So Disdained

• Marazan
  
• So Disdained
  
• Lonely Road
  
• Ruined City
  
• What Happened to the Corbetts
  
• An Old Captivity
  
• Landfall
  
• Pied Piper
  
• Pastoral
  
• Most Secret
  
• The Chequer Board
  
• No Highway
  
• A Town Like Alice
  
• Round the Bend
  
• The Far Country
  
• In the Wet
  
• Slide Rule
  
• Requiem for a Wren
  
• Beyond the Black Stump
  
• On the Beach
  
• The Rainbow and the Rose
  
• Trustee from the Toolroom
  

This was the second of my books to be published, twenty-three years ago. It took me nearly three years to write, because I was working as an engineer on the construction of an airship and I wrote only in the evenings in the intervals of more important technical work. It was written through from start to finish twice, and some of it three times.

Clearly, I was still obsessed with standard subjects as a source of drama—spying, detection, and murder, so seldom encountered by real people in real life. Perhaps I was beginning to break loose from these constraints: the reader must judge that for himself.

In revising the book for re-issue I have altered half a dozen outmoded pieces of slang, but I have made no other changes. The book achieved publication in the United States under the somewhat uninspiring title
The Mysterious Aviator
.

The greater part of this book is based upon my written statement to the Foreign Secretary, dated April 6th, 1927. Reference has also been made to the official notes of my evidence before the Italian Secret Police given through the British Vice-Consul at San Remo on March 26th, 1927, and to the deposition sworn before the Italian civil authorities by Captain Philip Stenning, D.S.O., M.C., upon the same day. I am indebted to the Foreign Office for permission to re-draft the less confidential portions of these documents, and to Lord Arner for permission to detail certain personal events without which this account would hardly be complete.

These are the dry bones of my story, and it may well be urged that the time has not yet come when they can be brought to life unbiased. But memory is short; in this book—and before my recollections have grown dim—with the great assistance of my wife, I have tried to set down something of the history of that great pilot and most involuntary adventurer who came to me in the night, stayed with me for five days, and went.

[Pg 1]

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.

[Pg 2]
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.

[Pg 3]
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
[Pg 4]
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: