Laughter in the Dark Read Free

gleam of her eye as it chanced to catch the light and the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background. There was nothing very much out of the common about all this: such things had happened to him before and he knew that it was unwise to dwell upon it. She moved away and was lost in the darkness and he suddenly felt bored and sad. He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun. There was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning.
    In the pause as soon as the lights were turnedon he noticed her again: she was standing at the exit next to a horribly purple curtain which she had just drawn to one side, and the outgoing people were surging past her. She was holding one hand in the pocket of her short embroidered apron and her black frock fitted her very tightly about the arms and bosom. He stared at her face almost in dread. It was a pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face. He guessed her age to be about eighteen.
    Then, when the place had almost emptied and fresh people began to shuffle sideways along the rows, she passed to and fro, quite near to him several times; but he turned away because it hurt to look and because he could not help remembering how many times beauty—or what he called beauty—had passed him by and vanished.
    For another half hour he sat in the darkness, his prominent eyes fixed on the screen. Then he rose and walked away. She drew the curtain aside for him with a slight clatter of wooden rings.
    “Oh, but I will have one more look,” thought Albinus miserably.
    It seemed to him that her lips twitched a little. She let the curtain fall.
    Albinus stepped into a blood-red puddle; thesnow was melting, the night was damp, with the fast colors of street lights all running and dissolving. “Argus”—good name for a cinema.
    After three days he could ignore the memory of her no longer. He felt ridiculously excited as he entered the place once more—again in the middle of something. All was exactly as it had been the first time: the gliding torch, the long Luini-esque eyes, the swift walk in the darkness, the pretty movement of her black-sleeved arm as she clicked the curtain to one side. “Any normal man would know what to do,” thought Albinus. A car was spinning down a smooth road with hairpin turns between cliff and abyss.
    As he left, he tried to catch her eye, but failed. There was a steady downpour outside and the pavement glowed crimson.
    Had he not gone there that second time he might perhaps have been able to forget this ghost of an adventure, but now it was too late. He went there a third time firmly resolved to smile at her—and what a desperate leer it would have been, had he achieved it. As it was, his heart thumped so that he missed his chance.
    And the next day Paul came to dinner, they discussed the Rex affair, little Irma gobbled up her chocolate cream and Elisabeth asked her usual questions.
    “Just dropped from the moon?” he asked, and then tried to make up for his nastiness by a belated titter.
    After dinner he sat by his wife’s side on the broad sofa, pecked at her with little kisses while she looked at gowns and things in a women’s magazine, and dully he thought to himself:
    “Damn it all, I’m happy, what more do I need? That creature gliding about in the dark.… Like to crush her beautiful throat. Well, she is dead anyway, since I shan’t go there any more.”

3
    S HE was called Margot Peters. Her father was a house-porter who had been badly shellshocked in the War: his gray head jerked unceasingly as if in constant confirmation of grievance and woe, and he fell into a violent passion on the slightest provocation. Her mother was still youngish, but rather battered too—a coarse callous woman whose red palm was a perfect cornucopia of blows. Her head was generally