Mysterious Aviator Page 5

  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 … Becau
se 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.”


  CHAPTER TWO

  I WENT OUT INTO THE YARD to start up the car. It was very fresh and cold outside; I left the engine to run warm while I went back into the house for a coat.

  Then I got going on the road for the downs. The wind and the rain of the night had gone completely and left only a thin mist about the hedges in the rising sun. I passed through the main street of Under and let the car rip along the road for Leventer.

  I saw the machine when I was a mile away. There she was, stuck right up on top of the down, insecurely tethered and swaying a little in the light wind. She was a landmark for miles around. I stopped the car near to where I had picked up Lenden and began to walk across the down towards her, hoping most earnestly that no one else had passed that way since dawn. It wasn’t very likely.

  There was a barn in the hollow of the down below the machine, about half a mile distant from her in the opposite direction to the road. I passed her without stopping, and went on down the hill. I thought it might be possible to get her down the slopes and tether her behind the barn. She would be out of sight of the road there, and as secret as it was possible to make her, short of dismantling her altogether. It realised, as I walked, that it might come to that in time. If she was to be disposed of secretly, the only way would be to take her to bits and burn her piecemeal.

  The slopes were easy enough on the way down to the barn. There would be no difficulty about getting her down the hill into seclusion. If ever she were needed again, it would even be possible to taxi her up the hill again under her own power till level ground was reached for her to take off. At that time I didn’t think that there was the least chance of that ever happening, but there was very little doubt that it could be done if necessary.

  I had a bit of luck then. Spadden, the farmer, came out of the barn as I approached; a grizzled, uncommunicative man of fifty-odd. He had a couple of sheep in there with bad feet, he told me. He had had the vet. out to them from Leventer the day before, in a terrible fright that it was foot-and-mouth; the vet., it seemed, had laughed heartily, given him a poultice, drunk a stoup of ale, and departed. Spadden told me all this as he greeted me beside the barn and as he was showing me the beasts. He was a good sort, was Spadden. He’d always given me a square deal, and I knew he wouldn’t talk.