on with it and get away.

There is a lamp-post at that corner of the square where Casson's Row runs in between Nos. 40 and 41. The lamp-post stands outside No. 40. The other gentleman crossed over before he came to it. He wore a Burberry and a soft hat. He carried something which oddly resembled a rucksack, and he looked like Ricky Hildred.

Bertrand stood still where he was on the dark side of the Row and watched the hat, the Burberry, and the rucksack. He had no doubt that they adorned Ricky Hildred, and that Ricky was also making for Millington's Hotel. A perfect fury of jealous rage rendered him incapable of reasoned thought. He pursued the half seen figure swiftly, but with caution. He wanted to find out what Ricky was up to, and when he had found out he wanted to take him by the scruff of the neck and bang his head against a brick wall. He felt as if this would be an extremely soothing exercise, and he hoped very much that there would be no policeman at hand to interfere.

There is another lamp-post in front of the hotel. Ricky passed between this and the house—Bertrand was now quite sure that it was Ricky Hildred. He couldn't have said why he was sure, but he hadn't a doubt of it.

Just beyond the lamp-post a very narrow alley cuts in between the hotel and No. 29. Ricky disappeared into the alley and Bertrand followed him. The hotel has a tradesmen's entrance upon the alley. It has also the sort of old-fashioned double-leaved wooden gate which commonly leads to a stable yard. Coming on this, Bertrand discovered it to be open. His jealousy and his anger incontinently received a cold douche of suspicion and curiosity.

“What the devil is this Ricky up to?” was the question he was asking himself as he slipped through the half open gate into the back yard which lay beyond it.

He stood there, still angry, but more puzzled. The rucksack came back into his mind. Why the rucksack? Why Ricky at all? Ricky wasn't in love with Lucilla—well, not enough to notice anyway. But granted Ricky, why the rucksack?

His restless inquisitive brain took charge at this point, and it was a keenly wide-awake young man who now picked his way amongst the booby traps with which almost any back yard is encumbered. There are dustbins. There are tin cans and buckets. There are empty petrol-tins. There are rakes, forks, and brooms. There is washing on a line. But to these general obstacles Millington's added a small hand-cart placed diagonally across his path, a stable lantern, a very large coil of wire, some lengths of hose-pipe, and a compact little pile of bricks.

The advantage of following someone else is self-evident. It was Ricky who smothered a groan when the shaft of the hand-cart caught him in the diaphragm. It was Ricky who, treading on the bristle end of a broom, had his lip cut when the handle flew up and smacked his face. It was Ricky who stumbled over the stable-lantern and barked his shin on the bricks. The way of transgressors is proverbially hard. The virtuous Mr. Darnac, following in the transgressor's wake, and warned by his muffled groans, successfully avoided the worst of the obstacles.

His curiosity grew with every moment. Was it possible that he had been mistaken, and that this was not Ricky at all, but a cat-burglar? In which case, what an immense, what a superlative lark! Bertrand began to feel happier then he had done for some days. He stood in deep shadow and listened with all his ears. Ricky—or the burglar—was in process of climbing the wall against which he stood. As far as he could make out, it was the side wall of some room which had been built out into the yard, for it was only one storey high. The burglar—or Ricky—was going up in the angle between this wall and the wall of the house. There was probably a convenient water-pipe—the burglar's friend.

Bertrand stood waiting. It was when the unseen climber had, by the very faint sounds that he was making, just reached the roof of the one-storey building, that not so much a new thought, but a new arrangement of his previous thoughts took place. It was Ricky—yes, assuredly it was Ricky. But at the same time it was also someone who broke in, and for a purpose which was assuredly criminal. He remembered Lucilla's headlong ride down Burdon Hill. He remembered her only just averted fall at Holme Fallow. And he began to edge along the wall, and having reached the corner, to shin up the water-pipe. There
was
a water-pipe.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Lucilla was asleep. She lay on her left side with one hand under her cheek. She was breathing softly and deeply, and she was dreaming a light, nonsensical, pleasant dream.

In this dream she was walking knee-deep in a field of buttercups. There was a faint but pleasant whirring sound in the air, and this was because hundreds of dragon-flies were circling, swooping, and hovering over the buttercups. The sun shone on the gold of the flowers and on the brilliant sapphire, emerald, turquoise, and chrysoprase of the dragon-flies' bodies. It was very hot and very pleasant. Lucilla herself was very comfortably dressed in a pair of shorts and a vest. Her feet were bare upon the grass, and her head was bare to the sky.

Ricky slipped the palette knife between the upper and the lower sash of the bathroom window and pushed back the catch. He began very cautiously to raise the lower half of the window.

In Lucilla's dream the sound became a loud whirring of wings, and one of the dragon-flies, grown to the size of an aeroplane and shining like all the jewels in the world, came down with a rush and caught her up in a swift breath-catching spiral of flight.

Sarah was not asleep. If you desire to-morrow too intensely, it is apt to recede down a vista of wakeful hours. She put out her light at half-past twelve and found her pillow too low. When she had reinforced it with a cushion, it was too high. At one o'clock she began to count sheep, but by half past one all the thoughts which she had been trying to keep out of her mind had come trooping in and were clamouring to be heard. She switched on the light and read persistently until three, when she really thought she had tired them out. She lay down in the dark again, and felt herself beginning to slip down into the shallows of sleep.

When Ricky moved the catch of the bathroom window, the sound he made was so very slight that even if she had been awake and listening, Sarah would scarcely have heard it. As it was, she stopped slipping down that dim incline and stayed without knowing why on the blurred edge between conscious and unconscious thought.

And then all at once she was awake. The window had made very little noise, but she was awake and up on her elbow, listening. And when she listened, she could hear that someone was moving in the next room. If she had been more fully awake, or more deeply asleep, this would not have troubled her. In the one case the sound would not have been enough to wake her up, and in the other she would have reasoned that sounds from a next-door room are to be expected in an hotel, and more especially when the room happens to be a bathroom. But in the misty half-and-half confusion of her mind the sound became linked with her fear of the night and her longing for the day. As she emerged from the confusion, the fear emerged too. She could hear a continuance of faint sounds from the other side of the party wall. The fear fastened upon these sounds.

Someone was moving, she thought furtively. There were none of the sounds which are natural to a bathroom. The noise of running water, the metallic click of the wire basket contrived to hold the vast out-moded sponges of an earlier day, the soft slapping sound of the rubber bath-mat being laid down, would have been music in Sarah's ears. Instead there came only the sounds which she thought of as furtive. She drew a long breath, slipped out of bed, and groped in the dark for her dressing-gown.

Bertrand Darnac reached the roof of the one-storey building, which was in fact an extension of the hotel dining-room. He lifted his head cautiously and stared about him. Several windows looked out this way. They were no more than four or five feet above the roof of the extension. The middle window was open and there was a light behind its down-pulled blind. The blind did not quite fit the frame. A line of light showed like a bright wire on either side of it, and the bottom edge cleared the sill by two or three inches. It was the bottom half of the window that was open, and the blind moved a little in the cool night air. Bertrand felt that he could bear to know what was going on behind that moving blind. He was angry, he was determined, he was apprehensive on Lucilla's account, and he was full of a most raging curiosity. He made his way across the roof and peered through the three-inch gap between the blind and the sill.

He saw the broad mahogany edge of an old-fashioned built-in bath. He saw the bath-taps, polished as very little brass is now polished. He saw about half of Ricky Hildred. He could not have sworn that what he saw was in fact Ricky, or any part of him. He saw about half of a Burberry, and suspected that Ricky was inside it. Then he saw a hand in a rubber glove, and immediately he was so very angry that it was only by the most heroic effort of self-control that he restrained himself from leaping into the bathroom and laying out the Burberry with a well-planted kick. He went on looking, and saw the hand which had gone down out of his sight come up again. It held an extraordinary but quite unmistakable object. Bertrand's anger went cold and savage as he recognized this object. It was a gas-mask. Inside that bathroom Ricky Hildred was putting on a gas-mask. “Very well then, my dear Ricky, we will give you time to put it on, and we will give you time to give yourself away. And we will give you rope—oh yes, we will give you rope to hang yourself.”

Afterwards Mr. Darnac was pleased to remember that in such a crisis he had been able to recall so apposite an English idiom. It proved to him that his command of English was really unassailable. At the moment, he applied his eyes to the three-inch gap, and his mind to considering Ricky Hildred.

The hand came down again and up again. It still wore the rubber glove. When it came up again, the other hand had joined it. The two hands supported a metal cylinder with a short length of tubing leading from it. Next moment the hands and the cylinder were out of sight behind the Burberry, and the Burberry began to move away from Bertrand in the direction of the door.

Bertrand restrained himself. He gave himself orders not to move until this devil of a Ricky had gone out of the door. It was not enough to catch him with his gas-mask and his cylinder. He must let him go farther than that. He must let him go to the very edge of his crime and catch him there.

He saw the Burberry approach the door. He heard the faint sound of the rubber glove upon the handle. And then he heard another sound. There was a little click, and the bathroom light went out.

Lucilla was soaring higher and higher into the blue of a sky surcharged with light. The sound of the dragonfly's wings had dropped to a low soothing hum. She could see the wings from where she sat on the great emerald ring which joined thorax and head. They were just the colour of the bronze pollen on one special kind of grass. Nothing else had the brownness or the dancing iridescent light. She sang “Oh let us be joyful” in her heart. She did not hear the bathroom door open.

Ricky came out into the passage. It was very dimly lighted by a small heavily shaded electric bulb which marked the head of the stairs. It is perhaps a mistake to say that the passage was lighted. It was rather filled with a sort of orange-coloured gloom strongly reminiscent of a fog. Ricky hated coming out into it like poison. It was all very well for Geoffrey to tell him what he must do, but suppose someone came out of his room—or her room—while he was doing it. All very well to say they wouldn't, but suppose they did. With the utmost reluctance he took his hand off the knob of the bathroom door and began to make his way down the passage. He passed the head of the stairs and Lucilla's door. He passed two more doors, one on either side. The carpet under his feet was most reassuringly thick and soft. He began to feel a little better. After all, why should anyone come out of any room at half-past three in the morning?

Sarah put out her hand in the dark and felt for the knob of the door. Her fingers touched the cold metal of the small old-fashioned bolt, and she remembered with a sort of startled shock that she had bolted herself in—and why. She slid back the little brass tongue. It ran smoothly in its groove and made no noise at all. The handle was lower down. She found it, turned it slowly, and pulled the door towards her until she could look out into the passage. The first thing she saw was the orange light at the head of the stairs. The stairs came up very nearly opposite her room, and a little to the left the shaded light shone high up on the wall. She saw that first. Then she looked sideways and saw that the bathroom door was open, and that a man was coming out of it.

Her first natural impulse was to draw back. She had begun to do so, when she saw that the man was Bertrand Darnac. He was bare-headed and in evening dress. What light there was fell full upon his face and on his white shirt-front. His name sprang to her lips, but did not pass them, because even as they moved to let the sound of that whispered “Ran!” escape, she saw something else. Someone at the far end of the passage straightened up from a stooping position, turned the handle of the door immediately in front of him, pushed it open, and disappeared into the darkness beyond. The door was John Hildred's door, and the darkness was the darkness of the room in which he lay asleep. The door closed upon the darkness.