Mysterious Aviator (2 page)

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.