Читать книгу Kif - Elizabeth Mackintosh - Страница 7

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Kif left England in June on a grey still evening when the sea was a level floor of lavender and Folkestone lay dreaming and lightless, a mere gathering of the greyness where the white cliffs still glimmered. The subdued bustle of readjustment which was the backwash of embarkment faded into a little silence as the dim coast vanished, broke out again, and eventually settled into the low hum of conversation which was one with the faint thud and wash of the Arundel nosing her way indifferently towards France. Kif leaned against the rail and thought of nothing in particular. The calm of the night was in him and some of its dreaminess and unreality. On one side of him Fatty Roberts, the company buffoon, was calling heaven to witness that if he died it would be from tobacco starvation and not from bullets. On the other was Barclay, very quiet and whistling snatches of something under his breath. Further away was the voice of Lance-corporal Struthers insisting—Kif could almost see the gesticulation—that it was 'the principle of the thing, sergeant.'

Jimmy had put up his first stripe shortly before he went on leave. The promotion elated him not at all. It was in his estimation the natural order of events and he treated it as such. He had spent his leave lording it over his admiring women-folk—five sisters, a mother, and a grandmother—and showing off blatantly before his elder brother, who had not yet torn himself from his browsing life among the sheep. 'One of these days he'll take root, mark me,' he had said. He had come back to the battalion with three recruits in his train whom he had proceeded to adopt, bully and mother, very much as he had Kif. There was no limit to Jimmy's fostering propensities. He was the complete company-sergeant-major in embryo. He had not wet his promotion beyond a mild exchange of drinks, but on the night that the battalion heard definitely that they were 'for off' he had come back to camp so riotously drunk that Barclay and Kif had hard work to save the infant stripe. At the cost of twenty minutes' hard work, some desperate expedients and some shin bruises, they did it, however. Jimmy had asked next morning, 'Who put me to bed last night?' but had offered not a word of spoken thanks. He had made a little eloquent gesture with his head, and left the matter there. In the months that followed he paid his debt in divers ways and many times.

Barclay had refused in spite of urgings from home, cogent arguments from his superiors, and the oratory of Jimmy Struthers, to consider taking a commission.

'It isn't my job,' he would say. 'I'll form fours, and march, and with luck register an outer, but I'm not going to mug up drills.'

What he really hated, though he would never say so, was the thought of responsibility. It was a thing his mind shied away from. If he took a commission he would be saddled with it night and day—an old man of the sea on his shoulders, perpetually clutching and weighing him down. It would be disastrous, he felt, to attempt to make himself into something he was not by nature. Disastrous not only to his own peace of mind, but perhaps to those unfortunates whose safety would depend on a man who had no confidence in himself. Therefore he stayed a private. And Kif was wholeheartedly glad, though he said nothing. Kif was popular enough in his platoon not to have necessarily missed Barclay if he had gone, but the fact remains that Kif was happier with Barclay, whom he did not always understand, than with Jimmy, whose language and habit of thought resembled his own. Barclay had twitted him gently about his failure to reach Golder's Green during his visit to London, and Kif had been perfectly frank about his doings with the exception of the visit to the zoo, which he suppressed, partly from an inward conviction that it was a childish proceeding, partly from fear of Barclay's amusement.

'Well, well,' said Jimmy—it was in the canteen and he was propped against the counter behind them—'you couldn't fairly expect him to posh himself up for the "afternoon tea" business on his precious leaf. He was out to see all he could in the time. And I bet he didn't leave anything out,' he added feelingly.

Barclay, who had been half saddened and a little foreboding somehow at Kif's rapture with the world, expressed more in his obvious happiness than in his account, smiled and said:

'Oh, as long as he didn't see more than there was. . . .'

Jimmy's eyebrows went up. 'I suppose that's awful clever,' he said. 'I never read anything but the football results myself.'

Only brigadier-generals impressed Jimmy, and they not seriously. But Kif had wondered, going to sleep, what exactly Barclay had meant.

He looked down at him now in the dark and wondered what he was thinking. He had a family to be sorry about; a mother and things. It must be rotten to have other folks to consider. Thus Kif, all unaware that he should be feeling the want of someone to be sorry for him. His roving eye caught a familiar profile outlined against the sky and the direction of his thoughts changed. He considered the profile admiringly: the stubborn set of the head, thrust slightly forward so that the jaw was lifted, the grim upper lip which made a very slightly convex curve, and the short straight line of the lower one to the suddenly jutting chin. That Murray Heaton, ex-horse-breeder and occasional cross-country jockey had earned the unqualified approval of as mixed a company as ever was brought together, was due not to any fortunate sally at a critical moment, but to their shrewd recognition of his worth as a leader. His men not only obeyed him unquestioningly, admired him, quoted him, and imitated him, but they looked on him as their own property; than which is no better testimonial. Barclay admired the man's efficiency and envied him his complete self-confidence. Kif approved his lack of fuss, and the way his eyes smiled when his mouth did not. And Jimmy adored him in secret, and spoke possessively of him in public.

It is popularly supposed that proximity to horseflesh leaves some peculiar and indelible stamp on a man; a metaphorical straw in the mouth. I have never been able to see it. Apart from the draught-board-breeches-and-yellow-waistcoat brigade—which is limited, and in any case insignificant—your horseman, professional or otherwise, in mufti looks just like an admiral, a detective, an actor, a boy-in-buttons, or a stockbroker, as the case may be. Heaten looked rather like a lawyer until you noticed his hands. He had an uncanny capacity for seeing things which appeared to have happened behind his back, a fact which was partly responsible for the veneration in which he was held.

Kif, considering him, wondered for the first time what the possession of power would be like; what it would be like to order people about and to have them say 'sir' and look respectful. He considered it gravely. To decide instead of being decided for. And you'd have to see that the thing you decided on was done, of course. The whole thing would be a hell of a nuisance, now he came to think of it. Having other people dependent on you. You'd have money, of course. Money would be good. But you couldn't have a really good time, somehow. In which case the money would be of no use. No; being the boss was as far as he could see a dam' poor business.

So by devious routes did Barclay and Kif arrive at the same conclusion.

And with such unheroic thoughts did Kif journey to France.