Читать книгу So Disdained - Nevil Shute Norway - Страница 4

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As I have said, this matter started in the night. I was agent to Lord Arner at that time; steward and agent, for most of the family affairs passed through my hands, and I ran the outdoor business of the house itself. I lived by myself in the Steward's House at Under Hall, about a couple of miles from the little town of Under, in West Sussex. I live there still.

Very late, on the night of which I am writing, I was driving home over the South Downs, after a dinner in Winchester. I forget for the moment what that dinner was about; I do not think it can have been connected with my old school; because I was driving home in a very bad temper, and so I think it must have been the Corn Association. They tell me that I am reactionary. Very likely they are right, but they should give a man a better dinner than that before they tell him so.

In any case, all that is beside the point. I started home to drive the forty odd miles from Winchester to Under at about half-past eleven that night. It was March; a fine night with a pack of loose cloud in front of the moon that gradually turned to rain. I was in a dinner-jacket, but the hood of my old Morris is pretty watertight. I could take the rain phlegmatically, and so I set the wiper going, jammed my foot down a bit harder, and wished I was in bed with a fire in my bedroom instead of bucketing along at forty miles an hour over the black country roads.

Now, on that run from Winchester to Under, you pass over give-and-take sort of country for most of the way, but about ten miles from Under the road gets up on to the high ground by Leventer, and runs along the top for a couple of miles. That two miles runs with a fairly good surface straight over the unfenced down. You can let a car out there in the daytime, but at night you have to be careful, because of the cattle.

It was about half-past twelve when I came swinging up over that bit of down that night, doing about forty and keeping a sharp look-out for sheep. The night was as black as the pit. By that time the rain was coming down pretty hard. There was no traffic on the road at that time of night; I sat there sucking my dead pipe and thinking no evil, watched the rain beat against the windscreen, watching the wiper flick it off again, and thanked my lucky stars that I wasn't out in it.

About half-way along that stretch of down I passed a man on the road.

He was walking along in the direction of Under. I didn't see very much of him as I passed, because the rain blurred the windscreen except just where the wiper caught it, and I was going at a fair pace. He seemed to be a tallish well-set-up fellow in a leather coat, but without a hat. The water was fairly streaming and glistening off him in my headlights. I drove past. Then it struck me that it was a pretty rotten trick to drive by and leave a man out on the road in a night like that. I jammed both feet hard down, and we stopped with a squeal about twenty yards beyond him.

I stuck my pipe in my pocket, switched on the dashboard light, leaned over, and opened the door.

"Want a lift into Under?" I called.

On a night like that I should have expected to hear his footsteps squelching along at the side of the road. When I didn't, I turned and looked out of the little window at the back. He seemed to have stopped dead. I fancied that I could see him dimly in the rain, standing by the side of the road in the red light of my tail lamp.

The rain came beating steadily against the car, with little patterings. To put it frankly, I thought it was our local idiot. In a job like mine one gets to know the look of those chaps and the way they wander about the country in the worst weather, often with no hat on. We have a good few naturals about my part of the world, and they don't come to much harm. Their people seem to like to have them about the place, and they're good with animals.

In any case, it was a rotten night for an idiot to be out. It didn't much matter to me what time I got to bed now, and I had a fancy to collect this chap and see him safely home. His people live at a farm about five miles off that road, more or less on the way to Under.

I thought that he was frightened at the sudden stopping of the car, and so I slid along the seat and stuck my head out of the door to reassure him.

"All right, Ben," I said. They call him Ben. "I'm Mr. Moran from Under Hall. I'll take you back home in the car if you'll come with me. It's a rotten wet night for walking. That's right. Stay where you are, and I'll bring the car back to you. Then you can come in out of the wet."

I slipped the gear into reverse and ran the car back along the road to him. He was still standing motionless by the grass; I could see him in the gleam of the tail lamp through the little window. I stopped the car when he was opposite the door.

"Come on in," I said. "It's all wet out there. You know me—Mr. Moran."

He moved at last, and stooped towards the door. "It's very good of you," he said. "It's not much of a night for walking."

I knew he wasn't an idiot as soon as I heard his voice, of course. And while I was wondering why he had held back from accepting a lift upon a night like that, he stuck his head in under the hood and followed it with his body.

He settled himself into his seat and turned to face me. "I'm going as far as Under," he said quietly. "If you could put me down at the station I'd be very grateful."

He had a lean, tanned face, which he was wiping with a khaki handkerchief; his hair was straight and black, and fell down wetly over his forehead towards his eyes. In the road the rain dripped monotonously from the car in little liquid notes that mingled with the purring of the engine. I stared at him for a minute. He returned my stare unmoved.

"My name is Moran," I said at last. "Aren't you Maurice Lenden? We met in the Flying Corps. In Ninety-two Squadron, in 1917. About June or July. I remember you quite well now." I paused, and eyed him curiously. "It's funny how one runs across people."

He avoided my eyes. "You must be mixing me up with someone else," he said uncertainly. "My name is James."

From the way he spoke I knew that he was lying. But apart from that, I never forget a face. If I wasn't pretty good that way I shouldn't have been agent to Lord Arner. I knew as certainly as I was sitting there that he was Lenden. I remembered that I had met him since the war at a reunion dinner—in 1922 or '23. I remembered that somebody had told me that he was still flying, as a civilian aeroplane pilot. And there was something else that I had heard about him in gossip with some old Flying Corps men in Town, quite recently—divorce, or something of the sort. At the moment I couldn't bring that to mind.

I wrinkled my brows and glanced at him again, and for the first time I noticed his clothes. It was probably the clothes which brought him to my mind so readily at first. Damn it, the man was dressed for flying. He had no hat, but he wore a long, heavy leather coat with pockets at the knee. There was a map sticking out of one of these, all sodden with the rain. He had altered very little; in those clothes he might have come walking into the Mess, in 1917, when I used to play that game myself. Below the coat he was wearing sheepskin thigh-boots reaching high above the knee, with the fur inside.

I was so positive that I smiled. "James or Lenden," I said, "I'm damn glad to see you again. Been flying?"

I suppose I was a bit riled at his refusal to know me. I was watching him as I spoke, and I saw his lips tighten irritably. But all he said was:

"I should be very grateful for a lift into Under, if you're going that way."

The rain streamed down into the headlights, and the wiper flicked uneasily upon the windscreen. "You won't get a train from Under tonight," I said, "and you'll have your work cut out to wake them at the pub. It's a rotten hole. If you're Lenden, you'd better come along back with me. There's a spare room in my place that you can have. Dare say I can fix you up with a pair of pyjamas, too."

He was about to say something, but hesitated. And then: "It's very good of you," he muttered. "But I'd rather go on."

I sat there staring at him in perplexity. He was hugging a little square, black case in the crook of his arm, but at the moment it didn't strike me what that was. I couldn't understand why he had given me a false name. And then it struck me that he'd made a damn poor show of it if he wanted to get away unnoticed, and that I could have done it very much better myself. But that was in keeping with the man as I remembered him. He was a simple soul, and quite incapable of any sustained deception.

"Look here," I said at last. "Purely as a matter of general interest—where have you come from? You've been flying, haven't you? I see you're in flying kit."

He didn't answer for a minute, but then: "I had a forced landing," he said.

"Here?"

He jerked his head towards the down. "Just over there."

I wrinkled my brows. "How long ago?"

"About an hour. Hour and a half perhaps. Just before the rain came."

I leaned forward on the wheel and stared at him. I couldn't make out for the moment whether to believe a word of what he said. There was something wrong about him, and I didn't know what it was. He wasn't drunk. I thought it might be drugs. He didn't sound natural. His talk about a forced landing seemed to me to be all nonsense. I've been a pilot myself, and I know. When one is in sole charge of a machine worth several thousand pounds, and one has just put it down very suddenly and unexpectedly and hard—one doesn't just go off and leave it. Especially on a night like that.

The rain drummed steadily upon the fabric of the hood.

"You are Lenden, aren't you?" I inquired.

He laughed shortly, and a little self-consciously. "Yes, I'm Lenden," he said. "Just my infernal luck, running up against a man like you. I've been a regular Jonah lately." And he laughed again.

"Thanks," I said dryly.

He stirred uneasily in his seat. "Let's get on," he muttered.

"Right you are," I said, and slipped in the gear. I didn't want to go ferreting about in his affairs if he wanted to keep them to himself. "You weren't speaking the truth, by any chance, when you said you'd had a forced landing?"

That stung him up a bit.

"You'll know in the morning, I suppose," he replied. "They'll find the machine."

I slipped it out again. "Damn it," I said. "Do you mean you've got an aeroplane out there?"

He nodded.

"Did you crash her?"

"No, she's all right, but for the oil pressure. It was that that brought me down."

I could make nothing of his way of treating the affair.

"What have you done with her?" I asked. "There's a barn about half a mile down the hill over there. Did you get her under the lee of that?"

He looked embarrassed. "I just left her where she was."

I gazed at him blankly, hardly able to believe my ears. It was the sort of thing a novice might have said—not a pilot of his experience. After all, one expects a man to do his best for the machine.

"Do you mean she isn't pegged down, or anything?"

He shook his head. "I just left her."

I leaned forward and switched off the engine of the car. "But damn it all," I said, "she'll blow away!"

He didn't stir.

"Let her," he said.

I knew then that it must be drugs.

"We can't do that," I said irritably. "She'll be blowing about all over the country, on a night like this." It riled me that I should have to get out of the car into the rain in my dinner-jacket to go and tie up this man's aeroplane, but there seemed to be nothing for it. I reached out and took an electric torch from the dashboard pocket, and nudged him.

"Come on," I said. "Get out. We're going to peg her down. Get on with it."

He didn't move. I paused for a moment.

He seemed to make something of an effort. "Look here, Moran," he said. "Let's get going to Under. That machine's all right where she is."

"Leaving her loose?" I asked.

He nodded. "That's right. Leave her loose. Look here, I don't want to bother about her. Just take me along to Under and drop me at the station."

Well, drugs are the devil.

"Can't do that, old boy," I said cheerfully. "She's on our land—Lord Arner's land. It might cost us a couple of pounds if she blew through a hedge, leaving her loose like that. More, perhaps."

I shoved him towards the door. "Come on. Let's go and have a look at her."

He shrugged his shoulders. "If you like."

I had a couple of garden forks and a hank of cord in the back of the car, as luck would have it, that I'd got in Winchester for the house. There was a strap in the dickey, too. I took the lot out, wrapped my raincoat closely round me, swore a little, and set out with Lenden across the down.

It was infernally dark. The lights of the car behind us gave us a direction and prevented us from wandering in circles on the slopes. Lenden didn't know where he had left the machine, but thought that he had walked for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before it hit the road. We went stumbling on into the darkness for a bit, flashing my torch in every direction.

Presently I stopped. It was pretty hopeless to go on groping for her that way on a night like that.

"Did you land into wind?" I asked.

He nodded. "It was pure guesswork, of course. The wind must have been a bit under the starboard wing, because she went down to port as I touched. Still, I got her up again, so she can't have been far wrong."

"Right," said I. "Now, did you land uphill or down?"

He considered for a moment. "Uphill, by the feel of it," he said vaguely. "She pulled up pretty quickly. Yes, I'm sure it was uphill. Not much of a slope, though."

"You had lights to land by?"

"Wing-tip flares. They burnt out as soon as I was on the ground, so I couldn't see much." He hesitated. "I say, let's leave the ruddy thing."

I disregarded that, and stood thinking about it for a minute. If he had landed uphill and into wind it localised the machine pretty well, especially as it was only ten minutes' walk from the road. I bore round to the right, and began to traverse the only uphill slope that faced into the wind.

We found her at the top of the down, where the slope was gentle. I heard her before we got the light on her, a series of drumming crashes as the loose rudder flicked over from hard-a-port to hard-a-starboard, and then to port again. I switched the light in that direction, and there she was, facing more or less into wind with the controls slamming free. He hadn't even troubled to drop the belt around the stick.

"Damn fine way to leave a machine," I muttered. If he heard, Lenden did not reply.

That was a very big aeroplane. I hadn't flown myself since 1917, when I went down with a bullet through my chest to spend the remainder of the war in Germany. I thought that I had forgotten all about that game. But now I am inclined to regard it as one of those things that no man ever really forgets; an old pilot will always linger a little over the photographs of aeroplanes on the back page of the Daily Mail. That is the only way in which I can account for the fact that I knew that machine by sight. The French had been doing a number of record-breaking long-distance flights upon the type; I stood there in the rain for a minute playing the torch upon the wings and fuselage, and wondered what on earth Lenden was doing with a French high-speed bomber.

"Where d'you get the Breguet from, Lenden?" I asked.

He hesitated for a moment. "I've been doing a job on her," he said vaguely.

There was no point in standing there in the rain questioning a man who didn't want to talk. The first thing was to stop those controls slamming about; I made him get up into the cockpit and tighten the belt around the stick. He obeyed me quietly. Then we set about pegging her down for the night.

In a quarter of an hour it was done. We'd buried the garden forks beneath each wing-tip and stamped the sods down over them, lashing the wing loosely to them with the cord. That was the best that we could do in the circumstances. It was a pretty rotten job when it was done, but it only had to hold till daylight. I didn't think it was going to blow hard.

I went all round before we left to have a final look that everything was shipshape. The wind went sighing through the wires in the darkness, and the rain beat and drummed most desolately upon the fabric of the wings. Flashing my light under the fuselage I saw a sort of blunt snout four or five inches in diameter sticking out down below the clean lines of the body. I stooped curiously, and ran my fingers over the bottom of it. There was a lens.

"All right," said Lenden from the darkness behind me. "It's a camera."

I straightened up and thought of the black packet that he had left in the car. But I had had enough of asking questions.

"Let's get along back to Under," I said, and turned towards the lights of the car. "Unless you're staying here?"

He shook his head, and we went stumbling through the rain over the down towards the car. I was thoroughly wet by the time we got there, and not in the best of tempers. I'd done my best to help the man for the sake of old times, but I couldn't help feeling a bit hurt at the way that he had received the assistance I had given him. And it was a funny business, too. I didn't see what he was doing with a Breguet XIX in England, and I didn't see what had brought him to make a forced landing with it in the middle of the night. And it was very evident that he didn't want to tell me.

We reached the car in silence, and bundled in out of the wet. I paused for a moment before pressing the starter.

"You'd better come along back with me to my place," I suggested.

He seemed embarrassed at that. "It's very good of you," he said diffidently. "But I'd rather go straight to the station. I'm . . . in a hurry."

"You won't do much good at the station at this time of night," I remarked. "There isn't a train till twenty past seven."

I considered for a moment, and added: "You'd better come along with me and sleep on the sofa if you want to catch that train. There'll be a fire to sleep by, which is more than you'll find at the station." I eyed him thoughtfully. "There's nobody else in the house. I'm a bachelor." I don't quite know why I added that.

He hesitated again, and gave in. "All right," he said at last. "I'd like to very much."

We were about five miles from Under Hall. I lived there, in the Steward's House, just across the stable-yard from the mansion. It had been the most convenient arrangement in every way. Arner himself was over seventy years old, and too busy a man to occupy himself with the management of his estate; his only son was in Persia.

It was no great shakes as a job, but—it suited me. The screw wasn't much to boast about, but I had a small income of my own that was getting gradually larger with judicious nursing, and the family treated me as an equal. It's the sort of job that I'm cut out for. I was articled to a solicitor some years before the war, though I was country-bred. I tried it again for a year after the Armistice, and then I gave it up. I should have made a rotten lawyer.

I drove into the stable-yard at about a quarter-past two that night, left the car in the coach-house, and walked across to my own place with Lenden. The Steward's House at Under is built into the grey stone wall that separates the gardens from the stable-yard, and the one big living-room has rather a pleasant outlook on the right side of the wall. There are three little bedrooms and a kitchen. It suited me to live there.

They had banked up the fire for me, and left a cold meal on the table with a jug of beer standing in the grate. There was a cold pie, I remember, and a potato salad. I threw off my coat, kicked the fire into a blaze, gave Lenden the use of my room for a wash, and settled down with him for a late supper.

I didn't eat much at that time in the morning, but Lenden seemed hungry and made quite a heavy meal. I lit my pipe and sat there lazily with my back to the fire, waiting and smoking till he had finished. Between the mouthfuls he talked in a desultory manner about the war. The Squadron was re-equipped late in 1917, after I was shot down. With Bristol Fighters. I had heard that. Later they got moved to a place near Abbeville. He got shot through the thigh soon after that, and his observer was killed in the same fight, and he crashed in our support trenches. He became an instructor at Stamford when he came out of hospital. And afterwards at Netheravon. Yes, he supposed he'd been luckier than most.

"Damn sight better off than if you'd been in Germany," I said shortly. "You didn't stay on at all after the war?" I paused. "Someone told me that Standish had gone back," I said, and watched the smoke curl into the darkness above the lamp. "Short-service commission, or something. I forget who it was."

He nodded. "He did. But I came straight out at Armistice." He glanced at me darkly across the table. "I was married. Got married in August, 1918, an' I wanted to be out of it. Make a home for my girl, an' all that sort of thing." He grinned without laughing. "Like hell."

I nodded absently.

Lenden had finished eating. "Went joy-riding with a fellow from Twenty-one Squadron that summer," he said. "Early summer of 1919, just after the war. We had an Avro seaplane." He mused over it for a minute. "My God, we'd got a lot to learn in those days. We took our wives with us, for one thing. . . ."

He leaned his head upon his hands and began to tell me about this joy-riding concern. They spent practically the whole of their savings and gratuity upon this seaplane, and they started in with it to tour the South Coast towns, giving joy-rides at a guinea a head. In the prevailing optimism of those days they thought that they could make it pay.

Perhaps, if they had had a land machine they might have got away with it, in spite of their total lack of business experience. Lenden, with the knowledge that he had gained in later years, had no illusions on that point. But he himself put down their failure to the difficulty of operating the machine from the beach of a crowded seaside resort, and he talked for a long time about that.

"Handling the machine on to the beach. That's what did us in—properly. Damn it, it took the hell of a time. Days when there was a sea breeze I'd come in to land over the town, sideslipping down over the houses and the promenade. We were always getting pulled up for flying too low over the promenade. They didn't think about our having a living to get out of their ruddy town."

He stared morosely at the table-cloth. "The sea breeze was hell. I'd land a couple of hundred yards out, and then turn to taxi in to the beach. Then the fun began, and we'd come taxi-ing in to the beach with a twenty-mile wind behind, blowing us straight on to the sand. We hit the beach like that once or twice when we were new to the game, an' stove in a float each time. When we got sick of patching floats I used to try and swing her round into the wind again at the last moment, to check her way. Often as not I'd get outside the stretch of shore the Council had roped off for us in doing that, and go driving in among the bathers. That meant stopping the prop for fear of hitting them, and blowing ashore on to the beach. And there was always a row about it afterwards.

"We never got more than three ten-minute joy-rides done in the hour," he said. "And the engine running the whole time. It meant that we had to make the charge thirty shillings a flight."

And so it came to an end. They began operations in May at Brighton; by July they were in difficulties, and in September they gave up. They were lucky in that they were able to sell the machine, and in that way they realised sufficient of their capital to pay off most of the bills and to leave them with about fifty pounds each in hand.

"I sent my wife back to her people for a bit," said Lenden. "That was the first time."

He relapsed into silence, and sat there brooding over the table. And when he spoke again, I was suddenly sorry for the man. "It's ruddy good fun having to do that," he said quietly. "Especially when it's the first time."

He went on to tell me that he had been out of a job then for about two months, hanging about the aerodromes and living on what he could pick up. He bought and sold one or two old cars at a profit; in those days there was ready money to be made that way. And so he eked out his little means until he got a job at Hounslow with A.T. and T.

I raised my head inquiringly.

"Aircraft Transport and Travel," he replied. "On the Paris route. We used to fly Nines and Sixteens from Hounslow to Le Bourget, and get through as best you could. Later on we moved to Croydon."

I nodded. "I crossed that way once. They gave us paper bags to be sick into."

"Dare say. It was all right while the fine weather lasted, but in the winter . . . it was rotten. Rotten. No ground organisation to help you—no wireless or weather reports in those days. Days when it was too thick to see the trees beyond the aerodrome we used to ring up the harbour-master at Folkestone and get a weather report from him. But we didn't do that much.

"And people used to pay to come with us," he said slowly. "On days like that."

He rested his chin upon one hand and stared across the white table into the shadows of the room. "I've taken a Sixteen off from Hounslow with a full load of passengers when the clouds were right down to the ground," he said, "and flown all the way to the coast without ever getting more than two hundred feet up. Time and again. Jerking her nose up into a zoom when you came to a tree or a church, and letting her down again the other side so's you could see the ground again. At over a hundred miles an hour. Crossing the Channel like that—ten minutes in a cold sweat, praying to God that your compass was right, and your engine would stick it out, and you'd see the cliffs the other side before you hit. And then, at the end of it all, to have to land in a field half-way between the coast and Le Bourget because it was getting too thick for safety." He paused. "It was wicked," he said.

They used to carry the much advertised Air Mails. That meant that the machines had to fly whether there were passengers to be carried or not. It was left to the discretion of the pilot whether or not the flight should be cancelled in bad weather; the pilots were dead keen and went on flying in the most impossible conditions.

"Sanderson got killed that way," he said. "At Douinville. An' all he had in the machine was a couple of picture post-cards from trippers in Paris, sent to their families in England as a curiosity. That was the Air Mail. No passengers or anything—just the Mail." He thought for a little. "Now that was a funny thing," he said quietly. "Sanderson hit a tree on top of a little cliff, and he died about a week later. An' all the time in the hospital he was explaining to the nurse how he'd put his machine in through the roof of the Coliseum and what a pity it was, because there was a damn good show going on at the time and he'd gone and spoilt it all. And presently he died.

"We got a bit more careful after that," he said.

For Lenden that had been a good job. He told me that he had been making about nine hundred a year while it lasted. He took a little flat in Croydon and lived there with his wife for twelve months or so.

"That was a fine time," he said. "The best I've ever had. We'd got plenty of money for the first time since we were married. An' Mollie liked the flat all right, and she made it simply great. We thought we was going on for ever, an' we were beginning to make plans to get into a house with a bit of garden where we could have fruit trees and things. And we were going to have a pack o' kids—two or three of them, as soon as we got settled."

There was silence in the room for a minute. "You can't run a show like that without a subsidy," he said at last. "Or you couldn't in those days, with the equipment we had. It lasted on into the winter of 1920. Then Aircraft Transport and Travel—it was a damn good name, that—they packed up. And that was the end of that."

He was staring into the shadows at the far end of the room, and speaking in a very quiet voice. I had heard something of that early failure in the heroic period of aviation, but this was the first time that I had heard a personal account.

This time he was longer out of a job. The flat in Croydon was broken up and his wife went back again to her people, while Lenden went wandering around the south of England in his search for flying work. The time had gone by when motor-cars could be bought and sold at a profit by those outside the trade, and I gathered that by the end of four months his wife's parents were financing him. In the end he found a job again in his own line of business, as pilot for an aerial survey to be made in Honduras.

"D'you ever meet Sam Robertson?" he inquired. "He was an observer in the war, and he got this contract for a survey for the Development Trust. Raked round in the city and got it all off his own bat. And he got me in on it to do the flying for him.

"In Honduras. They'd taken over a concession up the Patuca—there's lashings of copper up there if only you could get it out. Lashings of it. This survey was one of the first shows of that sort to be done. It was a seaplane job. Sam bought a Fairey with a Rolls Eagle in her from the Disposals crowd, and we left for Belize in March, 1921.

"It meant leaving Mollie with her people," he said. "I could make her a pretty fair allowance, of course. I'd got the money then—for as long as the job lasted."

I stirred in my chair. "Was this a photographic survey, then?" I asked.

He nodded. "In a way. The contract didn't run to a proper mosaic of photographs. There wasn't any need for it for what they wanted, and, anyway, we'd have had a job to line it up because there's never been any sort of ground work done there to give you a grid. No. We picked up one of their people at Trujillo, a fellow called Wilson who was their resident out there, and he came on up the Patuca with us. We did most of the work with oblique photographs, and each evening he made up a rough map of the country we'd flown over."

He paused. "It was the copper he was mostly interested in. You can tell it by the colour of the trees, you know. They look all dusty and dried up from the air, different to the rest of the jungle. You can see the copper areas quite clearly that way."

He said it was the devil of a country. From Belize they had gone by a little coastal steamer, Brazilian-owned, to Trujillo. There they erected the machine, on the beach, in the sun. The inhabitants were a sort of Indian, very quiet and mostly diseased.

"They used to come and sit round staring at us, without saying anything at all," he said. "And then when we'd sweated a bucket we'd go in to the pub and drink with the Dagoes. It was a rotten place, that. Rotten."

When the machine was ready they sent a launch full of stores round by sea to the mouth of the Patuca; he told me that the concession was about a hundred miles up the river. Wilson went with the launch; Lenden and Robertson gave them three days' start and went after them in the seaplane. In a couple of hours' flight they had passed the launch, and then they carried on up the river to the agreed meeting place—Jutigalpa.

He told me that that was a glorified mud village, with a Spanish-speaking half-caste to collect a few taxes from the Indians. They lived in a native hut, picketing the machine in the shade of the trees on the beach. That was to be their home for the next six months.

They started flying operations as soon as the launch arrived. They had a very fat mechanic, Meyer by name; within the first three days he was down with fever and some form of heat apoplexy, and had to be sent back to Trujillo in the launch. That delayed them for a week. Then they carried on with the flying, and had surveyed about a third of the area when they crashed a float. Lenden, in taxi-ing the machine on the water, ran her over a submerged snag which ripped their port float from bow to stern; he was fortunate in being able to run the machine ashore before she sank.

"And there we were," he said, "for the next three months, till we got a new float out from England. Wilson went back with Robertson to Trujillo to send the order, and then Robertson came back to Jutigalpa, and we built a sort of palm-leaf hut over the machine with the Indians. And then we just sat on our backsides in that rotten little hole and waited for the float."

When the float came they repaired the machine and carried on, finishing the survey in about six weeks. From the point of view of the Development Trust it was a success; they had found out what they wanted to know about their land cheaply and accurately.

"We finished the job, and came back to Trujillo," said Lenden.

The coals fell together with a little crash. It was about half-past three in the morning. I had lost all desire to go to bed; now that Lenden was talking freely I wanted to hear the end of his story. I knew what was coming. Gradually, and in his own way, he was working up to the point of telling me what he had been doing with that Breguet on the down. I wanted to know about that.

I swung round, pitched one or two more lumps of coal into the grate, and poked them up. Lenden got up absently from the table and came and threw himself down into a chair before the fire.

"No," he said at last. "You wouldn't have heard about it here. But there was a tornado out there that year. Sam Robertson and I settled down at Trujillo for a few weeks while he got in touch with some of the mines in Nicaragua. We thought that while we were there we might get one or two more jobs of the same sort in that district, and Wilson gave us a whole lot of help in getting them. We'd just about fixed to go down to the Santa Vanua—it was a sort of forestry survey that they wanted there—when the storm came."

He was staring into the fire, and speaking very quietly. "It came one evening, quite suddenly. We had the Fairey pegged down upon the beach in the lee of a cliff—it was the only place we had to put her. But no pickets could have stood against that wind. We got the whole town out to hold her down. I dare say there were fifty of us hanging on to her in the dusk, and she blew clean out of our hands and away up the beach."

He glanced at me. "She was all we had, you know—the whole capital. Sam and I hung on to her after she took charge—and she chucked us off like a horse. Robertson fell soft, but I broke an arm as I went down." He passed his hand absently up his left forearm. "Yes—she was all we had, and she went flying up the beach till she cartwheeled into a little corrugated-iron hut and knocked it flat, and then on—what was left of her—till she fetched up against the forest. We lay on the beach all that night because we could hear the houses crashing in the town, and Robertson made splints for my arm. And when the morning came and it blew itself out, half the houses in the place were down and Sam was as rich as me."

"That's rotten luck," I muttered.

He nodded. "Yes, it was bad luck, because there was all the makings of a survey business out there. But that finished us, and we came home Third Class."

And so he gave up aviation. He had been bitten three times, and he'd enough of it. He wanted to settle down, he said, and live with his wife. He told me that he had come to the conclusion out in Trujillo that flying was no good for a married man, and that he must look for more stable employment in the future. He realised that he would have to start at the bottom. Wilson stepped in there and gave him an introduction to a cousin who ran a firm of wholesale clothiers in St. Paul's Churchyard, and Lenden came home to England to start work in the city on four pounds ten a week. With Robertson he had been getting seven hundred a year.

"I took Mollie out of pawn again," he said, a little bitterly, "and we got furnished rooms between Eltham and Lewisham, not very far from her people. And that year it went all right."

He stared into the fire. "I was the proper city gent. Mr. Everyman. I wore a bowler hat and a morning coat like all the other stiffs, and carried a pair of gloves, and read the Daily Mail going up and the Evening News coming down."

It seemed to have been a poor sort of job. From the first there was little chance that he could make a success of it; the clerks with whom he worked had forgotten more about business than he had ever known. He was unsuited for it temperamentally, and he was getting fifteen shillings a week more than the others, which didn't make things any easier for him. And he was desperately hard up. He couldn't live on his pay; his wife's parents had to come forward again and make him a substantial allowance, and that got him on the raw. He told me all this that night.

He stuck it out for two years.

"I chucked it in the early summer of 1924," he said, and shot the ash from his cigarette into the fire. "It's the spring that gets you, in a job like that; when the days begin to get a bit warm and sunny, an' you know you could make better money out in the clean country on an aerodrome."

He was quiet for a little after that, and then he said: "We were right on the rocks by then, and not a chance of things getting any better. I was still on four pounds ten a week. The way I put it to the old man—I said I simply had to go where I stood a chance of earning a bit more money. It wasn't good enough to stick on like that. He cut up pretty rough about it, but I was through with the City. Mollie went home again for a bit, and I went back to the old game."

It was joy-riding again this time, as a paid pilot to a concern called the Atalanta Flying Services. The Atalanta Flying Services was a three-seater Avro, painted a bright scarlet all over. The pilot who had been flying her before had just cut off with all the loose cash in the kitty, and while they tracked him down Lenden got the job to carry on. This time, however, the directors put a secretary into the concern to keep him company.

"We picked up the machine at Gloucester," he said, "where the other fellow left her when he vanished. There were four of us in the game. There was the secretary—a chap called Carpenter—and a ground engineer, and an odd-job man, and myself. We had the Avro, and a Ford lorry that was all covered-in with tarpaulins and fitted up for sleeping and living in, and a Cowley two-seater. Carpenter used to drive the Cowley on in front and get to the next town a day or so ahead of us, and fix up the landing-ground with the farmer, and get out the posters."

He thought for a minute. "I dare say you've seen the posters," he said. "We came all round this part of the country. We had 'em printed in red, very big and staring. Like this:

WATCH

FOR THE RED AEROPLANE!

You've seen people walking on the wings at the

cinema, but have you ever seen it with your own

eyes? Have you ever flown in an aeroplane at a

dizzy height above the ground while a man

walked coolly to the extreme tips of the wings?

NO!

BUT YOU CAN NEXT WEEK!

The Atalanta Flying Services are coming, with

Captain Lenden, M.C., who shot down fourteen

enemy machines in the war and is one of Britain's

most experienced airmen. The Air Ministry have

certified that Captain Lenden is

ABSOLUTELY SAFE!

Flying daily from Shotover Farm, by kind permission

of Mr. Joshua Phillips.

"And a lot more of the same sort of thing," he said. "You know."

Two very happy years followed. The job was one that suited Lenden; it was a country life with few business worries. The pay worked out at about four hundred and fifty, and that enabled him to make a respectable allowance to his wife, though he seldom had an opportunity of seeing her. With the Avro, the Ford lorry, and the Morris-Cowley, the Atalanta Flying Services went wandering, and for the first eighteen months wherever they wandered they made money. They were entirely self-contained.

"We did it this way," he said. "We'd pick our field, and put up a fence of sackcloth round as much of it as we could. We charged sixpence for admission to see the flying. Just by the entrance we had the lorry, and we used it as a sort of office in the day. At night we used to picket the machine as close to the van as we could get her, and then turn in, all snug for the night."

They went all over the country in the next two years, staying ten days at each little town. From Gloucester they worked down through Devon into Cornwall; then back along the whole length of the south coast, till in the winter of 1924 they found themselves in Kent. At Croydon they overhauled the machine and went north into Essex, and up the coast to Sheringham and Cromer. In 1925 they went right up the east coast as far as Edinburgh, and back through the Midlands; till in the spring of 1926 they found themselves again in Gloucester.

He glanced at me. "I don't know that I've ever enjoyed a job so much as that, taking it all round. It was damn hard work. But it suited me—the life did."

He stopped talking, and remained staring moodily into the fire. I realised that the next episode had proved less prosperous and left him to himself for a bit. The fire was dying down; I got up and threw a few more lumps on, and raked the ashes from the hearth. I settled down into my chair again and lit a pipe. It was about four o'clock in the morning.

"What happened next?" I asked. I wanted to hear the end of this story if it meant sitting up all night.

He roused himself, and smiled a little. "What happened next," he said quietly, "was that Mollie left me."

I wasn't prepared for that, though on his own showing nothing was more probable. I said something or other, but he went on again without listening.

"It was my fault, of course. We'd never been able to have a proper home, or the kids we wanted. And one way or another I'd given her a rotten time of it. We hadn't lived together for two years when that happened. There was a cousin of hers, a chap in the Navy . . . She was still a girl, you know—a good bit younger than me. I went down to see her at her people's place."

He was quiet for a minute, and then he laughed. "I came away out of it as soon as I could. There was a girl at Gloucester who got me out of that mess. Worked in an office there. She was a damn good sort, an' her name was Mollie, too. I took her to the Regent at Cheltenham, and we spent a night there, and I sent my wife the bill. And presently I got a notice that she was suing for divorce. . . ."

He sat brooding in his chair for a bit then, staring into the fire, immersed in memories. But presently he roused himself again.

"That killed my luck," he said. "After that happened everything went wrong. We started off again from Gloucester to do the south coast, and at every place we went we showed a loss. At every ruddy place. Places like Taunton and Honiton, where we'd been really busy a couple of years before—if we got a dozen of them into the air it was all we did. People seemed to have got tired of it. We carried on that way for a couple of months, and then the directors got tired of it too. I brought the machine up to Croydon to be sold, and that was the end of that."

He lit another cigarette. "I hadn't got a home to go to then," he said.

He said no more than that, but something in the way he said it revealed to me something of what that meant to him. I know now that he was a man of little stamina. In all his roving and uncertain life since the war he had always had a base, somewhere to retire to, to be alone with his wife and to regain his self-respect. I think his wife must have been a great backbone to him. He wasn't the sort of man ever to make a name for himself alone, and in the loss of his wife he had suffered a grave injury.

"I had about fifty pounds in hand, and while that lasted I hung about Croydon touting for a job. But there wasn't much doing there. Stavanger gave me a few odd taxi trips to do for him, but nothing regular. And then I went and did my Reserve training, and that carried me on for a few weeks.

"By the end of the summer I was on the street," he said. "It was either earn something or starve then. I got a job in a garage, as a fitter. In Acton. Two pounds ten a week."

He grinned unpleasantly at me. "Temporary, of course. Just till something else turned up. I suppose that's how everyone looks at it when they go down the drain."

He told me about his life in the garage in little short, cynical sentences. From something that he said I gained a very clear impression that he had been drinking heavily ever since his wife left him, a circumstance which probably accounted for his failure to get a flying job. Unlike the other failures to which he likened himself, however, he hated the garage enough to rouse himself to get out of it. Possibly he gave up drinking—I don't know about that. At all events, he told me that he began to look about for a chance to get out of the country. He thought that if he could get out to Australia he might be able to pick up a job in aviation again. He said he wanted to get out of England.

He could have got a free passage to Australia, but he didn't know that.

And then a queer thing happened to him. He used to take a packet of lunch to work with him from his fifth-rate lodgings in Harlesden, and every other day he bought a copy of the Daily Mail to read in the lunch hour. And there, one day, he read an article about the Red Menace.

He lit another cigarette. "Bit of luck I got the paper that day," he said. "I might have missed it. God knows what would have happened then—I was about through with fitter's work. It said in the article that the Russians were building up the hell of an air service that was getting to be a menace to the whole of the rest of Europe. I'd heard somewhere or other that they were enlarging their service, but I'd no idea till I read that bit in the paper that it was anything like that. And then it went on to say how they were getting hold of British ex-officers and sending them out to Russia to train the Red Army in the latest tricks of aerial warfare, and what a sin and a shame it was that Englishmen should go and do that, and how the Government ought to stop it. It went on like that for a couple of columns. It said that they were paying as much as a thousand a year to these chaps."

He lifted his eyes from the fire and stared across at me. In the firelight and the shadows of the room there was a momentary pause. "Well," he said at last, "so they were."

I stirred in my chair, a little uneasily. "You went after it, then?"

"Like a knife. So would you have done."

He read that at lunch time, and he abandoned the garage and went straight off to the Public Baths in the High Street and had a sixpenny hot bath. Then he went back to his room and got out the most respectable of his old suits, and found he had a visiting card left, and he went straight off to the Soviet Embassy in Chesham Place.

He sat there in my armchair, staring into the fire for a minute and fingering the matchbox on his knee. "And it was all quite true," he said. "I'd got away from all that muck, just when I was beginning to think I never would."

The tone of relief in which he said that silenced me abruptly. It silenced me then, and it has done so ever since. For him, service with the Soviet meant a deliverance from hell, and a chance to get away and make a fresh start. That was a great injury that his wife did him when she went.

It was a sort of Polish Jew who interviewed him. He took Lenden through it pretty thoroughly, asking him the most searching questions about his war service. He was particularly anxious to know whether he had had any experience on post-war single-seater fighting machines. Lenden had done half an hour on one of the earlier Siskins, and made some capital out of that; for the rest he judged it better to speak the truth.

They sent him away with instructions to come back next day. In the interval they must have looked up his record at the Air Ministry in some occult manner, for they told him quite a lot about himself that he hadn't mentioned before. Then they gave him a pretty stiff medical examination, and then they photographed him. And finally they presented him with a contract, drawn up and ready for him to sign; eight hundred a year for a two years' engagement, with repatriation at the end of it. He signed it on the spot, and they gave him thirty pounds salary in advance.

"You could have knocked me down with a feather," he said. "But they've treated me damn well all through. I know they're dirty dogs in other ways, of course. I've seen it—a damn sight too much of it, out there. But they've always given me a square deal, and I don't mind saying so. Jews mostly—all that I've had anything to do with. And you mostly get a square deal in business from the Jews."

In three days' time they sent him his passport and some tickets. He went out to Russia indirectly, travelling under an assumed name. There was a place up on the hills behind Ventimiglia, he said, the villa of an Italian profiteer, that seemed to serve as a centre for their activities in that part of Europe, and it was to this place that he was told to go. He reported there in due course, and the next day he was sent on through Austria and Poland into Russia. He had a fair command of languages that he had picked up through flying about the continent, and the travelling didn't present many difficulties. From San Remo he travelled on a forged American passport.

They sent him first to Moscow. He did a little flying there, and in about ten days' time he was sent on down to Kieff, where they were forming a squadron for instruction in advanced fighting.

"We're a pretty mixed crowd," he said. "Most of the instructors out there are Germans, but there were a couple of English there before me, and one or two French and Italians." He shifted in his chair. "Never hit it off very well with the other two English out there—not my sort. The Germans aren't a bad crowd, though. There's one chap there that I got to know pretty well—a fellow called Keumer, who comes from Noremburg. Married, with two or three children. Like the-rest of us—couldn't get anything to do in his own place. Used to fly a Halberstadt in the war—in our part of the line, to. He's a damn stout lad. We live in pairs out there, in little three-roomed huts, and after a bit I went and shared his place."

He stared reflectively into the fire. "Kieff's a good town," he said. "It must have been better before the Revolution, but it's a good spot still. They put us out beyond Pechersk, with the aerodrome about a mile from the river. Not much to do away from the aerodrome. You can go into the town—they lend us a car whenever we want it—and eat a heavy meal with the Germans. Or you can go toying with Amaryllis—there's any amount of that to be had for the asking. Or you can go to the cinema and see Douglas Fairbanks and Norma Talmadge and Mack Sennett pretty well as soon as you can see 'em in London, with Russian sub-titles. And eat crystallised fruits. I tell you, there's a glut of crystallised fruits in that town. You can't get a proper cigarette for love or money, but you can get those damn things pretty well chucked at you. It's a local industry, or something."

He went on to talk for a long time about the type of machine that they had out there, and the ability of the Russian pilots. He was of the opinion that the best pilots were the Cossacks, and he said that the Russians were concentrating on trying to turn the best of their cavalry into fighting pilots. He thought that that was sound, and he had a very high opinion of their ability. The trouble was that they were so illiterate. Everyone coming to that course was supposed to be able to read and write; in actual fact their best pilots could do neither with any accuracy. Many of them had their horses with them; there were horse-lines along one side of the aerodrome.

"They fly into a fight . . . like riding a horse. No theory about it; but they're good. They've got a feel for the machine from the very first. It's a natural genius for the game. And they've got any amount of guts."

There was a very long silence then. He sat there in that chair before the fire, staring at the coals, his hands outstretched upon the bolstered arms, his long black hair falling down over his forehead in the half-light. I thought that he was shivering a little as I watched him.

"That went on till about six weeks ago," he said at last. "I had a pretty good time of it out there, taking it all round. My pay comes regularly, and I send a good bit of it back to England. I arranged that before I signed the contract, and they stuck to their side of it. The money gets through all right. And I like the work. I'd have been there still, but for this job."

I leaned forward and knocked my pipe out slowly against the palm of my hand over the grate. I knew that we were coming to the root of it now.

"This is for them?" I asked.

He didn't answer that at once. "They've grown to trust me pretty well out there," he said. "More than the others. They came along one day about the middle of last month, and made me an offer. They wanted a long night flight, or rather a series of night flights, done outside Russia. They offered me a thousand pounds sterling, with all expenses, as a fee for doing it."

He paused, irresolute.

"Where'd you got to fly to?" I asked.

"Portsmouth," he said laconically.

I had guessed something of the sort, I suppose. At all events, it didn't come as much of a surprise.

He went on without looking at me. "I'm getting to the end of my time out there. I've saved a bit, of course—about a couple of hundred pounds. But that's not capital. It wouldn't go any way if I was out of a job. I tell you, half a dozen times in the last three years I'd have been on my feet if I could have raked up a thousand or so. Dawson wanted me to go in with him in that show of his in Penang, you know." I didn't know, but I was silent. "And I couldn't, and he sold out to the Dutch as a going concern at three hundred per cent. And then Sam Robertson gave me a chance of going in with him on the Argentine Survey, and he's doing damn well, I hear. And I'd have liked to have been with Sam again. . . ."

I cut him short. "Why did they choose an Englishman?"

He laughed. "Bar the English and the Germans, I don't suppose there's a pilot in Russia that can lay a course properly, night flying. Not to call a pilot.

"They wanted a set of flashlight photographs taken from the air," he said. "Of Portsmouth."

The scheme, as they put it to him, was worth the thousand as a pilot's fee alone. There was the devil of a lot of risk about it. He was to take a machine from Kieff and fly by night across Poland and Germany to a place near Hamburg, where he was to land and wait during the day. On the next night he was to fly to Portsmouth, do his job, and return to Hamburg before dawn. The following night he was to return to Kieff.

If anything went wrong he was to land and burn the machine, and get away back to Russia with the plates by land.

I stared at him incredulously. "I never heard of night flying like that," I said. "It's absolutely crazy. Do you mean to say you took it on?"

He smiled a little bitterly. "I wanted that thousand. You see, I'm getting towards the end of my time out there. Yes, I took it on. I made damn sure about the money, though. I had it paid into my bank at Croydon by the Trade Delegation, and I wouldn't stir a finger till I had a letter from the manager about it in his own handwriting. That made it as certain as it could be—and when I got that I carried on with the preparations."

He began upon a long, technical description of the machine and its equipment for this flight. It was many years since I had had to do with aeroplanes, and much of what he told me passed over my head. I was afraid to put him off his tale by asking questions. He said that they had several of those Breguets in the school at Kieff, and he chose one of them for the job. And he told me, in a mass of technicalities, that they had a propeller for that machine which at slow speeds was very quiet.

Now half the noise of an aeroplane comes from the propeller. Virtually they had washed that out; they set to work then and built a silencer for the exhaust of the engine. They made the machine into a single-seater, and fitted her with fuel tanks for about fifteen hours' flight. By the time they'd finished with her they had a machine which would fly from Hamburg to Portsmouth and back in a night, and would keep in the air without losing height . . . silently.

"We did two machines like that," he said. "One for a reserve, in case anything happened to mine. We fixed it that old Keumer should fly the reserve one if it was necessary. By the time we'd done with mine she'd fly at about eighty so quietly that you could hear the rustle of a map as you unfolded it in the cockpit. It gave me a queer start the first time I heard that. And they couldn't hear her on the ground at all when she was a couple of hundred metres up."

They had one or two rehearsals of the photography, using a parachute flare, and then they were ready.

"What day's this?" he asked suddenly.

"Thursday," I said. "Or I suppose it's Friday by this time."

He thought for a little. "We were all ready last week. I started for Germany on Sunday night."

The landing-place in Germany was between Lubeck and Elmshorn, a little to the north of Hamburg. The flight, by the route he took, was about seven hundred and fifty miles; he took about six and three-quarter hours to do it. He left Kieff with a full load of fuel at about five o'clock in the afternoon, mid-Europe time, and set a compass course for the Baltic. It was a very dark night, and the ground was covered with snow. He said that it was very cold.

He flew most of the way at about five thousand feet. The Breguet wasn't a silent machine at her cruising speed by any means, and he didn't want to wake the Poles up down below. Between Kieff and Danzig he didn't check his course at all. He just sat there watching his compass and trying to fight the miseries of cold, and when he had been in the air for four hours he came down to about a couple of hundred feet to see where he was.

He saw the lights of a village on the snow, and he nearly hit a hill in trying to get down lower to see the sort of country he was over. Upon that he went up again and carried on for another twenty minutes. At the end of that time he found that he was over sea.

He thought it out, and came to the conclusion that he must be to the east of his course, since there was a westerly wind blowing and he had seen no sign of Danzig on the coast. Accordingly he swung round and set a course south-west by south to hit the coast again, and in a few minutes he had picked up the lighthouse at Putzig.

That gave him his position, and he set to flying along the coast towards Rügen, about a hundred and twenty miles farther on. There was a stiffish wind against him, and that leg of the course took him an hour and a quarter. The darkness and the intense cold, together with the strain, were making him sleepy. He had several drinks out of his flask, he said, and presently he picked up a lighthouse on Rügen.

After that he was pretty well home. He passed over Rostock and Lubeck, and then set about looking for his landing-ground. The Russians had secured a great country house that stood in the middle of that marshy land; he said that it was all shut up except for three rooms that they lived in. He said he didn't ask many questions about the place.

"Anyway," he said, "they'd done their part of it all right. The arrangement was that they'd have the devil of a great bonfire lighted half-way between Elmshorn and Lubeck, and three miles south of that I'd find the landing lights laid out on the ground for me to land by, inconspicuous-like. Well, I picked up the bonfire all right. They'd given a beano to some village there, and supplied the wood and the drink and everything. It was a good fire, that. The flames must have been getting on for fifty feet high at times. I saw it twenty miles away, and gave it a pretty good berth. It was easy then. I circled round a bit and found the landing, and put the Breguet down on to the grass along the line of lights."

He said that it had been a very cold flight. "Living in England, you don't know what it's like. I was all sort of cramped and stiffened in the one position. I tried to get out of the machine when she stopped, but I had to sit there till they came and climbed up on to the fuselage to help me out. I've never been like that before. The usual crowd of Jew Boys, but they were damn good to me that night. They had hot soup all ready, and a fire, and as soon as I was thawed out a bit and had a quart or so of soup inside me, I fell asleep where I was, pretty well standing up."

He slept till noon the next day, and spent the afternoon with a mechanic, overhauling the machine for the flight to Portsmouth.

"That was Monday afternoon," he said. "I started at about six in the evening, with fifteen hours' fuel on board. That flight should take about eleven hours for the return journey, allowing a bit for head winds and for about a quarter of an hour over Portsmouth."

He took a compass course over Holland, passing pretty well inland. He said he was afraid of getting mixed up with the Zuyder Zee. He came out on the coast near Ostend, and took a departure from there for Dover, flying at about three thousand feet. Finally he came to the Island at about half-past eleven. He picked up the Nab lighthouse first, and from there he followed straight along in through Spithead.

He took up the poker absently, and scraped a little of the ash from the bars of the grate. The fire was glowing very red into his face.

"I throttled down at the Nab," he said, "and then we went creeping in, doing about eighty, and so quiet that I might have heard my watch ticking if I'd put it to my ear. I had the parachute flare all ready, with a little stick to poke it down the tube with. It was the entrance to the harbour that I had to take—the narrow part."

My pipe was out, but I was afraid to interrupt his narrative by stirring to relight it.

"It was easy enough. The lights from the town—the streetlamps—showed on both sides of the water, so that the entrance looked like a great streak of black between the lights. I cruised round a bit before I set off the flare and dropped off a little height, so that I finished up at about two thousand five hundred feet. Eight hundred metres was the height that we'd fixed for the focus of the camera, you see."

He paused. "I could see that there was something funny going on before I set off the flare," he said. "There was a string of green lights stretching right across the entrance from side to side, near the mouth. Like a barrier to stop vessels coming in. And about half a mile inside from that there was a sort of faint glow in the middle of the harbour. Like a couple of floodlights running a bit dim. You couldn't see anything from the air but just that there was light there—in the middle of the water. Not like the lights of a ship, either. More like a quay."

He laid down the poker and glanced across at me. "Well, I was all ready. I went over to the Gosport side to start the fun. It was a westerly wind, you see, and I wanted to place the flare so that it would drift over the target. I turned her beyond the town and came back again down wind towards the entrance. And when the target bore about thirty degrees from the vertical with me, I made contact and shoved the flare down through the tube. It burst about thirty feet below me, and I had time for a quick glance round before the sights came on."

He relapsed into a long silence. I knew that having got so far he would finish the story in his own time, and I left him to think it over. Looking back upon it now, I think he may have been reluctant to tell what he had seen to any living person. I think that may have been one of the reasons for his pause.

"Was there much going on?" I asked at last.

He raised his head and eyed me steadily. "I don't know what it was," he said, "and that's the truth. I've never seen anything like it before. There was some damn great thing out there in the middle of the harbour—it wasn't a ship, and it wasn't a barge. I don't know what it was. There were three or four vessels standing by it, and there was a sort of thick black line of something running from it to the Gosport shore. That's what I saw—it's all I had time to see, because the sights began to bear and I got busy. It stood out pretty well as clear as daylight, the shadows all black and sharp. That flare was a corker of a thing."

He flung his half-smoked cigarette into the fire, and lit another.

"It burnt for about thirty seconds. I flew straight over the target and got in three good shots one after the other, that would join up to make a long strip photograph, you see. When the sights ceased to bear, I chucked her round in a quick turn and made another run over the target. I went slower over the ground that time because I was flying against the wind. I got in five shots on that run and I passed the flare about half-way, a little below me and to starboard. I swung her round again at the end of that run and got in two more shots as I headed east over the thing. In the middle of the second one the light went out. I tell you, it was a fine flare, that. There wasn't even a red glow to show where it had been and make them smell a rat. It just flicked clean out into the darkness."

He was heading east when that happened. He didn't linger over Portsmouth, but went straight on ahead and back the way he came. He kept his machine flying slowly and quietly till he was well out at sea past the Nab, then opened up his engine and made straight along the coast for Dover.

I got up from my chair and crossed to the back of the room. The daily papers generally lie about there for a week or so before they disappear, and I had no difficulty in finding the one I wanted. That passage was there as I remembered it.

FIREBALL AT PORTSMOUTH

Meteorologists to-day are eagerly discussing the appearance of a large fireball, or meteor, over Portsmouth on Monday night. According to eye-witnesses the phenomenon made its appearance at about half-past eleven, and lasted for a period variously estimated as from forty seconds to a minute. The body materialised at a comparatively low height, and according to one statement was accompanied by a low rumbling noise. The streets of the city and the harbour were brilliantly illuminated for a few moments during the passage of the phenomenon, which moved slowly in an easterly direction. No damage is reported.

I showed it to Lenden. He read it through, and smiled.

"You got back all right, then?" I asked.

He was staring into the fire, and shivering a little. "Yes, I got back," he said slowly. "I landed at about four o'clock. It was twice as long a flight as the one from Kieff, but I didn't feel it half so much. I was tired, of course, but nothing beyond the ordinary. It hadn't been so cold, for one thing."

As soon as he landed they set about pegging down the machine for the night, and draining the radiator. Then they went to get the plates from the camera. He said that the plates for that camera were held in two chargers; they were all in one box to start with, and as you exposed each plate it slid over to the other box automatically leaving a fresh plate all ready over the lens. They went to take off the box of exposed plates. It didn't come away freely, and when they finally got it off there was a crack and a tinkle of glass.

He glanced at me. "The first plate had jammed," he said quietly. "It was the tripping gear. They hadn't been passing the lens at all. I'd taken all the ten exposures on the one plate. I'd done it all, and flown all that way—for nothing."

It was bad luck, that, from his point of view. It meant that the flight all had to be done again. He told me that he was forced to leave it for a day or two. He'd done two long night flights on two successive nights, and he wasn't fit to do another one straight off. He had to have some rest; he said that he was getting jumpy and feverish with the exposure. He talked it over with the Jews, and they made it Thursday night for the second shot; the interval he spent mostly in bed.

"There was another thing," he said. "I knew there'd be some risk about the second trip. I mean to say, whatever it is that's going on there, it's pretty secret. One can't go on letting off fireballs over Portsmouth indefinitely, and think they won't tumble to the game. And it's a protected area, you know. They've got every right to shoot you down if you go monkeying about over that sort of place. It had been all right the first time; I'd taken them by surprise. But I knew it wasn't going to be so easy the second time."

He paused. "And, by God, it wasn't!"

He shivered violently, and drew up closer to the fire. He flew over in exactly the same way. He found the same subdued light in the middle of the entrance, but the thing had moved nearer to the Gosport shore. And as he drew closer, he saw one thing that scared him stiff and put the wind up him properly. They had the landing-lights out on Gosport aerodrome.

He sat there very still, staring at the glowing embers of the fire. "I could see that I was in for it then," he said very quietly. "And from our own people. I knew that as soon as I let off my flare it'd be like poking a stick into a wasps' nest. I knew there'd be machines coming up from the aerodrome after me, and that in a few minutes I might have something like a Gamecock hanging on behind me, and then I'd have to land or be shot down."

He was silent for a minute.

"The worst part of it—what put the wind up me most"—he was speaking so quietly that I could hardly hear what he said—"was that they'd be our own people. Somebody like Dick Scott or Poddy Armstrong, that I'd played pills with at the Royal Aero Club, sitting there in the Gamecock pooping off tracer bullets at me, and thinking he was doing a damn good job. . . ."

He pulled himself together and lit another cigarette. He was still shivering a bit; I wondered if he had taken cold.

He said that the job went through almost exactly as it had before. He set his flare off on the Gosport side of the harbour and began taking photographs as he went east. As he turned the machine at the end of that run he saw the first of the green lights come up.

They were setting off green rockets from Gosport, in groups of three at a time. It was the signal to land at once. The things rose to a height of about a thousand feet and burst in a cluster of green stars. They were shooting them up in groups of three at intervals of about ten seconds. Lenden paid no attention to them, but he got in five photographs on his way west over the target. He took nine exposures in all, and then swung the machine round and went straight out to sea.

"I didn't dare to open out my engine. The Breguet can do about a hundred and sixty miles an hour, but to do that you've got to make a noise. I kept her throttled down and silent, and went drifting out towards the Island, doing about eighty. I turned in my seat as I went, and had a good look at the aerodrome behind me. They had stopped sending up the rockets, and as I watched I distinctly saw a machine sweep across the aerodrome in front of the landing-lights as she took off. I knew then that they were after me."

He sat playing with the poker for a bit. "Well," he said. "They didn't find me."

They didn't get their searchlights going fast enough. By the time the first of those came up he was miles away, right out to sea above Spithead. He carried on like that till he was somewhere off St. Helen's; then he thought that his best course was to put on speed and get clear. So he switched on the little shaded light over his instruments and, with an eye wandering over the dials, thrust forward the throttle. He saw the needle of the oil gauge go leaping up till it jammed at the limit of the dial.

He glanced at me. I had barely appreciated the significance of that; it was so long since I had flown. "It's rotten when a thing like that happens," he said quietly, "at night, and over strange country. And I was right out to sea, mind you—about five miles from land. I didn't see the fun in coming down in the water if my engine was going to pack up, and so I turned towards the coast, somewhere by Selsey. And then, quite suddenly, the gauge flicked down to zero, and oil began to come spraying down the fuselage from the engine, coating the windscreen and blowing in my face. Warm oil, all black and sticky in the darkness. . . .

"I knew that I was in for it then," he said. "And it was all dark below. Pitch dark, with only a little white surf to show the line of the beaches. No hope of being able to pick out a field to land in. And I knew that very soon the engine would pack up."

He was shivering again. I threw a lump or two of coal on the fire, and he crouched a little closer towards it. He said he made for the downs. He knew that part of the country fairly well from flying over it, and he knew that he could pull off a forced landing on the top of the downs without hurting himself. He didn't care a damn what happened to the machine so long as he could get down uninjured with the plates. His orders were that in such a case the machine was to be burnt.

"I went up between Chichester and Arundel. And as I went," he said, "I was climbing, climbing for all I was fit to get a bit of height while the engine lasted. I got her up to five thousand feet or so, a few miles inland from the coast. I knew it was all open grass land in front of me then, and every chance of a decent landing. I thought I might want the engine again at the last minute to pull me clear of a tree or a house, so I shut off before she seized up for good, and put the machine on the glide down to land. And then, as luck would have it, the moon came out for a couple of minutes and showed me the lie of the country. The only time I've seen the moon since I left Kieff. It was easy then. I set off a wing-tip flare at about fifty feet, and landed where you saw."

His voice died into the silence. He had come to the end of his story, it seemed, and now he was waiting for me to say something. I glanced uneasily about the room in search of inspiration, and saw the black tin case he had brought from the machine lying beside his chair. I would have picked it up, but he was before me.

"These are the photographs?" I asked.

He nodded, turning the box over and over in his hands.

I thought about it for a minute. "Why didn't you burn the machine?"

Crouching towards the fire, he glanced up at me and grinned. "I hadn't got a match."

I suppose I looked doubtful.

He said that he had made a little pile of papers in the cockpit and soaked them with petrol. And then he went through his pockets and found he had one match—just the one. He hadn't thought about bringing proper incendiary materials with him. He struck the head off that match at the first go, and there he was. He tried to get a spark out of the lighting system for a time, but failed to ignite his papers. Then he tried to get one of the flares off the wing, and presently he had to give that up for lack of tools.

"Then it came on to rain in buckets," he said. "I was fed up with it by then. And left her."

That explained why he had not picketed the machine. Lenden crouched a little closer to the fire, and began shivering again. That drew my attention.

"You've got a chill," I said.

He sat back from the fire a little, and stopped shivering. "It's nothing," he replied. "I've had it for some days."

I eyed him thoughtfully for a minute, and wondered if he was going to be ill. He had flushed up in the last hour or so.

"Fever?"

He nodded. "Got it when I was out with Sam Robertson on the Patuca," he said. "I never give it much heed. It was the flight from Kieff that started it this time; I've had it intermittently since then. Off and on, you know. I'll take some quinine, if you've got any."

I went into my bedroom and returned with a bottle of tablets. He read the label, counted out about half the bottle into the palm of his hand, and swallowed them with the help of a glass of water from the table.

It was getting towards dawn. Outside, the lawns of the garden were beginning to show grey; through the uncurtained window I could see the outline of a flower-bed and a shadowy tree. I remained standing on the fender there before the fire, and staring down at him. I didn't know what to do.

He was still handling that flat box of plates. I stood there in perplexity for a bit, and at last:

"What are you going to do with those?" I asked bluntly.

Lenden had begun to shiver again. He seemed not to have heard my question, but sat there crouching down over the fire. He had an odd, flushed look about him, I remember; his hair was ruffled and hanging down over his forehead, giving him a worn and dissipated appearance. I thought for a little.

"Are you on your way back to Russia?" I asked.

Presently I repeated the question.

He didn't take his eyes from the fire. "God knows," he said morosely. "I don't."

It was no use thinking of going to bed now. It was getting on for half-past five, and the daylight was growing fast outside the window. I stood there on the fender studying him for a bit longer, and then I crossed the room and sat down at the piano. It was a Baby Grand that I had bought a year or so before, and I was still paying for it. That piano stands beside me now. It had a pleasant, clean tone, with little volume to it, most suitable to the sort of room that I can afford.

I had done that before, and I have done it since. I've always lived a pretty healthy life. To lose a night's sleep means very little to me, if I may sit quietly at the piano for an hour at the beginning of the new day. I slid on to the stool that morning, dropped my fingers on to the keys, and began upon the overture to my play.

It goes gently, that overture, and in my hands of course it plays itself. I let it ripple on through the various themes, absently polishing it a bit as I went. Now and again I glanced across to Lenden. He was still sitting exactly as I had left him, crouching over the fire, his hair hanging down untidily over his forehead, fingering that infernal box, and shivering. It was pretty evident that he was going to be ill. And that wasn't surprising. He had been soaked to the skin when I met him on the road, and I hadn't thought of offering him a change of clothes. He had dried before the fire.

I finished the overture and began upon the plot. The forest scenes come first in the play; I don't suppose I shall ever really be satisfied with those forest scenes. I have polished and refined them out of all recognition—continually. I don't know how long I sat over them then, but I was startled by Lenden's voice.

"What's that you're playing?"

I dropped my hands from the piano, and swung round on the stool. He had got up, and was standing on the fender with his back to the fire.

"Sorry," I said. "I'd forgotten about you."

He was staring at me most intently across the room.

"I remember you now," he said slowly. "I'd forgotten all about you, except that there was a man of your name in the Squadron. But I remember you now. Quite well. You used to fly the machine with the three red stars on the fuselage. And you used to play for us in the Mess, when we were tired of the gramophone."

I nodded. "That was my machine. I've got a photograph of her somewhere."

"I remember you now," he repeated. "What's that you were playing, then?"

I turned again to the piano. "It's a play for the cinema," I said. "An opera, if you like. For the films."

I dropped my fingers on to the keys again, and replayed the opening to the forest scene. It goes very pleasantly, that bit. I knew that he was standing there by the fire and watching me as I faced the rosewood of the instrument, and I knew that I was holding his attention. Whether he knew anything about music didn't matter with that thing. I wrote it for the people who didn't.

I came to the end of that theme. I had forgotten all about aeroplanes by then.

"What's it all about?" he asked curiously.

I touched a few chords of the next theme before replying, and then paused. "It's about a King's daughter," I said, "who went walking in the forest and got chased by a bear. By the hell of a bear. You can do that sort of thing on the pictures, you know. You can't go and put on a scene of a bear chasing a girl all round the stage at Covent Garden. Not so that you'd see the Princess all of a muck sweat. But you can do it on the films. . . ."

I began to play the first passages of the next theme, a little absently. "For one thing she wouldn't be able to sing if you chased her properly," I said. "Not for an hour or two, anyway. The story's just that she went into the forest alone . . . Because she wanted to get away from the Court and from her women and to be alone. Spring o' the year, you know. You can do the Court all right on the films. Indicate it. Fourteenth century, with those tall hats with a veil hanging down from them. And a tall, misty castle." Lenden had moved closer to the piano; as I talked my fingers were running automatically through the preliminary forest passages. "She went out after the flowers, and got chased by a bear that came sort of wuffling out of a thicket at her, and frightened her very much."

He had come quite close. I finished that passage, looked up, and grinned at him. "This is the bear."

I thought for a minute, and began upon the bear theme. It starts with the bear rooting and snuffling in the undergrowth, with a second motif of the Princess coming closer among the flowers, because she wanted to be alone. That motif starts faint, and grows. And then there's a bit of blood and thunder when the bear comes out into the open that merges into a regular nightmare bit of music that I take at racing speed. It's quite a simple theme. It starts fairly quietly. She's a good way ahead of the bear. Then as the chase goes on through the trees of the wood that theme gets louder, and faster, more monstrous, more uncouth. On the film one can work that up well, of course. The whole thing lasts for nearly five minutes of tense panic. The trees of the forest get larger, and the bear himself one makes larger . . . and larger, more monstrous, as he gets closer. It's a good bit of writing, that, though I say it myself. I put all I knew into it, and stopped abruptly at the Woodman.

I dropped my hands from the keys and turned to Lenden. "That's the bear," I said.

"By God," he muttered. "I don't wonder she got the wind up."

I think it may have been his simplicity that roused me to a sense of his position, and made me swing round suddenly upon my stool.

"See here," I said. "What about you, Lenden? D'you want to stay here? You can if you like, you know. There's a bedroom in there, and you're welcome to it for as long as you want it. Or are you going on up to Town?"

He shifted his position uneasily, and avoided my eyes. "I don't quite know what to do," he said uncertainly. "I've got these ruddy plates to get rid of. . . ."

His eyes, when I saw them, were half-closed and very bright; he had flushed up, and altogether he looked a pretty sick man. I'm no doctor, but I got up and took his wrist. His pulse seemed to be over-revving badly, and he was very hot. I was morally certain that if he went travelling alone he'd end his journey in a London hospital, and I said as much.

"I know." He pressed both hands to his forehead for a moment, and passed them back over his hair. "It's this infernal fever . . . and getting wet. I'm in for a searcher this time."

I met his eyes and held them for a moment. "You'd better get to bed," I said. "There's nobody comes to this house but me and the servants. I'll say that I brought you back with me from Winchester."

I doubt if he heard what I said. "It always shakes me when I get a bout like this," he muttered. "It was different when Mollie was there."

He was shivering again. "Lie up here for a day or two, till you're fit," I suggested. "Then you can go on to Town when you like. You can't go travelling like this."

"I'd ha' been all right if I'd got tight last night," he said. "I knew this was coming."

I went through into the spare bedroom. There was a greyness over everything by now; in the sitting-room the lamps were burning yellow in the growing morning light. I found sheets and blankets under the coverlet, and made up the bed for him. When that was done, I went back to the sitting-room. He was still turning that black box over and over in his hands, uncertainly.

I filled a kettle and put it on the fire to boil. "Room's ready when you are," I said. "You'd better go to bed—and stay there. I'll get you a hot-water bottle, soon as this boils."

"It's damn good of you," he muttered. He went through into the bedroom and began to undress.

Presently the kettle boiled. I took the bottle in to him and found him in bed; he was very grateful in an inarticulate sort of way. I cut him short, went out of the room, and left him to go to sleep.

Back in the sitting-room I stood for a minute looking at myself in the glass over the mantelpiece. I can't say it was a pretty sight. I was still in evening kit, but my tie had worked up towards one ear, and my trousers were smeared with mud from the down. The room was littered and squalid in the grey light; the electric lights unwholesome, and the remains of supper on the table an offence. Only the white keys and rosewood of the piano by the window appeared clean in that room.

I went into my bedroom, undressed, and had a bath. That pulled me round a bit. Half an hour later, when I had shaved, dressed, and flung open the window in the sitting-room, I was more or less myself again.

It was a cloudless morning. Over the kitchen garden the sun was rising through the mists left by the rain and in the stable eaves the birds were beginning softly, like a bit of Grieg. I went to the door of my house and looked out over the yard. Nobody was stirring yet, nor would be for half an hour to come, unless some under-housemaid in the mansion.

I had a job of work to do before breakfast, but I needed the help of one or two labourers for it, and I knew that it was no good going out to look for them for a bit. I shut the door and went back to the sitting-room, and kicked the dying fire together, and stood over it for a little. And then, since there was nothing else to do, I sat down again at the piano.

The morning was coming up all sunny and bright. It must have been chilly at the piano, for the window was open beside me, but I didn't seem to notice it. I had arranged that corner of the garden to have a fine show of daffodils that spring; it was a wild part where the family didn't come much. I could see them just beginning to poke up through the grass. There were primroses there—buckets of them—and a few snowdrops. I sat there looking at them for a bit, half-asleep; through the trees in winter you can see the grey whaleback of the down as it sweeps up above the house and the village.

I was sick of my own work. I strummed a bar or two, and played Chopin for a little, till I grew tired of him. I sat there for a bit then, and thought I'd better get out into the yard and start up my car. I had that aeroplane to hide. But I sat there for a little longer before moving, and presently I found myself rippling through the Spring Song. It was the cold that started me off on that, I suppose. That, and the flowers.

I must have become engrossed in it again. I know I ran through it several times quite softly, rippling through it and wondering if I should ever write anything myself one-tenth so good. It should be played lightly, that thing. Very lightly, and a little staccato. I don't know for how long I went on playing. It may have been for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, till some slight sound made me turn my head. Lenden was standing in the doorway in my pyjamas, his hand resting on the jamb to steady him, his face dead white.

I dropped my hands from the keys. "Better get along back to bed," I said. "You've got the hell of a temperature."

He moistened his lips. "For Christ's sake, stop playing that infernal thing. I can't stick it any longer."

I stared at him, puzzled. "Why not? What's the matter?"

He avoided my eyes. "I thought you might be doing it on purpose," he said uncertainly. "If you weren't. . . . The way you went on and on."

I smiled, got up from the piano, and crossed the room to him. "As for you," I said, "you're bats—that's what's the matter with you. You're imagining things. I'm going out now to hide that aeroplane of yours where it won't be seen from the road, before anyone else gets to know about it. You're going to go back to bed and go to sleep, pretty damn quick."

He turned from the door. "All right," he said wearily.

"I'll have some breakfast sent over for you about ten o'clock. Bit of fish, or something."

I paused. "And don't be a ruddy fool."