Capricorn and Cancer

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by Geoffrey Household


  ‘You are in love?’ he asked.

  ‘Doesn’t it stand to reason?’

  Theotaki quickly answered that he hadn’t doubted it for a moment. Nor he had. She wasn’t the type of woman to marry, just to escape from the country, without love. No, he wanted to know what she would answer—to hear, as it were, the worst from her own lips.

  He remembered the man who taught him his trade. He liked to remember him very carefully, for, since the man was dead, there was no other method of consultation. This teacher of his used to say that a female agent was every bit as good as any male. What she lacked in attack, she made up in human understanding. But never, the dead man had insisted, never choose a woman in love!

  Something of this, by way of warning, he repeated to D17.

  ‘I think your friend did not understand women,’ she answered.

  Theotaki explained that his friend had been talking only of women of character, who worked for patriotism, not money. He had not implied that such a woman’s devotion would be any less because she was in love, nor that she would be likely to sacrifice the cause to her private happiness. No, he had only meant that any woman of outstanding intensity was, when in love, Love Itself. She became possessed by hormones and happiness, and ceased to bother with details.

  ‘And I wouldn’t choose any woman but a woman in love,’ Alexia laughed. ‘Because until she is, she’s only half alive.’

  Theotaki admitted there was something in that. The will of a woman in love dominated her environment, though it couldn’t perhaps, burn its way through armour plate, it would certainly try.

  ‘But don’t forget my friend’s experience,’ he warned her. ‘He was a man of very wide experience. And so be a little more careful over details than you would be ordinarily. Just to compensate.’

  He gave her the precious sheet of foolscap, closely typed over with the positions, the strengths, the armour of corps, divisions and independent brigades.

  ‘Learn that by heart,’ he said, ‘and then burn it. Burn it and crush the ashes. When you get to Stockholm, make an excuse, as soon as you reasonably can, to be alone, and go straight to the address you will read at the bottom of the sheet. Say you come from me, and recite your lesson. That’s all. Then you can be happy with a good conscience. I, your leader, tell you so.’

  When she had vanished silently into the house, Theotaki flowed, inch by careful inch, like the battered tom-cat he resembled, back over the wall. He walked from the park to his flat through streets deserted by all but the police. Several times during the journey he showed his papers. He was a privileged person, kept rather contemptuously by the Ministry of the Interior for the sake of his general usefulness. Nobody could possibly have suspected Theotaki of any idealism.

  D17—well, what D17 did when she was alone in her bedroom could only be reconstructed from his knowledge of her and the story that reached him weeks later. She had a quick, reliable memory, and in the grey hour before dawn she learned those dull military numerals as conscientiously as she had learned poetry for school examinations. She would remember, said Theotaki—who had practised, earlier in his career, the same exact and desperate memorizing—every fact and figure for the rest of her life. That done, she would have been relaxed and beautifully at ease. The last service had been asked of her; she had an honourable discharge. She could give her whole attention to dreaming of the joy that would begin next day.

  She must have sat down about sunrise, in the last of her spare time, too excited to sleep, to write to her fiancé. That was like her. She was rich in forethought and expedients. Her departure might still be delayed by some incalculable change in the official mind. If it were, her lover would have a letter to comfort him. If it were not, they would read the two pages together, and laugh for relief from their common fears which had not come true.

  Then, when the letter was in its envelope and stamped, came all the fuss of leaving, the weeping mother, the insistence that she should have enough breakfast, the last-minute closing of her four suitcases, the drive to the station.

  At the frontier Theotaki took up direct observation again, for, if D17 should walk into trouble, he wanted to have first news of it. He was astonished at the ease, the gallantry of her departure. The Roumanian officials searched two of her cases and left the rest unopened. It was the starry-eyedness of her and youth and her own infectious certainty that no one could stop so innocently blissful a girl which carried her through. A perfect example, Theotaki pointed out, of the woman in love dominating her environment. That grim frontier post, on both sides of the line, was all bows and smiles.

  Theotaki could go no farther. That he had been allowed to come so far, and on the flimsiest of excuses, was a severe test of his nuisance value to his Ministry. He hastened back to Bucharest, very relieved but unable to get rid of an aching nervousness. He put it down to his dislike of breaking the rules of the trade. By short-circuiting his own organization, he had hopelessly committed its safety to the hands of D17. He assured himself that she could have no further difficulties, but she had still to cross a frontier between Budapest and Prague; and at Prague, before she took the plane to Stockholm, there would be a last, thorough and envious examination of her papers and her baggage.

  Theotaki spoke of Alexia’s journey as if he had been on the train with her. In thought, hour after hour, so he was. He knew to the minute—though that of course was mere calculation of schedules—when the blinds of the train would be pulled down so that no passenger might see the possible presence and activities of Russian troops; 136th Assault Division, she would say to herself, and inevitably her mind would run over the bare details of its strength and its experimental bridging equipment. She wouldn’t be able to help this silent recitation, and would try to stop herself forming the mental words lest they might be magically overheard.

  All that was true enough. Nevertheless Alexia, as he heard afterwards, had passed most of the journey in a dream of romantic confidence. It had been broken, while she sat in the train, by moments of vague inexplicable worry; but whenever she and her baggage were in contact with the enemy, she treated officials as if they were as gay and careless as she herself, in twelve hours more, hoped to be. She turned the future into the present with an audacity that no mere man could have imitated and which she didn’t even recognize as unreal—with the result that when police and customs and their informers on the train gave her a look, they saw only a girl neither immorally rich nor suspiciously poor, and much too happy to have anything in their line of business upon her conscience.

  At Prague, however, the solid and bad-tempered Czechs turned her inside out. They flung the upper layers of her bags aside and angrily rummaged the bottom for antisocial contraband. They interrogated her. They gave her a fresh batch of forms to sign. And when they had punished her so far as they could for wanting to leave the Russian orbit at all, they had to allow her to leave it.

  After that it was all plain sailing. She was met by her fiancé on arrival, and Swedish smiles passed her straight into their country, and let her loose in a blue and white Stockholm which sparkled like her mood. No, not sentimentalists, Theotaki explained. They had merely done their investigation of Alexia at the proper time, and once her visa had been issued there was no further point in annoying her. That was the mark of a civilized country. Communists hadn’t yet learned to make up their minds and stand by the decision.

  It must have been very difficult for D17 to shake off fiancé and future parents-in-law and the odd score of hospitable friends who were determined to cherish her; but she did it. She had, after all, long experience in concealing her intentions. Somehow she established her right to a moment of privacy, and claimed it. She delivered her message, word perfect, and kept the taxi waiting and was back in her bedroom in half an hour.

  Then she started, said Theotaki, to unpack. He heard of that unpacking when he met his Stockholm correspondent in the quiet course of their business, and even then they couldn’t laugh. He was right. He had never co
me nearer to sending an agent to certain death. On the top of the first case Alexia opened was her writing-pad, just where she had hastily thrown it in the unworldly light of dawn, after finishing that last letter, that all-absorbing letter, to her fiancé. The bag was the only one of the four that had never been examined by Roumanians or Hungarians, and the Czechs had gone like burrowing dogs for the bottom while scattering out the top between their legs. In the writing-pad, hidden only by its flimsy cardboard cover, was the sheet of foolscap, gloriously forgotten, not crushed at all to ashes, not even burned, which Theotaki had given her with such delicate precautions.

  7

  Moment of Truth

  SHE begged me for it. You know how divinely exalted young women can become. Begged for a cyanide pill as though it were her right, as though I should be doing her out of a great spiritual experience if I hesitated. Men don’t behave like that at all. A man accepts the means of death without looking at it, hides it in his smallest pocket and examines it with loathing when he gets home or wherever is serving him as a home. No, martyrdom for us has no attraction—not, at any rate for the more active type.

  You never dreamed she had that sort of past, did you? And I would not have told you, if you hadn’t made that unjust remark about her: bright and beautiful as the vicar’s daughter in a Victorian novel. Pah!

  There’s nothing artificial in her character. It’s not an attack of poise brought on by reading too many women’s magazines. Dina impresses everyone, even on first acquaintance, with her extraordinary inner happiness. It’s real, and only an unromantic mind like yours could have thought it was not. She adores her husband. Can’t see anything ordinary in him. And she is convinced that there were never such children as hers. Nothing exceptional in that, of course—except that she happens to be right. Dina is entirely without any sense of guilt; that unnecessary, unjustified sense of guilt which takes the spirit out of so many of our highly civilised women. She is in love with life and she can’t forget it.

  I suppose you know that Dina is of pure Polish blood and breeding. By 1944 there was nothing left, of all she believed in, but patriotism. War and politics had made her an orphan, and the little legacy which would have taken her through the university was reduced to nothing. So when she was about to become a charge on public funds she was shipped off from Warsaw as a foreign worker, and found herself in a factory at Dusseldorf making sights for guns. The Germans are a most extraordinary people. Can you imagine any other nation filling up their country with enemies in wartime? They couldn’t believe that Europe really disliked being conquered by nice, comfortable, honest Nazis.

  In Dina’s factory I was a very favoured person, working on special lenses. That’s a job which trains a man to infinite patience and readiness to accept disappointment. It married in with my real interest, which was to interfere in every way open to me—very minor ways—with the production of munitions. I was not suspected. The whole of my political past in Austria made me a very probable Nazi sympathiser. My reason for loathing Hitler and all that he stood for was simply good taste. That’s a motive quite outside the ken of policemen, and I didn’t go out of my way to explain it.

  Dina was reported to me as promising material. Among so many worn, shabby, still pretty girls she was inconspicuous, but she had the advantage that even in the rain and smoke of Dusseldorf you could always spot her, if you were looking for her, a long way off. I had her watched for six months before I employed her.

  I became fonder of her—in a fatherly way—than was strictly professional. She was so graceful and slight, with a corona of fair, fine curls and big brown eyes burning to shake the world, or at any rate that part of it governed by Hitler. And so very, very young. If she had been born ten years later than she was, all that emotion—well, it might have found an outlet in crazy worship of some crooner or other. As it was, she had as single a mind as a tiger cub on its first kill without the help of mother.

  I had not the heart to use her for much except messages; and once or twice, when it was reasonably safe, she accidentally left a little parcel of explosives—disguised as a packet of sandwiches, for example—in contact with a machine lathe. She had little to fear from any ordinary questioning. She could readily admit that she ran innocent errands for me.

  The less one knew, the better. But I had occasionally to deliver material to another organisation—a suicidal outfit of Poles, led by a Colonel Lipski who passed himself off as a sturdy blacksmith from Posen. Communication with him was difficult—we were taking our orders from different sources—and I had recourse to Dina. She could disappear into the wet, black streets and become part of the drifting smoke and drifting masses. It was quite natural for Poles to foregather. We all had so much freedom.

  That’s an odd view of wartime Germany, isn’t it? But sometimes, after working hours, the streets seemed to hold more foreigners than Germans. The situation must have been a nightmare for the Gestapo. They did their best. Efficiency was impossible, so they made up for it by terror. In our factory alone they tortured and shot four men for sabotage. Two were loyal Nazis. One was their own agent. And the fourth, a very conscientious foreman. A little too conscientious. In that fog of suspicion we were remarkably successful at faking evidence against anyone who was better dead.

  Still, human nature was on the Gestapo side. Their agents, sharing a street corner or a café or just a damp patch of shadow with weary foreigners, were bound to make friends. Those war slaves were simple people, straight from tenements or villages. Five per cent would betray whatever they didn’t understand for money; and twenty per cent couldn’t keep a secret without telling a neighbour. That made a full quarter whom it was lethal to trust. And into that sullen, formless mass I had to send Dina. She must have a felt a little like your Victorian vicar’s daughter then.

  Some such murderous rumour, something whispered and overheard in the dusk at the factory gate, enveloped Lipski and his organisation. I don’t suppose the Gestapo knew at first what would come out of the arrests. But Dina and I knew. Lipski hated too passionately. If they really went to work on him, he was likely to spit in his interrogator’s face and boast of his past and what he had done—naturally taking all the blame on himself. He was a very gallant man, but not clever. A trained Gestapo expert, with such a spirited confession to work from, could lead the blacksmith-colonel much farther along his line of contacts that he ever meant to go.

  It was then that Dina came to my workshop. She had every right to be there. She was employed in the storekeeper’s office, and I used to pass my indents through her. My assistants just grinned whenever I invited her into my little private office. Not unpleasantly. The smiles merely commented on the sentiment of a middle-aged Austrian for a waif as tense as the glass on which he worked.

  ‘I shall be next,’ she said.

  She gloried in it. Think of your own daughter in her most unaccountable and resolute mood—that was Dina! She might have determined to run away and get married. A grim bridegroom. Not to be feared if he embraced her instantaneously. But the Gestapo might ensure that the honeymoon was protracted.

  It was a wonder that she had not been arrested already. Lipski was possibly unconscious for the time being.

  ‘Try to believe that you know nothing,’ I told her. ‘Why shouldn’t you have taken messages for me? My assistants, the foreman, the office boy—they are always trotting about the works with notes from me. I have a passion for writing notes. Forget down to the bottom of your soul that what I gave you had any more significance than what I give them!’

  She refused to be put off.

  ‘It’s not the messages among ourselves,’ she answered. ‘I am the only person who could lead the police from Lipski to us.’

  ‘But you will not,’ I assured her.

  ‘How can you know I won’t?’ she cried. ‘How can I know? We must make sure—both of us.’

  I pretended not to know what she wanted. She was so young, and death is so irrevocable.

  ‘You pr
omised,’ she said.

  Well, I had—to all of them who worked directly under me. Yes, I had explained to them that instant death was quite painless, reminded them that soldiers seldom had that much luck, told them that the only thing to fear was betrayal of a comrade. All very suitable. No doubt there were thousands of commanding officers handing out the same line on both sides of twenty different fronts. But that did not make it less true.

  I had the pills locked up with my personal instruments, marked Aspirin. Hold one in your handkerchief, male or female, convey it to your mouth and crunch. A remedy that no one should be without, as the advertisements say. It was a pity that the establishment behind Lipski had never distributed free samples. But they were doing sabotage on a shoe-string.

  Dina was bound to be questioned. Lipski would not give her away—not even spitting at them. Poles are always chivalrous. But nothing could prevent them finding out, by a process of elimination, that she was among three or four suspects who came into the story out of darkness and vanished back into darkness. And Dina, of course, could lead them to me. Not that I mattered. I had cyanide, too.

  I gave her what the situation demanded, remembering—oh, what she was alive and all she wouldn’t be if she were dead.

  Dina was arrested next day. She did her duty. Only eighteen she was when her teeth met in the pill. Don’t they say that all his past life revolves before a drowning man? Well, before her, in the second that was left to her, revolved all the future she might have had. The lovers, the husband, the children, the peace which somehow, some day, would bring long unimaginable years.

  Less than a second, I had told her. But there was time in it for a moment of truth when the fifty or sixty years which might have been could advance her, on account, their visions of fulfilment.

 

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