Mysterious Aviator (6 page)

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.