XVI
On the Unmorality of Professional Thieves
The main building of what had once been Boltover’s Cement Works consisted of four high walls and a slate roof. Here had stood the wash mills and the revolving knives which had reduced the clay and mud from the nearby river into slurry. Leading therefrom was the heating chamber and the kiln house. There was no trace of mill, though the kilns still stood.
All the machinery had been removed, the concrete floor strengthened and the only engine visible was a great Atlantic locomotive which had stood with steam up day and night before the wreckage of two trucks. In each of these was a rough circular hole and the blistered paint and the drops of metal which hung upon the edge or had trickled down its blackened side, told of the terrific heat which had been employed to break through the steel walls.
Near one wall were a number of small packages neatly stitched in canvas and ready for removal, and on these sat Mr. Mulberry, the benignity of whose countenance was somewhat discounted by the fact that a loaded rifle lay across his knees. Leading from the main building was a small office approached through a steel door and in this were seated the seven guiding spirits of the great raid, Francis Stockmar, Gregori, Colonel Westhanger, Colling Jacques, Thomas Stockmar, Mr. Cunningham and Kate.
Gregori was talking. He leant across the table, his hands lightly clasped, his head on one side turned to the girl who sat opposite to him and a little to his right.
“I think, Kate, we finish here,” he was saying. “Crime Street is getting a little too warm.”
“I didn’t expect you to lose your nerve,” she said.
“I’m not losing my nerve,” he said with a scowl. “I am afraid of losing my life, if you want to know the truth. We are watched all the time. They know you are out of town and are searching for you.”
“They found me,” said the girl coolly. “I am staying at Brighton.”
“We have made a big haul and it will take us a year to get rid of it,” Gregori went on, “but when we have got rid of it, we shall have enough to settle down.”
“But why do you want to settle down?” she asked.
“My dear Kate,” said her uncle querulously, “don’t ask absurd questions. You know there is no reason in the world why we should not settle down. We have enough money.”
“Exactly what do you mean by settling down?” she insisted. “I am not being sarcastic. I merely want information. You have taught me that it is the game and not the prize that is worth while. That has been my life’s teaching. Why, you told me if you were a millionaire,” she looked at her uncle under her bent brows, “nothing would induce you to be ‘dull and honest.’ Those were your words.”
“My dear child,” said Colonel Westhanger, “I have told you lots of things which have to be interpreted in a liberal spirit. We have had all the fun we want and now we will—”
He was at a loss in his desire to avoid a tautological repetition of a certain phrase.
“Settle down,” she suggested; “be dull and honest?”
“But, surely, Kate,” said Gregori impatiently, “you don’t want to be a hunted beast all your life?”
“Why not?” she asked in astonishment. “It is just as much fun being hunted as hunting. You have said that a score of times. Does Michael Pretherston—”
“Oh, hang Michael Pretherston,” said Gregori.
“Does Michael Pretherston,” she went on, “get as much fun out of chasing me, as I get out of escaping him? Does Michael Pretherston find the same exhilaration of mind in following on my tracks as I find in keeping ahead of him?”
“Anyway,” said Gregori. “I have had enough of it and I want to go out of the business and I advise you to do the same. And there is another thing, Kate—”
He looked at the Colonel for support, but Colonel Westhanger found it convenient at that moment to be staring at the skylight.
“What is the other thing?” she asked.
“Well, you know I am fond of you,” he said, “and I want to—” he floundered.
“Settle down,” she suggested innocently; “what is all this ‘settling down’ that everybody loves so much? Does it mean we shall never plan another great coup?” She leant her elbows on the table. “Honestly, I am not being wilfully dense. I know money is useful, because it helps one to prepare the way for making more money, but I have not been in this,” she waved her hand, “in all these things for money. I told Michael Pretherston so and he believed me.”
“What have you been telling Michael Pretherston?” asked Gregori suspiciously.
“I told him that,” she said simply.
“But, my dear girl,” said her uncle, “fun and excitement and all that sort of thing are well enough in their way, but you don’t mean to tell me, at this hour, that you have not been working for the ‘stuff’?”
“I will tell you as much at this or any other hour,” she answered immediately.
“I see,” said Gregori with a faint smile, “then really you are what I would call a criminal artist—art for art’s sake, eh?”
“I mean that,” she said again. “One must not judge one’s successes by the amount of money one has made.”
“That is how I joodge it,” said the thick voice of Francis Stockmar; “so much mooney, so much sugsess, isn’t it?”
“I tell you frankly,” said Gregori. “I am in this for the money and so is your uncle. We have taken many risks, some of us have been caught and some of us,” he said significantly, “have been lucky. I’ve got thirty years in front of me, with any luck, and so I am going to—”
“Settle down,” suggested Kate ironically.
“I am going to quit.”
“Come, come, be sensible, Kate,” said the Colonel, patting her on the shoulder. “You have been a very good girl and we owe you almost everything we have. I am sure everyone agrees that you have been the brains of our—er—association. The only time when any of us have been caught is when we have gone out on a side line of our own. Now leave well alone.”
“When hunters have caught the fox,” she said, “do they leave well alone and never hunt again? In war, when a soldier comes through a battle safely, does he leave well alone and never go into action again? Does the huntsman who is nearly caught by a lion leave well, and lions, alone?”
“This is different,” said her uncle doggedly.
“But I don’t understand it. If what you say is right, then I am wrong and have been wrong all my life. I am wrong and the police are right.”
“Of course, they’re right,” said Gregori; “what rubbish you are talking.”
“The police are right?” she asked in open-eyed astonishment.
“Of course they are right. They must protect society. In five years’ time, when I am settled on my little estate in Spain and my house is burgled do you imagine I shall not call in the police?”
“I know they are right in their way,” she said, as if she were speaking her thoughts aloud, “but we are right, too.”
“We cannot both be right,” said Colonel Westhanger.
“I asked you some time ago,” she said, turning to him, “which was the better life—the dull life or ours. They cannot both be better. The elementary conditions cannot change. That life must be the best, or ours.”
“That life is best,” said the Colonel decisively.
She looked at him steadily.
“Then why have you let me live this?” she asked. “You cannot change me. I cannot change. I cannot!” she said with vehemence and the men noted with amazement the emotion she displayed. “Nothing can change me!”
Gregori reached out and took her hand, but she snatched it away.
“I will tell you what can change you, little girl,” he said undeterred by the rebuff, “love can change you. Give me a chance.”
She looked at him and laughed in his face.
“Will you be good or bad, honest or dishonest? You will only be a half man, living two lives. Marry you! And am I to go into witness boxes to testify against your burglar? And prosecute your poachers? I am living now, what I believe to be the truth. I believe I have the right to match my wits against the world and take, by my intelligence, what the old robber barons took by brutal strength. If I pass to the other side I should be a liar, living a life in which I did not believe. I am going on.”
“Then you will go on by yourself.”
“Will I?” she asked softly.
“Go out and find somebody who thinks as you think if you can,” sneered Gregori; “you will be obliged to live a lie, anyway. You will never meet a man who believes in stealing, who believes in fraud and who will go on so believing, until he is an old man. You will never meet a man on the other side of life who would trust you if he knew you, and he would know you unless you—went on lying.”
He laughed.
“You are in a cleft stick, my little friend, and if you take my tip you will stick to the friends who know you.”
He laughed again.
“Suppose I come down into Spain and burgle your house—” her eyes lit up—“and I would do it! Or, suppose, when you have—settled down—and when you have all deposited your symbols of success in your banks, I planned a little coup and smashed your banks? I could do it easily and I would do it,” she said. “What would you do?”
Their faces were a study. The Colonel was stroking his white moustache. Francis Stockmar was scowling horribly. Mr. Cunningham was staring blankly at the opposite wall.
“Naturally you would not play such a low-down trick upon your old friends,” said the Colonel soothingly; “nobody believes you would, Kate. I mean, it would be tragic for some of us, after spending years of our lives accumulating a little nest egg to find we had become beggars in a night. Of course, speaking personally, I should consider myself exonerated from any responsibility I had in regard to our relationship and I should have to tell the police—”
“You would call the police, too, would you? Would you, Stockmar?”
“Yas,” said the stolid Austrian, “of goorse. The mooney to recover, ain’t it?”
“And you?”
“I don’t think you would do anything so treacherous,” said Mr. Cunningham; “naturally, we would not take that sort of thing lying down.”
“Naturally,” said Colling Jacques, “the whole matter is this, when we go back to the respectable world and obey the laws, we, as citizens, are entitled to the protection which the laws give us.”
“I see. You are, so to speak, touching wood. The wood is the law.”
“That is it,” he said.
Kate got up and walked to the one window of the room and looked out upon the dreary yard with its tangle of twisted machinery, its rusted boilers, its chaos of rotting cement bags.
“Well, you can all do as you like,” she turned on them, “but I tell you this, that if you think you are going to—settle down—at my expense, and if you think I have been planning and scheming and playacting and lying in order that you might all become respected parish councillors, you have made a mistake. You talk about my friends, if you are my friends, God help me! There is one man in the world who is worth the whole crowd of you.”
She was interrupted by a crash as though a heavy body had been thrown against a door. Somebody fumbled with the lock and Gregori jumped up and threw it open. They half carried, half pushed a gagged and bound man through the doorway. Behind him peered the saturnine, malignant face of his captor, Doctor Garon.
“Got him,” he said triumphantly.
“Who is it?” asked Gregori, staring at the half conscious man.
The girl did not ask. She went suddenly cold, for she knew it was Michael Pretherston.